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marvelgr

Opinion | We're in a Fossil Fuel War. Biden Should Say So. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ossil-fuel-climate-change.html

shared by marvelgr on 24 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a war enabled and exacerbated by the world’s insatiable appetite for fossil fuels.
  • Russia is a petrostate — its economy and global influence are heavily reliant on its vast reserves of oil and natural gas — and Vladimir Putin its petromonarch, another in a line of unsavory characters whom liberal democracies keep doing business with because they’ve got something we can’t live without.
  • The way out of this bind would also appear obvious and urgent. By accelerating our transition to cheap and abundant renewable fuels, we can address two grave threats to the planet at once: the climate-warming, air-polluting menace of hydrocarbons and the dictators who rule their supply.
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  • yet American politicians on the left sure seem incapable of drawing out this connection
  • In his State of the Union address shortly after Russia’s invasion, President Biden whiffed on a major opportunity to revive his stalled climate change agenda by underlining the geopolitical dangers of fossil fuels. His references to climate change — what he has previously called an “existential threat” to the planet — were buried under, rather than connected to, his comments about the war.
  • “This narrative has not been out there — that this war is why we need to get off of fossil fuels,”
  • This could have been a moment for moral clarity on the dangers of fossil fuels — but so far, Democrats have fumbled that message.
  • pundits on the right have had a field day with the notion that Russia’s invasion somehow points up the folly of focusing on climate change. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board blamed “the Biden Administration’s obsession with climate” for making “the U.S. and Europe vulnerable to Mr. Putin’s energy blackmail” and wrote that “the climate lobby has made Mr. Putin more powerful.”
  • “More groups need to be connecting the dots, making the case that true energy independence is about running on sunshine, because sunshine is free and abundant and cannot be controlled by dictators.
  • such a message is likely to resonate with people. A study she and a co-author published online in 2017 examined the political factors that led to clean energy policies. “What we found was, overwhelmingly, these policies were passed during energy crises,”
  • the Democrats have yet to aggressively make the case for their proposals in the new context of war — to point out that climate policy is not unrelated to foreign policy, and that freeing ourselves from other people’s fuels is the best long-term solution to skyrocketing energy prices.
  • the ways in which fossil fuels make energy prices far more volatile and put us at the behest of powers and leaders that can act in ways that are dangerous and unjust” has rarely been more obvious.
  • “I started to think about the parallels between climate change and this war and it’s clear that the roots of both these threats to humanity are found in fossil fuels,” Krakovska said in the interview. “Burning oil, gas and coal is causing warming and impacts we need to adapt to
  • And Russia sells these resources and uses the money to buy weapons. Other countries are dependent upon these fossil fuels; they don’t make themselves free of them. This is a fossil fuel war. It’s clear we cannot continue to live this way; it will destroy our civilization.”
Javier E

Why Conservative Parts of the U.S. Are So Angry - YES! Magazine - 0 views

www.yesmagazine.org/...can-conservative-america-angry

conservative white resentment demographics gop county politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Racially and politically, Antlers is typical of much of rural Oklahoma, a state forged from the 19th century territory set aside for Native American tribes forcibly removed from other parts of the United States. Antlers is now 75% White and 22% Native American or mixed race, but with very few Latino, Asian, or Black residents. In 2020, Antlers and its county, Pushmataha—which supported former President Bill Clinton in 1996 and even Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan in 1980—voted for Republicans, 85% to the Democrats’ 14%, up from an 80% share for Republicans in 2016, 54% in 2000, and 34% in 1996.
  • Antlers’ social statistics are beyond alarming. Nearly one-third of its residents live in poverty. The median household income, $25,223, is less than half Oklahoma’s $55,557, which in turn is well below the national median of $74,099 in January 2022.
  • The best-off ethnic group in Antlers is Native Americans (median household income, $35,700; 48% with education beyond high school; 25% living in poverty)
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  • That’s still well below the national median, but the conditions of the White population are dismal: a median household income of $24,800, only 41% with any post-high school education, and 30% living in poverty.
  • In a growing nationwide trend, the median household incomes of people of color, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, now exceed those of White people in nearly 200 of the 1,500 Republican-trifecta counties—those in which the party controls the governor’s office and both legislative chambers of state government (see Figure 1)
  • In the most telling statistics, White people in Antlers are nearly twice as likely to die by guns as Native Americans (see Figure 2). Compared with Whites nationally, Antlers Whites suffer excessive death rates from drugs and alcohol (1.3 times the national average), suicide (1.5 times), all violent deaths (1.8 times), homicide (2.5 times), and gunfire (2.6 times).
  • When I was growing up in Antlers 60 years ago and visited it 20 years ago, my family’s old block consisted of well-kept middle-class homes fronting yards for chickens and horses. On my latest visit in January 2022, I found the houses all boarded up or blowing open in the wind (see photo at top). There are hundreds of abandoned dwellings with collapsing roofs and walls and junk-filled empty lots alongside barely intact, yet still occupied, houses.
  • Antlers is not all devastation, however. It sports a gleaming Choctaw-built travel center financed by casino revenues, which are also invested in local Native Americans’ well-being.
  • Across America, the partisan gap in gross domestic product per capita is also huge and growing: $77,900 in Democratic-voting areas, compared with $46,600 in Republican-voting areas
  • 444 Republican counties have a GDP per capita of under $30,000, and 10 times as many people live in those counties than in the seven similarly low-GDP Democratic counties.
  • Whites in about 40% of all Republican counties lost income over the past two decades. And Trump’s administration was no help to his base. During his presidency, the overall Democrat–Republican GDP per capita gap widened by another $1,800.
  • For the largest urbanized states, the three with Democratic control of all branches of government (California, New York, and Illinois) had GDPs per capita vastly higher than the three biggest Republican-controlled states (Texas, Florida, and Ohio).
  • The right-wing canard that hardworking White people subsidize welfare-grubbing cities is backward. Democrat-voting counties, with 60% of America’s population, generate 67% of the nation’s personal income, 70% of the nation’s GDP, 71% of federal taxes, 73% of charitable contributions, and 75% of state and local taxes.
  • Mirroring Antlers, White Republican America also suffers violent death rates, including from suicide, homicide, firearms, and drunken driving crashes, far higher than Whites in Democratic America and higher than non-White people everywhere.
  • To top it off, Republican-governed Americans are substantially more likely to die from COVID-19.
  • As the death gap between Republican and Democratic areas widens over time, the life expectancy for Whites in Republican-voting areas (77.6 years) is now three years shorter than that of Whites in Democratic areas (80.6 years), shorter than those of Asians and Latino people everywhere, and only a few months longer than Black and Native Americans in Democratic areas.
  • That White people are falling behind across key economic, health, and safety indexes is not due to victimization by immigrants and liberal conspiracies, however, but to victimization by other Whites and self-inflicted alcoholism, drug overdose, and suicide.
  • Aside from the problem that Republican members of congress (and two recalcitrant Democrats) have sabotaged beneficial initiatives, former President Barack Obama already tried that. From 2010 to 2016, the Obama administration’s economic recovery measures fostered millions of new jobs and thousands of dollars in real median income growth for Whites in urban and most rural areas alike, reversing the recession under Republican George W. Bush’s presidency.
  • Is the solution to undividing America massive federal programs to improve Republican America’s struggling economies and troubled social conditions, then?
Javier E

A Tale of Two Conservative Legal Scholars - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...tale-of-two-conservative-legal

conservative ghetto institutions alternative scholars media

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Did Eastman have the intellectual horsepower to know what he was talking about? Looking back from today at the scope of his career, I think the answer is pretty clearly no. He was a third-rate legal mind with first-rate political patrons who grabbed a winning lottery ticket when Florida Republicans looked around to hand one out to anyone who would retcon a legal rationale for their preferred outcome.
  • when third-raters keep getting passed up the ladder, because they exist in alternative ecosystems where the competition and standards are relaxed, they can wind up near real power. And cause real danger.
  • We’ve seen this exact problem in the world of conservative media, which, like the conservative legal world, was created with the goal of being its own alternative ecosystem. In conservative media the standards are a good bit more lax than they are in traditional media, even. (Which is saying something.)
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  • I could argue—I would argue—that for a long while, conservative media was on balance a valuable, healthy constellation of institutions.Today that is no longer the case. There remain a handful of healthy conservative media institutions. The vast majority are toxic to public life.
  • You might ask the same question about Commentary magazine and Fox News that we started out asking about Luttig and Eastman: Why is one of them healthy and valuable while the other is pernicious and dangerous?
  • I wonder if part of the John Eastman story is the peril inherent in building alternative institutions: if withdrawing from the mainstream to set up explicitly parallel institutions inevitably leads to corruptions of those alternatives, while also impoverishing the mainstream by starving it of more diverse views.3
Javier E

DNA Confirms Oral History of Swahili People - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ancient-swahili-dna.html

Africa origins Swahili Islam influence ethnic roots culture dna analysis

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • A long history of mercantile trade along the eastern shores of Africa left its mark on the DNA of ancient Swahili people.
  • A new analysis of centuries-old bones and teeth collected from six burial sites across coastal Kenya and Tanzania has found that, around 1,000 years ago, local African women began having children with Persian traders — and that the descendants of these unions gained power and status in the highest levels of pre-colonial Swahili society.
  • long-told origin stories, passed down through generations of Swahili families, may be more truthful than many outsiders have presumed.
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  • The Swahili Coast is a narrow strip of land that stretches some 2,000 miles along the Eastern African seaboard — from modern-day Mozambique, Comoros and Madagascar in the south, to Somalia in the north
  • In its medieval heyday, the region was home to hundreds of port towns, each ruled independently, but with a common religion (Islam), language (Kiswahili) and culture.
  • Many towns grew immensely wealthy thanks to a vibrant trading network with merchants who sailed across the Indian Ocean on the monsoon winds. Middle Eastern pottery, Asian cloths 0c 0c and other luxury goods came in. African gold, ivory and timber 0c 0c went out — along with a steady flow of enslaved people, who were shipped off and sold across the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf. (Slave trading later took place between the Swahili coast and Europe as well.)
  • A unique cosmopolitan society emerged that blended African customs and beliefs with those of the foreign traders, some of whom stuck around and assimilated.
  • Islam, for example, arrived from the Middle East and became an integral part of the Swahili social fabric, but with coral-stone mosques built and decorated in a local, East African style
  • Or consider the Kiswahili language, which is Bantu in origin but borrows heavily from Indian and Middle Eastern tongues
  • The arrival of Europeans, beginning around 1500, followed by Omani sailors some 200 years later, changed the character of the region
  • over the past 40 years, archaeologists, linguists and historians have come to see Swahili society as predominantly homegrown — with outside elements adopted over time that had only a marginal impact.
  • That African-centric version of Swahili roots never sat well with the Swahili people themselves, though
  • They generally preferred their own origin story, one in which princes from present-day Iran (then known as Persia) sailed across the Indian Ocean, married local women and enmeshed themselves into East African society. Depending on the narrative source, that story dates to around 850 or 1000 — the same period during which genetic mixing was underway, according to the DNA analysis.
  • “It’s remarkably spot on,” said Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the Royal Agricultural University of England
  • “This oral tradition was always maligned,”
  • “Now, with this DNA study, we see there was some truth to it.”
  • The ancient DNA study is the largest of its kind from Africa, involving 135 skeletons dating to late-medieval and early-modern times, 80 of which have yielded analyzable DNA.
  • To figure out where these people came from, the researchers compared genetic signatures from the dug-up bones with cheek swabs or saliva samples taken from modern-day individuals living in Africa, the Middle East and around the world.
  • The burial-site DNA traced back to two primary sources: Africans and present-day Iranians. Smaller contributions came from South Asians and Arabs as well, with foreign DNA representing about half of the skeletons’ genealogy
  • “It’s surprising that the genetic signature is so strong
  • Gene sequences from tiny power factories inside the cell, known as mitochondria, were overwhelmingly African in origin. Since children inherit these bits of DNA only from their mothers, the researchers inferred that the maternal forbearers of the Swahili people were mostly of African descent.
  • By comparison, the Y chromosome, passed from father to son, was chock-full of Asian DNA that the researchers found was common in modern-day Iran. So, a large fraction of Swahili ancestry presumably came from Persian men
  • Dr. Reich initially assumed that conquering men settled the region by force, displacing the local males in the process. “My hypothesis was that this was a genetic signature of inequality and exploitation,”
  • hat turned out to be a “naïve expectation,” Dr. Reich said, because “it didn’t take into account the cultural context in this particular case.”
  • In East Africa, Persian customs never came to dominate. Instead, most foreign influences — language, architecture, fashion, arts — were incorporated into a way of life that remained predominantly African in character, with social strictures, kinship systems and agricultural practices that reflected Indigenous traditions.
  • “Swahili was an absorbing society,” said Adria LaViolette, an archaeologist at the University of Virginia who has worked on the East African coast for over 35 years. Even as the Persians who arrived influenced the culture, “they became Swahili,”
  • One major caveat to the study: Nearly all the bones and teeth came from ornamental tombs that were located near grand mosques, sites where only the upper class would have been laid to rest.
  • the results might not be representative of the general populace.
  • Protocols for disinterring, sampling and reburying human remains were established in consultation with local religious leaders and community stakeholders. Under Islamic law, exhumations are permitted if they serve a public interest, including that of determining ancestry,
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