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lucieperloff

Biden to Restore Three National Monuments in Utah and New England - The New York Times - 0 views

  • had been stripped away by former President Donald J. Trump, according to two people familiar with the matter.
  • Mr. Biden will reinstate and slightly expand the original 1.3 million acre boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument, and restore the original 1.8 million acre boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante, two rugged and pristine expanses in Utah that are defined by red rock canyons, rich wildlife and archaeological treasures.
  • “The president’s protection of these three national monuments is among a series of steps the administration has taken to restore protections to some of America’s most cherished lands and waters, many of which are sacred to tribal nation
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  • Mr. Biden ordered a review of the elimination of protections for the monuments to “determine whether restoration of the monument boundaries and conditions would be appropriate.”
  • Conservation groups welcomed the news. “Thank you, President Biden — you have listened to Indigenous tribes and the American people and ensured these landscapes will be protected for generations to come,”
  • President Biden fanned the flames of controversy and ignored input from the communities closest to these monuments,
  • The new boundaries will restore the original Obama-era boundary and will include the additional 11,200 Trump-era acres.
Javier E

I Was a Useful Idiot for Capitalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • From my parents’ teenage years in the 1930s and ’40s through my teenage years in the 1970s, American economic life became a lot more fair and democratic and secure than it had been when my grandparents were teenagers. But then all of a sudden, around 1980, that progress slowed, stopped, and in many ways reversed.
  • I read an article about that year’s record-setting bonuses on Wall Street. The annual revenues of Goldman Sachs were greater than the annual economic output of two-thirds of the countries on Earth—a treasure chest from which the firm was disbursing the equivalent of $69 million to its CEO and an average of $800,000 each to everybody else at the place.
  • “This is not the America in which we grew up,” I wrote in a magazine column at the time, by which I meant America of the several very prosperous decades after World War II, when the income share of the super-rich was not yet insanely high. Since the 1980s, the portion of income taken each year by the rich had become as hugely disproportionate as it had been in the 1920s, with CEOs paid several hundred times more than the average worker, whose average income had barely budged for decades. “We’ve not only let economic uncertainty and unfairness grow to grotesque extremes,” I wrote, but “also inured ourselves to the spectacle.”
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  • Mea culpa. For those past two decades, I’d prospered and thrived in the new political economy. And unharmed by automation or globalization or the new social contract, I’d effectively ignored the fact that the majority of my fellow Americans weren’t prospering or thriving.
  • In 40 years, the share of wealth owned by our richest 1 percent has doubled, the collective net worth of the bottom half has dropped to almost zero, the median weekly pay for a full-time worker has increased by just 0.1 percent a year, only the incomes of the top 10 percent have grown in sync with the economy, and so on
  • Economic inequality has reverted to the levels of a century ago and earlier, and so has economic insecurity, while economic immobility is almost certainly worse than it’s ever been.
  • What’s happened since the 1970s and ’80s didn’t just happen. It looks more like arson than a purely accidental fire, more like poisoning than a completely natural illness, more like a cheating of the many by the few—and although I’ve always been predisposed to disbelieve conspiracy theories, this amounts to a long-standing and well-executed conspiracy, not especially secret, by the leaders of the capitalist class, at the expense of everyone else.
  • And I and my cohort of hippie-to-yuppie liberal Baby Boomers were complicit in that.
  • A union? Sure, fine. But I was talent. I was creative. I was an individual. College graduates tend to think of themselves that way, younger ones all the more, younger Baby Boomers at the time probably the most ever. And the intensified, all-encompassing individualism that blew up during the 1960s—I do my thing, and you do your thing—was not a mindset or temperament that necessarily reinforced feelings of solidarity with fellow workers or romantic feelings about unions.
criscimagnael

Why Republicans Campaign on Guns While Democrats Choose Not To - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey unpacked lipstick, an iPhone and something else from her purse in one campaign advertisement — “a little Smith & Wesson .38,” she said. A Republican candidate for governor in Georgia declared in a different spot, “I believe in Jesus, guns and babies.”
  • As the nation reels from a massacre at a Texas elementary school in which a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, a review of Republican and Democratic advertising during the first months of 2022 highlights the giant cultural chasm over guns in America. As both parties have navigated their respective primary seasons, Republicans have been far more likely to use messaging about guns to galvanize their base in the midterms than Democrats — who are largely in agreement on the issue of combating gun violence, but have seen one legislative effort after another collapse.
  • But more than 100 television ads from Republican candidates and supportive groups have used guns as talking points or visual motifs this year. Guns are shown being fired or brandished, or are discussed but not displayed as candidates praise the Second Amendment, vow to block gun-control legislation or simply identify themselves as “pro-gun.”
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  • “You basically have Republican primary candidates trying to explain to Republican primary voters that they are going to be on their side when it comes to the cultural cold civil war that’s being fought right now,”
  • Within hours after the Texas shooting, shaken Democrats in Washington vowed to try again to pursue a compromise with Republicans on gun legislation that could move through the divided Senate. But the challenges were immediately evident, and Democratic outrage and frustration were palpable.
  • How or whether the Texas school shooting, the deadliest since Sandy Hook, will change the midterm election landscape remains unclear.
  • Ads for Josh Mandel, the former Ohio treasurer who lost the Republican primary for Senate, used the tagline “Pro-God, pro-gun, pro-Trump.”
  • “Babies, borders, bullets”
  • In New York, Representative Thomas Suozzi, who is waging a long-shot primary campaign against Gov. Kathy Hochul, is highlighting her support years ago from the National Rifle Association. For her part, a Hochul ad cites her work “cracking down on illegal guns to make our neighborhoods safer.”
  • On the campaign trail, though, Mr. Fetterman has faced scrutiny over a 2013 incident in which, as mayor of Braddock, Pa., he brandished a shotgun to stop and detain an unarmed Black jogger, telling police he had heard gunshots. He has declined to apologize or say he did anything wrong.
  • “We are exhausted,” she continued, “because we cannot continue to be the only country in the world where we let this happen again and again and again.”
Javier E

What Ever Happened to Google Books? | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • It was the most ambitious library project of our time—a plan to scan all of the world’s books and make them available to the public online. “We think that we can do it all inside of ten years,” Marissa Mayer, who was then a vice-president at Google, said to this magazine in 2007,
  • Google has scanned an impressive thirty million volumes, putting it in a league with the world’s larger libraries (the library of Congress has around thirty-seven million books). That is a serious accomplishment. But while the corpus is impressive, most of it remains inaccessible. Searches of out-of-print books often yield mere snippets of the text—there is no way to gain access to the whole book
  • The thrilling thing about Google Books, it seemed to me, was not just the opportunity to read a line here or there; it was the possibility of exploring the full text of millions of out-of-print books and periodicals that had no real commercial value but nonetheless represented a treasure trove for the public. In other words, it would be the world’s first online library worthy of that name.
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  • yet the attainment of that goal has been stymied, despite Google having at its disposal an unusual combination of technological means, the agreement of many authors and publishers, and enough money to compensate just about everyone who needs it.
  • by 2008, representatives of authors, publishers, and Google did manage to reach a settlement to make the full library available to the public, for pay, and to institutions. In the settlement agreement, they also put terminals in libraries, but didn’t ever get around to doing that. But that agreement then came under further attacks from a whole new set of critics
  • Four years ago, a federal judge sided with the critics and threw out the 2008 settlement,
  • predictably, a full seven years after the court decision was first announced, we’re still waiting.
Javier E

The Petulant King - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • In 1997, Prime Minister Tony Blair began relaxing immigration laws in hopes of creating an England imbued with the best traditions of a range of cultures, an England that was no longer fortified against the world but wide open to it, an oasis of people eating fusion cuisine and voting Labour.
  • To watch contestants from every racial, ethnic, and religious background tell the hosts the secret ingredient in “me gran’s sponge” from inside a giant white tent pitched on the green lawns of a country house in Berkshire is to see “England” smacked down to a set of consumer preferences: Emma Bridgewater, strings of fluttering Union Jacks, cake.
  • the old lessons of empire were not lost on the newcomers, a few of whom brought to England the same thing that England had once brought them: contemptuous disregard of the religion, customs, habits, traditions, and shared beliefs of the native population. And that’s how you get Sharia councils in modern England.
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  • to try to maintain the fantasy of a continuous England that could absorb within it wildly different cultures. What she relied upon was the West. The Englishmen who caused so much devastation around the world did not bring any miracles with them; they brought only bloodshed and cruelty and plunder, the same forces that had ruled the world since the beginning.
  • But by the time of Elizabeth’s reign, England understood itself as a Western nation, identifiable by its commitment to individual rights, equality, and self-determination. These values created the free world, and to the very limited extent that a Queen can stand for them—the Queen of a country with such a terrible imperial history—she was determined to do so.
  • she often acknowledged how Britain was changing, never once disparaged it, and found within it a plausible case for continuity. What she did was locate—or possibly create—a unifying culture of Englishness as defined by the values of the Blitz: courage, calm, resolve.
  • Elizabeth spoke of Englishness and its enduring character, not of racial composition or traditional custom. She—of all people—said England’s greatness wasn’t in its past. It lies in its present and its future.
  • now this whole delicate operation of creating a Britain in which the old and the new don’t merely coexist, or inform each other, but are together part of a cohesive narrative of greatness, in which the monarch is both the defender of the Church of England and the symbolic leader of a country with 3 million Muslims—all of this has fallen to … Charles?
  • Weak, selfish, petulant Charles?
  • This is not an era of reconciliation and bygones being bygones. This is an era of reparations. A lot of people around the world don’t want to “celebrate diversity,” a concept wholly born of the dying West. They want their treasures back, and they know where to find them.
  • Most of them were stolen, and in the most sadistic way possible. Will Charles—Boomer Zero—be able to keep hold not merely of the things but of the idea of England that his mother helped create?Doubtful.
Javier E

Yes, People Will Pay $27,500 for an Old 'Rocky' Tape. Here's Why. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • When Mr. Carlson first began to look for sealed VHS cassettes, they were considered so much plastic trash. “Back to the Future,” “The Goonies,” “Blade Runner,” were about $20 each on eBay. He put them on a shelf, little windows into his past, and started an Instagram account called Rare and Sealed.
  • The current cultural tumult, with its boom in fake images, endless arguments over everything and now the debut of imperious A.I. chatbots, increases the appeal of things that can’t be plugged in.
  • One thing people are eagerly seeking with the new technology is old technology. Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, which he used to write a shelf of important novels, went for a quarter-million dollars. An Apple 1 computer fetched nearly twice that. A first-generation iPhone, still sealed in its box, sold for $21,000 in December and triple that in February.
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  • Blend these factors — a desire for escape from our virtual lives; bidding as fast as pushing a button; and the promotion of new collecting fields like outdated technology devices — and you have Heritage Auctions in Dallas.
  • Heritage is a whirlwind of activity, of passion, of hype, constantly trying new ways of enticing people to own something beautiful and useless. Ninety-one million Americans, according to U.S. Census Bureau surveys, are having trouble paying household bills. Everyone else is a potential bidder.
  • Twenty years ago, Heritage had four categories: coins, comics, movie posters and sports. Now it has more than 50, which generated revenue of $1.4 billion last year. Everything, at least in theory, is collectible.
  • “We don’t question the value or legitimacy of a particular subject matter relative to outmoded norms,” Mr. Benesh said. “We’re not here to tell you what’s worthwhile. The marketplace will tell you. The bidders” — Heritage has 1.6 million — “will tell you.”
  • In mid-2020, the privately held company moved to a 160,000-square-foot building by Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, doubling the size of its former headquarters. Hundreds of specialists, most of them collectors themselves, prepare hundreds of thousands of items for bids here — researching, photographing, writing catalog copy.
  • The problem is, older historical items that were previously unknown are becoming rare. Every barn, basement and attic has been ransacked for treasures. New items related to Washington or Lincoln, for instance, are nearly impossible to find.
Javier E

Opinion | It's 2086. This Is What American History Could Look Like. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • If it seems far-fetched that a notorious insurgent could be given such a place of honor, the past begs to differ. When the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, was imprisoned after the Civil War (rumored to be dressed at the time of his arrest in his own outlandish costume), he was more reviled and mocked than any Capitol rioter, and his crimes far more serious. His statue joined George Washington’s in the Capitol 65 years later.
  • As curators at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, we are regularly confronted by hard physical evidence of just how slippery the past can be.
  • It is chilling, but not impossible, to envision the signs screaming “Stop the steal!” picked up on the garbage-strewn National Mall on Jan. 7, 2021, treated one day as patriotic treasures, displayed alongside the writing desk Thomas Jefferson used to draft the Declaration of Independence or the inkwell Abraham Lincoln dipped into to compose the Emancipation Proclamation.
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  • History, however, may have other plans. Contrary to the mantra, it has no right or wrong side.
  • Judging, it turns out, isn’t history’s strong suit. Notions of justice change radically over time, and they are not the reason we collect, preserve or display objects from the past
  • To curators and historians, the evolving meaning of our objects is far more fascinating than whom they label as unrighteous
  • The collections of the Smithsonian contain, for instance, pikes from John Brown’s failed slave rebellion in the South in 1859. At different moments since then, his pikes have symbolized a demented terrorist’s scheme for mass murder, a religious fanatic’s fiery crusade and a hero’s lonely struggle for justice.
  • Nothing in our past, no matter how blatant it may seem to us today, is guaranteed eternal condemnation
  • Our recent reckoning with American history has shown the indelible impact of staid forms of institutional power, like dedicating monuments, inscribing plaques and holding hearings. Enshrining rioters as heroes could be done fairly quietly.
  • There’s no controlling what the future will say about us. Generations just keep coming, re-evaluating old heroes and asking new questions.
  • We cannot know; we have no ownership over what is to come. The best we can do is map our moment scrupulously, to preserve the signposts that will lead to a place we’ll never see.
  • As curators, as historians, as citizens, we are frequently reminded that the past is a foreign country. But so is the future.
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