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Contents contributed and discussions participated by rachelramirez

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rachelramirez

Study Shows Racial Achievement Gap in Kindergarteners - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...516831

education politics policy

shared by rachelramirez on 27 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • When Does the Racial Achievement Gap First Appear?
  • Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011 who were followed through the end of their fifth-grade year. Sixty-two percent of the 2,199 Latino students studied had at least one foreign-born parent, and 45 percent spoke only Spanish or predominantly Spanish at home. Nearly half lived in poverty.
  • while Latino and white kindergartners showed similar gains throughout the year, Latino students remain behind in the spring because of where they started upon entering school in the fall.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “However, it is likely that prejudice, both interpersonal and systemic, plays a role. We know that when teachers, parents, communities, and the culture at large hold negative stereotypes (including low academic expectations) of minority-group members
  • arguing that failure to address it will threaten the nation’s future position as a global economic leader in an ever-increasing technology-based society, because one in four kindergartners in the U.S. is Latino.
rachelramirez

Why Is Trump Silent on Islamophobic Attacks? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...517893

Islamophobia politics anto-Semitism

shared by rachelramirez on 27 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Why Is Trump Silent on Islamophobic Attacks?
  • In the ten days following Trump’s victory, the Southern Poverty Law Center chronicled one hundred attacks—or threatened attacks—against American Jews and 49 against American Muslims.
  • the period between election day and February 9, the liberal blog Think Progress counted 70 anti-Jewish incidents and 31 anti-Muslim ones.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The ratio of anti-Jewish to anti-Muslim incidents, in other words, appears slightly over two to one, which mirrors the ratio of Jews to Muslims in the population.
  • Of the 70 anti-Jewish incidents that Think Progress catalogued, only one involved physical attack. (The large majority were bomb threats). Of the 31 anti-Muslim incidents, by contrast, nine did.
  • There’s been no similar pressure on Trump to condemn attacks on American Muslims. The press has certainly covered Trump’s attitudes—and those of his top advisors—toward Islam, particularly since he announced a ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim nations on January 27
  • But attacks on American mosques have received far less attention
  • One answer is assimilation. With the exception of African Americans, American Muslims are a largely immigrant community. By contrast, most American Jews came a century ago. That helps explain why Jews are better represented at elite levels of the press and government, and in a better position to press their community’s concerns.
  • There is no Muslim equivalent of the ZOA or Simon Wiesenthal Center.
rachelramirez

U.S. Forces Play Crucial Role Against ISIS in Mosul - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...litary-role-islamic-state.html

Iraq ISIS politics crisis

shared by rachelramirez on 27 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • U.S. Forces Play Crucial Role Against ISIS in Mosul
  • A flurry of attacks were carried out by the American-led coalition in and around Mosul on Saturday, some involving the dropping of multiple bombs.
  • Iraq’s federal police have fully secured the Mosul airport, while Iraq’s elite counterterrorism service seized a nearby military base last week.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • That is a small fraction of the approximately 500 dead and 3,000 wounded that Iraqi forces suffered in their push to secure the eastern half of the city during an earlier, 100-day offensive.
  • the Iraqi strategy has been to mount an attack on multiple axes to present the militants with more problems than they can handle. But the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has responded at times by concentrating its firepower on what it believes to be the Iraqis’ main line of attack.
rachelramirez

U.S. Government Ethics Chief Was Behind Those Tweets About Donald Trump, Records Show :... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...weets-about-trump-records-show

government ethics politics

shared by rachelramirez on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • U.S. Ethics Chief Was Behind Those Tweets About Trump, Records Show
  • the typically straitlaced Office of Government Ethics surprised observers with a series of tweets mimicking Donald Trump's bombastic style, exclamation points and all: "Brilliant! Divestiture is good for you, good for America!"
  • In two emails, dated Nov. 30, just several minutes apart, Shaub sent to OGE Chief of Staff Shelley Finlayson the nine tweets that took the Internet by storm that day.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The controversy was two-fold: (1) The OGE doesn't typically air its positions publicly, advising White House transition teams behind the scenes. (2) Trump hadn't promised the total divestitures of business interests implied by the tweets.
  • The emails were part of a 365-page document shared with NPR in response to disclosure requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
  • It's still unclear why — if Shaub's tweets were deliberate — they were temporarily deleted on the day they were posted
  • The vast majority of the disclosures were media inquiries from the month of November — but also troves of messages from members of the public received around the time of the tweets.
  • There are dozens and dozens of emails, letters and even a postcard (of Alexander Hamilton with a black eye?), expressing concerns about Trump's business holdings and conflicts of interest.
rachelramirez

Website Goes Down At Office Of Government Ethics Amid Political Storm : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...nt-ethics-amid-political-storm

ethics npr politics policy trump

shared by rachelramirez on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Website Goes Down At Office Of Government Ethics Amid Political Storm
  • The website at the Office of Government Ethics went down Friday afternoon, apparently overwhelmed with traffic, as the agency and its director found themselves at the heart of a growing political fight.
  • The office's director, Walter Shaub Jr., has been conducting an unusually public discussion about ethics with the president-elect and the people he has chosen for his Cabinet.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Although the office didn't respond to a question about why the tweet was sent out when it was, it came a day after Trump tweeted praise of a business and encouraged people to shop there. Thank you to Linda Bean of L.L.Bean for your great support and courage. People will support you even more now. Buy L.L.Bean. @LBPerfectMaine— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2017
  • Shaub — a political appointee of President Obama in his fourth of a five-year term and a career civil servant — described Trump's announced plans to turn over management of his businesses to his sons as "meaningless" as it relates to conflicts of interest.
  • Over the weekend, Senate Democrats released a letter Shaub sent raising alarms about nominees who hadn't completed their ethics reviews being scheduled for confirmation hearings.
  • The ethics agency director ended the letter, "For as long as I remain Director, OGE's staff and agency ethics officials will not succumb to pressure to cut corners and ignore conflicts of interest."
  • Conflict-of-interest laws that apply to executive branch employees don't apply to the president. Trump has made it clear he believes he is going above and beyond what is required by law, but Shaub and others have been quite critical of those steps, saying they are insufficient.
  • "The Oversight Committee has not held one hearing, conducted one interview, or obtained one document about President-elect Donald Trump's massive global entanglements," Cummings said in a statement,
  • This also comes after House Republicans pushed to reduce the influence of the independent Office of Congressional Ethics
rachelramirez

Trump worries Nato with 'obsolete' comment - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-38635181

trump nato politics policy economics

shared by rachelramirez on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Trump worries Nato with 'obsolete' comment
  • A statement by US President-elect Donald Trump that Nato is "obsolete" has caused "worry" in the alliance, Germany's foreign minister says.
  • Shares in BMW, Volkswagen and Daimler fell after he warned that cars built in Mexico, where they have invested in factories, would be taxed at 35% if exported to the US.
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  • Few expected the new transatlantic relationship to echo the warm and trusting alliance nurtured by Angela Merkel and Barack Obama, who was a vocal supporter of Mrs Merkel's refugee policy.
  • Germany's outspoken Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel retorted that the migrant crisis was the result of "faulty, interventionist American policies in the Mediterranean and Middle East".
  • though few here believe his Congress would approve the 35% tax he appears to be threatening to impose on imported vehicles.
  • "A lot of these countries aren't paying what they're supposed to be paying, which I think is very unfair to the United States."
  • Mr Trump added that Nato was "very important" to him
  • Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, Mr Steinmeier said the president-elect's comments had caused "worry and concern".
  • the US deployed 3,000 soldiers, 80 tanks and hundreds of armoured vehicles to Poland in a move by President Barack Obama to reassure Nato allies concerned about a more aggressive Russia.
  • At his Senate confirmation hearing last week, Mr Trump's choice for defence secretary, Gen James Mattis, had described Nato as central to US defence, and had accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of trying to "break" the alliance.
  • Mr Trump described Mrs Merkel as Europe's most important leader but said the EU had become "basically a vehicle for Germany".
rachelramirez

Pro-Lifers Are Going to the Women's March on Washington - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513104

shared by rachelramirez on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • These Pro-Lifers Are Headed to the Women’s March on Washington
  • Perhaps the Women’s March on Washington is a sign that feminism is changing, too, ever so slightly: a first gathering of a truly “intersectional” movement which makes room for women with diverse convictions, including a moral opposition to abortion.
  • Some pro-lifers say they’ll protest. A delegation from Students for Life of America will be there to march against the influence of “the abortion industry” in the women’s movement
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  • Many pro-life women felt just as outraged as pro-choice women about Donald Trump’s conduct and comments, including the revelation that he once bragged about groping women without their permission.
  • the organizers say pro-lifers will be welcome to march on January 21st.
  • With roughly a week to go before the march, organizers also released a set of “unity principles,” and one of them is “open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion and birth control for all people.”
  • Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, the Texas-based president of a group called New Wave Feminists. “I get that he applied this pro-life label, but I don’t know very many people who genuinely believe he’s pro-life.”
  • A small group of marchers associated with the pro-life publication Life Matters Journal will be there to support “this actual affirmation of peace and human rights, not just for women, but for all people of any or no gender, ethnicity, religion, immigration status, age, or disability,
  • Some groups seem more interested in spinning up controversy than actually participating, though. Students for Life of America has invited hundreds of women to attend on Facebook, proclaiming that “we will not sit by as Planned Parenthood, our nation’s abortion Goliath and a sponsor of this march, betrays women into thinking abortion is their only choice.”
  • The Women’s March, in all its grassroots chaos, might be a feminist space where they’re actually welcome—or, at least, where they can inconspicuously march along with everyone else
rachelramirez

South Korean Prosecutors Seek to Arrest Samsung Head for Bribery - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...-samsung-head-for-bribery.html

samsung economic

shared by rachelramirez on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • South Korean Prosecutors Seek to Arrest Samsung Head for Bribery
  • Jay Y. Lee, the head of Samsung Group, in a massive bribery scandal that goes all the way up to the president’s office
  • accusations he paid multi-million dollar bribes to a friend of President Park Geun-hye in order to secure business deals
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • faces accusations of embezzlement and perjury, Reuters reported, citing copies of prosecutors’ documents
  • “The special prosecutors' office, in making this decision to seek an arrest warrant, determined that while the country's economic conditions are important, upholding justice takes precedence,”
  • Lee is due to appear at a court hearing on Wednesday, when a judge will decide whether to grant the arrest warrant.
rachelramirez

U.K. Set to Choose Sharp Break From European Union - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...break-from-european-union.html

brexit politics policy economics

shared by rachelramirez on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • U.K. Set to Choose Sharp Break From European Union
  • Prime Minister Theresa May is likely to choose to exit Europe’s single market and its customs union — a so-called hard Brexit.
  • Mrs. May calling for British unity “to make a success of Brexit and build a truly global Britain.”
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  • Being outside the single market could damage Britain’s important financial services sector and is likely to hit the value of the pound again, at least temporarily.
  • We don’t want the E.U. to fail, we want it to prosper economically and politically, and we need to persuade our allies that a strong new partnership with the U.K. will help the E.U. to do that.”
  • two main priorities are ending the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice over British law, and restoring British control over its borders and immigration, including from the European Union
  • Membership in the customs union would mean that Britain would have to obey European Union regulations on manufacturing standards and would be banned from making separate trade deals with countries
  • A week ago, Mrs. May said in a television interview that post-Brexit Britain would not be able to keep “bits” of its European Union membership.
  • Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, said that Mr. Hammond “appears to be making a sort of threat to the European community
  • Britain already runs a significantly higher yearly deficit than most European countries, about 4.4 percent of gross domestic product, and its cumulative debt is estimated at nearly 85 percent of G.D.P. Mainstream economists — under fire for wrongly predicting an immediate recession after the Brexit vote last June — say those figures are likely to worsen as the pound falls and the economy slows
rachelramirez

House Joins Senate in Approving Groundwork to Revoke Health Care Law - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...le-care-act-senate-budget.html

senate health politics obamacare

shared by rachelramirez on 13 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • House Joins Senate in Approving Groundwork to Revoke Health Care Law
  • The House joined the Senate on Friday in laying the groundwork for speedy action to repeal the Affordable Care Act, approving the budget blueprint passed by the Senate on Thursday that would allow Republicans to tear up the health care law
  • places Republicans squarely in position to fulfill their long-held desire to dismantle President Obama’s signature domestic achievement.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • While pursuing repeal with zeal, Republicans are far from reaching any consensus on how to go about replacing the health care law, under which more than 20 million Americans have gained health insurance.
  • The blueprint directs four House and Senate committees to draw up legislation.
  • “every American will be adversely affected" by the repeal of the health care law.
rachelramirez

News Today - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...13613

Cuba Obama politics policy

shared by rachelramirez on 13 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • U.S. Ends 'Wet Foot, Dry Foot' Policy for Fleeing Cubans
  • the White House announced Thursday
  • Obama administration ended the policy with immediate effect through an executive order, one which could be reversed by the incoming Trump administration.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • which was enacted by the Clinton administration in 1995, would grant residency for Cubans that made it to U.S. land, putting them on the path toward U.S. citizenship
  • Cubans who were intercepted in U.S. waters would be turned away and sent back to Cuba or a third country
  • “With this change we will continue to welcome Cubans as we welcome immigrants from other nations, consistent with our laws,” President Obama said
  • Hundreds of thousands of Cubans have fled the island nation since 1960
  • Since 2012, 118,000 Cubans have arrived in the U.S.,
  • This is just the latest step by the Obama administration in its continued efforts to normalize relations
rachelramirez

Jeff Sessions Wanted to 'Drop the Case' Against KKK Lynching, Attorney Testified - The ... - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...nching-attorney-testified.html

sessions trump politics US history

shared by rachelramirez on 09 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Jeff Sessions Wanted to ‘Drop the Case’ Against KKK Lynching, Attorney Testified
  • they’re sure to include questions that were raised when he was nominated for a federal judgeship in 1986. His confirmation was derailed largely by the testimony of Thomas Figures, an assistant U.S. attorney in Alabama when Sessions was U.S. attorney.
  • Sessions and his supporters, then as now, defend his civil rights record based on several cases to which Figures was also assigned, including the conviction of Henry Hays for the 1981 murder by lynching of a Donald Figures.
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  • Sessions had once told him that “he believed the NAACP, the SCLC, Operation PUSH, and the National Council of Churches were all un-American organizations teaching anti-American values.”
  • He was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed in Alabama’s infamous Yellow Mama electric chair in 1997, the first white man executed for killing a black man in Alabama since 1913, which Sessions noted in his attorney general questionnaire.
  • Judge Braxton Kittrell presided but did not comment on Sessions’s role in the prosecution when he testified before the Senate in 1986.
  • The FBI investigated at the request of the district attorney but turned up no suspects. Encouraged by his brother, the attorney for Donald’s mother, Figures pushed for a second FBI investigation, and eventually a grand jury which returned indictments against Knowles and Hays, who were arrested in June 1983.
  • During the Donald case, Sessions allegedly told Figures and others he liked the Klan until he found out they smoked marijuana.
  • Session replied “something to the effect of, ‘I didn’t know that Klansmen used marijuana now,” Kowalski said, and that “he used to have respect for that organization but now he no longer does, knowing they use drugs.”
  • Sessions was denied confirmation thanks to the allegations of racism and abuse of power, making him the first Reagan appointee not approved by the Senate, and only the second nominee to the district court bench rejected in 49 years.
  • In 1992 a federal grand jury charged Figures for allegedly bribing a drug dealer not to testify against his client, a prosecution many viewed as retaliatory.
  • Senators on the Judiciary Committee will have only Figures’s 1986 testimony to go on when hearings begin next week. He died in January 2015, then serving as a municipal judge in Mobile.
rachelramirez

Who's in Donald Trump's Cabinet? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...510527

donald trump cabinet politics US policy

shared by rachelramirez on 09 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The Donald Trump Cabinet Tracker
  • The Senate hasn’t formally rejected a Cabinet pick since it voted down President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of John Tower for defense secretary in 1989
  • Trump may have more luck with the Senate than his immediate predecessors, and he has Democrats to thank. When they held the majority in 2013, they changed the rules so that executive-branch nominations are no longer subject to the 60-vote threshold for filibusters. That means Trump could conceivably win Senate approval of his entire Cabinet without a single Democratic vote.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Democrats are accusing Republicans of trying to rush Trump’s Cabinet into office without proper vetting, particularly in the case of the wealthy executives who have slim public records and a greater potential for conflicts of interest.
  • Democrats are also upset that Republicans have scheduled six hearings for a single day, Wednesday; they believe it’s an attempt to dilute media coverage of the hearings and make it easier for the nominees to avoid a major controversy.
  • Trump’s pick: Rex Tillerson
  • Tillerson’s ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin will be the biggest potential obstacle to his confirmation by the Senate. In 2012, Putin awarded him the “Order of Friendship”—a high honor in the Kremlin, but one that will not sit well with Russia hawks in Congress.
  • He benefits from the support of the Republican leadership, and endorsements from Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates and James Baker.
  • Trump’s pick: General James Mattis
  • Mattis is known as a straight-shooter and a voracious reader, and Trump has gushed that he is “the closest thing to George Patton that we have.” Like Trump, Mattis is someone whose blunt talk occasionally crashes through the line of political correctness
  • Trump’s pick: Representative Tom Price
  • In the meantime, Price’s experience in federal health policy could allow him to begin dismantling the Affordable Care Act from the inside at HHS.
  • The biggest obstacle to Price’s confirmation is not his fervent opposition to Obamacare but his support for Ryan’s longstanding desire to convert Medicare into a voucher program.
  • Trump’s pick: Former Texas Governor Rick Perry
  • As Democrats will undoubtedly remind the public to no end, the Energy Department was the Cabinet post that Perry infamously forgot he wanted to eliminate during a Republican primary debate in 2011.
  • will quickly turn serious as senators force Perry to explain how he plans to lead a department that he doesn’t believe should exist.
  • Trump’s pick: Andrew Puzder
  • He’s been a "vocal defender of Trump’s economic policies,” and shares a rhetorical style with the president-elect. As brash businessmen, they seem like two peas in a pod.
  • On policy, his opposition to a minimum-wage increase will be a target for Democrats, who will argue that placing a wealthy executive atop the Labor Department is an insult to working-class voters who supported Trump.
  • Trump’s pick: Elaine Chao
  • As labor secretary for the full two terms of the George W. Bush administration, Chao brings more civilian experience in the federal government than anyone else in Trump’s Cabinet. Before that, she directed the Peace Corps and led United Way.
rachelramirez

Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ex-President of Iran, Dies at 82 - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ayatollah-rafsanjani-dead.html

iran politics culture

shared by rachelramirez on 08 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ex-President of Iran, Dies at 82
  • Argentina has accused Mr. Rafsanjani and other senior Iranian figures of complicity in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people died. In 1997, a German court concluded that the highest levels of Iran’s political leadership had ordered the killing five years earlier of four exiled Iranian Kurdish dissidents in Berlin
  • Mr. Rafsanjani, for instance, was credited with suggesting that “Death to America” be dropped from the litany of slogans at Tehran’s Friday prayers, a weekly moment of fervor in Iran’s political and religious calendar.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • For much of his career, he maintained roles in Parliament and on influential clerical panels, under the tutelage of Ayatollah Khomeini and then, less durably, of his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
  • Instead, Ayatollah Khamenei built his own power base. But Mr. Rafsanjani’s back-room dealings — often trading on his close relationship with Ayatollah Khomeini — earned him the nickname “kingmaker.”
  • In March, Mr. Rafsanjani wrote on Twitter that the “world of tomorrow is one of negotiations, not the world of missiles.
  • In 2013, Mr. Rafsanjani was disqualified from standing in presidential elections and swung his political weight behind a moderate, longtime associate, Hassan Rouhani, who won the vote and went on to bring many of Mr. Rafsanjani’s supporters into his cabinet and to negotiate the nuclear agreement with the United States in 2015
  • From 1963 to 1978, Mr. Rafsanjani was jailed five times for his opposition to the shah, but he remained in close contact with exiled clerics, including Ayatollah Khomeini, who was living in Najaf, Iraq.
  • By 2013, Mr. Rafsanjani was said to have built a family business empire that owned Iran’s second biggest airline, exercised a near monopoly on the lucrative pistachio trade and controlled the largest private university, Azad. The family’s business interests also included real estate, construction and oil deals
  • In presidential elections in June 2009, Mr. Rafsanjani supported the moderate Mir Hussein Moussavi, who lost to Mr. Ahmadinejad. The outcome was widely disputed, and many Iranian protesters died or were detained challenging the authorities in the streets. The protesters included Mr. Rafsanjani’s youngest daughter, Faezeh, who had campaigned for women’s rights and was arrested in large demonstrations against Mr. Ahmadinejad’s victory
  • In September 2009, Mr. Rafsanjani seemed to be sidelined when the authorities barred him from addressing Friday prayers in Tehran on Quds Day, an annual display of solidarity with Palestinians.
  • In 2011, Iran sided with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria during the Arab Spring, along with the Hezbollah Shiite militia in Lebanon, setting Tehran against Mr. Assad’s Western adversaries, including the United States.
rachelramirez

A-List's Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...b-hits-him-where-it-hurts.html

trump politics US history

shared by rachelramirez on 03 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • NOT NORMALA-List’s Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts
  • Rockettes and now even a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who are refusing to raise their microphones, kick up their bare-legged heels or otherwise perform for Donald Trump at his inaugural
  • America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Our love of Hollywood-style glamour helped elect two presidents: JFK and Reagan, who fulfilled the prophecy that a country so enamored of actors would eventually make one their president. “All in the Family” chronicled the racial and cultural upheavals of the Nixon era. Bill Clinton captured the zeitgeist of young voters in the early 1990s by playing his saxophone on the “Arsenio Hall” show
  • owes his election in large part to the sense of familiarity that being a reality TV star afforded him. That status allowed many of his voters to put aside his misogyny and vulgarity
  • onservatives rail at Hollywood movies that make them feel alienated by presenting capitalists, corporations and moral traditionalists as the villains, and sexual libertines, iconoclasts and the godless (or godlike, in the form of superheroes, witches and warlocks) as the heroes.
  • the 80 percent of white self-professed evangelicals who voted for Trump purportedly did so to lay claim to the courts, where they believe they can yet win out on banning abortion and birth control, forcing women back into traditional roles, and undoing gay marriage
  • Obama, though, has taken celebrity association to another level. He has been a darling of Hollywood, the music industry and popular culture from the time he declared for president in 2007
  • which dined out on vows to discriminate against Mexicans and Muslims while unleashing a resurgence of racist hate groups and just plain haters is reaping the cultural opprobrium it sowed. And it’s making The Donald miserable.
rachelramirez

The Recount Road to Nowhere - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...another-call-for-a-recount

trump politics US recount

shared by rachelramirez on 30 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • The Recount Road to Nowhere
  • This is a critical period in which the shape of Trump’s Administration will be formed, one that presents all sorts of tasks and challenges for his opponents.
  • Trump has three hundred and six, and Clinton has two hundred and thirty-two. This includes sixteen for Trump from Michigan, where his victory, by ten thousand votes, was certified this afternoon.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • A recount would have to reverse the results in all three states to get Clinton to two hundred and seventy. And, as fivethirtyeight.com noted, this has never happened in cases where the margins are as large as those in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania; even Michigan would be at the edge of past experience.
  • Stein’s Wisconsin application lists a number of reasons for a recount, most of which are paraphrases of a single thought: the Russians might, just might, have fixed the election
  • The only example of observable irregularities that Stein cites is an uptick in absentee voting, something that may have many causes.
  • Nate Silver gave Trump close to a one-in-three chance of winning. And, as the Obama Administration confirmed this weekend, there is no sign of interference in the balloting.
  • It has been widely noted that Clinton did not visit Wisconsin in the general election. The results may have been “surprising,” but they are not mysterious.
  • There have also been reports pointing to a weaker performance for Clinton in counties with paperless balloting; however, as both fivethirtyeight.com and the Upshot have pointed out, any difference disappears when one controls for demographics.
  • written by its attorney Marc Elias, which said that the campaign took concerns about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania “very seriously,” especially given that “this election cycle was unique in the degree of foreign interference witnessed throughout the campaign.”
  • “lawyers and data scientists and analysts combing over the results to spot anomalies that would suggest a hacked result”; of meetings with data scientists; of researching recount and audit rules; of an attempt “to systematically catalogue and investigate every theory that has been presented to us.”
  • On Sunday morning, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, responded to the recount calls by pointing to how outraged the Clinton campaign was when Trump said, during the debates, that he couldn’t say whether he’d accept the results.
  • When it comes to combating Trump, one must take particular care not to join him in the land of conspiracies, however intellectually engaging or emotionally satisfying that may be. One has to start, instead, by holding fast to the truth.
rachelramirez

When Finland's Teachers Work in America's Schools - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...508685

shared by rachelramirez on 29 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • When Finnish Teachers Work in America’s Public Schools
  • Kristiina Chartouni, a veteran Finnish educator who began teaching American high-school students this autumn, said in an email. “I am supposedly doing what I love, but I don't recognize this profession as the one that I fell in love with in Finland.”
  • In Tennessee, Chartouni has encountered a different teaching environment from the one she was used to in her Nordic homeland—one in which she feels like she’s “under a microscope.”
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  • Chartouni misses that feeling of being trusted as a professional in Finland. There, after receiving her teaching timetable at the start of each school year, she would be given the freedom to prepare curriculum-aligned lessons, which matched her preferences and teaching style.
  • In general, U.S. public-school teachers report that they have the least amount of control over two particular areas of teaching: “selecting textbooks and other classroom materials” and “selecting content, topics, and skills to be taught.
  • Marc Tucker, the president and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy, suggested to me that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which he called “the inauguration of [America’s] accountability movement,” significantly affected how U.S. public-school teachers perceived their level of autonomy.
  • Under NCLB, America’s public schools needed to make adequate yearly progress, decided in large part by student performance on state standardized tests, or face serious consequences, such as school closures.
  • As a public-school educator in Tennessee, Chartouni is seeing how some accountability measures—ones that are unobserved in Finnish schools—have reduced her level of professional freedom.
  • ” So, occasionally, Chartouni decides to assign easy bell work as she greets her exhausted students: “sit down, relax, and breathe.” (In Finland, students and teachers typically have a 15-minute break built-into every classroom hour.)
  • She described it as a rote job where she follows a curriculum she didn’t develop herself, keeps a principal-dictated schedule, and sits in meetings where details aren’t debated.
  • “I feel rushed, nothing gets done properly; there is very little joy, and no time for reflection or creative thinking (in order to create meaningful activities for students).”
  • “And the countries that give [teachers] more autonomy successfully are countries that have made an enormous investment in changing the pool from which they are selecting their teachers, then they make a much bigger investment than we do in the education of their future teachers, then they make a much bigger investment in the support of those teachers once they become teachers.
rachelramirez

The Woman Who Sees Time as a Hula Hoop - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...508985

time atlantic

shared by rachelramirez on 29 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • The Woman Who Sees Time as a Hula Hoop
  • Imagine a calendar. Chances are you just thought about a rectangular grid, with time progressing from the top-left to the bottom-right. But around one percent of you may have pictured something different—a V, for example, or a hoop encircling your head.
  • . Some associate letters or numbers with colors, others taste sounds or see smells, and people with calendar forms map time onto space.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Her calendar is a hula hoop, which stretches horizontally in front of her and touches her chest at one point—always December 31st, no matter the actual time of year.
  • But if she turns her head to the right, the left side of the calendar became fuzzier, as it would be if it was an actual physical object.
  • “embodied cognition,” which says that the way we think isn’t just the product of our brains, but is also profoundly influenced and constrained by our bodies.
  • Most people find this task harder than they expect—they hesitate, or make mistakes. But Megan was much faster than average, even on more difficult variations like skipping every other month, or two months at a time.
  • That said, Ramachandran found that Megan’s calendar is also vulnerable to visual illusions.
  • “This shows that the calendar isn’t the United Nations—an airy nothing,” says Ramachandran. “It’s behaving like a real physical object out there in the world, but of course it’s not.”
rachelramirez

Cruz: 'Pitchforks and Torches' If GOP Doesn't 'Deliver' on Promises - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...esn-t-deliver-on-promises.html

gop politics US policy

shared by rachelramirez on 27 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Cruz: ‘Pitchforks and Torches’ If GOP Doesn’t ‘Deliver’ on Promises
  • Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Republican voters would take up “pitchforks and torches” if the party’s leaders don’t deliver on the promises that propelled Donald Trump to the White House and gave the GOP full control of Congress.
  • “And I think quite rightly. I think people are so fed up with Washington. This election was a mandate with change, and the most catastrophic thing Republicans could do is go back to business as usual.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Cruz, a hardline conservative voice in the Senate, has been a constant thorn in the side of the GOP leadership in the upper chamber.
  • Trump has suggested in recent days that he would back away from many of the promises that were cornerstones of his presidential campaign
rachelramirez

The Linguistic Evolution of 'Like' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...507614

linguistics culture US

shared by rachelramirez on 27 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • The Evolution of 'Like'
  • It’s under this view of language—as something becoming rather than being, a film rather than a photo, in motion rather than at rest—that we should consider the way young people use (drum roll, please) like.
  • So today’s like did not spring mysteriously from a crowd on the margins of unusual mind-set and then somehow jump the rails from them into the general population. The seeds of the modern like lay among ordinary people; the Beatniks may not even have played a significant role in what happened later. The point is that like transformed from something occasional into something more regular.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The word was lic, and lic was part of a word, gelic, that meant “with the body,” as in “with the body of,” which was a way of saying “similar to”—as in like.
  • Like has become a piece of grammar: It is the source of the suffix -ly. To the extent that slowly means “in a slow fashion,” as in “with the quality of slowness,” it is easy (and correct) to imagine that slowly began as “slow-like,”
  • Therefore, like is ever so much more than some isolated thing clinically described in a dictionary with a definition like “(preposition) ‘having the same characteristics or qualities as; similar to.’
  • Because we think of like as meaning “akin to” or “similar to,” kids decorating every sentence or two with it seems like overuse.
  • To an Old English speaker, the word that later became like was the word for, of all things, “body.”
  • It’s real-life usage of this kind—to linguists it is data, just like climate patterns are to meteorologists—that suggests that the idea of like as the linguistic equivalent to slumped shoulders is off.
  • In that light, what has happened to like is that it has morphed into a modal marker—actually, one that functions as a protean indicator of the human mind at work in conversation.
  • There are actually two modal marker likes—that is, to be fluent in modern American English is to have subconsciously internalized not one but two instances of grammar involving like.
  • The like acknowledges—imagine even a little curtsey—the discomfort. It softens the blow—that is, eases—by swathing the statement in the garb of hypotheticality that the basic meaning of like lends.
  • Something “like” x is less threatening than x itself; to phrase things as if x were only “like,” x is thus like offering a glass of water, a compress, or a warm little blanket.
  • People’s sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality, and the person of a certain age who claims never to use like “that way” as often as not, like, does—and often.
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