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Javier E

Did Ohio get coronavirus right? Early intervention, preparation for pandemic may pay of... - 0 views

  • Now, Ohio may be realizing the benefits of early intervention in the pandemic by its government and medical community. With about 5,100 covid-19 cases, it has fewer than a third the number of people with the novel coronavirus than in three comparably sized states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois. And Ohio has just a small fraction of the deaths reported in those states.
  • The Cleveland Clinic, which eventually beefed up plans to expand from 3,200 beds to 8,000 should the worst occur, held just 150 covid-19 patients (along with 2,000 others) this week and is preparing to scale back some facilities. It is moving to lend medical personnel to cities such as Detroit and New York hit hard by the virus.
  • In the Cincinnati region, models now show that peak occupancy of hospital beds by covid-19 patients may be just 10 percent of the predicted worst-case scenario.
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  • an early look at Ohio’s preparations and decision-making shows they reflect textbook recommendations for the way to handle an outbreak. Identify it early. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. Move swiftly because disease expansion will be exponential, not linear. In the absence of testing, assume the virus is spreading through the community. Communicate with the public clearly, and keep the message consistent.
  • Ohio has a well-established emergency medical response system. The state is divided into three regions, each clustered around major population centers in Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati. Planners call these zones the “three C’s.”
  • Their CEOs met and agreed to drop their historical competition for shares of the market and collaborate on just about everything, said Richard P. Lofgren, president and CEO of the University of Cincinnati’s health system.
  • As news of the outbreak in China began to spread in early January, epidemiologists and infectious disease experts at the three major medical centers in those regions began to track the spread. Soon, they were modeling the potential impact in Ohio and meeting more regularly to prepare.
  • In retrospect, the sports festival forced planners to confront the pandemic days, and in some cases more than a week, before other communities. DeWine would go on to close schools and businesses, and order residents to stay home, earlier than most other states. His March 12 school order was one of the first in the nation. Ohio State University, with 68,000 students on multiple campuses, went to online classes March 9 and extended it to the rest of the semester March 12.
  • Cincinnati’s peak is now forecast to be 291 cases — about 10 percent of the original prediction — on April 28, according to modeling Alessandrini received Tuesday. The number is so low she is hesitant to trust it yet. The peak is also later than originally predicted, and patients should arrive in a manageable order, not the crush that New York City experienced
  • Experts expect flare-ups as the pandemic fades — a saw-toothed curve rather than a smooth downward slope.
  • Persuading cooped-up residents to accept a very gradual return to something like their previous lives will require great discipline,
Javier E

He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump's Failure on the Virus - The New York ... - 0 views

  • “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”
  • A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.
  • Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.
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  • The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials.
  • Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.
  • The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.
  • But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:
  • The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.
  • Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
  • The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist
  • Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system
  • the task force had gathered for a tabletop exercise — a real-time version of a full-scale war gaming of a flu pandemic the administration had run the previous year. That earlier exercise, also conducted by Mr. Kadlec and called “Crimson Contagion,” predicted 110 million infections, 7.7 million hospitalizations and 586,000 deaths following a hypothetical outbreak that started in China.
  • By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work.
  • But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.
  • When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles.
  • He only regained his swagger, the associate said, from conducting his daily White House briefings, at which he often seeks to rewrite the history of the past several months. He declared at one point that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and insisted at another that he had to be a “cheerleader for the country,” as if that explained why he failed to prepare the public for what was coming.
  • Mr. Trump’s allies and some administration officials say the criticism has been unfair.
  • The Chinese government misled other governments, they say. And they insist that the president was either not getting proper information, or the people around him weren’t conveying the urgency of the threat. In some cases, they argue, the specific officials he was hearing from had been discredited in his eyes, but once the right information got to him through other channels, he made the right calls.
  • “While the media and Democrats refused to seriously acknowledge this virus in January and February, President Trump took bold action to protect Americans and unleash the full power of the federal government to curb the spread of the virus, expand testing capacities and expedite vaccine development even when we had no true idea the level of transmission or asymptomatic spread,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman.
  • Decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the administration over how to deal with China
  • The Containment IllusionBy the last week of February, it was clear to the administration’s public health team that schools and businesses in hot spots would have to close. But in the turbulence of the Trump White House, it took three more weeks to persuade the president that failure to act quickly to control the spread of the virus would have dire consequences.
  • There were key turning points along the way, opportunities for Mr. Trump to get ahead of the virus rather than just chase it. There were internal debates that presented him with stark choices, and moments when he could have chosen to ask deeper questions and learn more. How he handled them may shape his re-election campaign. They will certainly shape his legacy.
  • Facing the likelihood of a real pandemic, the group needed to decide when to abandon “containment” — the effort to keep the virus outside the U.S. and to isolate anyone who gets infected — and embrace “mitigation” to thwart the spread of the virus inside the country until a vaccine becomes available.
  • Among the questions on the agenda, which was reviewed by The New York Times, was when the department’s secretary, Mr. Azar, should recommend that Mr. Trump take textbook mitigation measures “such as school dismissals and cancellations of mass gatherings,” which had been identified as the next appropriate step in a Bush-era pandemic plan.
  • The group — including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health; Dr. Robert R. Redfield of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Mr. Azar, who at that stage was leading the White House Task Force — concluded they would soon need to move toward aggressive social distancing
  • A 20-year-old Chinese woman had infected five relatives with the virus even though she never displayed any symptoms herself. The implication was grave — apparently healthy people could be unknowingly spreading the virus — and supported the need to move quickly to mitigation.
  • The following day, Dr. Kadlec and the others decided to present Mr. Trump with a plan titled “Four Steps to Mitigation,” telling the president that they needed to begin preparing Americans for a step rarely taken in United States history.
  • a presidential blowup and internal turf fights would sidetrack such a move. The focus would shift to messaging and confident predictions of success rather than publicly calling for a shift to mitigation.
  • These final days of February, perhaps more than any other moment during his tenure in the White House, illustrated Mr. Trump’s inability or unwillingness to absorb warnings coming at him.
  • He instead reverted to his traditional political playbook in the midst of a public health calamity, squandering vital time as the coronavirus spread silently across the country.
  • A memo dated Feb. 14, prepared in coordination with the National Security Council and titled “U.S. Government Response to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus,” documented what more drastic measures would look like, including: “significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone. Consider school closures. Widespread ‘stay at home’ directives from public and private organizations with nearly 100% telework for some.”
  • his friend had a blunt message: You need to be ready. The virus, he warned, which originated in the city of Wuhan, was being transmitted by people who were showing no symptoms — an insight that American health officials had not yet accepted.
  • On the 18-hour plane ride home, Mr. Trump fumed as he watched the stock market crash after Dr. Messonnier’s comments. Furious, he called Mr. Azar when he landed at around 6 a.m. on Feb. 26, raging that Dr. Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily.
  • The meeting that evening with Mr. Trump to advocate social distancing was canceled, replaced by a news conference in which the president announced that the White House response would be put under the command of Vice President Mike Pence.
  • The push to convince Mr. Trump of the need for more assertive action stalled. With Mr. Pence and his staff in charge, the focus was clear: no more alarmist messages. Statements and media appearances by health officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Redfield would be coordinated through Mr. Pence’s office
  • It would be more than three weeks before Mr. Trump would announce serious social distancing efforts, a lost period during which the spread of the virus accelerated rapidly.Over nearly three weeks from Feb. 26 to March 16, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States grew from 15 to 4,226
  • The China FactorThe earliest warnings about coronavirus got caught in the crosscurrents of the administration’s internal disputes over China. It was the China hawks who pushed earliest for a travel ban. But their animosity toward China also undercut hopes for a more cooperative approach by the world’s two leading powers to a global crisis.
  • It was early January, and the call with a Hong Kong epidemiologist left Matthew Pottinger rattled.
  • Mr. Trump was walking up the steps of Air Force One to head home from India on Feb. 25 when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, publicly issued the blunt warning they had all agreed was necessary.
  • It was one of the earliest warnings to the White House, and it echoed the intelligence reports making their way to the National Security Council
  • some of the more specialized corners of the intelligence world were producing sophisticated and chilling warnings.
  • In a report to the director of national intelligence, the State Department’s epidemiologist wrote in early January that the virus was likely to spread across the globe, and warned that the coronavirus could develop into a pandemic
  • Working independently, a small outpost of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Center for Medical Intelligence, came to the same conclusion.
  • By mid-January there was growing evidence of the virus spreading outside China. Mr. Pottinger began convening daily meetings about the coronavirus
  • The early alarms sounded by Mr. Pottinger and other China hawks were freighted with ideology — including a push to publicly blame China that critics in the administration say was a distraction
  • And they ran into opposition from Mr. Trump’s economic advisers, who worried a tough approach toward China could scuttle a trade deal that was a pillar of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign.
  • Mr. Pottinger continued to believe the coronavirus problem was far worse than the Chinese were acknowledging. Inside the West Wing, the director of the Domestic Policy Council, Joe Grogan, also tried to sound alarms that the threat from China was growing.
  • The Consequences of ChaosThe chaotic culture of the Trump White House contributed to the crisis. A lack of planning and a failure to execute, combined with the president’s focus on the news cycle and his preference for following his gut rather than the data cost time, and perhaps lives.
  • the hawks kept pushing in February to take a critical stance toward China amid the growing crisis. Mr. Pottinger and others — including aides to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — pressed for government statements to use the term “Wuhan Virus.”Mr. Pompeo tried to hammer the anti-China message at every turn, eventually even urging leaders of the Group of 7 industrialized countries to use “Wuhan virus” in a joint statement.
  • Others, including aides to Mr. Pence, resisted taking a hard public line, believing that angering Beijing might lead the Chinese government to withhold medical supplies, pharmaceuticals and any scientific research that might ultimately lead to a vaccine.
  • Mr. Trump took a conciliatory approach through the middle of March, praising the job Mr. Xi was doing.
  • That changed abruptly, when aides informed Mr. Trump that a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman had publicly spun a new conspiracy about the origins of Covid-19: that it was brought to China by U.S. Army personnel who visited the country last October.
  • On March 16, he wrote on Twitter that “the United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus.”
  • Mr. Trump’s decision to escalate the war of words undercut any remaining possibility of broad cooperation between the governments to address a global threat
  • Mr. Pottinger, backed by Mr. O’Brien, became one of the driving forces of a campaign in the final weeks of January to convince Mr. Trump to impose limits on travel from China
  • he circulated a memo on Jan. 29 urging Mr. Trump to impose the travel limits, arguing that failing to confront the outbreak aggressively could be catastrophic, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.
  • The uninvited message could not have conflicted more with the president’s approach at the time of playing down the severity of the threat. And when aides raised it with Mr. Trump, he responded that he was unhappy that Mr. Navarro had put his warning in writing.
  • From the time the virus was first identified as a concern, the administration’s response was plagued by the rivalries and factionalism that routinely swirl around Mr. Trump and, along with the president’s impulsiveness, undercut decision making and policy development.
  • Even after Mr. Azar first briefed him about the potential seriousness of the virus during a phone call on Jan. 18 while the president was at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Mr. Trump projected confidence that it would be a passing problem.
  • “We have it totally under control,” he told an interviewer a few days later while attending the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. “It’s going to be just fine.”
  • The efforts to sort out policy behind closed doors were contentious and sometimes only loosely organized.
  • That was the case when the National Security Council convened a meeting on short notice on the afternoon of Jan. 27. The Situation Room was standing room only, packed with top White House advisers, low-level staffers, Mr. Trump’s social media guru, and several cabinet secretaries. There was no checklist about the preparations for a possible pandemic,
  • Instead, after a 20-minute description by Mr. Azar of his department’s capabilities, the meeting was jolted when Stephen E. Biegun, the newly installed deputy secretary of state, announced plans to issue a “level four” travel warning, strongly discouraging Americans from traveling to China. The room erupted into bickering.
  • A few days later, on the evening of Jan. 30, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff at the time, and Mr. Azar called Air Force One as the president was making the final decision to go ahead with the restrictions on China travel. Mr. Azar was blunt, warning that the virus could develop into a pandemic and arguing that China should be criticized for failing to be transparent.
  • Stop panicking, Mr. Trump told him.That sentiment was present throughout February, as the president’s top aides reached for a consistent message but took few concrete steps to prepare for the possibility of a major public health crisis.
  • As February gave way to March, the president continued to be surrounded by divided factions even as it became clearer that avoiding more aggressive steps was not tenable.
  • the virus was already multiplying across the country — and hospitals were at risk of buckling under the looming wave of severely ill people, lacking masks and other protective equipment, ventilators and sufficient intensive care beds. The question loomed over the president and his aides after weeks of stalling and inaction: What were they going to do?
  • Even then, and even by Trump White House standards, the debate over whether to shut down much of the country to slow the spread was especially fierce.
  • In a tense Oval Office meeting, when Mr. Mnuchin again stressed that the economy would be ravaged, Mr. O’Brien, the national security adviser, who had been worried about the virus for weeks, sounded exasperated as he told Mr. Mnuchin that the economy would be destroyed regardless if officials did nothing.
  • in the end, aides said, it was Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the veteran AIDS researcher who had joined the task force, who helped to persuade Mr. Trump. Soft-spoken and fond of the kind of charts and graphs Mr. Trump prefers, Dr. Birx did not have the rough edges that could irritate the president. He often told people he thought she was elegant.
  • During the last week in March, Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House adviser involved in task force meetings, gave voice to concerns other aides had. She warned Mr. Trump that his wished-for date of Easter to reopen the country likely couldn’t be accomplished. Among other things, she told him, he would end up being blamed by critics for every subsequent death caused by the virus.
Javier E

Opinion | What We Pretend to Know About the Coronavirus Could Kill Us - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Public health experts like Dr. Emanuel tend to be cautious about predictions and transparent about what they don’t know. In the case of the coronavirus, that can cause a dearth of definitive information — and an opportunity for reckless information that’s partly true but politically skewed.
  • The dynamic is on display during the daily White House news conferences, where President Trump’s claims are often hedged or corrected by public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci.
  • much of the pernicious false news about the coronavirus operates on the margins of believability — real facts and charts cobbled together to formulate a dangerous, wrongheaded conclusion or news reports that combine a majority of factually accurate reporting with a touch of unproven conjecture.
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  • armchair epidemiology, which Slate described as “convincing but flawed epidemiological analyses.”
  • The prime example is a Medium blog post titled “Covid-19 — Evidence Over Hysteria” by Aaron Ginn, a Silicon Valley product manager and “growth hacker” who argued against the severity of the virus and condemned the mainstream media for hyping it.
  • Conservative pundits, who’d spent weeks downplaying the seriousness of the virus, were drawn to Mr. Ginn’s conclusion that “shuttering the local economy is a distraction and arbitrary with limited accretive gain outside of greatly annoying millions and bankrupting hundreds of businesses.”
  • The Fox News political analyst Brit Hume tweeted the post, and then so did the anchors Bret Baier and Laura Ingraham. Within hours, the blog post was amplified across conservative media.
  • “I am seeing this playbook more and more,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “Secondhand data showing a crisis narrative that feels just a bit too well crafted. Mixing the truth with the plausible and the plausible with that which seems plausibly true in a week.”
  • Epidemiologists disagreed, pointing to some of Mr. Ginn’s assumptions as “unsubstantiated” and ignorant of “first-chapter-of-the-epidemiology-textbook stuff.”
  • After a 31-tweet thread from the infectious-disease expert Carl Bergstrom debunking Mr. Ginn’s data as cherry-picked, Medium took the post down, prompting a backlash in conservative spheres. More than two million people had already viewed it.
  • Mr. Ginn’s post, which seems informed by his reflexive skepticism of the mainstream media, filled two needs for readers: It offered a scientific-seeming explanation that real scientists would not provide. And it provided a political foil, the media.
  • This, according to Dr. Bergstrom, is what makes armchair epidemiology so harmful. Posts like Mr. Ginn’s “deplete the critical resource you need to manage the pandemic, which is trust,
  • “When people are getting conflicting messages, it makes it very hard for state and local authorities to generate the political will to take strong actions downstream.”
  • At first glance, the piece looked quite convincing. Mr. Ginn drew heavily from charts from the C.D.C., Johns Hopkins and the Financial Times. “You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say,” he claimed.
  • Dr. Bergstrom argues that the advances in available data make it easier than ever for junk-science peddlers to appear legitimate.
  • “Statistical analysis is a black box to most of us,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “And it’s like, ‘I can’t challenge a multilinear statistical regression because I don’t know what that is,’
  • “And so a form of authority gets imposed on a reader and we tend not to challenge data the way we’ve learned to challenge words.”
  • Mr. Evans is concerned that ultimately important nuance will be lost and pro-Trump pundits will use the news to exclusively scapegoat China and divert blame away from domestic failings. “What’s scary is how smart the false stuff is,” he said.
  • Covid-19 and the immediate threat to public health means that networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been unusually decisive about taking down misinformation. “In a case of a pandemic like this, when we are seeing posts that are urging people not to get treatment,” Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said recently, “that’s a completely different class of content versus the back-and-forth of what candidates may say about each other.”
  • The Trump administration and right-wing media watchdogs will weaponize changing facts about the virus, pointing to them as proof of a deep state bent on damaging the president or a media apparatus trying to swing an election
  • Others will try to pin the blame for the pandemic solely on the Trump administration
  • What we don’t know about Covid-19 will degenerate into ever more intricate conspiracies — some almost believable, some outrageous but all dangerous.
  • “We’re in a stream of ever-evolving data, and it’s being shaped around cognitive biases, partisanship and preferences embedded in our cultural identities,”
  • I called Mr. Pomerantsev because the information vacuum around the virus made me think of the title of his earlier book on Russia — “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.
  • In the absence of new, vetted information, reckless speculation takes its place, muddling our conception of the truth.
  • in crisis situations — especially early on — our desire for information exceeds our ability to accurately deliver it. Add to this the complexities of epidemiology: exponential growth; statistical modeling; and the slow, methodical nature of responsible science.
  • Together, they create the ideal conditions for distrust, bad-faith interpretations and political manipulation, the contours of which we’re only beginning to see.
  • “The really big question that haunts me is, ‘When do we return to reality?’” Mr. Pomerantsev mused over the phone from his own quarantine. “Or is it that in this partisan age absolutely everything is chopped, cut and edited to fit a different view? I’m waiting for society to finally hit up against a shared reality, like diving into the bottom of swimming pool. Instead we just go deeper.”
Javier E

Why Students Should Care About the Wars America Fights - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The more I asked my students about their thoughts on the Middle East, the more I realized that it was not simply a matter of disinterest (although that is certainly a factor among some), but rather that the subject only existed to them in an abstract manner.
  • My high-school experience was shaped by 9/11, and I enlisted in the Marine Corps shortly after the towers fell. It wasn’t until after I returned from deployment to Iraq and entering college that I began to think more about what this war meant and how it has fundamentally changed American society. But for my students, this was a war that had existed for almost their entire lives: In fact, from the moment many of them were born, the U.S. has been engaged in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not to mention the indelible mark that terrorism has left on Europe in recent years, or the very visible specter of ISIS operating within the Middle East and Africa today. How could there be no questions?
  • I wanted students to actively seek understanding of the region and the war that shaped a new generation of vets, including myself. I wanted to know that this history would not be lost, that a war costly in blood and treasure would not be forgotten; student detachment now would mean their detachment as they entered college and, ultimately, the “real world.” The consequences of a disinterested society are severe when considering the inevitability of future American military mobilization.
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  • I began to wonder if the disconnect is generational, whether today’s children are uniquely disconnected from the war that has shaped their lives
  • Consider the Vietnam War: The number of U.S. households owning a television increased by 75 percent between 1950 and 1960. By the time the Tet Offensive took place in 1968—a major turning point in the war—nearly 95 percent of households owned a TV. Images of the war were directly broadcast into the homes of millions of Americans via the big three networks
  • the fact that it was America’s first truly televised war speaks to its magnitude as a media event. Personal connections also rendered teenagers hyper-exposed to the war. Even though a minority of those who served in Vietnam were conscripted, the draft was still a salient aspect of the war, one of which families were all too aware
  • By contrast, in 2010, when the war in Iraq reached its seven-year mark, just 1 percent of news coverage was dedicated to the conflict. And currently, the proportion of Americans having served in the U.S.’s longest-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stands at less than 1 percent
  • Fewer families maintain connections to the military today than in previous eras, and this fact is especially pronounced among younger Americans; the younger you are, the less likely you are to know anyone who served in the armed forces.
  • With no relatives or family friends having served in Iraq or Afghanistan, and with such little media exposure to the conflicts, many young people do not have any reference point for understanding the impact of war.
  • Experts argue history education—let alone nuanced history education that encourages critical thinking—is a low priority for America’s public schools, and if that’s the case this flaw only exacerbates the problem. As does the reality, according to some critics, that many modern-day textbooks teach a highly biased account of the “War on Terror.”
  • What does this mean? America’s youth aren’t apathetic—rather, they’ve grown up during a war obscured by modern American culture. If one doesn’t care to look at the war, then he doesn’t have to
  • . It’s not indifference per se, but instead lack of context.
  • If education is truly an investment in the future, then that education must involve addressing consequences of prolonged war.
  • It is today’s students who will foot the bill for Iraq and Afghanistan when they become taxpayers. It is today’s students who are now—and will continue to be—exposed to an entirely new set of policies and institutions have been developed in the name of the “War on Terror.” Today’s students, for instance, will continue to grow up in an era of both ever-increasing electronic surveillance and reduction of privacy.
  • Students’ silence speaks to the need for American schools to address a growing divide between the military and the American public—to include as a core part of the curriculum lessons on this ill-defined war that has left societies in ruin and changed American politics. At some point, students must learn that it is their civic responsibility to understand and assess violence being waged in their name.
krystalxu

The Push to Make French Gender-Neutral - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them.
  • It’s not that speaking French makes it impossible for you to conceive of something as gender-neutral, he suggested
  • those studies are limited in that they can’t control for outside factors like culture, which are extremely important in determining sexist attitudes.
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  • The statement also warned that inclusive writing would “destroy” the promises of the Francophonie (the linguistic zone encompassing all countries that use French at the administrative level, or whose first or majority language is French).
  • this subject is still on the margins of cognitive science and linguistics research, and critics of inclusive writing say that not enough work has been done to prove conclusively that changing a language will improve gender equality.
  • also the speakers of minority languages in France (like Catalan, Occitan, and Gascon), who have always used the median-period as a phonetic marker.
  • So the uproar was almost instantaneous when, this fall, the first-ever school textbook promoting a gender-neutral version of French was released.
Javier E

'The East Is Rising': Xi Maps Out China's Post-Covid Ascent - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Xi Jinping has struck a confident posture as he looks to secure China’s prosperity and power in a post-Covid world, saying that the country is entering a time of opportunity when “the East is rising and the West is declining.”
  • “The biggest source of chaos in the present-day world is the United States,” Mr. Xi said, a county official in northwest China recounted in a speech published last week on a government website. He quoted Mr. Xi as saying: “The United States is the biggest threat to our country’s development and security.”
  • he is seeking to balance confidence and caution as China strides ahead while other countries continue to grapple with the pandemic.
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  • Although China is growing stronger, Mr. Xi has said, there are still many ways in which “the West is strong and the East is weak,”
  • “Xi Jinping strikes me as ruthless but cautious in erecting a durable personal legacy,”
  • In the eyes of China’s leaders, he said, “the response to the coronavirus was really a textbook example to the party of how you could bring things together in a short amount of time and force through a program.”
  • The Biden administration has signaled that it wants to press China on human rights and compete with it on technological advancements and regional influence in Asia
  • At home, China is grappling with an aging population and trying to overhaul an engine of economic growth that uses too much investment and energy for too little gain and too much pollution.
  • the Chinese legislature appears poised to back plans to drastically rewrite election rules for Hong Kong, removing the vestiges of local democracy in the former British colony.
  • Mr. Xi, 67, appears likely to claim a third five-year term in power, bulldozing past the term limits that had been put in place to restrain leaders after Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.
  • Having emerged triumphantly from the pandemic, Mr. Xi will look to further centralize his power,
  • The congress is part of the party’s stagecraft this year to reinforce the view that Mr. Xi is essential to safely steering China through momentous changes. Official Chinese media have recently hailed Mr. Xi’s campaign to end rural poverty as a major success
  • in July, Mr. Xi will preside over the centenary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, celebrations that are likely to cast him as a historic leader like Mao and Deng.
  • Mr. Xi has portrayed China as moving closer by the year to regaining its rightful historic status as a great power, while established powers are riven by dysfunction.
  • “There is a vivid contrast between the order of China and the chaos of the West.”
  • officials have used such phrases markedly more often in recent months, underscoring the confidence — critics say hubris — enveloping the Chinese government.
  • The health of the economy will be crucial to whether that confidence survives. Government advisers have suggested that average growth could be 5 percent or higher over the next five years, if things go well.
  • But the country might not sustain that level of growth unless it becomes more innovative and reduces its reliance on investment in heavy industry and infrastructure,
  • China’s aging population will place growing demands on pension funds, health care and accumulated savings.
  • Such economic pressures could corrode public support for the party in the years ahead
  • Leaders in Beijing appear much more focused on the United States, which they see as remaining bent on hobbling China’s ascent, regardless of who is in the White House.
  • Chinese policymakers were alarmed when the Trump administration pulled back Chinese companies’ access to American technology. Many say that the United States will keep trying to hold back China by restricting its access to “chokehold technologies,” such as advanced semiconductors and the machines to make them.
  • “Containment and oppression from the United States is a major threat,” said Chen Yixin, a security official who served as Mr. Xi’s policy enforcer in Wuhan
  • “This is both an unplanned clash and a protracted war.”
  • Mr. Xi’s plan for addressing these shortcomings is to expand domestic innovation and markets to be less dependent on high-tech imports
  • He could dominate for years yet, making his decisions, or misjudgments, all the more consequential.
  • “Internally there are now few sources of opposition — no sources of opposition,” Xiao Gongqin, a historian in Shanghai, said in a telephone interview, “so the leader must be able to stay even-keeled.”
anonymous

Opinion | We Need a G.I. Bill for Essential Workers - The New York Times - 0 views

  • America must do right by the people who have risked their lives during the pandemic.
  • or far too many American workers, the pandemic has delivered a one-two punch of hardship. The American Voices Project, a national study of the ongoing crisis brought on by the coronavirus, recently interviewed a 26-year-old essential worker about the pandemic’s first punch: “I was working at a gas station, bringing home enough to get me by,” she said. “And then the Corona hit, my hours got cut, I was only working one or two days, sometimes no days, and then I was out of a job. It literally was hell … I was suffocating in bills.”
  • Because of her growing debt, she used her certification as a nursing assistant to land a job in one of the riskiest settings around: a nursing home. The job entails constant face-to-face interaction. “I’m given a group of people that I have to care for,” she said. “I’ll have to pass out breakfast or lunch trays, or they’re incontinent, so I’d be giving towels. It’s basic care.”
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  • This is a textbook description of what some philosophers and social scientists call a noxious contract. Because there are bills to pay, and because the downturn means that alternatives are in short supply (punch one), she had little alternative but to accept a contract that comes with real risk (punch two). Although noxious contracts are as old as market economies, the pandemic has put them on steroids. The key problem: We’ve suddenly created a vast group of risky occupations and thrust them on a labor force with fewer options.
  • Although the first G.I. Bill ended up reinforcing inequalities and didn’t live up to its promise, that only means that we now have an obligation to do it again and do it right. If ever there were a time to step up in this way, it would be precisely now, when the country is emerging from one of its biggest challenges since the original G.I. Bill was signed.
martinelligi

Myanmar coup: 'We were told to shoot protesters', say police who fled - BBC News - 0 views

  • Police officers from Myanmar have told the BBC they fled across the border into India after refusing to carry out the orders of the military which seized power in a coup last month. In some of the first such interviews, more than a dozen defectors told us they escaped, fearing they'd be forced to kill or harm civilians.
  • The military is edgy. They are becoming more and more brutal." As we speak, Naing pulls out his phone to show me photos of the family he left behind - a wife, and two daughters aged just five and six months.
  • ey say they're part of a growing number of officials who are joining the pro-democracy, civil disobedience movement (CDM) in the country.
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  • Authorities in Myanmar have asked India to return any defectors, to "uphold friendly relations".
  • Htut, who is 22, says he and other police were paired with members of the military as they patrolled the streets. Protesters who were peacefully banging utensils in support of the pro-democracy movement were threatened with arrest.
  • n 2017, Myanmar's army responded to attacks on police by Rohingya militants with a deadly crackdown, driving more than half a million Rohingya Muslims across the border into Bangladesh in what the UN later called a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing"
Javier E

Zoom school's unexpected upside - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Virtually inviting students into my home via video meant I had to obliterate the boundaries I once held dear. My students saw me at my most comfortable: no makeup — opting instead for an extra hour of sleep
  • I once greeted each student walking into my classroom by issuing a basic “Hey, what’s up?” But as many of my students and their family members became ill, long daily check-ins became a must. These conversations allowed students to compare symptoms with one another; other times, the talks gave them space to mourn the loss of a loved one or offer empathy and support
  • Afterward, we sometimes got to the material I’d planned to cover, sometimes not. But unlike before, I didn’t berate myself for not hitting all my curriculum targets for the day. Some lessons could wait; these could not.
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  • Knowing what these kids were dealing with — caring for sick family members, babysitting younger siblings, using their own money to keep food on the table — I worked to become more flexible. I used to invest a lot of importance in arbitrary deadlines and make-or-break exams to establish high academic standards. These days, I’ve let go of many of my old notions about penalties for late or missing work; I no longer give students one way, and one way only, to show mastery of a skill.
  • I used to judge my students for not completing an assignment to my satisfaction, even after multiple opportunities to do so. I’d lament to my husband about their questionable priorities. This was harder now that I’d learned so much about their lives:
  • I have never paid closer attention to my students’ mental and physical health, or devoted so much time to hearing their struggles and giving them resources to help manage their anxiety.
  • seeing my students’ faces up close — not behind the cover of a textbook or staring down at their phones — I saw the dark circles under their eyes, chapped lips, unkempt hair. Students were inhaling and exhaling trauma. Together, we allowed one another into our lives and made that breathing a little easier.
  • Perhaps the biggest transformation was this: I accepted the fact that I was not the single most important person in my students’ lives, and my assignments weren’t their most important tasks. I am no longer the authoritarian at the front of the classroom, asserting rules that benefit me and me alone. This might once have struck me as lenient — undisciplined, even — but the fluidity has produced a higher level of respect and a better quality of work than I’ve seen in quite some time.
  • I have always seen them as humans first — but perhaps for the first time, I allowed them to see me in the same way. I once feared that seeming human, more myself, would undermine my authority and make me a worse teacher; now I’ve realized that our most valuable interactions come from sharing our vulnerability.
Javier E

How politics is shaping Biden's infrastructure proposal - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • e new administration’s governing style. Rather than seek the perfect policy answer — an approach touted by the Obama administration — they are focused on solutions that can muster a broad base of support.
  • The plan also includes funding electric vehicles without setting a timeline for when the nation will stop selling gas-powered cars and trucks, and funding highly subsidized inland waterways without spelling out how much industry will pay for new locks and dams.
  • “We have to pass policies that people actually want,” said Leah Stokes, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “In an economics textbook, it’s efficiency all the time. That’s not the way it is in politics. The goal should be improving people’s lives.”
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  • Many influential interest groups and lawmakers are fighting to include different ideas.
  • Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) said he supported the infrastructure plan’s inclusion of the Pro Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize
  • The fraught politics of personal cars, SUVs and diesel trucks, meanwhile, meant some highly effective climate policies didn’t make it into Biden’s plan.
  • White House Deputy National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi said in a phone interview. “It’s about making sure that the investments are made in a way that stretches the geography of opportunity to every Zip code, that fully avails the environmental justice upside and totally leans into the supply- chain and domestic manufacturing opportunities that all this presents.”
  • “The focus across the board is to try to deliver the upside in small towns and big cities and all the places in between, with an emphasis on communities that are very often left behind and left out,
  • “In the climate space, if we cared only about optimizing economic efficiency we’d probably only consider a carbon price,” he added. “But as we’ve learned from over 15 years of carbon-pricing around the globe, that works out better on economists’ whiteboards than it does in reality.”
  • Josh Freed, who leads the climate and energy team at the center-left think tank Third Way, said in an email, “The 'best’ use of taxpayer funds isn’t always the one that maximizes economic efficiencies.”
  • Some of the biggest emissions savings in transportation would come from ending the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035, followed soon after by heavy trucks. The plan avoids those politically dicey mandates.
  • The incentives and other policies mirror those championed by Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has called for major rebates when drivers buy electric vehicles.
  • The president’s infrastructure ambitions depend on Schumer’s ability to shepherd a package through the evenly split Senate.
  • Even supporters of the infrastructure push say it has elements that bend to political forces. Some economists, for instance, believe the plan’s call for “Buy American” provisions to ensure infrastructure is made by American workers will drive up the cost of the measures for the federal government. But those provisions are fiercely supported by unions and other liberal groups because they boost the amount of federal spending that has to be directed to American workers.
rerobinson03

Opinion | August Vollmer 'Abolished' the Police - in 1905 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • August Vollmer has been hailed by many in law enforcement as the father of modern American policing. He has also been criticized for pioneering the militarization of the police and espousing the racist theories of eugenics. What’s rarely talked about, however, is that he began his tenure as the head of the police department of Berkeley, Calif., in 1905 by forcing all of his deputies to resign — arguably a kind of early experiment in abolishing the police. He eventually replaced them with college-educated people, hoping they would usher in a new, progressive era in policing.
  • Today, as governments and citizens contemplate the future of local law enforcement, it’s worth remembering that reshaping American policing is not some shocking new idea from the radical left.
  • Meanwhile, Mr. Vollmer systemized the practices of policing and built in accountability. He mandated that his officers create written records of their work (the first that the city ever kept) to measure their progress in reducing crime. He popularized the idea of crime labs, where officers could study evidence using science — an idea that rapidly spread to other departments, along with his record-keeping methods. And his department partnered with social organizations for at-risk youth, such as the scouts and Boys’ Club
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  • Mr. Vollmer’s 1936 textbook makes a similar suggestion, though more as an approach to reducing crime than Ms. Kaba’s goal of creating a cooperative society in which police are obsolete. Mr. Vollmer asserted that school, welfare, health, and recreation were more likely to prevent crime than jails.
  • To this point, Mr. Vollmer would perhaps respond that reforming the police doesn’t come cheap — and that public funds could be used to educate would-be officers. When he forced out his deputies, he rebuilt the department with extra money from the city for education, raises and lab equipment. The proposals of Ms. Kaba and other police abolitionists would put public funds toward educating a wide range of people in community support jobs: mental health experts, conflict de-escalation teams, addiction specialists and advocates who can help the unhoused find shelter.
rerobinson03

Opinion | Tom Hanks: The Tulsa Race Massacre Is Every American's History - The New York... - 0 views

  • But for all my study, I never read a page of any school history book about how, in 1921, a mob of white people burned down a place called Black Wall Street, killed as many as 300 of its Black citizens and displaced thousands of Black Americans who lived in Tulsa, Okla.
  • Instead, in my history classes, I learned that Britain’s Stamp Act helped lead to the Boston Tea Party, that “we” were a free people because the Declaration of Independence said “all men are created equal.” That the Whiskey Rebellion started over a tax on whiskey. That the Articles of Confederation and the Alien and Sedition Acts were cockeyed. Rightfully, Sacco and Vanzetti, Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party and the Wright Brothers had their time in my classes. Our textbooks told of the Louisiana Purchase; the Johnstown, Pa., flood; the great San Francisco earthquake; and George Washington Carver’s development of hundreds of products from the common goober.
  • The truth about Tulsa, and the repeated violence by some white Americans against Black Americans, was systematically ignored, perhaps because it was regarded as too honest, too painful a lesson for our young white ears. So, our predominantly white schools didn’t teach it, our mass appeal works of historical fiction didn’t enlighten us, and my chosen industry didn’t take on the subject in films and shows until recently.
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  • How different would perspectives be had we all been taught about Tulsa in 1921, even as early as the fifth grade?
  • Should our schools now teach the truth about Tulsa? Yes, and they should also stop the battle to whitewash curriculums to avoid discomfort for students. America’s history is messy but knowing that makes us a wiser and stronger people. 1921 is the truth, a portal to our shared, paradoxical history.
Javier E

Xi Jinping Is Undoing China's Economic Miracle - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • China’s economic “miracle” wasn’t that miraculous. The country’s high-octane ascent over the past 40 years is, in reality, a triumph of basic economic principles: As the state gave way to the market, private enterprise and trade flourished, growth quickened, and incomes soared.
  • China’s leader is rejecting decades of tried-and-true policy by reasserting the power of the Communist Party within the economy and redirecting Chinese business inward.
  • In a document issued in September, the Communist Party said it aimed to “guide” private companies to “explore the establishment of a modern enterprise system with Chinese characteristics.” The “opinion” of the party is that its cadres ought to have more influence over the management decisions of private firms, to ensure that they adhere firmly to the correct, state-determined line.
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  • Since the days of Deng, the mantra of Beijing’s top policy makers had been “reform and opening up,” which stressed integration with the global economy. Xi, however, wants to limit that integration, or at least engage with the wider world on different terms
  • Perhaps he thinks that a heftier role for the state could help firm his hold over party and government. “He wanted more control, and he thought having a big state sector was an element of achieving that,” Lardy explained.
  • Deng Xiaoping, one of Xi’s predecessors, who launched China’s now-famous pro-market reforms in the late 1970s, understood that the country was destitute because it was strangled by the Communist state and cut off from the world. Deng and his successors steadily lifted controls on private investment, trade, and foreign business. Unfettered by overbearing state planners, China’s entrepreneurial energies, mixed with imported capital and technology, unleashed an explosion of growth and wealth.
  • In other words, China will stay open for business—if that business helps protect its own interests.
  • “He is feeling under siege,” James McGregor, the chairman of the China arm of the consulting firm APCO Worldwide, told me. Chinese officials “are eliminating all vulnerabilities to the outside world, or reducing them as much as they can.”
  • an economist at the research firm Capital Economics, dubbed the self-sufficiency drive a “lose-lose” for China’s economy, because it diverts resources from more productive purposes and forces firms to choose suppliers for political, not economic, reasons
  • Xi wishes to reduce China’s reliance on other countries, especially potential adversaries such as the United States. From Beijing’s perspective, the Trump administration’s restrictions on technology sales to the telecom giant Huawei Technologies and other Chinese outfits exposed the dangers of counting on untrustworthy foreigners, and Xi intends to ensure that China’s advance can’t be upset by politicians in Washington or elsewhere.
  • To protect national security, China needs “independent, controllable, safe, and reliable” supply chains, Xi said in an April speech, with “at least one alternative source for key products and supply channels, to create a necessary industrial backup system.” Localizing technology has been a long-standing Chinese ambition, but China watchers think Xi has thrown that plan into hyperdrive
  • All of this adds up to a grand experiment in the kind of state-directed development unseen since the days of Mao Zedong.
  • Classically trained economists frown upon Xi’s program. He’s ticking just about every box of what not to do to propel incomes and innovation
  • et we shouldn’t immediately dismiss his plans as doomed to fail. As a gargantuan market of 1.4 billion people, China can develop local companies of size and scope without bothering much with the outside world. (Ma’s Ant is a prime example.) If the program works, economists may have to rewrite their textbooks.
  • et the undertaking is fraught with risks. By favoring the state sector, Xi is funneling valuable money and talent to notoriously bloated and inefficient government enterprises instead of far more nimble and creative private firms
  • This dovetails nicely with another of Xi’s goals, self-sufficiency. China, he believes, should produce homemade substitutes to key products now bought from overseas—especially microchips and other critical technologie
  • learly, Xi is preparing for protracted conflict between the world’s two largest economies by attempting to fireproof China from measures President-elect Joe Biden might use against him. Yet in doing so
  • if Xi succeeds in replacing more of what China purchases from the world, he will also undermine the economic rationale for continued engagement with a brutal authoritarian regime. Xi thinks he is shielding China against isolation. He could instead be causing it.
Javier E

Trump and the Failure of the Expert Class - WSJ - 0 views

  • For conservatives, the case was exactly reversed: They had some major policy wins, but at the cost of frequent embarrassment and dismay at the president’s offensive behavior and self-defeating logorrhea.
  • The worst of his conduct took place after the 2020 election and seemed to fulfill progressive commentators’ allegation that Donald Trump was carrying out an “assault on democracy.” Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept defeat, culminating in demands that Vice President Mike Pence overturn a lawful election on no legal authority, occasioned a debacle that may haunt the Republican Party, and the country, for years.
  • lso during the 2016 campaign, an assemblage of top-tier academics, intellectuals and journalists warned that Mr. Trump’s candidacy signified a fascist threat. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Nazism at Yale, was among the most strident of these prophets. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” he warned in a Facebook post shortly after the election. “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authorities at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire.” Many experts stuck with the fascism theme after Mr. Trump’s election and throughout his presidency
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  • The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t. 
  • When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials
  • For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.”
  • Mr. Trump assaulted democracy in the ordinary sense of the word, but he did so only after the 2020 election. That effort was discreditable and disruptive, but it was also delusional and ineffective. It was not the assault the president’s expert-class critics had foreseen.
  • It took a 22-month investigation by a special counsel to establish an absence of evidence that Mr. Trump’s campaign had conspired with the Russians.
  • Reporters treated every turn of events as evidence of Mr. Trump’s unique evil.
  • Reports of his defeat, accurate though they were, meant little coming from news organizations that cared so much about discrediting him and so little about factual truth.
  • Meanwhile the administration pressed ahead with a diplomatic push to strike commercial and diplomatic deals between Israel and Arab states
  • political talking points aside, this much is apparent: No nation—or anyhow no nation that values individual liberty and isn’t an island—has managed even to slow the spread of Covid-19 without causing economic ruin and attendant disorder.
  • The Trump administration made its share of mistakes during the early stages of the pandemic, although its chief failing was the president’s lack of rhetorical clarity
  • By any set of criteria outside the self-contained system of public-health best practices, the lockdowns failed. They purchased minor slowdowns in the spread of the virus at the cost of punishing economic destruction, untold social dysfunction, and mind-blowing public debt. 
  • many parts of the country didn’t lock down, or did so only loosely and briefly, and managed to keep their hospitals running just fine.
  • Controlling the spread of Covid-19 in the U.S. was always going to be a messy business: Many infected people don’t get sick and have no compelling reason to burrow in their homes, and America is an unruly nation with a long tradition of nonconformity
  • The experts might have accounted for these realities. They might have realized that the measures prescribed by their textbooks—contact tracing, forced quarantines, shelter-in-place orders—were mostly unworkable in America. They didn’t.
  • If this was an attempted coup, it was a comically inept one. Hardly anyone in Mr. Trump’s own administration, including the vice president, wanted anything to do with it.  
  • The most regrettable part of this class failure is that, with rare exceptions, the experts themselves acknowledge no error. Nothing about the Trump years has occasioned soul-searching or self-criticism on their part
rerobinson03

Opinion | The Story Behind the Myanmar Coup - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Myanmar’s decade-long experiment in conditional democracy just ended in a textbook example of a coup — a coup that was a pre-emptive strike.
  • The Tatmadaw invoked the Constitution (which it drafted back in 2008) to declare a state of emergency for a year; the already-powerful commander in chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, is now essentially a dictator. He has pledged “to practice the genuine, discipline-flourishing multiparty democratic system in a fair manner” and has announced plans to hold another election at an unspecified date.
  • But the military still has much power, constitutionally guaranteed: It controls the ministries of defense, home affairs and border affairs; 25 percent of seats in the national and regional assemblies are reserved for it; it has veto authority over amendments to key provisions of the Constitution.
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  • Beyond the personal tensions, there is, of course, institutional antagonism. For some three decades, the N.L.D. was subject to crushing persecution at the hands of the Tatmadaw and the security forces; hundreds of the party’s members were arrested, tortured, killed or driven into exile.
  • At a minimum, the coup, being a major step backward, may undermine morale and cohesion among the troops. Decades of armed conflict with several ethnic groups have inflicted numerous casualties on ordinary soldiers. Desertion has been on the rise. Can the generals expect full compliance from the institution after the coup?
brickol

'It Was Very Humiliating': Readers Share How They Were Taught About Slavery - The New Y... - 0 views

  • Inspired by Nikita Stewart’s essay for The 1619 Project on why slavery is taught so poorly in American schools, we asked readers to tell us about their own experiences learning this history. We received hundreds of responses depicting off-base and factually inconsistent lessons, as well as a few thoughtful approaches.
    • brickol
       
      The same events can have varying interpretations
  • my textbook said that many enslaved people were “sad” that slavery ended, because their enslavers took care of them and gave them food and clothing.
    • brickol
       
      It is important to evaluate the sources from which you are obtaining your information. Doing this will help you assess what information is reliable.
  • we discussed the semantic difference between the phrases “they were given freedom” and “they took their freedom.”The conclusion of the lesson was that “to take” implies that one is retrieving what has been stolen and is a phrase of power, whereas “to give” implies that freedom is not an inherent trait but rather a state to be bestowed by a benefactor
    • brickol
       
      Analyzing the author's use of language when reading history can illuminate their biases and point of view. This can be helpful when evaluating their work.
liamhudgings

Officials want to clear a mile-long homeless camp on a Sonoma County bike trail. Some d... - 0 views

  • Pest control workers were using the spread as bait as they installed rat traps -- 340 of them -- throughout the mile-long homeless encampment after infrared video from a sheriff's helicopter revealed a major rodent infestation.
  • A popular biking spot, the trail is now the site of the largest homeless encampment in Sonoma County history. It's also a textbook outcome of the 16% surge last year in homelessness in California -- largely fueled by skyrocketing housing costs -- and the myriad problems that go along with it.
  • "It means lower property values. There are people that are 40 feet away who have townhouses. Who would want to buy their house?"
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  • "I absolutely acknowledge the tremendous anger and frustration in the community and in the neighborhood, and it's warranted," said County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, whose district includes the trail.
  • "We're legally mandated to provide alternatives to every single resident along the trail before we move forward with clearing the encampment," Hopkins said. "We really need to get an encampment opened in a place that is actually appropriate for it."
  • the encampment still is rife with open drug use, violence and crime, local officials said. Drug needles recently littered the path amid the piles of trash and junk.
  • "Yes, there are thieves and there are addicts,"
  • "But there are also people struggling that just lost their job. You have to take each case individually."
  • Edwards, who said she worked as a nurse's aide in her home state of Nebraska, followed a boyfriend to California, she said. A bad breakup left her homeless."I hate to think that I will die out here and didn't make anything of myself," she said.
  • But like a lot of people on the trail, Edwards seemed to have no plan or path, indicative of broader challenges associated with the homeless crisis.
  • Using meth, she said, helped ease her mental anguish.
Javier E

Opinion | President Trump has committed treason - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Trump fomented a deadly insurrection against the U.S. Congress to prevent a duly-elected president from taking office. Treason is not a word to be used lightly, but that is its textbook definition.
  • “We will not take it anymore, and that’s what this is all about,” he told a sea of MAGA fans and Proud Boys on the Ellipse outside the White House at noon. From behind bulletproof glass, he told them: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
  • Earlier, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani had proposed, to the same crowd, a “trial by combat” to resolve Trump’s election complaints. And Donald Trump Jr. delivered a political threat to lawmakers who don’t vote to reject the election results: “We’re coming for you.”
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  • Trump instructed his supporters to march to the Capitol — “and I’ll be there with you” — to “demand that Congress do the right thing” and not count the electoral votes of swing states he lost. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong,” he admonished them, with CYA instructions to make themselves heard “peacefully and patriotically.”
clairemann

How DHS and ICE Are Making The Case for Trump's Re-Election | Time - 0 views

  • In the final weeks leading up to the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have launched a highly unusual publicity blitz to spotlight immigration enforcement actions in key battleground states where President Donald Trump is trailing his opponent Joe Biden in the polls.
  • These public announcements by senior leaders ahead of the election, which former officials tell TIME are abnormal, if not unprecedented, have been held to publicize mostly routine immigration enforcement operations that would usually have been revealed with little fanfare.
  • Instead, DHS and ICE officials have used them as a platform to aggressively make the case for the president’s immigration policies, often taking on a markedly Trumpian tone and echoing parts of his stump speech.
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  • Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy Ken Cuccinelli have talked about immigrants taking American jobs, blasted Democrat-run sanctuary cities, touted “America First” and warned of “evil people who seek to travel to the United States with the intent of harming and killing Americans.”
  • In Phoenix last week, Wolf warned that there would be a surge in migration and an “unimaginable public health crisis” at the southern border if Trump were to lose the election — a series of nakedly political statements that stunned many former officials.
  • “The rhetoric that’s come out of Wolf and Cuccinelli is appearing to be a propaganda arm of the White House,”
  • The arrests were part of “Operation OPTical Illusion,” a crackdown on the federal Optional Tactical Training program, which allows international students to work in their field of study while on a U.S. student visa.
  • Cuccinelli directly tied this immigration enforcement action to Trump’s agenda, saying the arrests “will open up those jobs for American workers” and emphasizing that this “has been a very high priority for this President.”
  • Earlier in October, ICE put up bold black and red billboards in several parts of Pennsylvania, featuring the faces of six immigrants and their charges of burglary, robbery, and assault in big lettering. The agency described them as “at-large immigration violators who may pose a public safety threat” and said the campaign was meant to “educate the public about the dangers of non-cooperation policies.
  • “DHS is showing us a textbook example of why we have a federal law against government officials using their positions to support a political campaign,”
  • The politically significant locations of these press conferences, and the presence of senior leadership, means each event has been covered by local news and circulated on social media, likely reaching their intended in-state audience and beyond.
  • “the Trump administration is building [a] new wall and doing so faster than ever before” and “the Trump admin is putting America first by protecting American workers.” On Thursday, Wolf posted an almost 2-minute video about news media raising questions about Trump’s promised border wall in what was effectively a campaign ad, with the message: “They said it couldn’t be done…They were wrong. 400 times and counting.”
  • “These billboards are clearly intended to fuel anti-immigrant fervor one month before the election,”
  • “Top DHS officials are acting more like campaign surrogates than public servants, and they need to be held accountable.”
  • “I am deeply disturbed that ICE is spending government dollars and putting lives at risk in furtherance of what is described as a political messaging campaign,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, wrote in a letter to Pham in early October.
  • Immigration lawyers and advocates have raised concerns the agency has also been timing other law enforcement actions for political purposes. In September, ICE announced that 19 non-citizens in North Carolina had been charged with illegally voting in the 2016 election.
  • This time around, the ICE announcement about the charges — which came more than three years after the investigation started — were also “highly suspect, and likely to be politically driven,” says Helen Parsonage, an attorney who represents five of the non-citizens.
  • While Trump’s 2016 rallies were often filled with vivid accounts of immigrant crime, “build the wall” chants and infamous readings of a poem about a snake to illustrate the threat posed by immigrants and refugees, it’s a theme he’s rarely touched on in his 2020 rallies.
Javier E

Opinion | The Rotting of the Republican Mind - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
  • We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality
  • Many people point to the interne
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  • Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?
  • My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real.
  • In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.
  • This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survive collective scrutiny.
  • We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch said, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.”
  • While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities.
  • In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.
  • In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending.
  • Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them.
  • People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers.
  • The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community.
  • conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.
  • For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools
  • For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have
  • For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals
  • If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.
  • Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set
  • He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source.
  • The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking.
  • That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it
  • second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.
  • Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.
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