Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items matching "lessons" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
lilyrashkind

Lesson of the Day: 'An Intimate Look at Mexico's Indigenous Seri People' - The New York Times - 0 views

  • People.” Photographs and Text by Núria López TorresThe Seri, an Indigenous nation of only about 1,000 people, have lived in northwestern Mexico for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Their identity is deeply tied to their natural environment, which in recent decades has been susceptible to an increasing number of threats related to climate change.
  • What is one thing you can infer about the Seri people based on their origin story of the Earth?Does this story remind you of any others about how Earth was created from other cultures and religions?
  • 3. How has climate change threatened core aspects of the Seri people’s culture? What other challenges has the community faced?4. What actions have Seri women taken to protect their territory and heritage?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • What is your reaction to the article? What did you learn? What emotions, thoughts or questions did you have after reading? Respond to these questions in your journal.
  • Look closely at the photograph you selected and ask yourself these questions from Ms. Farr’s lesson:Does the photo have high-contrast colors, low-contrast colors or a mix of both?What’s the first thing you see in the photo? What’s the next thing you notice?
  • Finally, choose one quotation from the article to pair with the photograph you selected. How does the photograph help illustrate an idea from the quotation? You can share your selection with classmates and then discuss which photographs and quotations you selected and why.
julia rhodes

North Korea's Lesson - Nukes for Sale - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • HE most dangerous message North Korea sent Tuesday with its third nuclear weapon test is: nukes are for sale.
  • Testing a uranium-based bomb would announce to the world — including potential buyers — that North Korea is now operating a new, undiscovered production line for weapons-usable material.
  • North Korea’s latest provocation should also remind us of the limits of Western policies, led by the United States, that focus on “isolating” the hermit kingdom.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Hence the grim conclusion that North Korea now has a new cash crop — one that is easier to market than plutonium. Highly enriched uranium is harder to detect and therefore easier to export
  • American policy makers’ attention has been consumed by Iran’s attempt to build its first nuclear weapon. During those years, American officials believe, North Korea has acquired enough plutonium to make an arsenal of 6 to 10 nuclear bombs,
  • American experts therefore believe that Pyongyang must have another still-undiscovered parallel plant that has been operating for several years. That plant by now could have produced several bombs’ worth of highly enriched uranium.
  • history shows that the North Koreans will “sell anything they have to anybody who has the cash to buy it.” In intelligence circles, North Korea is known as “Missiles ‘R’ Us,” having sold and delivered missiles to Iran, Syria and Pakistan, among others.
  • With what consequences for North Korea? Pyongyang got paid; Syria got bombed; and the United States was soon back at the negotiating table in the six-party talks.
  • Given America’s failure to hold Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, accountable when he sold Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, the technology from which to make a bomb, could the younger Mr. Kim imagine that he could get away with selling a nuclear weapon or bomb-making material?
Javier E

For Islamists, Dire Lessons on Politics and Power - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • From Benghazi to Abu Dhabi, Islamists are drawing lessons from Mr. Morsi’s ouster that could shape political Islam for a generation. For some, it demonstrated the futility of democracy in a world dominated by Western powers and their client states. But others, acknowledging that the coup accompanied a broad popular backlash, also faulted the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood for reaching too fast for so many levers of power.
  • The Brotherhood’s fall is the greatest in an array of setbacks that have halted the once seemingly unstoppable march of political Islam. As they have moved from opposition to establishment after the Arab spring revolts, Islamist parties in Turkey, Tunisia and now Egypt have all been caught up in crises over the secular practicalities of governing like power sharing, urban planning, public security or even keeping the lights on.
Javier E

Lessons of the Great Recession: How the Safety Net Performed - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • it’s none too soon to begin asking the question: what have we learned about economic policy in this crash that should inform our thinking for the next downturn? 
  • Let’s start with the safety net since it’s a fixture of advanced economies and serves the critical function of catching (or not) the most economically vulnerable when the market fails
  • For many of today’s conservatives, the increased use of a safety-net program is proof that there’s something wrong with the user, not the underlying economy.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • But while people do abuse safety nets — and not just poor people (think bank bailouts and special tax treatment of multinational corporations) — I want to see receipt of unemployment insurance, the rolls of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), and so on go up in recessions.  In fact, their failure to do so would be a sign that something’s very wrong, like an air bag that failed to deploy in a crash.
  • There are two reasons that T.A.N.F. was so unresponsive.  First, welfare reform in the mid-1990s significantly increased its work requirements
  • Second, T.A.N.F. was “block granted,” meaning states receive a fixed amount that is largely insensitive to recessions
  • it is a fixture of conservative policy on poverty to apply this same block grant strategy to food stamps and Medicaid.  The numbers and the chart above show this to be a recipe for inelastic response to recession, or, more plainly, a great way to cut some big holes in the safety net.
  • The official rate for children goes up over the recession, from 18 percent to 22 percent, but once you include the full force of safety-net (and Recovery Act) measures that kicked in, it holds steady at about 15 percent.
  • this figure provides strong evidence of the effectiveness of the American safety net in the worst recession since the Depression.
  • because the recession is receding, shouldn’t the SNAP rolls be coming down as well?
  • SNAP rolls remain elevated because their function remains critical in what’s still a tough job market for low-income households. 
  • the fact is that markets fail, and when they do, income and food supports must rise to protect the most economically vulnerable families.
  • let’s get this straight: the poor and their advocates were not the ones who tanked the economy.  Nor should they be on the defensive when the safety net expands to offset some of the damage.  The right question at such times is thus not why the SNAP rolls are so high.  It’s whether SNAP, unemployment insurance, T.A.N.F. et al are expanding adequately to meet the needs of the poor.
bodycot

Four essential lessons General James Mattis taught me about leadership | Fox News - 0 views

    • bodycot
       
      Lessons from Gen. James Mattis.
Javier E

A Lesson From Cuba on Race - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Those issues relate to what another writer here, George Yancy, in writing about the Trayvon Martin case, referred to as a “white gaze” that renders all black bodies dangerous and deviant. Unless we dismantle this gaze and its centuries-strong cultural pillars, it will be difficult to go past the outrage on race.
  •  our unjust economic system. Under this system, people compete for basic goods and services in what seems to be a fair and non-discriminating market. But since they enter this market from vastly different social circumstances, competition is anything but fair. Those who already possess goods have a much better chance of renewing their access to them, whereas those who don’t have little chance of ever getting them.
  • an examination of the recent history of Cuba does in fact provide valuable lessons about the complex links between economic justice, access to basic goods and services, racial inequality, and what Gutting refers to as “continuing problems about race.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • If by economic justice we mean egalitarian access to basic goods and services such as food, health, housing, employment and education, then Cuba came closer than any other country in our hemisphere to fulfilling this ideal.
  • the economic and social programs promoted by the Cuban government produced dramatic results. By the early 1980s, when reliable data to measure the impact of such programs became available, inequality according to race had declined noticeably in a number of key indicators. The life expectancy of nonwhite Cubans was only one year lower than that of whites; life expectancy was basically identical for all racial groups
  • the Cuban race gap in life expectancy was significantly lower than those found in more affluent multiracial societies such as Brazil (about 6.7 years) and the United States (about 6.3 years) during the same period.
  • Racial differences in education and employment had also diminished or, in some cases, even  disappeared. The proportion of high school graduates was actually higher among blacks than among whites in Cuba, whereas the opposite was true in both Brazil and the United States.
  • In other words, despite Cuba’s success in reducing racial inequality, young black males continued to be seen as potential criminals. Perceptions of people of African descent as racially differentiated and inferior continued to permeate Cuban society and institutions.
  • Despite the massive changes discussed here, blackness continued to be associated with negative social and cultural features. Black was still ugly. Black still meant deficit of culture and refinement, rates of schooling notwithstanding. Black was still associated with violence, rape, robbery, crime. Black continued to be black.  The justice system kept criminalizing black youths, sending a scandalous number of them to prison.
  • in the 1980s blacks represented the vast majority of the inmate population in Cuba.
  • Those found to be “dangerous” could be deprived of freedom even without committing acts defined as crimes by the law. In other words, this was a legal institution particularly vulnerable to the influence of preconceptions and stereotypes
  • whereas nonwhites represented 34 percent of the adult population as a whole, their proportion among the socially “dangerous” was a staggering 78 percent
  • particularly in comparison to other multiracial societies in the Americas, the Cuban occupational structure was significantly less unequal according to race. On top of that, salaries in the massive public sector (over 90 percent of employment at the time) were regulated by law, so income differences were also extremely low.
  • Those issues relate to what another writer here, George Yancy, in writing about the Trayvon Martin case, referred to as a “white gaze” that renders all black bodies dangerous and deviant. Unless we dismantle this gaze and its centuries-strong cultural pillars, it will be difficult to go past the outrage on race.
Javier E

The War to End All Wars? Hardly. But It Did Change Them Forever. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • For Germany, which had invested heavily in the machinery of war, it was an almost incomprehensible defeat, laying the groundwork for revolution, revanchism, fascism and genocide. Oddly enough, says Max Hastings, a war historian, Germany could have dominated Europe in 20 years economically if only it had not gone to war.
  • “The supreme irony of 1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,” Mr. Hastings said, a point he now emphasizes when speaking with Chinese generals.
  • Some question whether the lessons of 1914 or of 1939 are more valid today. Do we heed only the lessons of 1939, when restraint was costly, and miss the lessons of 1914, when restraint could have avoided the war? Continue reading the main story Recent Comments AR 3 hours ago So exactly 100 years ago Baghdad and Damascus were sleepy, almost forgotten provincial cities of the Ottoman Empire. Too bad they didn't... AHS 3 hours ago Thanks for this thoughtful and challenging article. We Americans, in particular, are often unaware of the context of our lives and politics... Kevin Cahill 3 hours ago World War I showed that politics doesn't always work well. Vietnam and W's invasion of Iraq showed that it often doesn't work well. See All Comments Write a comment
Javier E

Inequality And The Right - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Monday, March 7, 2011Monday, March 7, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by The Rise and Fall of John Ensign Chris Good Sarah Palin Feud Watch Tina Dupuy In Wisconsin, the Mood Turns Against Compromise Natasha Vargas-Cooper Business Presented by Credit Card Balances Resume Their Decline Daniel Indiviglio 5 Ways the Value of College Is Growing Derek Thompson America's 401(k)'s Are a Mess, Are Its Pensions? Megan McArdle Culture Presented By 'Spy' Magazine's Digital Afterlife Bill Wyman http://as
  • To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.
  • it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.
fischerry

American Involvement in World War I: How the War Changed After America's Entry - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com - 0 views

  • As much as the U.S. wanted to stay neutral during World War I, it proved impossible. This meant the U.S. had to raise the forces and money to wage war. Find out how Americans played their part in WWI in this lesson.
  • April 6th, 1917
  • Britain, propaganda, the sinking of ships by German U-boats, and a German attempt in the Zimmermann Note to get Mexico to declare war on the U.S. pushed the U.S. to getting involved.
malonema1

3 Lessons The White House Could Learn After The Downfall Of Another Trump Nominee : NPR - 0 views

  • After the demise of yet another Trump administration nomination, it's worth taking a look at lessons learned. So far, the president has tried to blame Democrats as "obstructionists" for White House physician Ronny Jackson's downfall and described Jackson on Friday as an "American hero."
  • Trump has always managed by instinct and gut — not by orderly process. And for him, the chaos that ensues is just part of his brand. But it doesn't always result in a successful Cabinet confirmation or policies that can withstand judicial scrutiny. Turning to Rear Adm. Jackson to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs surprised many on the White House staff, just like Trump's decision to rush out the travel ban in his first week in office or to impulsively announce steel tariffs on U.S. allies.
  • Jackson and the president insist the allegations are false, but, in the end, neither was willing to fight them. After all, as Trump admitted, Jackson hadn't even asked for the job.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "All I can tell you is we didn't initiate this discussion," Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, told NPR's Ari Shapiro on Tuesday before Jackson withdrew his nomination. "This discussion came when we were notified by folks who work with Adm. Jackson, folks in the military."
  • Shulkin had clashed with other administration officials and says he was pushed out by people who wanted to privatize VA health care and allow big corporations to profit from treating veterans. Shulkin's critics say ethics problems did him in.
  • As if he were teasing the next episode of a reality TV show, though, he wouldn't give a name, saying only that it will be "somebody with political capabilities."
Javier E

The Curse of Econ 101 - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • Poverty in the midst of plenty exists because many working people simply don’t make very much money. This is possible because the minimum wage that businesses must pay is low: only $7.25 per hour in the United States in 2016 (although it is higher in some states and cities). At that rate, a person working full-time for a whole year, with no vacations or holidays, earns about $15,000—which is below the poverty line for a family of two, let alone a family of four.
  • A minimum-wage employee is poor enough to qualify for food stamps and, in most states, Medicaid. Adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum is roughly the same as in the 1960s and 1970s, despite significant increases in average living standards over that period.
  • At first glance, it seems that raising the minimum wage would be a good way to combat poverty.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • The United States currently has the lowest minimum wage, as a proportion of its average wage, of any advanced economy,
  • On the other hand, two recent meta-studies (which pool together the results of multiple analyses) have found that increasing the minimum wage does not have a significant impact on employment.
  • The minimum wage has been a hobgoblin of economism since its origins
  • Think tanks including Cato, Heritage, and the Manhattan Institute have reliably attacked the minimum wage for decades, all the while emphasizing the key lesson from Economics 101: Higher wages cause employers to cut jobs.
  • In today’s environment of increasing economic inequality, the minimum wage is a centerpiece of political debate
  • The real impact of the minimum wage, however, is much less clear than these talking points might indicate.
  • In 1994, David Card and Alan Krueger evaluated an increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage by comparing fast-food restaurants on both sides of the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. They concluded, “Contrary to the central prediction of the textbook model ... we find no evidence that the rise in New Jersey’s minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state.”
  • Card and Krueger’s findings have been vigorously contested across dozens of empirical studies. Today, people on both sides of the debate can cite papers supporting their position, and reviews of the academic research disagree on what conclusions to draw.
  • economists who have long argued against the minimum wage, reviewed more than one hundred empirical papers in 2006. Although the studies had a wide range of results, they concluded that the “preponderance of the evidence” indicated that a higher minimum wage does increase unemployment.
  • The argument against increasing the minimum wage often relies on what I call “economism”—the misleading application of basic lessons from Economics 101 to real-world problems, creating the illusion of consensus and reducing a complex topic to a simple, open-and-shut case.
  • The profession as a whole is divided on the topic: When the University of Chicago Booth School of Business asked a panel of prominent economists in 2013 whether increasing the minimum wage to $9 would “make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment,” the responses were split down the middle.
  • The idea that a higher minimum wage might not increase unemployment runs directly counter to the lessons of Economics 101
  • there are several reasons why the real world does not behave so predictably.
  • In short, whether the minimum wage should be increased (or eliminated) is a complicated question. The economic research is difficult to parse, and arguments often turn on sophisticated econometric details. Any change in the minimum wage would have different effects on different groups of peop
  • At the other extreme, very large employers may have enough market power that the usual supply-and-demand model doesn’t apply to them. They can reduce the wage level by hiring fewer workers
  • In the above examples, a higher minimum wage will raise labor costs. But many companies can recoup cost increases in the form of higher prices; because most of their customers are not poor, the net effect is to transfer money from higher-income to lower-income families.
  • In addition, companies that pay more often benefit from higher employee productivity, offsetting the growth in labor costs.
  • why higher wages boost productivity: They motivate people to work harder, they attract higher-skilled workers, and they reduce employee turnover, lowering hiring and training costs, among other things
  • If fewer people quit their jobs, that also reduces the number of people who are out of work at any one time because they’re looking for something better. A higher minimum wage motivates more people to enter the labor force, raising both employment and output
  • Finally, higher pay increases workers’ buying power. Because poor people spend a relatively large proportion of their income, a higher minimum wage can boost overall economic activity and stimulate economic growth
  • Even if a higher minimum wage does cause some people to lose their jobs, that cost has to be balanced against the benefit of greater earnings for other low-income workers.
  • Although the standard model predicts that employers will replace workers with machines if wages increase, additional labor-saving technologies are not available to every company at a reasonable cost
  • Nevertheless, when the topic reaches the national stage, it is economism’s facile punch line that gets delivered, along with its all-purpose dismissal: people who want a higher minimum wage just don’t understand economics (although, by that standard, several Nobel Prize winners don’t understand economics
  • This conviction that the minimum wage hurts the poor is an example of economism in action
  • one particular result of one particular model is presented as an unassailable economic theorem.
  • A recent study by researchers at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, however, found that higher minimum wages have not affected either the number of restaurants or the number of people that they employ, contrary to the industry’s dire predictions, while they have modestly increased workers’ pay.
  • The fact that this is the debate already demonstrates the historical influence of economism
  • Low- and middle-income workers’ reduced bargaining power is a major reason why their wages have not kept pace with the overall growth of the economy. According to an analysis by the sociologists Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, one-fifth to one-third of the increase in inequality between 1973 and 2007 results from the decline of unions.
  • With unions only a distant memory for many people, federal minimum-wage legislation has become the best hope for propping up wages for low-income workers. And again, the worldview of economism comes to the aid of employers by abstracting away from the reality of low-wage work to a pristine world ruled by the “law” of supply and demand.
Javier E

Deadly 1918 flu pandemic's lessons ignored in Trump's coronavirus response, historian says - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • as fears about the coronavirus spread, at least one historian is worried the Trump administration is failing to heed the lesson of one of the world’s worst pandemics: Don’t hide the truth.
  • “They [the Trump administration] are clearly trying to put the best possible gloss on things, and are trying to control information,” said John M. Barry, author of “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History,”
  • News about the war was carefully controlled by the Committee on Public Information, an independent federal agency whose architect, publicist Arthur Bullard, once said, “The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false.”
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • when the Spanish flu spread across the United States in the fall of 1918, both the government and the media continued the same rosy strategy “to keep morale up.”
  • President Woodrow Wilson released no public statements. Surgeon General Rupert Blue said, “There is no cause for alarm if proper precautions are observed.” Another top health official, Barry said, dismissed it as “ordinary influenza by another name.”
  • But it wasn’t. The Spanish flu had a mortality rate of 2 percent — much higher than seasonal influenza strains, and similar to some early estimates about the coronavirus.
  • For the most part, the media followed the government’s lead and self-censored dire news. That made everything worse, Barry said.
  • For example, in Philadelphia, local officials were planning the largest parade in the city’s history. Just before the scheduled event, about 300 returning soldiers started spreading the virus in the city.
  • “And basically every doctor, they were telling reporters the parade shouldn’t happen. The reporters were writing the stories; editors were killing them,” he said. “The Philadelphia papers wouldn’t print anything about it.”
  • The parade was held and, 48 hours later, Spanish flu slammed the city. Even once schools were closed and public gatherings were banned, city officials claimed it wasn’t a public health measure and there was no cause for alarm,
  • Philadelphia became one of the hardest hit areas of the country. The dead lay in their beds and on the streets for days; eventually, they were buried in mass graves. More than 12,500 residents died
  • The Jefferson County Union in Wisconsin warned about the seriousness of the flu on Sept. 27, 1918. Within days, an Army general began prosecution against the paper under a wartime sedition act, claiming it had “depressed morale.
  • As the pandemic raged through October of that year, Americans could see with their own eyes that the “absurd reassurances” coming from local and national officials weren’t true. This crisis of credibility led to wild rumors about bogus cures and unnecessary precautions
  • The Spanish flu ultimately killed about 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 people in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even President Wilson caught it, in the middle of negotiations to end the Great War.
  • “I think the No. 1 lesson that came out of the experience is that if you want to prevent panic, you tell the truth,”
  • Now, with coronavirus, Barry said he’s “a little bit worried” about the plan being followed. He doesn’t think the Trump administration is “outright lying, but they’re definitely giving you interpretations that seem to be the best-case scenarios.”
  • He’s particularly concerned about President Trump’s decision to have Vice President Pence oversee the response, instead of an expert such as Anthony Fauci, the doctor who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.
  • Given the credibility crisis that happened with the 1918 pandemic, Barry said that was “the exact wrong thing to do.”
Javier E

How U.S. can defeat coronavirus: Heed Asia?s lessons from epidemics past - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • in wealthy places on China's periphery — Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea — a rapid response swung into action.One reason was that they had learned from the past.
  • “We were all burned very badly with SARS, but actually it turned out to be a blessing for us.”
  • Political will, dedicated resources, sophisticated tracking and a responsible population have kept coronavirus infections and deaths in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore relatively low. South Korea, with more deaths, has led the way in widespread testing.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • In Taiwan, officials boarded planes arriving from Wuhan and assessed passengers for symptoms before allowing anyone to disembark. Within days, Singapore, South Korea and other Asian states had implemented similar steps.
  • A year after SARS, Taiwan established a National Health Command Center that brought together all levels and branches of government, preparing for the possibility of another disease outbreak. Its interventions over the past two months have been decisive in keeping Taiwan ahead of the curve
  • They didn’t hesitate, they didn’t want to die,” Wang said. “The mortality rate was so high [during SARS] and they didn’t know how bad this one was going to be. Nobody thought it was like the flu.”
  • As early as Jan. 5, Taiwan was tracing people who had been in Wuhan in the previous 14 days. Those with symptoms of respiratory infections were quarantined.
  • In subsequent weeks, authorities used data and technology to identify and track cases, communicated effectively to reassure the public, offered relief to businesses and allocated medical resources where they were needed most — rationing face masks and dramatically increasing their production.
  • On Jan. 27, Taiwan combined the databases of its National Health Insurance Administration and National Immigration Agency, allowing it to track everyone who had been in Wuhan in the recent past and alert doctors to patients’ travel histories
  • Now, Taiwan is hoping to keep its infection numbers down and has asked residents not to travel abroad after its biggest single-day jump of cases — 23 — on Wednesday. It is also barring most noncitizens from entering.
  • South Korea, meanwhile, has become the poster child for testing. Its success is rooted in a previous failure: The limited availability of test kits was seen as having aggravated the 2015 MERS outbreak, when the country suffered the second-highest caseload after Saudi Arabia.
  • Whereas the United States and Japan keep testing tightly controlled by a central authority, South Korea opened the process to the private sector, introducing a path to grant “emergency usage approval” to tests for pathogens of pandemic potential.
  • More than 260,000 people in South Korea have been tested for the virus, the highest per capita anywhere, with testing and treatment fees covered by the government and drive-through centers capturing global attention
  • Singapore, too, benefited from its own capabilities to test, as did Hong Kong and Japan. All developed their own diagnostic tests when the covid-19 genome sequence was published.
  • Outside mainland China, the territory had been the biggest casualty of the Communist Party’s coverup of the SARS outbreak, with some 300 deaths and little clarity on what was unfolding until it was too late.
  • This time, though, and without needing to be told much, Hong Kong residents took matters into their own hands. The city’s financial district was reduced to a ghost town in early February as companies closed offices. Bakeries known for hour-long weekend lines were abandoned.
  • Parties, weddings and family gatherings were canceled — without any government order. Almost everyone rushed to ­procure masks; a recent study ­estimated that 74 percent to 98 percent of residents wore them when leaving their homes. Voluntary social distancing was hailed as a key reason for the lower rate of infections.
  • From electronic wristbands to smartphone trackers, Asian jurisdictions have pulled out all the stops to ensure that suspected patients comply with quarantine and isolation orders, monitoring that is backed by laws that were tightened post-SARS.
  • Singapore used its FBI equivalent, the Criminal Investigation Department, to effectively interrogate every confirmed case with stunning granularity — even using patients’ digital wallets to trace their footsteps. Those caught lying face fines and jail time.
  • In South Korea, information on the movements of infected people before they were tested is collected and relayed over smartphones, creating a real-time ma
  • Taiwan tracks infected people’s whereabouts via smartphones
  • In Hong Kong, everyone subject to a compulsory quarantine must activate real-time location-sharing on their phone or wear an electronic wristband.
  • These measures have been backed by local populations that lived through previous epidemics and have largely shed concerns about privacy and tracking.
  • Americans should not focus “only on the kind of high-profile displays of state power that have made headlines from China” but also look at countries such as South Korea that are “balancing Democratic openness with rapid, concerted public-health action.”
  • Experts agree, though, that Western governments must be prepared to limit their citizens’ movements, mandate isolation for positive cases and track contacts regardless of privacy concerns.
Javier E

Opinion | The Deborah Birx dilemma is a lesson for the ages - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Birx doesn’t deserve our pardon, but it’s worth trying to understand the essential choice she made. In fact, “Birx’s Dilemma” ought to be taught in public policy schools until the end of time.
  • Birx isn’t one of the political hacks who did Trump’s bidding until it was time to save her reputation by making an empty show of principle.
  • No, Birx is a retired Army colonel and respected doctor who made a tangible difference in the global fight against AIDS. As Trump’s White House coordinator for the pandemic response, she worked tirelessly to get the coronavirus under control — no one disputes that.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • She was put in an impossible predicament, something Birx has been vocal about since she left the White House, most recently in a much-hyped CNN interview with Sanjay Gupta that aired this past weekend.
  • unlike Fauci, who stumbled more than once but managed to stay truthful enough to get himself ostracized by Team Trump, Birx practiced some impressive moral yoga in her defense of the president’s response.
  • Birx operated on the same premise that many others in senior roles, including career soldiers such as former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly and onetime national security adviser H.R. McMaster, accepted as well.
  • She apparently woke up every morning believing it was nobler to try to manage an ignorant, mercurial president than it was to speak out publicly and risk losing all influence.
  • She no doubt told herself she had an obligation, as a policy expert, to do whatever she could to protect Americans from the administration’s abject incompetence. And if that meant she had to echo untruths and offer up a bunch of silly praise, so be it.
  • This was Birx’s dilemma: to work within the system and maybe mitigate the tragedy, or to say what she knew and resign herself to powerlessness.
  • What we do know is that, by tempering her remarks, Birx enabled and amplified Trump’s lies — that the virus was a media creation, that reopening the economy wasn’t dangerous, that the government had things under control.
  • the larger lesson here — as though we should have to learn it again — is that appeasement never works.
  • It doesn’t work for nations facing down aggressors. It doesn’t work for a political party that’s been taken over by a nativist bully. And it doesn’t work when you’re serving a president who demands unyielding loyalty and a willful disregard for the truth.
carolinehayter

Teachers Say Laws Banning Critical Race Theory Are Putting A Chill On Their Lessons : NPR - 0 views

  • As Republican lawmakers across the country advance state bills that would limit how public school teachers can discuss race in their classrooms, educators say the efforts are already having a chilling effect on their lessons.
  • In recent weeks, Republican legislatures in roughly half a dozen states have either adopted or advanced bills purporting to take aim at the teaching of critical race theory, an academic approach that examines how race and racism function in law and society.
  • Conservatives have made the teaching of critical race theory a rallying cry in the culture wars, calling it divisive and unpatriotic for forcing students to consider the influence of racism in situations where they might not see it otherwise.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • educators say the newly adopted and proposed laws are already forcing teachers to second-guess whether they can lead students in conversations about race and structural racism that many feel are critical at a time the nation is navigating an important reckoning on those issues.
  • In Texas, a bill that has passed both chambers of the Republican-controlled Legislature would impose restrictions similar to Oklahoma's, including banning public universities from requiring students to take diversity training. It would also require teachers who discuss ugly episodes in history, or controversial current events, to explore "contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective."
  • "What if they say the wrong thing?" Lewis said. "What if somebody in their class during the critical thinking brings up the word oppression or systemic racism? Are they in danger? Is their job in danger?"
  • "We need to do it, because our students desire it," she said. "But how do we do that without opening Oklahoma City public schools up to a lawsuit?"
  • Lewis acknowledged that in a conservative state such as Oklahoma, there are many parents – especially white ones – who support the idea of shielding their children from uncomfortable conversations about race. But she said that's why they're so important.
  • Texas teachers already feel that pressure, including one of her colleagues who during the pandemic gave students a virtual lesson on race and prejudice in U.S. society.
  • "Then he wrote an email to the administration complaining that the teacher was accusing his child of being a racist when they were having a conversation about implicit bias and what implicit bias is and how it affects us," Dougherty said.
  • She said she knows teachers who are already self-censoring. They're "afraid to speak out on issues because they feel there are going to be repercussions from their districts," she said.
  • "Does the state of Texas want me to stand up and spend class time saying, well, let's look at all sides of this topic?" Kleiman said. "I don't think that's what the state of Texas wants. But that's what this bill does." Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email
Javier E

Opinion | The Pentagon Papers' Lessons Went Unlearned - The New York Times - 0 views

  • On the 50th anniversary of their release, the Pentagon Papers invite us to reflect on how little they ended up mattering.
  • The canonical lesson of the Vietnam War was to avoid another Vietnam. But a half-century after the Pentagon Papers exposed the misguided thinking that got us into that war, delusions and dishonesty regarding the role of military power persist.
  • In present-day national security circles, the conviction that armed force holds the key to untangling history’s complexities remains an article of faith for many.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Most telling of all is the war in Afghanistan, now approaching its final stages. Documents pried loose in a three-year legal battle showed how this longest war on foreign soil in U.S. history reprises the major themes of the Pentagon Papers.
  • “Senior U.S. officials,” The Washington Post reported, “failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”
zoegainer

The Most Important Thing Biden Can Learn From the Trump Economy - The New York Times - 0 views

  • During Mr. Trump’s time in office, it has become clear that the United States economy can surpass what technocrats once thought were its limits: Specifically, the jobless rate can fall lower and government budget deficits can run higher than was once widely believed without setting off an inflationary spiral.
  • Before the pandemic took hold, the jobless rate was below 4 percent, inflation was low, and wages were rising at a steady clip, especially for low and middle earners. The inflation-adjusted income of the median American household rose 9 percent from 2016 to 2019.
  • The higher interest rates from unfunded tax cuts that had been forecast did not materialize; the C.B.O. in spring 2018 had expected the 10-year Treasury bond yield to average 3.5 percent in 2019. In fact, it averaged a mere 2.1 percent, making federal borrowing more manageable.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • A widespread view among economic policy elites, after the runaway inflation in the 1970s and early 1980s, was that elevated unemployment was a necessary cost of keeping prices stable. Also, that the government can’t spend much more money than it takes in without crowding out private investment — leaving the economy weaker over time — and that policymakers should act pre-emptively to ward off these risks.
  • It may not have been the best economy ever, as he has repeatedly claimed, but it was easily the strongest since the late 1990s, and before that you have to go back to the late 1960s to find similar conditions.
  • And the Fed cut interest rates starting in 2019 despite a very low jobless rate, implicitly accepting the premise that it had moved too aggressively with rate increases to prevent inflation that never arrived.
  • Yet from spring of 2018 to the onset of the pandemic, the United States experienced a jobless rate of 4 percent or lower, with no obvious sign of inflation and many signs that less advantaged workers were able to find work.
  • A central question for Mr. Biden will be: To what degree is the Trump-era economic success a result of policies that liberals disagree with, to what degree is it a result of policies that Mr. Biden might embrace, and to what degree is it just luck?
  • Mr. Mulligan and other allies of the president emphasize the role of deregulating major industries and lowering taxes on business investment — microeconomic strategies — as crucial to the economy’s success.
  • The Biden administration and Democratic Congress will view more aggressive regulation as a core goal, aimed at preventing corporate misbehavior, protecting the environment, and more. Indeed, left-leaning economists would argue that the very policies Mr. Mulligan credits with the boom are the least durable parts of the Trump-era expansion.
  • If you believe Mr. Mulligan and other Trump allies, the macroeconomic lessons of the Trump years — those having to do with things like deficits, inflation and interest rates — won’t be enough for the Biden administration to recreate the 2019 economy. In this view, the microeconomic details of how the president has governed will be crucial, and the policies that Mr. Biden has advocated — in areas as varied as tighter restrictions on carbon emissions and more aggressive regulation of banks — will prove counterproductive to the cause.
  • If inflation were to remain persistently low, she said, “a more radical rethinking of the economy’s productive potential would surely be in order.”
  • She said that a high-pressure economy — one where unemployment is low and employers have to compete for workers — improves upward mobility
  • Mr. Powell, who will lead the Fed for roughly the first year of Mr. Biden’s term and then will be either reappointed or replaced in February 2022, has also become a vocal enthusiast for avoiding these mistakes of the past.In the strong pre-pandemic labor market, he said in an August speech on the Fed’s new policy framework, “many who had been left behind for too long were finding jobs, benefiting their families and communities, and increasing the productive capacity of our economy.”
  • President-elect Biden has embraced these lessons in shaping his agenda, as he made clear in a news conference Friday where he confirmed that his plans will add up to trillions of dollars when one includes both pandemic response money and longer-term plans.“With interest rates as low as they are,” Mr. Biden said, “every major economist thinks we should be investing in deficit spending to generate economic growth.”
Javier E

Reach Out and Elect Someone-Postman.pdf - 0 views

  • Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In I 966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. "Politics," he said, "is just like show business."
  • I~ politic~ were like a sporting event, there would be several virtues to attach to its name: clarity, honesty, excellence.
  • The television commercial has been the chief instrument in(. • creating the modem methods of presenting political ideas.
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial.
  • An \ American who has reached the age of forty will have seen well h ver one million television commercials in his or her lifeti~e, nd has close to another million to go before the first Social ecurity check arrives.
  • the practice of capitalism has its contradictions. I Cartels and monopolies, for example, undermine the theo,ry
  • evision commercials make hash of it. To take the simplest example: To be rationally considered, any claim-commercial ! or otherwise-~ust be made in language. More precisely, it i' must take the fomi of a proposition, for that is· the universe of II discourse from which such words as "true" apd "false" come. If that universe of discourse is discarded, then 'the application of/ empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the othtr instrum¢nts \ of reason are impotent.
  • Today, on television commercials, propositions are as. scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply_not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama-a mythology, if you will-of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamb_urgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune.
  • t has accomplished this in two ways. The first_ is by requiring its form'AQ) to be used in political ca~p~igns.
  • the commercial insists ~n . , an unprecedented brevity of expression.
  • One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
  • What the advertiser needs to know is not what l is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product .. research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
  • pear so to anyone hearing or reading it. But the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes tinie and invites argument. It is a very bad commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about the validity of th~ point_ being made.
  • More9ver, commercials have the advantage of vivid visual symbols through which we may easily learn the lessons being taught. Among those lessons are that shor:t and simple messages are preferable to long and complex ones; that drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than being confronted with 1 questions about ·problems.
  • ninous form of pubhc commumcauon m our society, it was I inevitable that Americans would ac~ommo~~te themselves ,~o tl:le philosophy of television commercials. By accommodate, I mean that we accept them as a normal and plausible form of discourse. By "philosophy," I mean that the television commerl cial has embedded in it certain assumptions about the nature of communication that run counter to those of other media, espe( dally the printed word.
  • Such beli~fs would naturally have implications for our orientation to political discourse; that is to say, we may begin to accept as normal certain assumptions about the political domain that either derive from or are amplified by the tekvision commercial.
  • For example, a person who has seen one million television commercials might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures-or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical expression. Or that argument is in bad taste, and leads only to an intolerable uncertainty.
  • But what virtues attach to politics if Ronald Reagan is right? show business is not entirely ·without an idea of excellence, but its main business is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is artifice. If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.
  • Such a: person may also come to believe that it is not necessary to draw any line between politics and other forms of social life. Just as a television commercial will use an athlete, an act<;>r, a musician, a novelist, a scientist or a countess to s~eak for the virtues (?f a product in no way within their domain of expertise, television also frees politicians from the limited field of their own expertise.
  • The commercial asks us to believe that all problems am solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry.
  • his is, of course, a preposterous theory about the roots of discontent, and would ap-
  • Although it may go ,too far to say that the politician-ascelebrity has, by itself, made political partie~ irrelevant, there is certainly a conspicuous correlation between the rise of the former and the decline of the latter.
  • The point is that television does not reveal whol the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by "better"
  • such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in ) executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, ._and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with "image."
  • This is the lesson of all great television commercials: TheD provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.
  • But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare 41d deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience.
  • In the shift from party politics to television ·politics, the same goal is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Sena~or, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent.
  • The historian Carl Schorske has, in my opinion, circled closer to the truth by noting that the modem mind has grown indifferent to history because history has become useless to it; in other words, it is not obstinacy or ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of history.
  • It follows from this that hjggr¥_can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.
  • "The past is a world," Thomas Carlyle said, "and not a void of [ grey haze." But he wrote this at a time when the book was the principal medium of serious public discourse.
  • Terence Moran, I be~ lieve, lands on the target in saying that with media whose structure is biased toward furnishing images and fragments, we are deprived of access to an historical perspective. In the absence of continuity and context, he says, "bits of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole."·
  • A book is all history. Everything about it takes one back in time-from the way it is produced to its linear mode of exposition to the fact that the past tense is its most comfortable form of address. As no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past. In a conversation of books, history, as Carlyle understood it, is not only a world but a living world. It is
  • We do opt refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, .it requires a contextual basis-a theory, a vision, a metaphorsomething within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.
  • But televisio. n is a ~peed-of-light me~um, a present-centered \ medium, lts grammar, so to say, penruts no access to the past. Everything presented in moving pictures is experienced as happening "now," which is why we must be told in language that a ideotape we are seeing was made months before.
  • The politics of image and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any. A mirror records only what you are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday. With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.
  • "History," Henry Ford said, "is_bunk." Henry Ford was a typographic optimist. "History," the Electric Plug replies, "doesn't exist."
  • profound cultural proolem until the maturing of the Age of ·l Print. Whatever dangers th~re may be in a word that is written, such a word is a hundred times more dangerous when stamped by a press.
  • We ought also to look to Huxley, not Orwell, to understand the threat that television and other forms of imagery pose to the foundation of liberal democracy-namely, to freedom of information.
  • To paraphrase J David Riesman only slightly, in a world of printing, information is the gunpowder of the mind; hence come the censors in their austere robes to dampen the explosion.
  • Thus, Orwell envisioned that ( 1) government c:ontrol over (2) printed matter posed a serious threat for Western: democracies. He was wrong on both counts. (He was, of course, right on both counts insofar as Russia, China and other pre-electronic cultures are concerned.)
  • The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might_ be superseded by another sort of problen:i altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.
  • I merely note the fact with apprehension, as did George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, when he wrote:
  • in fact, information and ideas did not become a
  • Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch .... 6
  • The fight against censorship is a nineteenth-century issue, which was largely won in the twentieth.
  • What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our a.ccess to information but in fact. widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian., It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form ~ that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.
  • Tyrants of all varieties' have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusement.s as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses·would ignore that which does not amuse.
  • iri the Age of Television, our information environment is completely different from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut;
  • That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship. Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment-and cares.
  • hat, in fact, we have ~o way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.
  • How delighted would be all the kings, czars and fuhrers of the past (and commissars of. the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when ~II political discourse takes the form of a jest.
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 546 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page