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Javier E

Opinion | Kamala Harris Isn't Bluffing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ala-harris-democrats-risk.html

risk management harris gop trump village river politics culture

shared by Javier E on 20 Aug 24 - No Cached
  • a community of like-minded thinkers who take calculated risks for a living. These people, from poker players to venture capitalists — I call them the River, and they are from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, sports betting, crypto — make decisions based not on what they know at the moment but on expected value
  • For them, when it is time to make a decision, the question is: Do the risks outweigh the rewards?
  • The River is the rival of the group of academics, journalists and policy wonks that I call the Village. This term might be more familiar: It’s the East Coast expert class. Harvard and Yale. The New York Times and The Washington Post. Together, these communities make up only a small percent of the population — in short, they are elites.
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  • The Village tends toward risk aversion, as evident in its Covid caution and its increasing wariness about free speech (which very much can have sticks-and-stones consequences). It tends to make decisions by consensus, with dissenters punished by ostracization
  • The River has been on a winning streak in terms of its impact on society and our economy: Its core industries, tech and finance, continually grow as fractions of the economy, and Las Vegas is bringing in record revenues
  • So far in the 2024 election, the Village has been making better risk-management decisions — out-Rivering the River. The presidential race remains close, but at least for now it looks like the Village is winning.
  • At least the Village got the most important decision right: kicking President Biden to the curb. In so doing, they roughly doubled their chances of winning
  • To understand why, it helps to know that the River can be prone to contrarianism. As the Village has become bluer and bluer, some communities within the River have rebelled by becoming, to varying degrees, red-pilled in response.
  • But the River is by no means a bloc, whereas the Village’s penchant for consensus helped it, when Mr. Biden stepped aside, to consolidate quickly around Ms. Harris
  • The poker player in me would have played the percentages and taken the calculated risk in Mr. Shapiro. The choice of Mr. Walz has grown on me as Ms. Harris has sustained her momentum in the polls — but Pennsylvania still looms large.
  • It’s much harder to see the upside for Mr. Trump’s choice of Senator JD Vance of Ohio.
  • Mr. Trump himself straddles the River-Village boundary awkwardly as a former casino magnate (though not a successful one), but he’s more intuitive than analytical and obsessed with his news coverage in the Village.
  • The Trump campaign made two classic mistakes with his V.P. choice, though Silicon Valley’s conservatives cheered. One was counting their chickens before they hatched.
  • The second error was a failure to practice strategic empathy, meaning a willingness to put yourself in your opponent’s shoes.
  • This is generally something that people in the River are good at; it’s essential in poker.
  • There’s another term from the poker world that describes Mr. Trump’s recent decision-making:
  • He may be on tilt, the condition of making suboptimal choices because your emotions get in the way. Every poker player has seen it: An opponent builds up a huge stack, looks forward to treating himself to a steak dinner and bragging to his buddies. But then he loses a big pot — and before he knows it, the rest of his chips are gone as he tries to chase his losses.
Javier E

Migrant Workers Propelled China's Rise. Now Many See Few Options. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ural-jobs-migrant-workers.html

china workers history economics

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Now that times are tough and jobs harder to find, China’s roughly 300 million migrant workers, with flimsy social benefits, have little to fall back on. They don’t enjoy the same health insurance, unemployment and retirement benefits as city-born people, as threadbare as their safety net is. Once migrant workers pass their prime working age, they are expected to go back to their home villages so they won’t become burdens to the cities.
  • Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, conceded in a speech in 2020, “When the economy experiences fluctuations, the first group to be affected are the migrant workers.”
  • He said more than 20 million migrant workers, unable to find work, had returned to their villages during the 2008 financial crisis. In 2020, he said, nearly 30 million migrant workers had to stay home, and out of the reach of jobs, because of the pandemic.
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  • The national unemployment rate, as calculated by the National Bureau of Statistics, accounts only for urban unemployment, which stands at just above 5 percent and is believed to be underestimated. The average monthly income of migrant workers was $630 in 2022, or less than half the income of those working for the government. And that data is flawed because it includes only months when a worker has a job.
  • Mr. Xi said in his speech that the mass return of migrant workers in 2008 and 2020 had not caused any social problems because they “have land and houses back in their home villages so they can return to cultivate the land, have food to eat, and work on something.”
  • But the prospect of moving back to the villages is often bleak and even scary, especially for younger migrant workers who have spent their adult lives in the cities. They can see what awaits them. Their parents and grandparents may need to work until they physically cannot anymore and hesitate to seek medical care. They usually do not have unemployment benefits, and they cannot rely on their families, as some urban youths do, because their parents’ and grandparents’ pensions are “only enough to buy salt,
  • The other reality facing migrant workers is that returning to their villages to earn money farming is not an option, as Mr. Xi said it was. There is not enough land waiting for them
  • “For Chinese, especially in the countryside, there’s no such thing called retirement,” he said. His grandfather is 90 and cleans pig manure for a farm every day in the central province of Henan.
  • The morning we spoke he had just gotten off a shift that started at 7:30 p.m. and ended at 7 a.m. He had worked for two weeks without a day off because of the demand for Apple’s newest iPhone.
  • He feels he cannot go home to his village and do nothing while his parents and grandfather are still working. “It’s just not appropriate,”
  • “My ideal country is one where the people live in peace and prosperity, where there is food safety, freedom of speech, justice, a media that can expose injustices, a five-day, eight-hour workweek for workers,” said Mr. Zhang, the unemployed welder. “If these can be achieved, I will support whoever is in power, regardless of their party or how long they govern.”
  • Mr. Ge left his village at age 17 and started working on construction sites and in factories. He had benefits during the six years he worked at Foxconn, a contract manufacturer for Apple. But when he was out of work this year, he could not get any unemployment benefits, which is not uncommon as local governments are deeply in debt. Now 34, he still works 10-hour shifts at another Apple contract manufacturer and lives in a dormitory.
  • “Only people who couldn’t find jobs would do farming,” said Guan, a migrant worker in the northwestern province of Gansu, “because income from farming is too low.”
  • “To be honest, deep down I feel lost,” he said. “All I can say is that for the time being, I’ll save as much money as possible. As for what the future holds, it’s really hard to say. I might not even live to see that age.”
Javier E

Opinion | Yes, the President Bears Blame for the Terror From the Right - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rump-sayoc-bowers-attacks.html

terrorism incitement responsibility

shared by Javier E on 01 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • For years, conservatives have rightly pointed out that Islamist terrorists don’t spring from an ideological or cultural vacuum. It usually takes a village, real, virtual or proverbial, to make an Islamist terrorist — one composed of hate-spewing imams, TV programs saturated with anti-Semitic and anti-Western conspiracy theories, neighborhood vigilantes enforcing fundamentalist religious strictures, and political leaders excusing, reflecting or disseminating many of the same beliefs and attitudes.
  • The villagers are rarely terrorists themselves. They often condemn terrorism. Sometimes they are its victims. Yet they also provide the soil in which the seeds of terror germinate.
  • What are the villages from which Sayoc and Bowers hailed? For Sayoc it was the real-world villages of the Trump rally, with its mob-like intensity and unquestioning fidelity to one supreme leader. For Bowers, it was the virtual villages of Twitter and alt-right social networks, digitally connecting angry loners who follow nobody.
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  • Just so with the Trumpist and alt-right villages. Different methods and values — but not altogether different. Both draw on similarly cramped ideas about nationhood and sovereignty. Both see political opponents as enemies and immigrants as invaders. Both are susceptible to conspiracy theories. And both feed off the same incessant background noise of Trump-speak. “Lock her up.” “Enemy of the American people.” “Illegal alien mob.”
  • In other words: the criminalization of political opposition, the vilification of the media, and the demonization of foreigners
  • At some point, the distance between word and deed becomes short. And then they are joined, as they were last week
  • Conservatives used to understand the danger. Why care about social formalities, modes of dress, niceties of speech, qualities of restraint? Not simply because manners make the man, although they do, but because manners also shape political cultures
  • How does a conservative movement that is supposed to believe that every healthy society needs powerful moral guardrails give itself over to a president whose every other utterance cheerfully knocks those guardrails down?
  • Abe Foxman, the former longtime head of the Anti-Defamation League, precisely expresses the president’s level of responsibility for what happened in Pittsburgh.
  • “Pittsburgh is not Trump,” Foxman says. “It’s also Trump.” Trump, he adds, is not an anti-Semite. But fanning one set of hatreds against immigrants has a way of fanning others
  • Turning to last year’s neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Foxman says of Trump, “He didn’t create them. He didn’t write their script. He didn’t give them the brown shirts. But he emboldened them. He gave them the chutzpah, that it’s O.K.
  • “And when he had an opportunity to put it down,” Foxman adds, “he didn’t.” The blood that flowed in Pittsburgh is on his hands, also
Javier E

Opinion | At 'The Villages,' the Party Never Ends for Boomers - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-hedonism-on-full-display.html

boomers meaning of life hedonism aging polarization culture crisis trump gop history

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • the parades and games and clubs, most definitely the political ones, also give people a sense of belonging and purpose — of still being able to make a difference. Whatever their ideological persuasion, residents are constantly reminded that civic engagement matters. That they matter
  • Like at all retirement communities, the social life at the Villages tackles head-on the scourges of isolation, despair and loneliness that are eating away at so many Americans as the nation’s social fabric frays.
  • In a culture that can feel as though it is leaving seniors behind, the Villages is designed to bring people together. And despite the at times harrowing political warfare, the community largely succeeds in doing so — even if it isn’t always easy.
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  • People here feel responsible for one another.
  • The central problem, of course, is that this sense of belonging may flow as much from who is not a part of the Villages as who is. The populace here is 98 percent white, putting it increasingly out of touch with the broader nation.
  • It is reminiscent of college or summer camp — but for people who no longer have to worry about what they’re going to be when they grow up or what their political choices will bring. For Villagers, the future is less of a concern than living their best life. Right. Now.
  • The culture, like the overwhelmingly conservative politics, can feel like a scrupulously maintained bulwark against the onslaught of time and change.
  • In this way, the community is a distillation of the cultural crosscurrents at play in an America that is simultaneously graying and diversifying.
  • One of Donald Trump’s shrewdest political moves has been to exploit some people’s nostalgia for a bygone era where the cultural hierarchy was clear and the world made sense. The Villages works overtime to maintain a replica of that fantasyland — a shiny, happy, small-town bubble where seniors can tune out the rest of the world and party like it’s 1969.
zachcutler

Defusing ISIS bombs with bare hands and little else - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

isis US crisis

shared by zachcutler on 25 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Defusing ISIS bombs with bare hands and little else
  • Along a dusty village track just 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Mosul, a Peshmerga pick up truck leads us to a small house. We drive slowly, and in single file. There are hidden dangers all around.
  • It is a sobering show and tell -- and it isn't over yet. He brings us a suicide belt worn by an ISIS fighter who was killed before he could detonate it. Captain Sadk defused this deadly explosive too -- and an even bigger one he produces from the back of the pick up.
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  • All in a day's work for Kurdish teams led by men like Captain Sadk. Clearly, it's a dangerous job, but it has been particularly deadly for the Kurds, who have precious little in the way of high-tech equipment or training. For most here it's a learn-on-the-job affair, involving old metal detectors, wire clippers and bare hands. No body armor for many -- let alone bomb disposal suits. This is not "The Hurt Locker" movie.
  • As Kurdish and Iraqi forces edge ever closer to Mosul, ISIS fighters fall back. But in their absence, they leave behind their ability to kill and maim.
  • "They put them on the road, in the houses," he says. "We liberate a village and they are everywhere -- people come back to their homes, open a door or even a refrigerator and it blows up."
  • On the road back to Erbil, we see dozens of small trucks laden with personal effects -- residents of now liberated villages who returned briefly to grab whatever they could before leaving again. They're not ready to return, and for good reason.
  • Just how many IEDs and booby-traps are along the roads and in the villages around Mosul is impossible to tell. Brigadier General Mzuri tells us his men have spent three months trying to clear one village and still aren't finished.Clearing this area of rigged explosives will take longer -- much longer -- than the battle for Mosul itself.
Javier E

Making Change Happen, on a Deadline - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ng-change-happen-on-a-deadline

change deadline motivation politics economics

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • what’s missing to turn poor places into rich places isn’t more information, money, technology, workshops, programs, evaluation or any of the other things that development organizations normally provide.  What’s missing are motivation and confidence.
  • What Matta means is that usually the obstacle to development is not that we don’t have the tools, but that we don’t use the tools we have. People drag their feet. The next step is someone else’s problem.  Budget approval takes forever.  The money disappears.  People won’t try because it never works.  The goal is too pie-in-the-sky. The parts aren’t available.  The bricks get stolen.  The project gets started and then the leadership changes and it sits, abandoned.   Every villager fumes:  nothing gets done around here.
  • “The biggest issue is that people don’t actually mobilize,” said Matta.  “The last mile is where solutions need to come together in specific ways.   We think we have part of the answer to the last mile problem.”
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  • Who can accomplish something significant in three months?   But this is exactly the point — it takes a project out of the realm of business as usual.
  • Rapid Results was designed to help large corporations.   It was invented about 40 years ago by Robert Schaffer, a management consultant.  Five years ago, Schaffer’s company spun off a group as a nonprofit to train people all around the world to use the same method.   Rapid Results has spread, well, rapidly, because it has a champion in the World Bank, which is teaching people to use the method in various countries.
  • A trained facilitator sits down with people in a business, organization or village to decide on what to do.  They vote.  Now, if we had some money from the government or the World Bank — say, $5,000 or perhaps $30,000 — how could we spend it to accomplish that goal in just 100 days?  The village chooses its goal and how to get it done. The facilitator only talks about what other villages have accomplished in 100 days.
  • Rapid Results initiatives are a “bite-sized approach to complex problem-solving.  Communities will get confidence to tackle problems that may seem insurmountable.”  The tight deadline “forces a degree of prioritization and focus which leads to results,
  • The deadline creates an ethos of doing whatever it takes.  People aren’t sitting and waiting for the district official to come out.   They go buy the materials themselves.  Women sleep on the bulk cement bags to make sure no one steals them. A village in Sudan needed bricks for a school, and the contractor wasn’t producing enough.  So the Rapid Results team organized a competition in the community to make bricks, and the project stayed on schedule.
Javier E

Airbnb CEO: Cities Are Becoming Villages - Uri Friedman - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...373676

cities urbanism village community trust

shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • trust, mediated by technology, is making a comeback, along with the paradigm of the village. It's what's motivating millions of people in tens of thousands of cities around the world to book lodging with semi-screened strangers through his service. Choose your buzzword: the sharing economy, the peer-to-peer economy, the trust economy. Whatever you call it, it's what's propelled not just Airbnb, but also new car services like Uber and Lyft and labor services like TaskRabbit.
  • the Internet moving into your neighborhood," Chesky said. "And what it really means is that people, for the first time, can become micro-entrepreneurs. They can actually build a reputation, and they can offer goods and services."
  • "At the most macro level, I think we're going to go back to the village, and cities will become communities again," he added. "I'm not saying they're not communities now, but I think that we'll have this real sensibility and everything will be small. You're not going to have big chain restaurants. We're starting to see farmers' markets, and small restaurants, and food trucks. But pretty soon, restaurants will be in people's living rooms."
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  • the United Nations predicts that two-thirds of the global population will be urban-dwellers by 2050.
  • In 2011, there were 23 "megacities" of at least 10 million people around the world. By 2050, there will be 37.
honordearlove

Rohingya crisis in Myanmar: Refugees recount horror of 'slaughter,' then a perilous jou... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-af6a-6555caaeb8dc_story.html

crisis myanmar bangladesh Rohingya

shared by honordearlove on 17 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • They fired shots in the air, and then, the villagers say, turned their guns on fleeing residents, who fell dead or wounded in the monsoon-green rice paddies. The military’s retribution for a Rohingya militant attack on police posts earlier that day had begun.
  • The Burmese military’s “clearance operation” in the hamlet of Maung Nu and dozens of other villages populated by Burma’s ethnic Rohingya minority has triggered an exodus of an estimated 400,000 refugees into Bangladesh, an episode the United Nations human rights chief has called “ethnic cleansing.
  • Rights groups say it will take months or years to fully chronicle the devastation the refugees are fleeing. Satellite photos show widespread burning, witnesses recount soldiers killing civilians, and the Burmese government has said that 176 Rohingya villages stand empty. No total death toll is yet available because the area remains sealed by the military.
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  • The crisis has sparked widespread outcry and condemnation of Burma and its de facto leader, Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. She and her government have said little about the plight of the Rohingya, except to reframe the situation as a national security matter as the new militancy has coalesced.
  • But their peaceful coexistence ended when Rohingya insurgents launched their attack on police posts. The military crackdown has continued unabated since then, black smoke scudding across the skyline, visible in southern Bangladesh even this past week.
  • Zubair said he had followed to see what was to become of his vessel. He says he watched in horror as the military began stacking the boat with dead bodies, one after another like lumber, including those of two 13-year-old boys he had known well.
Javier E

Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire | Marc Parry | News | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...empire-caroline-elkins-mau-mau

British Empire empire history

shared by Javier E on 20 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Elkins emerged with a book that turned her initial thesis on its head. The British had sought to quell the Mau Mau uprising by instituting a policy of mass detention. This system – “Britain’s gulag”, as Elkins called it – had affected far more people than previously understood. She calculated that the camps had held not 80,000 detainees, as official figures stated, but between 160,000 and 320,000. She also came to understand that colonial authorities had herded Kikuyu women and children into some 800 enclosed villages dispersed across the countryside. These heavily patrolled villages – cordoned off by barbed wire, spiked trenches and watchtowers – amounted to another form of detention. In camps, villages and other outposts, the Kikuyu suffered forced labour, disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder.
  • “I’ve come to believe that during the Mau Mau war British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial logic,” Elkins wrote in Britain’s Gulag. “Only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomising its men, women, and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilising mission reinstated.” After nearly a decade of oral and archival research, she had uncovered “a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead”.
  • lkins knew her findings would be explosive. But the ferocity of the response went beyond what she could have imagined. Felicitous timing helped. Britain’s Gulag hit bookstores after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had touched off debate about imperialism. It was a moment when another historian, Niall Ferguson, had won acclaim for his sympathetic writing on British colonialism. Hawkish intellectuals pressed America to embrace an imperial role. Then came Bagram. Abu Ghraib. Guantánamo. These controversies primed readers for stories about the underside of empire.
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  • Enter Elkins. Young, articulate and photogenic, she was fired up with outrage over her findings. Her book cut against an abiding belief that the British had managed and retreated from their empire with more dignity and humanity than other former colonial powers, such as the French or the Belgians.
  • Some academics shared her enthusiasm. By conveying the perspective of the Mau Mau themselves, Britain’s Gulag marked a “historical breakthrough”, says Wm Roger Louis, a historian of the British empire at the University of Texas at Austin. Richard Drayton of King’s College London, another imperial historian, judged it an “extraordinary” book whose implications went beyond Kenya. It set the stage for a rethinking of British imperial violence, he says, demanding that scholars reckon with colonial brutality in territories such as Cyprus, Malaya, and Aden (now part of Yemen).
  • But many other scholars slammed the book. No review was more devastating than the one that Bethwell A Ogot, a senior Kenyan historian, published in the Journal of African History. Ogot dismissed Elkins as an uncritical imbiber of Mau Mau propaganda. In compiling “a kind of case for the prosecution”, he argued, she had glossed over the litany of Mau Mau atrocities: “decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women”. Ogot also suggested that Elkins might have made up quotes and fallen for the bogus stories of financially motivated interviewees. Pascal James Imperato picked up the same theme in African Studies Review. Elkins’s work, he wrote, depended heavily on the “largely uncorroborated 50-year-old memories of a few elderly men and women interested in financial reparations”.
  • In this very long book, she really doesn’t bring out any more evidence than that for talking about the possibility of hundreds of thousands killed, and talking in terms almost of genocide as a policy,” says Philip Murphy, a University of London historian who directs the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and co-edits the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. This marred what was otherwise an “incredibly valuable” study, he says. “If you make a really radical claim about history, you really need to back it up solidly.
  • Critics didn’t just find the substance overstated. They also rolled their eyes at the narrative Elkins told about her work. Particularly irksome, to some Africanists, was her claim to have discovered an unknown story
  • During the Mau Mau war, journalists, missionaries and colonial whistleblowers had exposed abuses. The broad strokes of British misbehaviour were known by the late 60s, Berman argued. Memoirs and studies had added to the picture. Britain’s Gulag had broken important new ground, providing the most comprehensive chronicle yet of the detention camps and prison villages.
  • among Kenyanists, Berman wrote, the reaction had generally been no more than: “It was as bad as or worse than I had imagined from more fragmentary accounts.”
  • If, at that late date,” he wrote, “she still believed in the official British line about its so-called civilising mission in the empire, then she was perhaps the only scholar or graduate student in the English-speaking world who did.”
  • she believes there was more going on than the usual academic disagreement. Kenyan history, she says, was “an old boys’ club”.
  • “Who is controlling the production of the history of Kenya? That was white men from Oxbridge, not a young American girl from Harvard,” she says.
  • for years clues had existed that Britain had also expatriated colonial records that were considered too sensitive to be left in the hands of successor governments. Kenyan officials had sniffed this trail soon after the country gained its independence. In 1967, they wrote to Britain’s Foreign Office asking for the return of the “stolen papers”. The response? Blatant dishonesty, writes David M Anderson, a University of Warwick historian and author of Histories of the Hanged, a highly regarded book about the Mau Mau war.
  • Internally, British officials acknowledged that more than 1,500 files, encompassing over 100 linear feet of storage, had been flown from Kenya to London in 1963, according to documents reviewed by Anderson. Yet they conveyed none of this in their official reply to the Kenyans
  • The turning point came in 2010, when Anderson, now serving as an expert witness in the Mau Mau case, submitted a statement to the court that referred directly to the 1,500 files spirited out of Kenya. Under legal pressure, the government finally acknowledged that the records had been stashed at a high-security storage facility that the Foreign Office shared with the intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6. It also revealed a bigger secret. This same repository, Hanslope Park, held files removed from a total of 37 former colonies.
  • A careful combing-through of these documents might normally have taken three years. Elkins had about nine months. Working with five students at Harvard, she found thousands of records relevant to the case: more evidence about the nature and extent of detainee abuse, more details of what officials knew about it, new material about the brutal “dilution technique” used to break hardcore detainees
  • The British government, defeated repeatedly in court, moved to settle the Mau Mau case. On 6 June 2013, the foreign secretary, William Hague, read a statement in parliament announcing an unprecedented agreement to compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured and abused during the insurrection. Each would receive about £3,800. “The British government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration,” Hague said. Britain “sincerely regrets that these abuses took place.” The settlement, in Anderson’s view, marked a “profound” rewriting of history. It was the first time Britain had admitted carrying out torture anywhere in its former empire.
  • some scholars find aspects of Elkins’s vindication story unconvincing. Philip Murphy, who specialises in the history of British decolonisation, attended some of the Mau Mau hearings. He thinks Elkins and other historians did “hugely important” work on the case. Still, he does not believe that the Hanslope files justify the notion that hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Kenya, or that those deaths were systematic. “Probably most of the historical criticisms of the book still stand,” he says. “I don’t think the trial really changes that.
  • second debate triggered by the Mau Mau case concerns not just Elkins but the future of British imperial history. At its heart is a series of documents that now sits in the National Archives as a result of Britain’s decision to make public the Hanslope files. They describe, in extensive detail, how the government went about retaining and destroying colonial records in the waning days of empire. Elkins considers them to be the most important new material to emerge from the Hanslope disclosure.
  • One record, a 1961 dispatch from the British colonial secretary to authorities in Kenya and elsewhere, states that no documents should be handed over to a successor regime that might, among other things, “embarrass” Her Majesty’s Government. Another details the system that would be used to carry out that order. All Kenyan files were to be classified either “Watch” or “Legacy”. The Legacy files could be passed on to Kenya. The Watch files would be flown back to Britain or destroyed. A certificate of destruction was to be issued for every document destroyed – in duplicate. The files indicate that roughly 3.5 tons of Kenyan documents were bound for the incinerator.
  • . Broadly speaking, she thinks end-of-empire historians have largely failed to show scepticism about the archives. She thinks that the fact that those records were manipulated puts a cloud over many studies that have been based on their contents. And she thinks all of this amounts to a watershed moment in which historians must rethink their field.
  • Murphy says Elkins “has a tendency to caricature other historians of empire as simply passive and unthinking consumers in the National Archives supermarket, who don’t think about the ideological way in which the archive is constructed”. They’ve been far more sceptical than that, he says. Historians, he adds, have always dealt with the absence of documents. What’s more, history constantly changes, with new evidence and new paradigms. To say that a discovery about document destruction will change the whole field is “simply not true”, he says. “That’s not how history works.”
  • Some historians who have read the document-destruction materials come away with a picture of events that seems less Orwellian than Elkins’s. Anderson’s review of the evidence shows how the purging process evolved from colony to colony and allowed substantial latitude to local officials. Tony Badger, a University of Cambridge professor emeritus who monitored the Hanslope files’ release, writes that there was “no systematic process dictated from London”
  • Badger sees a different lesson in the Hanslope disclosure: a “profound sense of contingency”. Over the decades, archivists and Foreign Office officials puzzled over what to do with the Hanslope papers. The National Archives essentially said they should either be destroyed or returned to the countries from which they had been taken. The files could easily have been trashed on at least three occasions, he says, probably without publicity. For a variety of reasons, they weren’t. Maybe it was the squirrel-like tendency of archivists. Maybe it was luck. In retrospect, he says, what is remarkable is not that the documents were kept secret for so many years. What is remarkable is that they survived at all.
Javier E

As Germans Push Austerity, Greeks Press Nazi-Era Claims - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sterity-greeks-press-back.html

Greece Germany WWII history

shared by Javier E on 13 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • As they moved through the isolated villages in this region in 1943, systematically killing men in a reprisal for an attack on a small outpost, German soldiers dragged Giannis Syngelakis’s father from his home here and shot him in the head. Within two days, more than 400 men were dead and the women left behind struggled with the monstrous task of burying so many corpses.
  • Mr. Syngelakis, who was 7 then, still wants payback. And in pursuing a demand for reparations from Germany, he reflects a growing movement here, fueled not just by historical grievances but also by deep resentment among his countrymen over Germany’s current power to dictate budget austerity to the fiscally crippled Greek government.
  • Estimates of how much money is at stake vary wildly. The government report does not cite a total. The figure most often discussed is $220 billion, an estimate for infrastructure damage alone put forward by Manolis Glezos, a member of Parliament and a former resistance fighter who is pressing for reparations. That amount equals about half the country’s debt.
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  • Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s government has compiled an 80-page report on reparations and a huge, never-repaid loan the nation was forced to make under Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1945.
  • Some members of the National Council on Reparations, an advocacy group, are calling for more than $677 billion to cover stolen artifacts, damage to the economy and to the infrastructure, as well as the bank loan and individual claims.
  • Even the figure for the bank loan is in dispute. The loan was made in Greek drachmas at a time of hyperinflation 70 years ago. Translating that into today’s currency is difficult, and the question of how much interest should be assessed is subject to debate. One conservative estimate by a former finance minister puts the debt from the loan at only $24 billion.
  • Experts say that the German occupation of Greece was brutal. Germany requisitioned food from Greece even as Greeks went hungry. By the end of the war, about 300,000 had starved to death. Greece also had an active resistance movement, which prompted frequent and horrific reprisals like the one that occurred here in Amiras, a small village in Crete. Some historians believe that 1,500 villages were singled out for such reprisals.
  • A few individual cases have made their way through the Greek courts, including one representing the victims of a massacre in Distomo in 1944. Germans rampaged through the village gutting pregnant women, bayoneting babies and setting homes on fire, witnesses have said. Lawyers for Distomo won a judgment of $38 million in Greece. But the Greek government has never given permission to lay claim to German property in Greece as a way of collecting on the debt.
  • “What is unusual about that loan is that there is a written agreement,” said Katerina Kralova, the author of “In the Shadow of Occupation: The Greek-German Relations During the Period 1940-2010.” “In other countries, the Germans just took the money.”
woodlu

The fruits of growth - Extreme poverty is history in China, officials say | China | The... - 1 views

www.economist.com/...history-in-china-officials-say

shared by woodlu on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • EARLY IN DECEMBER China announced that it had eradicated extreme poverty within its territory.
  • some 800m people in China have escaped penury in the past four decades.
  • Never before in the country’s history has destitution come anywhere close to being eliminated.
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  • Speaking frankly, it’s a lie,” says Liang Yong, a gruff villager. The official investigation of Ziyun’s economy was, he says, perfunctory.
  • Provincial leaders popped into his village, rendered their verdict that it had left poverty behind and then sped off. “It’s a show. In our hearts we all know the truth,”
  • Pork is pricey these days, so he eats meat just a couple of times a week. After paying his two children’s school fees, he has little money left.
  • He is poorer than many others in China, especially in its cities.
  • But the ability to scrape enough together for meat, education and heating marks Mr Liang as someone who has in fact left extreme poverty
  • Sceptics understandably ask whether China fiddled its numbers in order to win what it calls the “battle against poverty”.
  • It has regularly raised the official poverty line, which, accounting for living costs, is about $2.30 a day at prices prevailing in 2011.
  • Poverty lines in rich countries are much higher: the equivalent line in America is about $72 a day for a four-member household at 2020 prices.)
  • In 1978, shortly after Mao’s death, nearly 98% of those in the countryside lived in extreme poverty, by China’s current standards. By 2016 that was down to less than 5%
  • It decollectivised agriculture, giving farmers an incentive to produce more. It allowed people to move around the country to find work. It gave more freedom to entrepreneurs. It helped by building roads, investing in education and courting foreign investors. Its goal was to boost the economy;
  • The government’s approach changed in 2015 when Xi Jinping, its leader, vowed to eradicate the last vestiges of extreme poverty by the end of 2020.
  • tried to encourage personal initiative by rewarding poor people who found ways of bettering their lot
  • They spent public money widely.
  • I
  • n 2020 the allocation per head was more than 26,000 yuan
  • One of the biggest challenges has been the terrain where the poor live.
  • about 30% of the country’s total—that were designated as poverty-stricken when Mr Xi began his anti-poverty campaign were all mainly rural. Most were mountainous or on inhospitable land
  • to introduce industry
  • mostly modern agriculture.
  • China does not count any poverty in its cities because welfare safeguards supposedly help those without money.
  • the shiitake are a cash crop, letting them earn about 80 yuan a day, a decent wage.
  • In the 1980s China broke up communal farms, letting people strike out on their own. Now the government wants them to pool their resources again
  • turning farmers into “shareholders”
  • Residents get stakes in new rural enterprises, which, all going well, will pay dividends.
  • The Luomai shiitake farm is run by China Southern Power Grid, a state-owned firm. But there is a risk that as the anti-poverty campaign fades away, some projects will fizzle.
  • The second approach to helping hard-up villages was more radical: moving inhabitants to better-connected areas.
  • 2016 and 2020 officials relocated about 10m people.
  • The government concluded that it was too costly to provide necessary services, from roads to health care, to the most remote villages
  • A frequent problem after moving people into such housing is finding work for them.
  • the government called on local officials to arrange jobs for at least one member of each household.
  • with her new surroundings. There is a good school just across the street, which is far better for her child.
  • A bigger challenge is relative deprivation, a problem abundantly evident to anyone who has travelled between the glitzy coastal cities and the drabber towns of the hinterland.
  • recent study by Chinese economists concluded that the “subjective poverty line” in rural areas was about 23 yuan per day, nearly twice the amount below which a person would be officially classified as poor.
  • namely setting the relative poverty line at half the median income level. It suggests that about a third of rural Chinese still see themselves as poor.
  • If poverty is calculated this way it becomes almost impossible to eliminate,
  • government created a 25-hectare zone for growing and processing shiitake mushrooms
  • But workers who have moved from the countryside lack the right documentation for ready access to urban welfare.
  • And for any city-dweller, support is meagre. In relative terms about a fifth of China’s urban residents can be classified as poor,
  • To reduce relative poverty, China needs different tactics from the ones used in its campaign against extreme poverty.
  • policies for which it has shown little eagerness.
  • On the streets of Guiyang, the booming capital of Guizhou, hardship is still a common sight.
  • Zhou Weifu, a porter in his 50s, scoffs at the suggestion that poverty is over. “What kind of work is this? I can barely make any money,”
Javier E

Parisians get to know their neighbours with Sunday lunch for 1,000 - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...nday-lunch-for-1-000-jxtwf6wps

urban village neighborhood culture policy urbanism

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Hyper Voisins, thanks both to its size and the sheer diversity of its activities, goes much further. About 5,000 people, he believes, is the maximum, but, with his group as a model, he has proposed to Paris authorities that they encourage 150 more to be set up. “That would be 750,000 people, a third of the population,” he said. “We would change the face of Paris and turn it into a convivial city.”
  • Among the 1,000 diners, there were also a few hundred from other parts of the city, who are welcome to sign up and come along.
  • Roberdeau now praises the scheme for having changed her life: a few years ago, after she was widowed, her daughter, worried about how long she could go on living alone, tried to persuade her to move into a retirement home nearer to her in Charente-Maritime, 300 miles to the south. “I didn’t want to leave the area or the apartment where I spent the last years with my husband,” said Roberdeau. Thanks to the support she gets from her neighbours, she has been able to remain.
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  • Convincing some of Bernard’s neighbours to join in initially proved more of a challenge. Among them was Mireille Roberdeau, who has lived in the same top-floor flat in Rue de l’Aude since 2000, when her late husband worked for the company that built it. Aged 88, she is the doyenne of the “super neighbours”.
  • A former executive at Ouest-France, the country’s biggest newspaper, he has long been fascinated by how people interact, and read widely the academic literature on the subject. It was only after he was made a redundant a decade with a “big cheque”, however, that he had the chance to implement his ideas.
  • “I had the choice of buying a house or financing this project,” said Bernard. “I told my wife I would only do it for three years and then go back to normal life. But I lied and I decided to keep on doing it.” Several years on, his wife, Béatrice, appears to have forgiven him.
  • Bernard’s own project began with the simple idea of encouraging people to say “bonjour” to each other a bit more. “Our challenge, which was slightly stupid but also slightly poetic, was to transform neighbours who say hello to each other into ‘super neighbours’ who say hello 50 times a day,” he told me a few days before the lunch. “It’s all about finding the lowest common denominator.”
  • Patrick Bernard, 63, the group’s founder, is evangelical about hyperlocalism. He thinks the way to improve social cohesion and quality of life in big cities is to encourage the rise of “micro-neighbourhoods”, or what he calls “three-minute villages”. Such grassroots initiatives, he argues, can complement a recent “top down” drive by planners in Paris and elsewhere to create “15-minute cities”, in which everything needed for daily life is within easy reach.
  • The main emphasis, though, is on encouraging people to meet and get to know those who live around them, helped by dozens of WhatsApp groups, covering everything from pets, knitting and babysitting to cheese, fish and baking cakes. Membership is free.
  • Six years after the pioneers first sat down together, the group has expanded into every aspect of the lives of the 5,000 residents living in 15 or so local roads: it is in part about improving the environment, whether planting greenery in the street, finding innovative ways to recycle or compost or transforming the once-traffic-filled local square — Place des Droits-de-l’Enfant — into a village square, with a market, benches for people to sit and concerts.
  • The annual Table d’Aude — or the “longest table in Paris”, as it styles itself — is the work of a group called La République des Hyper Voisins (The Republic of the Super Neighbours), which aims to recreate the traditional conviviality of village life in a big-city setting.
Javier E

Paris Wanted a Green Olympics. Team USA Wants Air Conditioning. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-usa-air-conditioning-f0b93ebf

air conditioning olympics US

shared by Javier E on 25 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • That’s not to say organizers are letting athletes slow-broil for three weeks. The Village here, located just north of Paris, was built with a cooling system that runs cold water through the floors, which officials say can reduce the ambient temperature by 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit and achieve a target range of 73 to 79 Fahrenheit. The effort is part of the hosts’ larger plan to make Paris the greenest Olympics in modern history, which includes measures such as reducing the number of vehicles by 40% from previous Games, building fewer new venues, and cutting the Games’ carbon footprint by half compared with the average of London 2012 and Rio 2016. 
  • But for those athletes who remain unconvinced and worry about their performance being derailed by sleeping in sweatbox apartments, Paris 2024 has made air conditioning units available for hire. And there are no gold medals for guessing which delegation leads the way. 
  • The 592-strong Team USA delegation isn’t risking the slightest discomfort. Every single U.S. room and some common areas have been equipped with portable A/C units, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee. The Americans will all be able to take on any Paris heat wave by hanging out in meat-locker conditions, even though temperatures over the next 10 days aren’t expected to top 90.
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  • Out of the 7,000 rooms in the Village, 2,500 have been supplied mobile air conditioning units at the teams’ requests, a Paris 2024 spokesman said
  • Keeping cool at all times is that much more important given the erratic schedules that some of the athletes here are facing, said Carroll, the Australian Olympic committee executive. Since many athletes’ events are at night, they’ll need to sleep during the hottest part of the day. So the decision to pay for air conditioners was a no-brainer.
  • But not everyone is all-in on A/C. Germany’s Olympic sports federation will have one of the larger contingents in the village with around 350 athletes. That includes 6-foot-7½-inch decathlon medal favorite Leo Neugebauer, who recently won the NCAA title competing for the Texas Longhorns in Austin, where air conditioning isn’t merely a suggestion—it’s a way of life.
  • When Germany asked its individual sport federations if they wanted to order air conditioning units for the athletes’ village, demand for frigid air was lukewarm, according to Olympic committee spokesman Michael Schirp.
  • “A total of 11 AC have been ordered. Eleven,” he wrote, adding an emoji of a face wearing sunglasses.
katyshannon

Philippines' Typhoon Koppu brings severe floods - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-34568596

philippines typhoon floods bbc news crisis

shared by katyshannon on 19 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Heavy rain and floods are affecting dozens of villages, after Typhoon Koppu swept through the northern Philippines.The slow-moving weather system has killed at least two people and forced tens of thousands from their homes.
  • Koppu has now been downgraded to a severe tropical storm by the Japanese Meteorological Agency, which is responsible for naming and tracking it.However, the Philippines' own weather agency, which calls the weather system Lando, is still characterising it as a typhoon.
  • Despite weakening, Koppu is expected to keep dumping rain on the country for a considerable time to come. Some forecasts suggest it may not be until Wednesday that it moves past the Philippines and on to Taiwan.
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  • Unlike previous tropical cyclones, the threat from typhoon Koppu is not so much from the wind but from the massive amount of rain. More than a metre of rainfall is forecast in just a few days in Luzon province. That is double what London gets in an entire year. In the south of Luzon, it has brought severe flooding with whole villages under water. But perhaps more dangerous are massive landslides. The fear is that with the ground heavy and saturated with water, whole hillsides could collapse.
  • Typhoon Koppu made landfall near the town of Casiguran on the main island of Luzon on Sunday morning, bringing winds of close to 200km/h (124mph) and cutting power to vast areas.
  • A teenager was killed by a fallen tree in Manila which also injured four others. A concrete wall also collapsed in the town of Subic, northwest of Manila, killing a 62-year-old woman, officials said.
  • dawn on Monday, wind speeds were down to 150 km/h (93 mph) in the northern town of Santiago, according to the state weather service.But floodwaters are preventing even military vehicles reaching many of the worst-hit villages, and rescuers report a shortage of boats."We haven't reached many areas. About 60% to 70% of our town is flooded, some as deep as three metres," said Henry Velarde, vice mayor of Jaen, a town in Nueva Ecija province."There are about 20,000 residents in isolated areas that need food and water."
  • katyshannon on 19 Oct 15
     
    Philippines' Typhoon Koppu flooding endangers thousands
cjlee29

Mosul Fight Unleashes New Horrors on Civilians - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-of-horrors-on-civilians.html

shared by cjlee29 on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Islamic State has moved hundreds of civilians from villages around the city to use as human shields,
  • United Nations said the militants may have killed nearly 200 people.
  • hit a Shiite mosque in northern Iraq, killing more than a dozen women and children.
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  • A sulfur plant set on fire by the Islamic State has sent dozens of people for treatment for respiratory problems, and several journalists have been hurt, and two killed, covering the fighting.
  • “ISIS has lost hundreds of its members from airstrikes when they withdraw, so now they are forcibly displacing the residents of villages they are leaving and using them as human shields,”
  • The human toll and factional distrust are early examples of the complex humanitarian crisis
  • killed close to 200 people, including civilians and children, in and around Mosul in the past week.
  • Among them were said to have been 50 former Iraqi policemen
  • Mr. Colville said that in one case, several women and children, including a 4-year-old, who were being held as human shields by Islamic State fighters were suddenly gunned down by the militants, possibly because they were lagging behind the group.
  • Although the government’s military operation itself is largely meeting its goals in progressing toward the city, the turmoil surrounding it is a sign of just how difficult it would be to secure a lasting peace across Iraq’s many divisions even after a victory.
  • So far, about 9,000 people have fled the fighting as Kurdish and Iraqi government forces have moved to secure villages around the city, according to the United Nations.
  • as the United Nations has worked to protect civilians, it has at times been undermined by the Iraqi security forces.
  • On the military front, the Islamic State has managed to launch two attacks on cities far from Mosul, diverting the attention of Iraqi security forces and the warplanes of the American-led coalition.
  • Kurdish officials in Kirkuk responded by forcing out hundreds of Arab families who had sought safety there, according to United Nations officials and local residents, as they feared that terrorists had sneaked into the city posing as displaced civilians.
  • local authorities were exacting collective punishment on Arabs for the crimes of the Islamic State
  • Local officials blamed the American-led coalition, but United States military officials have said the episode was not the result of a coalition airstrike.
  • Some have suggested that an artillery shell hit the mosque, but Human Rights Watch said the evidence it had seen “is consistent with an airstrike.” The Iraqi forces are also conducting airstrikes, and Human Rights called for a thorough investigation.
  • Citing safety concerns, the Iraqi government said recently that it would begin restricting journalists’ access to the front lines
julia rhodes

Despite Joy Over Vote in Afghan District, Reports of Fraud - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...district-reports-of-fraud.html

vote afghan fraud history politics crisis

shared by julia rhodes on 22 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • The turbulent district of Andar has been caught in one kind of crossfire or another for years: between American forces and insurgent leaders, between warring militant factions, between those hostile to the national government and those courting it.
  • Government officials hailed the news as a triumph for Afghan democracy in a place where only three valid votes were recorded across the whole district in the 2010 parliamentary elections.To a degree, that judgment was justified.
  • But as always in Andar, there is another side. A review by The New York Times found that polling centers in more than half of the host villages were either closed or saw little to no activity on Election Day, even though they submitted thousands of votes.
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  • Representatives of observer organizations, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of disrupting the official tabulation process, said evidence of fraud was widespread. Though polls were open across the district, it was unsafe for monitors to reach many places, raising the likelihood of vote manipulation.
  • The residents of some villages woke to find that ballot boxes had been moved to different locations — or were not available at all. In Shamshai, another area of Taliban control, election officials decided at the last minute to send boxes to a village a few miles away. In Taliban-held Alizai, the ballot boxes never turned up.
  • Still, some said they did not mind living under Taliban rule, especially in recent years. They said that after the uprising, some of the insurgents had started treating people better, aware that there was now an alternative.
sgardner35

Activist: Malawi's constitution is failing girls - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by sgardner35 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Part of my research methodology was to engage in focus group discussi
  • ons with women in village settings. In order to do this in any village in Malawi, one has to seek permission from the village chief.And so I did. The chief told me to come back the next day so that he can have time to mobilize the women, as well as give them proper notice of the proposed discussion
  • They were... kids. Teenage girls.
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  • I was shocked. Then it dawned on me, "aah, girl-child marriages." After asking, I found the girls' ages ranged from 13 to 18, with two being 24. This then spurred me into action and it was the beginning of a decade-plus journey of understanding girl-child marriages in my country and fighting for the practice to end.
  • In 2010, half of the women (50%) aged 20--24 years were married or in a union before age 18 (compared to 6.4%of boys), while 12% of women married before they were 15 compared to only 1.2% of men. Child marriage is in both rural and urban areas. It is also higher than the regional average for sub-Saharan Africa (37%).
  • This law was born amid the outcry against girl-child marriage, as the country had realized the dangers of girl-child marriage.Save for a few areas, it is a very progressive piece of legislation, particularly from a women's rights perspective. Among other things, the law prohibits marriage for anybody below the age of 18.
  • studies have shown that girl-child marriage is a risk factor in the transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, as young wives do not have much bargaining power to negotiate safe sex with older men.
  • Girl-child marriages need to be prohibited tough the Constitution because they are a violation of every conceivable human right including the right to life, health, education, human dignity and development. What I know for sure child marriage is a guarantee for poverty among girls in my country and I want it to end. No ifs or buts.
Javier E

Archaeologists discover 81 ancient settlements in the Amazon - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ient-settlements-in-the-amazon

amazon americas settlement agriculture history

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, de Souza and his colleagues describe the mound village and 80 other newly discovered archaeological sites from the years 1250 to 1500.
  • They predict that the region hides hundreds more undiscovered sites, and that as many as a million people might have carefully managed the rain forest long before Europeans arrived.
  • Fifty years ago, she said, “prominent scholars thought that little of cultural significance had ever happened in a tropical forest. It was supposed to be too highly vegetated, too moist. And the corollary to those views was that people never cut down the forests; they were supposed to have been sort of ‘noble savages,’ ” she said. “But those views have been overturned,” Piperno continued. “A lot of importance happened in tropical forests, including agricultural origins.”
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  • De Souza and his collaborators spent a month conducting on-the-ground surveys of 24 of those sites. All of them contained evidence that they had been inhabited: abandoned stone tools and broken ceramics, buried trash heaps, an enriched soil called terra preta that is characteristic of indigenous land management through burning and adding fertilizer. By measuring how much of samples’ radioactive carbon had decayed over the years, the researchers dated wood charcoal found at the sites to the early and mid-1400s.
  • Others’ research shows that entire regions of the rain forest are dominated by tree species once cultivated for food by indigenous people. And highly planned networks of villages have been identified on either side of the region de Souza studied.
  • The latest discovery, de Souza said, suggests there was a continuous string of settlements across the entire southern rim of the Amazon basin.
  • “It seems that it was a mosaic of cultures,” he continued. The villages shared some practices — enriching the soil, cultivating Brazil nut and cocoa trees, encircling their homes with protective ditches — but spoke a diverse array of languages
  • “The forest is an artifact of modification,” de Souza said. He quickly added: “It has nothing to do with the kind of practice we are seeing nowadays — large-scale, clearing monoculture. These people were combining small-scale agriculture with management of useful tree species. So it was more a sustainable kind of land use.”
Javier E

Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...climate-change-siberia

warming siberia global warming crisis

shared by Javier E on 04 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Siberia has warmed up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Scientists say the planet's warming must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius — but Siberia's temperatures have already spiked far beyond that.
  • the region near the town of Zyryanka, in an enormous wedge of eastern Siberia called Yakutia, has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times — roughly triple the global average.
  • The permafrost that once sustained farming — and upon which villages and cities are built — is in the midst of a great thaw, blanketing the region with swamps, lakes and odd bubbles of earth that render the land virtually useless.
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  • For the 5.4 million people who live in Russia’s permafrost zone, the new climate has disrupted their homes and their livelihoods. Rivers are rising and running faster, and entire neighborhoods are falling into them. Arable land for farming has plummeted by more than half, to just 120,000 acres in 2017.
  • As the permafrost thaws, animals and plants frozen for thousands of years begin to decompose and send a steady flow of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere — accelerating climate change.
  • Siberians who grew up learning to read nature’s subtlest signals are being driven to migrate by a climate they no longer understand.
  • This migration from the countryside to cities and towns — also driven by factors such as low investment and spotty Internet — represents one of the most significant and little-noticed movements to date of climate refugees. The city of Yakutsk has seen its population surge 20 percent to more than 300,000 in the past decade.
  • In Yakutia, an area one-third the size of the United States, cattle and reindeer herding have plunged 20 percent as the animals increasingly battle to survive the warming climate’s destruction of pastureland.
  • Winters, though still brutal, turned milder — and shorter. Fed by the more rapidly thawing permafrost, rivers started flooding more, leaving some communities inaccessible for months and washing others away, along with the ground beneath them.
  • a booming cottage industry in mammoth hunting has taken hold
  • ornithologists in the region have identified 48 new bird species in the past half century, an increase of almost 20 percent in the known diversity of bird life.
  • “It used to be man was in control,” said Pyotr Kaurgin, head of the Chukchi indigenous community in the village of Kolymskoye, on the northern reaches of the Kolyma River. “Now nature is in control.”
  • Formed during the late Pleistocene, the Earth’s last glacial period, which ended about 11,700 years ago, Yedoma consists of thick layers of soil packed around gigantic lodes of embedded ice. Because Yedoma contains so much ice, it can melt quickly — reshaping the landscape as sudden lakes form and hillsides collapse.
  • In the summer, huge blazes tore through Siberian boreal forests, unleashing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Some scientists fear worsening northern fires are amplifying the permafrost damage.
  • on the Yamal Peninsula, monstrous craters have opened up in the tundra. Scientists suspect they represent sudden explosions of methane gas freed by thawing permafrost.
  • Due to thawing permafrost — along with the demise of Soviet-era state farms — the area of cultivated land in Yakutia has plummeted by more than half since 1990. The region’s cattle herds have shrunk by about 20 percent, to 188,100 head in 2017 from 233,300 in 2011. Reindeer herds have also declined sharply
  • he degradation of crop and pastureland caused by the thawing permafrost helped bring about the collapse of the region’s agriculture.
  • Yegor Prokopyev, the retired head of Nelemnoye, says climate change is the latest shock to befall the Kolyma River region. There was communism and forced collective farming. Then capitalism and government cutbacks.
  • . The radical transformation underway here, she said, should serve as a warning to people in every corner of the globe. “Changing our ways is imminent,” Crate said.
  • The town of Zyryanka has warmed by just over 2 degrees Celsius from 1966 to 2016, according to their analysis.
  • The Post’s analysis, which uses a data set from Berkeley Earth, looks further back. It shows that Zyryanka and the roughly 2,000-square-mile area surrounding it has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius when the past five years are compared with the mid- to late 1800s.
  • From 2005 to 2014, his team found, the number of days with below-freezing temperatures three feet below the surface fell from around 230 days a year to 190.
  • enormous wedges of ice lie under Yakutia.
  • “The permafrost is thawing so fast,” said Anna Liljedahl, an associate professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.”
  • In the 1970s, Desyatkin said, the ground in the Middle Kolyma District, just north of Zyryanka, thawed to a depth of about two feet every summer. Now it thaws to more than three feet. That extra foot of thawing means that, on average, every square mile of territory has been releasing an additional 700,000 gallons of water into the environment every year
  • Meanwhile, ancient plant and animal remains trapped inside the Yedoma are exposed to nonfreezing temperatures — or even the open air. That, in turn, activates microbes, which break down the remains and unleash carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, especially from the thawing plant material.
  • Scientists estimate that the Earth’s Yedoma regions contain between 327 billion and 466 billion tons of carbon. Were it all released into the atmosphere, that would amount to more than half of all human-caused emissions from greenhouse gases and deforestation between 1750 and 2011
  • As the permafrost thaws and riverbanks erode, more tusks will emerge. Though mammoths disappeared from the Siberian mainland some 10,000 years ago, the government estimates that 500,000 tons of their tusks are still buried in the frozen ground.
  • Supply and demand are so great that some people are collecting mammoth tusks at near-industrial scale. They use high-pressure hoses to blast away riverbanks and hire teams of young men to comb the wilderness for months at a time.
  • . In the glutted market, Sivtsev said, the price for top-quality tusks has fallen from about $500 a pound five years ago to around $180.
  • climate change is leaving people with few choices. “They have to somehow support and feed their families.”
  • The ducks and geese are just about gone, he said, possibly moving to new habitats in Siberia as the climate shifts. The sable pelts aren’t as thick as they used to be. The shorter winters mean that once reliably frozen-over lakes and rivers are now less predictable, making hunting grounds harder to reach and restricting his ability to get goods to market.
  • In Nelemnoye, the population has declined to 180 from 210 in the past decade, according to village head Andrei Solntsev. Just 82 of the residents have work. Many factors are pushing people to move to the city — lack of Internet access, poor flight connections, limited job opportunities — but the uncertainty born of a changing climate looms over everything
  • As the permafrost thaws and recedes, a handful of apartment buildings there are showing signs of structural problems. Sections of many older, wooden buildings already sag toward the ground — rendered uninhabitable by the unevenly thawing earth. New apartment blocks are being built on massive pylons extending ever deeper — more than 40 feet — below ground
  • a study published this year that the value of buildings and infrastructure on Russian permafrost amounts to $300 billion — about 7.5 percent of the nation’s total annual economic output. They estimate the cost of mitigating the damage wrought by thawing permafrost will probably total more than $100 billion by 2050.
bluekoenig

The lost neighborhood under New York's Central Park - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

politics US history culture centralpark nyc

shared by bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20
     
    Under New York City's Central Park sits a neighborhood previously inhabited by an African American community after the abolition of slavery in New York. Seneca Village was created after former slaves were made uncomfortable or cast out of what was NYC at the time. Over time, it became very populated, becoming one of the first integrated communities with Irish immigrants moving in, sharing a similar goal of finding a new way of life. In 1853, however, the idea and plans for Central Park were proposed by the NYC elites who wanted something like Kensington Park for their own city, right overtop of Seneca Village and other homes. The cities newspapers portrayed Seneca Village as a no man's land filled with dirty people in shacks and huts living off the land, unimportant and easily removed, before forcing people out of their homes and leveling everything into a park. A recent archeological dig unearthed a rich history revealing it wasn't a shanty town but a rich middle-class community of educated and even rich individuals. Many fought to keep their property but due to their skin color they were entirely disregarded and forced out by the end of the summer.
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