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Javier E

Fun is dead. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...fun-is-dead

fun joy pleasure social media work US

shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Sometime in recent history, possibly around 2004, Americans forgot to have fun, true fun, as though they’d misplaced it like a sock.
  • Instead, fun evolved into work, sometimes more than true work, which is where we find ourselves now.
  • Fun is often emphatic, exhausting, scheduled, pigeonholed, hyped, forced and performative
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  • Things that were long big fun now overwhelm, exhaust and annoy. The holiday season is an extended exercise in excess and loud, often sleazy sweaters.
  • Which means it is nothing of the sort. This is the drag equivalent of fun and suggests that fun is done.
  • Adults assiduously record themselves appearing to have something masquerading as “fun,” a fusillade of Coachellic micro social aggressions unleashed on multiple social media platforms. Look at me having so much FUN!
  • “I feel like I should be having more fun than I’m actually having,” says Alyssa Alvarez, a social media marketing manager and DJ in Detroit, expressing a sentiment that many share. “There are expectations of what I want people to believe that my life is like rather than what my life is actually like.”
  • Weddings have morphed into multistage stress extravaganzas while doubling as express paths to insolvency: destination proposals for the whole family, destination bachelorette and bachelor blowouts, destination weddings in remote barns with limited lodging, something called a “buddymoon” (bring the gang!) and planners to help facilitate the same custom cocktailsness of it all.
  • What could be a greater cause for joy or more natural than having a baby? Apparently, not much these days. Impending parenthood is overthought and over-apped, incorporating more savings-draining events that didn’t exist a few decades ago: babymoons and lethal, fire-inducing, gender-reveal gatherings and baby showers so over-the-top as to shame weddings.
  • Retirements must be purposeful. Also, occasions for an acute identity crisis. You need to have a plan, a mission, a coach, a packed color-coded grid of daily activities in a culture where our jobs are our identities, our worth tied to employment.
  • Vacations are overscheduled with too many activities, FOMO on steroids, a paradox of choice-inducing decision fatigue, so much so that people return home exhausted and in need of another one.
  • “The world is so much less about human connection,” says Amanda Richards, 34, who works in casting in Los Angeles and is a graduate of Cudworth’s course. “We do more things virtually. People are more isolated. And there’s all this toxic positivity to convince people of how happy you are.”
  • For eons, early adulthood was considered an age of peak fun. Now, according to several studies, it’s a protracted state of anxiety and depression.
  • Because there is now a coach for everything, Alvarez hired the “party coach” Evan Cudworth, taking his $497 course this fall on how to pursue “intentional fun.” (It now costs $555.)
  • Instead of this being the most wonderful time of the year, we battle holiday fatigue, relentless beseeching for our money and, if Fox News is to be believed, a war on Christmas that is nearing its third decade.
  • Blame it on technological advances that tether us to work without cessation
  • Blame it on the pandemic, which exacerbated so much while delivering Zoomageddon.
  • Blame it on 2004, with the advent of Facebook, which led to Twitter (okay, X), Instagram, Threads, TikTok and who-knows-what lurking in the ether.
  • Blame it again on 2004 and the introduction of FOMO, our dread of missing out, broadcast through multiple social media spigots
  • “So many people are retreating into their phones, into anxiety,” says Cudworth, 37, from Chicago. “I’m helping people rediscover what fun means to them.”
  • His mandate is redefining fun: cutting back on bingeing screen time, eradicating envy scrolling, getting outside, moving, dancing. “With technology, we don’t allow ourselves to be present. You’re always thinking ‘something is better around the corner,’” Cudworth says, the now squandered in pursuit of the future.
  • Blame it on an American culture that values work, productivity, power, wealth, status and more work over leisure
  • ow do Americans spend their leisure hours when they might be having fun with others, making those vital in-person connections? Watching television, our favorite free time and “sports activity” (yes, that’s how it’s classified), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average of 2.8 hours daily.
  • “That’s way more television than you really need. We put play on the back burner,” says Pat Rumbaugh, 65, of Takoma Park, Md. She’s “The Play Lady,” who organizes unorganized play for adults
  • Catherine Price, the author of “The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again,” believes “we’re totally misdoing leisure” and “not leaving any room for spontaneity.”
  • To Price, True Fun is the confluence of connection (other people, nature), playfulness (lightheartedness, freedom) and flow (being fully engaged, present), which is not as challenging as it sounds. “You can have fun in any context. Playfulness is about an attitude,”
  • Back in the day, co-workers were friends. (Sometimes, more.) After hours, they gathered for drinks, played softball. Today, because of email, Slack and remote work, offices are half empty and far quieter than libraries.
  • “We go to work and there’s no sense of connection and camaraderie,” says Davis, who was long employed by his city’s department of parks and recreation. “People feel emotionally disconnected. Healthy conversations are the precursor of fun. We’ve lost the art of communication. Our spirit comes home with us. If you don’t communicate at work, what are you coming home with?”
Javier E

A Ruinous War and Peacemaking in Gaza | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...us-war-and-peacemaking-in-gaza

gaza israel

shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Even a temporary ceasefire displays the moral power of peacemakin
  • On both sides, the celebrations were tempered by an awareness of those still in captivity. Hamas freed children and their mothers but not their fathers, and elderly women but not their husbands. The two hundred and forty prisoners whom Israel released were, according to the Jerusalem-based human-rights group B’ Tselem, a fraction of the nearly five thousand Palestinians held on security grounds as of September
  • Ceasefires usually don’t end wars, because they don’t address the issues that underlie them.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • (A study of sixty-seven civil wars published in the Journal of Peace Studies in 2021 found no evidence that ceasefires and prisoner releases led to sustainable peace agreements.)
  • Because of Israel’s deep alliance with this country, its wars run on a timer: When will the U.S. conclude that its interests, and Israel’s, require that hostilities end? After the atrocities of October 7th, the Israel Defense Forces launched an unprecedented retaliation and, because of the predictable killing and immiseration of innocents which followed, effectively shortened the time that the Biden Administration and European allies were likely to offer unqualified support.
  • there is no way for the I.D.F. to fight what amounts to a war of attrition without killing many more noncombatants
  • In any event, Israel cannot “destroy” or “eliminate” Hamas anytime soon. With international diplomatic support, however, it might be able to disarm, suppress, and further delegitimatize the group
  • Doing so would require the committed help of those powerful Arab states, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, whose leaders fear and despise the Islamist ideology that Hamas espouses.
  • Durable Israeli security cannot be achieved without Palestinian sovereignty. The alternative to re-starting the difficult work toward a sustainable deal is violence with no end in sight. ♦
lilyrashkind

Faith leaders lead community in grieving after Uvalde shooting - 0 views

www.inquirer.com/...e-texas-shooting-20220529.html

US community

shared by lilyrashkind on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • On Tuesday, a gunman entered the elementary school and killed 21 people — 19 of them students — in Uvalde, Texas. Two weeks before in Buffalo, a gunman shot and killed 10 people — most of whom were Black — in a racist massacre.
  • “It’s very hard for people to even talk about their grief right now,” said Thomson. “When we don’t know what to do, we come together as a community.”
  • The Rev. Mark Tyler of Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church shared with his congregation on Sunday that people are “getting sick” of watching people continue to die in mass shootings while nothing is done to change the status quo. According to Tyler, healing is found when feelings are shared and heard.
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  • “A grieving process allows us to heal. When we deny that process, that’s when the numbness sets in. Then beyond that we start feeling symptoms of anxiety, and beyond that — depression,” said Whaley-Perkins. “So it’s really important for people who are vulnerable or have previous traumas that you don’t wait to see if it’s going to go away. Healing is extraordinarily important.”AdvertisementAccording to Whaley-Perkins, a community should be a group of people that provide safety, can be trusted, and where one can be vulnerable with their feelings. For many in Philadelphia, where they practice their faith is also where communities resides.
  • “Unless we change fundamentally how we educate our society, unfortunately people will still find a way to do these things,” said Shemtov. “We are all different — but we were all created by God with a purpose. Everybody has to start where they can start. If you’re not in the position to make national or local change, we can all change how we treat ou
  • As the country reckons with how to move forward, interfaith leaders in Philadelphia look to balance healing with collective action. To Chad Dion Lassiter, who is a national race relations expert and executive director of Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, taking care of oneself, of one’s community, and finding the motivation to take action are made possible by taking the healing process seriously.
lilyrashkind

How Educators Around the World Are Teaching the Russia-Ukraine War - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ng-the-russia-ukraine-war.html

educators world teaching war

shared by lilyrashkind on 31 May 22 - No Cached
  • Please note: This is a special Lesson of the Day that brings together many different sources and ideas. Unlike our usual format, this is written to teachers, not students.
  • Then, in an extensive Going Further section, we have rounded up many contributions from teachers in the United States across subjects and levels who describe ways they are helping their students understand this conflict and its roots and effects.We hope that no matter what you teach, there is something here you can use.
  • Do Volodymyr’s actions surprise you? Why do you think The Times might have included this specific detail of this family’s story? What do you think it says about the power and importance of education, and the role it plays in young people’s lives, even amidst an ongoing war?
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  • Now, students will participate in a jigsaw activity. Below are three articles about three different student populations that have been affected by the war in Ukraine. Assign each student, or have them choose, one of the articles to become an “expert” in. Make sure there are about an even number of students reading each article.
  • 5. What are some of the fears or challenges teachers themselves are facing because of the war?6. You’ve read one of three articles about what education is like for a specific group of students. What role is school serving for the group you read about? Is there anything more schools could be doing to support these young people? If so, what and why?
  • What role can schools serve, even during war? How important do you think education is in a time like this? Do you believe educators should teach about what is happening in Ukraine? How do you think they should handle this sensitive subject?
  • Many teachers answered our call in mid-March to tell us how they were addressing the war in their classrooms. Here are some responses that show the many ways, large and small, that educators have sought to help their students understand the conflict and its roots, the plight of the Ukrainian people, the role of the United States and more. They have been edited for length and clarity.
  • I was shocked at how hungrily they soaked up the information, especially once Russia officially invaded Ukraine. These 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds wanted to learn more about what was happening in their world in the “right way” — via vetted news sources, exactly as you mentioned. After each episode, we discussed positives that we heard, we shared “wonders” (the things that we want to find more information on), and we shared one word to summarize the new information.
  • That day, my students’ remarks on the Russian invasion of Ukraine fit into five categories: empathy for the people of Ukraine, fear of World War III, criticism of Putin, criticism of memes that treat the invasion as a joke, and geopolitical curiosity.
  • Students then created infographics on Canva to illustrate their learning. Synthesizing that learning into smaller, digestible data bites helped them to make sense of such large, challenging concepts. Here are four examples of their work.
  • When discussing the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, that consisted of orienting everyone to where this conflict is happening geographically and what cities and countries are involved. We spoke about the history of NATO, key leaders, the concept of trade and supply chains — basically defining the common vocabulary and giving everyone the same tools for discussion.
  • Teaching about Russia and Ukraine this spring encompassed history, vocabulary, maps, graphs, and photo analysis. We began with a brainstorm about what students had heard about what was happening with Ukraine and Russia. Then students moved on to define terms like Soviet Union, Cold War and NATO, and worked together to combine their definitions into one “best definition.” This vocabulary work set them up to read the Times article about what was happening in Ukraine as Russia invaded, annotating in the
  • As part of a larger project on the theme of “nostalgia,” students were asked to think of a family recipe that made them nostalgic. But we also talked about the food that brings us comfort no matter where we find ourselves. To help students connect to the Ukrainian people, we talked about the comforts of borscht with information from this article about a chef who is leading a drive to recognize the soup as a Ukrainian cultural heritage.
  • That’s how I realized that my students needed to talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As a result, I took the following steps the next day, with positive results.
  • Part of what has made the coverage of the war in Ukraine compelling is my students seeing visual inversions of their own lives. There’s a photo of a grandmother, but she’s holding an assault rifle. There are teenagers, not much older than they are, running drills. There’s a teacher, but instead of trying to manage a class, she’s barely managing to hold it together.
  • What do you notice about how the person is framed in the photograph?What is the posture? Where is their gaze?Imagine what they might be thinking as they gaze out of the frame.
  • This is an excellent piece to use when considering primary and secondary audiences, purpose, appeals, and overall effectiveness. It is also a story we can track to see if the speech moves anyone in Congress to change their position on the type of support to provide Ukraine.
  • Does the American government favor any countries over other countries? What is the policy that guides the American government when dealing with other countries?How does the American government handle disagreements with other countries?Which countries are American allies, or friends?Which are America’s traditional enemies? How is this determined? Does that history matter?
  • How does President Biden “create the enemy?” Why should America follow this course of action? What is he suggesting will happen if America does not? What does America stand to gain from this plan? Are potential losses discussed?Note patterns in rhetorical appeals, diction, values and themes. What assumptions does President Biden make about the American character or national identity? In what ways do American mythologies seem to bolster a “single story” of foreign policy?
  • Begins.” Students took notes on the use of ethos, pathos and logos in the construction of the podcast. They also responded to the importance of having free and independent journalists report on the war.
  • “We Lived Happily During the War,” “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Dancing.”
  • E.I.H.R. cultivates partnerships among educators globally to create materials and deliver training based on best practices in Holocaust and human rights education. Together we deliver content and strategies for teaching conflict history and prevention, and sustainable peace. They have been building resources for teachers about Ukraine since Feb. 24, including this webinar on Understanding the Crisis in Ukraine from March 19.
criscimagnael

Australia Wields a New DNA Tool to Crack Missing-Person Mysteries - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dna-phenotyping.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The technique can predict a person’s ancestry and physical traits without the need for a match with an existing sample in a database.
  • When a man washed up on the shores of Christmas Island in 1942, lifeless and hunched over in a shrapnel-riddled raft, no one knew who he was.
  • It wasn’t until the 1990s that the Royal Australian Navy began to suspect that he may have been a sailor from the HMAS Sydney II, an Australian warship whose 645-member crew disappeared at sea when it sank off the coast of Western Australia during World War II.
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  • In 2006, the man’s remains were exhumed, but DNA extracted from his teeth yielded no match with a list of people Navy officials thought might be his descendants. With few leads, the scientist who conducted the DNA test, Jeremy Austin, told the Navy about an emerging technique that could predict a person’s ancestry and physical traits from genetic material.
  • In Australia, forensic scientists are repurposing the technique to help link missing persons with unidentified remains in the hope of resolving long-running mysteries. In the case of the sailor, Dr. Austin sent the sample to researchers in Europe, who reported back that the man was of European ancestry and most likely had red hair and blue eyes.
  • The predictions from DNA phenotyping — whether a person had, say, brown hair and blue eyes — will be brought to life by a forensic artist, combining the phenotype information with renderings of bone structure to generate a three-dimensional digital facial reconstruction.
  • This forensic tool, which has been slowly advancing since the mid-2000s, is similar to genetic tests that estimate risks for certain diseases. About five years ago, scientists with the Australian Federal Police began developing their own version of the technology, which combines genomics, big data and machine learning. It became available for use last year.
  • That alone wasn’t enough to identify the sailor, but it narrowed the search. “In a ship full of 645 white guys, you wouldn’t expect to see more than two or three with this pigmentation,”
  • “It’s an investigative lead we’ve never had before,”
  • In the United States, police departments have for years been using private DNA phenotyping services, like one from the Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs, to try to generate facial images of suspects. The images are sometimes distributed to the public to assist in investigations.
  • Many scientists, however, are skeptical of this application of the technology. “You cannot do a full facial prediction right now,” said Susan Walsh, a professor of biology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis who developed some of the earliest phenotyping methods for eye and hair color. “The foundation of the genetics is absolutely not there.”
  • Facial image prediction has been condemned by human rights organizations, including the A.C.L.U., which suggest that it risks being skewed by existing social prejudices.
  • The same DNA was then linked to dozens of serious crimes across Western Europe, prompting a theory that the perpetrator was a serial offender from a traveling Roma community.It turned out that the recurring genetic material belonged to a female Polish factory worker who had accidentally contaminated the cotton swabs used to collect the samples.
  • “The families want any and all techniques applied to these cases if it’s going to help answer the question of what happened,” she said.
  • Such was the case with the mystery sailor. After his genotype was sequenced and his phenotype predicted, a team of scientists across several Australian institutions, including Dr. Ward’s program, used this information to track down a woman they believed to be a living relative of the soldier. They checked her DNA and had a match.
lilyrashkind

Live updates: Latest news on Russia and the war in Ukraine - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...ssia-ukraine-live-updates.html

ukraine russia

shared by lilyrashkind on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • U.S. President Joe Biden has pledged to send Ukraine more advanced rocket systems and munitions to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield. The White House had been hesitant to send the weapons, which have long been requested by Kyiv.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described Russian bombing in the front-line eastern city of Sievierodonetsk as “insanity” given the presence of a large-scale chemical plant.Residents of Sievierodonetsk have been warned not to leave bomb shelters due to the risk posed by toxic fumes.
  • “We believe that the U.S. is deliberately pouring oil on the fire. The U.S. is obviously holding the line that it will fight Russia to the last Ukrainian,” Peskov told reporters, according to Reuters.His comments echo those made by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov who had claimed President Joe Biden’s administration increased the risk of direct clashes between Moscow and Washington by supplying rockets to Ukraine.— Sam Meredith
  • Scholz said Germany had been “delivering continuously since the beginning of the war”, pointing to more than 15 million rounds of ammunition, 100,000 grenades and over 5,000 anti-tank mines sent to Ukraine since Russia invaded the country on Feb. 24.
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  • His comments come as Russian forces continue their offensive in the Donbas region. The Donbas refers to the two eastern Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk — a major strategic, political and economic target for the Kremlin.
  • Speaking at his general audience to thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square, he said the block should be lifted because many millions of people depend on wheat from Ukraine, particularly in the world’s poorest countries.
  • Speaking to the RIA Novosti news agency, Ryabkov said of U.S. foreign policy that “the remnants of a responsible, sound approach to the situation have simply been scrapped.”
  • OPEC and non-OPEC countries are scheduled to discuss the next phase of production policy on Thursday.
  • Speaking in an evening address to the nation, Zelenskyy said the cities of Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk, and Kurakhove are now at the epicenter of the confrontation.“Given the presence of large-scale chemical production in Sievierodonetsk, the Russian army’s strikes there, including blind air bombing, are insanity,” he said.“But on the 97th day of such a war, it is no longer surprising that for the Russian military, for Russian commanders, for Russian soldiers, any madness is absolutely acceptable.”
  • On average, more than 2 children are killed and more than 4 are injured every day in Ukraine due mostly to attacks using explosive weapons in populated areas, according to reports verified by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.Civilian infrastructure critical for children, including 256 health facilities and hundreds of schools, have also been damaged or destroyed in the war.
  • U.S. officials have been hesitant to send MLRS to Ukraine over concerns that Russia may view it as an escal
steinbergerav

Uvalde shooting: Kamala Harris calls for assault weapons ban - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-61621470

shared by steinbergerav on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • After he was shot dead, police found as many as 1,657 rounds of ammunition and 60 magazines in his possession.
  • The Buffalo, New York, shooter, also 18, had previously come into contact with authorities, but no red flags came up when he legally bought his own AR-15-style weapon."Why should anyone be able to buy a weapon that can kill other human beings without at least knowing, 'Hey, has that person committed a violent crime before? Are they a threat against themselves or others? That's just reasonable," Ms Harris said on Saturday.
  • Before travelling to Uvalde, Mr Biden told students in Delaware that it was still possible to "make America safer" but as he seeks cross-party support for tighter gun regulations, he's in direct conflict with leading Republicans who blame the problem on issues of school security and mental health, rather than guns.As such, meaningful bipartisan co-operation looks very unlikely. Such questions, however, may well be paused for a few hours in Uvalde while he
criscimagnael

U.S. Aims to Constrain China by Shaping Its Environment, Blinken Says - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-policy-biden.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it,”
  • “We can’t rely on Beijing to change its trajectory,” he said. “So we will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open and inclusive international system.”
  • On Feb. 4, almost three weeks before the invasion, President Vladimir V. Putin met with President Xi Jinping in Beijing as their two governments issued a 5,000-word statement announcing a “no limits” partnership that aims to oppose the international diplomatic and economic systems overseen by the United States and its allies. Since the war began, the Chinese government has given Russia diplomatic support by reiterating Mr. Putin’s criticisms of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories that undermine the United States and Ukraine.
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  • In private conversations, Chinese officials have expressed concern about the emphasis on regional alliances under Mr. Biden and their potential to hem in China.
  • Mr. Blinken’s speech revolved around the slogan for the Biden strategy: “Invest, Align and Compete.” The partnerships fall under the “align” part. “Invest” refers to pouring resources into the United States — administration officials point to the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law passed last year as an example. And “compete” refers to the rivalry with China, a framing the Trump administration also promoted.
  • “Beijing wants to put itself at the center of global innovation and manufacturing, increase other countries’ technological dependence, and then use that dependence to impose its foreign policy preferences,” Mr. Blinken said. “And Beijing is going to great lengths to win this contest — for example, taking advantage of the openness of our economies to spy, to hack, to steal technology and know-how to advance its military innovation and entrench its surveillance state.”
  • Mr. Blinken also noted the human rights abuses, repression of ethnic minorities and quashing of free speech and assembly by the Communist Party in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. In recent years, those issues have galvanized greater animus toward China among Democratic and Republican politicians and policymakers. “We’ll continue to raise these issues and call for change,” he said.
  • Mr. Blinken said it was China’s recent actions toward Taiwan — trying to sever the island’s diplomatic and international ties and sending fighter jets over the area — that are “deeply destabilizing.”
  • “Arguably no country on earth has benefited more from that than China,” he said. “But rather than using its power to reinforce and revitalize the laws, agreements, principles and institutions that enabled its success, so other countries can benefit from them too, Beijing is undermining it.”
  • “For too long, Chinese companies have enjoyed far greater access to our markets than our companies have in China,” Mr. Blinken said.” This lack of reciprocity is unacceptable and it’s unsustainable.”
  • But skeptics have said Washington’s ability to shape trade in the Asia-Pacific region may be limited because the framework is not a traditional trade agreement that offers countries reductions in tariffs and more access to the lucrative American market — a move that would be politically unpopular in the United States.
  • “We can stay vigilant about our national security without closing our doors,” he said. “Racism and hate have no place in a nation built by generations of immigrants to fulfill the promise of opportunity for all.”
lilyrashkind

Southern California water restrictions start today as drought worsens - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...-start-today-amid-drought.html

water restrictions drought US

shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Sweeping restrictions on outdoor water use go into effect on Wednesday for more than 6 million residents in Southern California as officials work to conserve water during a severe drought.The conservation rules, among the strictest ever imposed in the state, were set by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, one of the largest water distributors in the country.
  • The megadrought in the U.S. West has produced the driest two decades in the region in at least 1,200 years. Conditions are likely to continue through 2022 and could persist for years. Researchers publishing in the journal Nature Climate Change have estimated that 42% of the drought’s severity is attributable to human-caused climate change.
  • During the state’s drought from 2012 to 2016, former Gov. Jerry Brown ordered a mandatory 25% cutback in water use, during which many residents responded by switching to drought-tolerant landscaping.Gov. Gavin Newsom has not imposed such mandatory restrictions, but requested last year that residents curb household water consumption by 15%. Officials also have urged people to use recycled water for outside projects, take shorter showers and only run dishwashers and washing machines when full.
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  • “Californians made significant changes since the last drought, but we have seen an uptick in water use, especially as we enter the summer months,” Newsom said in a statement. “We all have to be more thoughtful about how to make every drop count.”
criscimagnael

Lake Powell's total capacity is shrinking, report shows - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Lake Powell, the second-largest human-made reservoir in the US, has lost nearly 7% of its potential storage capacity since 1963, when Glen Canyon Dam was built, a new report shows.
  • In addition to water loss due to an intense multiyear drought, the US Geological Survey and the Bureau of Reclamation report found, Lake Powell faced an average annual loss in storage capacity of about 33,270 acre-feet, or 11 billion gallons, per year between 1963 and 2018.
  • And last week, Lake Powell dipped below the critical threshold of 3,525 feet above sea level, sparking additional concerns about water supply and hydropower generation millions of people in the West rely on for electricity.
lilyrashkind

WHO: Monkeypox Outbreak Suggests Virus Was Spreading Undetected | Health News | US News - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...virus-was-spreading-undetected

outbreak health

shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The head of the World Health Organization on Wednesday said that the rapid appearance of the monkeypox outbreak suggests the virus has been spreading undetected.“Investigations are ongoing but the sudden appearance of monkeypox in many countries at the same time suggests there may have been undetected transmission for some time,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing.
  • “Currently, the overall public health risk at global level is assessed as moderate considering this is the first time that monkeypox cases and clusters are reported concurrently in widely disparate WHO geographical areas, and without known epidemiological links to non-endemic countries in West or Central Africa,” WHO said.The risk level could increase if the virus “exploits the opportunity to establish itself as a human pathogen and spreads to groups at higher risk of severe disease such as young children and immunosuppressed persons,” it added.
lilyrashkind

Biden Struggles to Defend His Presidency Amid Setbacks | Politics | US News - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...d-his-presidency-amid-setbacks

biden presidency US politics

shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • But those plans, experts say, may be just that – plans and proposals, many of which need unlikely approval by an uncooperative Congress or are subject to the whims of hostile foreign leaders, unpredictable markets or other forces beyond any president's control.
  • "Did you anticipate that the closure of the Abbott facility, because it was not producing the quality that was necessary, that it would have this profound effect immediately, or did it take a little time?" Biden asked. The question appeared directed at criticisms that the administration did not work better, earlier, to head off shortages when Abbott was forced to recall contaminated formula.The public relations effort, however, may not be enough to boost Biden's low approval ratings in time to help Democrats in a challenging midterm election season this fall. And in many cases, Biden's ability to fix the problems bedeviling the administration is limited.
  • On COVID-19, Biden has indeed ramped up testing and vaccinations during his term, Perry says. But he can't fight Mother Nature and human nature, she adds, noting that public impatience with masking and the virus's mutations aren't things he can control.On Ukraine, Biden has repeatedly noted his success in strengthening the NATO alliance. But "has he ended the war? No. That's something a president can't do," Perry adds. Aside from the threat of the war itself, the ongoing Russian invasion means higher gas prices as well, since the U.S. and its allies have imposed embargoes on Russian energy.
Javier E

Frances Haugen's lawyers accuse Facebook of misleading investors about covid and climate misinformation in Securities and Exchange Commission complaints - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...er-facebook-sec-climate-change

facebook SEC climate change investors

shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The complaint also cites internal records about the platform’s Climate Science Information Center, a much-touted hub designed to connect people with authoritative climate information. Awareness of the webpage was “very low,” even for people who had visited it.
  • “Climate change knowledge is generally poor,” one of the internal reports from 2021 said. “Given how many people use Facebook for information about climate change … climate science myths are a problem across all surveyed markets.”
  • The filings argue that it’s particularly urgent that Facebook tackle climate change misinformation, in part because of the popularity of the site. An internal company document cited in the complaint says Facebook is the second-most common source for news related to climate change, behind only television news and ahead of news aggregators, movies, online climate news sources and other social media platforms.
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  • The company adds information labels to some posts about climate change, and it reduces distribution of posts that its fact-checking partners rate as false. But it generally does not remove those posts, as it does with certain false claims about vaccines and the coronavirus. Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, called the company’s approach “disturbing.”
  • “Unmitigated climate change is projected to lead to far greater numbers of human fatalities than covid-19,” said Mann, author of “The New Climate War.” “The fact that they’re treating greater threat with so much less urgency and care is problematic.”
Javier E

March 2020: How the Fed Averted Economic Disaster - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-economic-disaster-11645199788

fed pandemic monetary policy emergency history crisis us economics

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Over the week of March 16, markets experienced an enormous shock to what investors refer to as liquidity, a catchall term for the cost of quickly converting an asset into cash.
  • Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible.
  • They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.
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  • They were offering nearly unlimited cheap debt to keep the wheels of finance turning, and when that didn’t help, the Fed began purchasing massive quantities of government debt outright.
  • Investors dumped whatever they could, including ostensibly “risk-free” U.S. Treasury securities. As a global dash for dollars unfolded, Treasurys were no longer serving as the market’s traditional shock absorbers, amplifying extreme turmoil on Wall Street.
  • By week’s end, the Dow had plunged more than 10,000 points since mid-February as investors struggled to get their arms around what a halt to global commerce would mean for businesses that would soon have no revenue.
  • “It was sheer, unadulterated panic, of a magnitude that was far worse than in 2008 and 2009. Far worse,”
  • The idea of shutting down markets was especially discouraging: “It was a profoundly un-American thing to contemplate, to just shut everything down, and almost fatalistic—that we’re not going to get out of this.”
  • nearly two years later, most agree that the Fed’s actions helped to save the economy from going into a pandemic-induced tailspin.
  • “My thought was—I remember this very clearly—‘O.K. We have a four-or-five-day chance to really get our act together and get ahead of this. We’re gonna try to get ahead of this,’” Mr. Powell recalled later. “And we were going to do that by just announcing a ton of stuff on Monday morning.”
  • It worked. The Fed’s pledges to backstop an array of lending, announced on Monday, March 23, would unleash a torrent of private borrowing based on the mere promise of central bank action—together with a massive assist by Congress, which authorized hundreds of billions of dollars that would cover any losses.
  • If the hardest-hit companies like Carnival, with its fleet of 104 ships docked indefinitely, could raise money in capital markets, who couldn’t?
  • on April 9, where he shed an earlier reluctance to express an opinion about government spending policies, which are set by elected officials and not the Fed. He spoke in unusually moral terms. “All of us are affected,” he said. “But the burdens are falling most heavily on those least able to carry them…. They didn’t cause this. Their business isn’t closed because of anything they did wrong. This is what the great fiscal power of the United States is for—to protect these people as best we can from the hardships they are facing.”
  • They were extraordinary words from a Fed chair who during earlier, hot-button policy debates said the central bank needed to “stay in its lane” and avoid providing specific advice.
  • To avoid a widening rift between the market haves (who had been given access to Fed backstops) and the market have-nots (who had been left out because their debt was deemed too risky), Mr. Powell had supported a decision to extend the Fed’s lending to include companies that were being downgraded to “junk” status in the days after it agreed to backstop their bonds.
  • Most controversially, Mr. Powell recommended that the Fed purchase investment vehicles known as exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that invest in junk debt. He and his colleagues feared that these “high-yield” bonds might buckle, creating a wave of bankruptcies that would cause long-term scarring in the economy.
  • Mr. Powell decided that it was better to err on the side of doing too much than not doing enough.
  • , Paul Singer, who runs the hedge-fund firm Elliott Management, warned that the Fed was sowing the seeds of a bigger crisis by absolving markets of any discipline. “Sadly, when people (including those who should know better) do something stupid and reckless and are not punished,” he wrote, “it is human nature that, far from thinking that they were lucky to have gotten away with something, they are encouraged to keep doing the stupid thing.”
  • The breathtaking speed with which the Fed moved and with which Wall Street rallied after the Fed’s announcements infuriated Dennis Kelleher, a former corporate lawyer and high-ranking Senate aide who runs Better Markets, an advocacy group lobbying for tighter financial regulations.
  • This is a ridiculous discussion no matter how heartfelt Powell is about ‘we can’t pick winners and losers’—to which my answer is, ‘So instead you just make them all winners?’”
  • “Literally, not only has no one in finance lost money, but they’ve all made more money than they could have dreamed,” said Mr. Kelleher. “It just can’t be the case that the only thing the Fed can do is open the fire hydrants wide for everybody
  • Mr. Powell later defended his decision to purchase ETFs that had invested in junk debt. “We wanted to find a surgical way to get in and support that market because it’s a huge market, and it’s a lot of people’s jobs… What were we supposed to do? Just let them die and lose all those jobs?” he said. “If that’s the biggest mistake we made, stipulating it as a mistake, I’m fine with that. It wasn’t time to be making finely crafted judgments,” Mr. Powell said. He hesitated for a moment before concluding. “Do I regret it? I don’t—not really.”
  • “We didn’t know there was a vaccine coming. The pandemic is just raging. And we don’t have a plan,” said Mr. Powell. “Nobody in the world has a plan. And in hindsight, the worry was, ‘What if we can’t really fully open the economy for a long time because the pandemic is just out there killing people?’”
  • Mr. Powell never saw this as a particularly likely outcome, “but it was around the edges of the conversation, and we were very eager to do everything we could to avoid that outcome,”
  • The Fed’s initial response in 2020 received mostly high marks—a notable contrast with the populist ire that greeted Wall Street bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis. North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry, the top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, gave Mr. Powell an “A-plus for 2020,” he said. “On a one-to-10 scale? It was an 11. He gets the highest, highest marks, and deserves them. The Fed as an institution deserves them.”
  • The pandemic was the most severe disruption of the U.S. economy since the Great Depression. Economists, financial-market professionals and historians are only beginning to wrestle with the implications of the aggressive response by fiscal and monetary policy makers.
  • Altogether, Congress approved nearly $5.9 trillion in spending in 2020 and 2021. Adjusted for inflation, that compares with approximately $1.8 trillion in 2008 and 2009.
  • By late 2021, it was clear that many private-sector forecasters and economists at the Fed had misjudged both the speed of the recovery and the ways in which the crisis had upset the economy’s equilibrium. Washington soon faced a different problem. Disoriented supply chains and strong demand—boosted by government stimulus—had produced inflation running above 7%.
  • because the pandemic shock was akin to a natural disaster, it allowed Mr. Powell and the Fed to sidestep concerns about moral hazard—that is, the possibility that their policies would encourage people to take greater risks knowing that they were protected against larger losses. If a future crisis is caused instead by greed or carelessness, the Fed would have to take such concerns more seriously.
  • The high inflation that followed in 2021 might have been worse if the U.S. had seen more widespread bankruptcies or permanent job losses in the early months of the pandemic.
  • an additional burst of stimulus spending in 2021, as vaccines hastened the reopening of the economy, raised the risk that monetary and fiscal policy together would flood the economy with money and further fuel inflation.
  • The surge in federal borrowing since 2020 creates other risks. It is manageable for now but could become very expensive if the Fed has to lift interest rates aggressively to cool the economy and reduce high inflation.
  • The Congressional Budget Office forecast in December 2020 that if rates rose by just 0.1 percentage point more than projected in each year of the decade, debt-service costs in 2030 would rise by $235 billion—more than the Pentagon had requested to spend in 2022 on the Navy.
  • its low-rate policies have coincided with—and critics say it has contributed to—a longer-running widening of wealth inequality.
  • In 2008, household wealth fell by $8 trillion. It rose by $13.5 trillion in 2020, and in the process, spotlighted the unequal distribution of wealth-building assets such as houses and stocks.
  • Without heavy spending from Washington, focused on the needs of the least well-off, these disparities might have attracted more negative scrutiny.
  • Finally, the Fed is a technocratic body that can move quickly because it operates under few political constraints. Turning to it as the first line of defense in this and future crises could compromise its institutional independence.
  • Step one, he said, was to get in the fight and try to win. Figuring out how to exit would be a better problem to have, because it would mean they had succeeded.
  • “We have a recovery that looks completely unlike other recoveries that we’ve had because we’ve put so much support behind the recovery,” Mr. Powell said last month. “Was it too much? I’m going to leave that to the historians.”
  • The final verdict on the 2020 crisis response may turn on whether Mr. Powell is able to bring inflation under control without a painful recession—either as sharp price increases from 2021 reverse on their own accord, as officials initially anticipated, or because the Fed cools down the economy by raising interest rates.
Javier E

What Was Stonehenge For? The Answer Might Be Simpler Than You Thought. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...stonehenge-british-museum.html

stone age prehistoric UK monument history culture

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • While it was built at roughly the same time as the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Giza, we know far more about those Egyptian sites. Incomplete knowledge of Stonehenge has turned it into a riddle that is now part of its identity.
  • a new exhibition at the British Museum, “The World of Stonehenge,” which runs through July 17. The show strives to lessen the mystery around the monument by focusing on recent discoveries and putting them in the context of life in Britain, Ireland and northwestern Europe before, during and after Stonehenge’s construction.
  • He described the site as a mix between a town hall and a cathedral, where people mingled for both religious and social reasons.
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  • a structure that preceded Stonehenge: a stone circle built on the same spot some 500 years earlier, which, according to archaeologists, was a cemetery. It was constructed with large bluestone pillars — each of them transported from Wales, more than 200 miles away
  • Five centuries later, Stonehenge as we know it was built using some of those existing bluestones, as well as more than 80 towering “sarsen” stones, the monument’s vertical pillars, and horizontal lintels, or capping stones.
  • Each sarsen stone needed at least 1,000 people to transport it over a distance of 15 miles. The process took generations, and many were killed and maimed as a result, according to the exhibition wall text.
  • some of the pilgrims who helped build Stonehenge stayed at Durrington Walls, a nearby settlement which, at its peak, contained around 1,000 temporary houses.
  • Stonehenge was built at a time of drastic population decline and dispersal,
  • There were few, if any, villages, and society was “trying to create a sense of unity and collaboration among its members,” he explained.
  • Stonehenge was a “monument of remembrance,” he said, and an “expression of unity” that pulled people together in the pursuit of a common endeavor.
  • writing did not exist in England until the Romans arrived 2,500 years later — so there is no written history of Stonehenge and the people who put it up,
  • Nor did the people of prehistoric England leave any representations of human figures, said Wilkin, the curator. They had “an almost secretive attitude towards their religion,” perhaps with the intention of “excluding others from it,” so their spiritual practices are undocumented as well.
Javier E

Ukraine's Sovereignty Is A Vital U.S. Interest - 0 views

shaykhatiri.substack.com/...ines-sovereignty-is-a-vital-us

sovereignty Westphalian order liberal US foreign policy peace hegemony

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Russia’s escalation of its eight-year war against Ukraine presents a choice about what role America would like to play in the world.
  • should the United States conduct itself as a great power, and, if so, should it be a European power or restrict itself to preserving the order in Asia.
  • Before the end of World War II, American statesmen began to think about what world order should look like after the war. They designed a global order to mirror four tenets of the American regime at home: commerce, law, liberalism, and guns.
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  • This order has preserved the longest peace in human history.
  • Notwithstanding the outbreak of conflicts between smaller states, Asia has enjoyed a considerable degree of peace since World War II. The wars of the Greater Middle East pale in comparison with the region’s violent history, only tamed by European imperialism.
  • And Europe, a continent plagued by continental wars, has been at peace for a quarter century.
  • This has resulted in unprecedented prosperity, growth in life expectancy, and decline of violence
  • All American wars have been against autocracies. Especially in the recent era, at every point, America has tried to leave behind a democracy.
  • Most Americans though don’t remember the pre-American world. They tend to take the world they live in for granted, not realizing the enormous investment their leaders make in preserving it.
  • If one studies history, it is obvious that in comparison the American world is a beautiful garden. If unattended, however, the unforgiving law of the jungle will rule.
  • The core of the American order is a legacy of the Westphalian peace, that the sovereignty of other states must be respected
  • Detractors argue that America has also broken this rule. True enough. But as much as it is unpopular to say that America is not the world’s policeman, our country has acted as the world’s law enforcement officer. And while citizens do not have a right to be violent with each other, the police have the right to use force against lawbreakers.
  • A second flaw of this false comparison could be explained by the late Bill Buckley, “to say that we and [Russia] are to be compared is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes the old lady into the way of an oncoming bus and the man who pushes the old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus are both people who push old ladies around.”
  • Most importantly, due to the simple fact that America is the judge, the jury, and the executioner of this order, it has disproportionately benefited Americans
  • And unlike the Russian military, the U.S. military has never permanently stayed in a country against the will of a democratic host.
Javier E

Revealed: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters and corrupt politicians | Credit Suisse | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...fraudsters-corrupt-politicians

switzerland bank secrecy corruption tax evasion whistleblower

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The huge trove of banking data was leaked by an anonymous whistleblower to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral,” the whistleblower source said in a statement. “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders.”
  • Swiss financial institutions manage about 7.9tn CHF (£6.3tn) in assets, nearly half of which belongs to foreign clients.
  • It identifies the convicts and money launderers who were able to open bank accounts, or keep them open for years after their crimes emerged. And it reveals how Switzerland’s famed banking secrecy laws helped facilitate the looting of countries in the developing world.
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  • his case is one of dozens discovered by reporters appearing to show Credit Suisse opened or maintained accounts for clients who had serious convictions that might be expected to show up in due diligence checks. There are other instances in which Credit Suisse may have taken quick action after red flags emerged, but the case nonetheless shows that dubious clients have been attracted to the bank.
  • Like every other bank in the world, Credit Suisse professes to have stringent control mechanisms to carry out extensive due diligence on its customers to “ensure that the highest standards of conduct are upheld”. In banking parlance, such controls are called know-your-client or KYC checks.
  • A 2017 leaked report commissioned by Switzerland’s financial regulator shed some light on the bank’s internal procedures at that time. Clients would face intensified scrutiny when flagged as a politically exposed person from a high-risk country, or a person involved in a high-risk activity such as gambling, weapons trading, financial services or mining, the report said.
  • Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. However, the leaked data identifies him as the co-signatory of two Credit Suisse company accounts. The first was opened in 2005, the year after the SEC had secured a default judgment against Radulović for running a pump-and-dump scheme.
  • One of Radulović’s company accounts held 3.4m CHF (£2.2m) before they closed in 2010. He was recently given a 10-year prison sentence by a court in Belgrade for his role trafficking cocaine from South America for the organised crime boss Darko Šarić.
  • Due diligence is not only for new clients. Banks are required to continually reassess existing customers. The 2017 report said Credit Suisse screened customers at least every three years and as often as once a year for the riskiest clients. Lawyers for Credit Suisse told the Guardian these periodic reviews were introduced “more than 15 years ago”, meaning it was continually running due diligence on existing clients from 2007.
  • The bank might, therefore, have been expected to have discovered that its German client Eduard Seidel was convicted of bribery in 2008. Seidel was an employee of Siemens. As the multinational’s lead in Nigeria, he oversaw a campaign of industrial-scale bribery to secure lucrative contracts for his employer by funnelling cash to corrupt Nigerian politicians.
  • After German authorities raided the Munich headquarters of Siemens in 2006, Seidel immediately confessed his role in the bribery scheme, though he said he had never stolen from the company or appropriated its slush funds. His involvement in the corruption led to his name being entered into the Thomson Reuters World-Check database in 2007.
  • However, the leaked Credit Suisse data shows his accounts were left open until at least well into the last decade. At one point after he left Siemens, one account was worth 54m CHF (£24m). Seidel’s lawyer declined to say whether the accounts were his. He said his client had addressed all outstanding matters relating to his bribery offences and wished to move on with his life.
  • The lawyer did not respond to repeated invitations to explain the source of the 54m CHF. Siemens said it did not know about the money and that its review of its own cashflows shed no light on the account.
  • A representative for Sederholm said Credit Suisse never froze his accounts and did not close them until 2013 when he was unable to provide due diligence material. Asked why Sederholm needed a Swiss account, they said that he was living in Thailand when it was opened, adding: “Can you please tell me if you would prefer to put your money in a Thai or Swiss bank?”
  • One client, Stefan Sederholm, a Swedish computer technician who opened an account with Credit Suisse in 2008, was able to keep it open for two-and-a-half years after his widely reported conviction for human trafficking in the Philippines, for which he was given a life sentence.
  • Swiss banks have cultivated their trusted reputation since as far back as 1713, when the Great Council of Geneva prohibited bankers from revealing details about the fortunes being deposited by European aristocrats. Switzerland soon became a tax haven for many of the world’s elites and its bankers nurtured a “duty of absolute silence” about their clients affairs.
  • The custom was enshrined in statute in 1934 with the introduction of Switzerland’s banking secrecy law, which criminalised the disclosure of client banking information to foreign authorities. Within decades, wealthy clients from all over the world were flocking to Swiss banks. Sometimes, that meant clients with something to hide.
  • One former Credit Suisse employee at the time alleges there was a deeply ingrained culture in Swiss banking of looking the other way when it came to problematic clients. “The bank’s compliance departments [were] masters of plausible deniability,” they told a reporter from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the coordinators of the Suisse secrets project. “Never write anything down that could expose an account that is non-compliant and never ask a question you do not want to know the answer to.”
  • The 2000s was also a decade in which foreign regulators and tax authorities became increasingly frustrated at their inability to penetrate the Swiss financial system. That changed in 2007, when the UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld voluntarily approached US authorities with information about how the bank was helping thousands of wealthy Americans evade tax with secret accounts.
  • Birkenfeld was viewed as a traitor in Switzerland, where banking whistleblowers are often held in contempt. However, a wide-ranging US Senate investigation later uncovered the aggressive tactics used by UBS and Credit Suisse, the latter of which was found to have sent bankers to high-end events to recruit clients, courted a potential customer with free gold, and in one case even delivered sensitive bank statements hidden in the pages of a Sports Illustrated magazine.
  • The revelations sent shock waves through Switzerland’s financial sector and enraged the US, which pressured Switzerland into unilaterally disclosing which of its taxpayers had secret Swiss accounts from 2014. That same year, Switzerland reluctantly signed up to the international convention on the automatic exchange of banking Information.
  • By adopting the so-called common reporting standard (CRS) for sharing tax data, Switzerland in effect agreed that its banks would in the future exchange information about their clients with tax authorities in foreign countries. They started doing so in 2018.
  • Membership of the global exchange system is often cited by Switzerland’s banking industry as a turning point. “There is no longer Swiss bank client confidentiality for clients abroad,” the Swiss Bankers Association told the Guardian. “We are transparent, there is nothing to hide in Switzerland.”
  • Switzerland’s almost 90-year-old banking secrecy law, however, remains in force – and was recently broadened. The Tax Justice Network estimates that countries around the world collectively lose $21bn (£15.4bn) each year in tax revenues because of Switzerland. Many of those countries will be poorer nations that have not signed up to the CRS data exchange.
  • More than 90 countries, most of which are in the developing world, remain in the dark when their wealthy taxpayers hide their money in Swiss accounts.
  • This inequity in the system was cited by the whistleblower behind the leaked data, who said the CRS system “imposes a disproportionate financial and infrastructural burden on developing nations, perpetuating their exclusion from the system in the foreseeable future”.
  • “This situation enables corruption and starves developing countries of much-needed tax revenue. These countries are the ones that therefore suffer most from Switzerland’s reverse-Robin-Hood stunt,” they said.
  • “I am aware that having an offshore Swiss bank account does not necessarily imply tax evasion or any other financial crime,” they said. “However, it is likely that a significant number of these accounts were opened with the sole purpose of hiding their holder’s wealth from fiscal institutions and/or avoiding the payment of taxes on capital gains.”
Javier E

Reality Is a Tank - The Triad - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...reality-is-a-tank

hegemony foreign policy international relations order policy politics

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • It is men and women like Bildt, who believe that the international order is secured by pen and ink, who have been living in a fantasy land. They have spent a generation inviting catastrophe into their sitting rooms.
  • They watched Putin jail and destroy Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia.They watched Putin assassinate dissidents on the ground in NATO countries.They watched Putin’s army commit war crimes in Chechnya.They watched his 2007 Munich speech in which he literally said, out loud, that he wanted to roll back the Westernization of Eastern Europe and restore Russia’s dominance.They watched the invasions of Georgia and then Ukraine.
  • In response these same men and women decommissioned nuclear power plants in Europe and built gas pipelines to Russia so that they could have good feelings about “environmentalism” while also pocketing economic windfalls.They crossed their fingers and closed their eyes.You tell me who “lost contact with reality.”
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  • A one-war doctrine, on the other hand, invites conflict.
  • Our presidents were not alone. Much of Conservatism Inc. has become functionally pro-Russia.
  • much of the American foreign policy establishment decided that it could live in whatever reality it preferred. Their signal accomplishment was killing America’s two-war doctrine.
  • The goal of the two-war doctrine was to prevent America from having to fight any major wars. Because when you have the ability to fight two conventional ground wars, you deter all of your enemies.
  • it’s not just the lotus-eating Europeans. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both got rolled by Putin. Donald Trump was practically Putin’s gofer.
  • both China and Russia are emboldened to pursue their interests: They know that we are unlikely to respond to aggression because in any given instance we will be paralyzed by the need to be able to deter a second aggressor.
  • The two-war doctrine was a victim of its own success. It was so effective at deterring large-scale aggression that Americans became convinced it wasn’t needed. That we could pocket the savings and get the same level of security through norms and agreements and economic interdependence.
  • Here is a thing everyone except Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping seems to have forgotten: Reality is a tank. Not a memorandum. Not a summit. Not a promise.
  • Over the last 20 years, Americans experienced the very real costs of being the global hegemon and decided that, all things being equal, we’d rather not have the job.We are about to experience the very real costs of not being the hyperpower.
  • I would like to think the American people will survey the situation and come to the hard conclusion that while it is expensive and arduous to be the enforcer of the international order, it’s ultimately cheaper and safer than the alternative. And that we will then select leaders who will carry out this brief.
  • But I’ve lived through the last three years, just like you. I’ve watched half of America whine like children over being asked to wear a KN-95 at the grocery store. I’ve seen a third of this country refuse to get a life-saving vaccine because they are so detached from reality.
  • In my darker moments I suspect that Vladimir Putin has taken our measure quite precisely.
Javier E

Opinion | In Ukraine, Putin's Gamble Has Failed - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...putin-russia-ukraine.html

ukraine putin strategy russia

shared by Javier E on 29 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Instead of trapping the United States, Mr. Putin has trapped himself. Caught between armed conflict and a humiliating retreat, he is now seeing his room for maneuver dwindling to nothing. He could invade and risk defeat, or he could pull back and have nothing to show for his brinkmanship.
  • Mr. Putin’s gamble has failed.
  • Mr. Putin — whose instinctive cautiousness I’ve observed at close quarters for two decades — has a record of withdrawing at the first sign of real conflict. When Russian mercenaries were killed by U.S. troops in Syria in 2018, for example, he had the perfect opportunity to retaliate. Instead, Russia denied the slaughter ever took place.
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  • Russia’s major successful military operations under Mr. Putin — the defeat of Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 — happened when the West was looking the other way. In both cases, the world was caught unawares and Russia could complete its designs without the threat of armed international opposition.
  • there’s no major domestic unrest and elections are two years away. Mr. Putin doesn’t require an expansionist escapade to either shore up his rule or distract the population from its troubles. War is a big red button that can be pushed only once. Right now, there’s no need.
  • The Ukrainian Army is much improved, having upscaled its equipment and preparations for a ground invasion, and the Russian troops deployed near the border are most likely insufficient to conquer the country. Because of its sheer bulk, the Russian Army might be able to advance: Quantity has a quality of its own, as Stalin reportedly said. But it would surely come at the cost of catastrophic losses in human life.
  • why did Mr. Putin raise the stakes so high? The answer is simple: Afghanistan. The West’s disastrous withdrawal from the country in August signaled the United States’ waning appetite for entanglement abroad. Emboldened, Mr. Putin clearly decided it was a good time to press his case for a revision of the post-Cold War order.
  • he fell back on unpredictability. The more irrational his behavior, went the thinking, the more likely the United States would accept his demands.
  • The core request — that NATO deny membership to Ukraine — was silly in a different way. There was no chance of Ukraine becoming a member any time soon, ultimatum or not. But that was Mr. Putin’s point: By demanding something that was already happening, Mr. Putin aimed to claim a victory over the West.
  • instead of submitting, the United States went the other way and began arming Ukraine
  • There is, perhaps, one certainty to hold on to: Mr. Putin will never start a war he’s likely to lose. So the only way to ensure peace is to guarantee that in a military confrontation, Mr. Putin would never win.
Javier E

'Be thankful you don't have our poison': US pollster Frank Luntz's warning to UK | US politics | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...erview-pollster-us-uk-politics

poison pollster warning politics crisis culture trump gop division polarization

shared by Javier E on 28 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The 59-year-old, well known from countless media appearances and for running focus groups that provide an insight into America’s political psyche, has also now chosen a less partisan path.
  • Having once worked for rightwing Republicans such as Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, he no longer hesitates to condemn Donald Trump’s pernicious influence or fears the conservative media backlash.
  • You all have proven that there’s still a desire for substance in politics, not just slogans and soundbites, and thank God you haven’t completely embraced American politics because your elections are of substance rather than style.
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  • Last year he went to the UK for a month and ended up staying nearly eight, finding an antidote to American’s poison.
  • “I still haven’t fully recovered from my stroke, and what goes on in this country, I couldn’t talk about it. I got in the middle of it. Tucker Carlson [a host on Fox News] was killing me every fucking night.”
  • also invited UK journalists to disseminate a warning: don’t let British politics become as polarised and debased as the American system.
  • “You still like each other, you still respect each other, you still value public debate: your democracy is still functioning,”
  • “Ours has seized up and I don’t know how to get ours flowing again. Be thankful that you don’t have our poison … I’m very afraid of the American system being hopelessly damaged.”
  • “If I didn’t die, I’m not afraid any more, so you will hear me criticise people I never would have criticised two years ago. What are they going to do to me? It can’t be any worse than what I’ve been through and, when you become more fearless, it makes life easier to navigate.”
  • “I know that you guys are critical of the UK in recent times for being too American in your elections. You’re not. We are becoming more and more superficial. You are still substantial.”
  • Later he plays a video clip of one of his US focus groups descending into angry shouting and recriminations, a glimpse of a society that seems to be falling apart. He comments: “The worst of the worst. This is my warning to you. This is shit. This is a disaster and it will come to you if you let it happen.”
  • Today, after the catharsis of his stroke, Luntz finds plenty of blame to go around. He casts a harsh light on the media, social media and his own younger self. In an infamous 2003 memo, for example, he advised George W Bush’s Republican party to abandon the phrase “global warming” in favour of “climate change” because it is “less frightening”
  • “Biden does not understand the hopes and dreams of the average American,” says the messaging expert, who remains on the centre-right. “He does not empathise with them. His team is ideological rather than emotional and so he’s missing all this. It’s how people feel even more than how they think; feeling is a deeper emotion and Biden is not connecting to them at all.
  • Luntz argues that he overpromised. “He created unrealistic expectations. He’s a very arrogant human being and very flawed and the combination of flaws and arrogance is a really unhealthy cocktail.”
  • Wasn’t Biden supposed to be Mr Empathy? “There’s nothing about him that screams empathy. There’s everything about him that screams someone who’s already made up their mind.”
  • He identifies six issues that will determine voters’ choices: crime, immigration, shortages, prices, education and the January 6 insurrection. “Democrats have a huge problem on five out of the six.”
  • “Boris Johnson has written more books than Donald Trump has read. Boris is the real Trump. He understands the hopes and dreams of the public. He gets the historic context. He can wax poetically about 2,000 years ago, 200 years ago and two years ago. Trump could not do that.
  • The Great Rethink. It is a study of America voters’ attitudes and disillusionment with their leaders. “The only thing we agree on is that politicians suck,” Luntz says. “If you’re American, this is a very depressing time right now.”
  • nother offers some words to use (I am your voice, accountability, fact-based) and words to lose (agenda, I’m listening, transparency).
  • Luntz argues that even in a polarised society such as America, every parent asks the same question: will my child/grandchild be happy
  • Perhaps rather optimistically, he urges politicians to focus on children as “the great unifier”
  • “If you want to bring people together, you do it over their children. You guys are divided on just about everything; this crushes that divide. This brings people together and it’s not been done before.
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