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rachelramirez

What Drives Gun Sales: Terrorism, Obama and Calls for Restrictions - The New York Times - 0 views

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gun control restrictions politics policy

shared by rachelramirez on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • What Drives Gun Sales: Terrorism,Obama and Calls for Restrictions
  • When a man shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., gun sales did not set records until five days later, after President Obama called for banning assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.
  • Gun sales rose in New Jersey in 2013 after Gov. Chris Christie proposed measures that included expanding background checks and banning certain rifles.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Pushing for new restrictions can lead to an influx of new guns.
  • Gun sales have more than doubled in a decade, to about 15 million in 2013 from about seven million in 2002.
  • when the Supreme Court invalidated a ban on handguns in Washington, estimated handgun sales recorded in the city went from near-zero to about 40 every month.
Emilio Ergueta

Obama said gun owners would support his new restrictions. He was right. - The Washington Post - 0 views

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politics history US crisis obama gun right

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • President Obama rolled out a package of executive actions on guns this week. The changes included clarifying rules meant to broaden the use of background checks by private sellers, allocating money for mental health treatment, and adding more staff at the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to help enforce existing regulations.
  • The actions would be supported by an "overwhelming majority of the American people, including gun owners," he said Monday.
  • A new CNN-ORC survey of 1,000 Americans finds that the public supports Obama's plan by a 2-to-1 ratio: 67 percent of respondents favored the executive actions, while 32 percent opposed them. Even more striking, a similar share of people in gun-owning households -- 63 percent -- supported the measures.
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  • 51 percent of Republicans support Obama's executive action on guns
johnsonma23

Barack Obama: Guns Are Our Shared Responsibility - The New York Times - 0 views

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new york times barack obama guns

shared by johnsonma23 on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Barack Obama: Guns Are Our Shared Responsibility
  • THE epidemic of gun violence in our country is a crisis. Gun deaths and injuries constitute one of the greatest threats to public health and to the safety of the American people.
  • A national crisis like this demands a national response. Reducing gun violence will be hard. It’s clear that common-sense gun reform won’t happen during this Congress.
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  • They include making sure that anybody engaged in the business of selling firearms conducts background checks, expanding access to mental health treatment and improving gun safety technology.
  • We need the vast majority of responsible gun owners who grieve with us after every mass shooting, who support common-sense gun safety and who feel that their views are not being properly represented
  • The gun industry also needs to do its part. And that starts with manufacturers.
  • As Americans, we hold consumer goods to high standards to keep our families and communities safe.
  • We will not end the cycle of gun violence until we demand that the gun industry take simple actions to make its products safer as well
  • Yet today, the gun industry is almost entirely unaccountable.
  • All of us need to demand leaders brave enough to stand up to the gun lobby’s lies.
  • Those moments represent American democracy, and the American people, at our best. Meeting this crisis of gun violence will require the same relentless focus, over many years, at every level.
johnsonma23

NRA declines to participate in Obama gun town hall - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

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politics US gun obama

shared by johnsonma23 on 07 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • NRA declines to participate in Obama gun town hall
  • The nation's largest gun rights organization declined Wednesday to send official representatives to a nationally televised town hall with President Barack Obama on gun violence
  • The National Rifle Association sees no reason to participate in a public relations spectacle orchestrated by the White House,"
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  • 48% of Americans support stricter laws, while 51% were opposed,
  • his actions have been called into question about whether they would truly help stem gun violence.
  • Obama on Tuesday presented a renewed push for further gun regulations, including background checks for firearms purchases through the use of executive action
  • The NRA and Obama have been bitter enemies on the issue of new gun regulations -- each accusing the other of engaging in politics instead of working to find solutions to end gun violence.
proudsa

Let's Not Shelter in Place Anymore | Susan B. Katz - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...helter-in-place_b_8929166.html

shared by proudsa on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Every one of my 30 second-graders raised their tiny hands. That was what they heard at night -- gunshots. And, I couldn't honestly calm their fears. We had lockdowns almost every month -- due to drive-by shootings or gang activity on the corner.
  • While there, I got mugged in broad daylight, at gunpoint, by two young men. One pointed a sawed-off shotgun at me. It looked like a rifle as I stared down the barrel
  • They robbed a home across from the school then ran onto the schoolyard to mix into the crowds of students.
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  • The secretary and I could only shout to panicked parents through the mail slot, "No one is allowed on campus or off campus until further notice."
  • After several hours, when we'd been given the all clear, I read each child's name aloud and released five and six-year-olds to their sobbing parents.
  • I loved the kids, and the parents, but risking my life to go to work just didn't seem worth it. I can't imagine how the teachers at Sandy Hook or Columbine managed to return to work after those horrific massacres.
  • As in -- we feel empathy and outrage when the San Bernardino or Oregon shooting rampages happen but won't actually take action until it is in our neighborhood, at our local school.
  • And, yet, one of my best friend's parents were brutally murdered during an armed robbery at their store in Detroit when we were 14. Another friend accidentally shot his brother in his own backyard with his father's gun.
  • Can we not run errands anymore without risking driving through a war zone?
  • What is our country coming to? Children and teachers in classrooms across the country huddling together, shaking in fear, sheltering in place, locked down on a regular basis? How are our children's right to safety of less value than the right to own a gun? Just within the last ten years, a staggering 280,024 Americans were killed by guns. Not overseas, fighting a war, but struggling to survive on the streets of U.S. cities and while studying or teaching in our schools.
  • Let's take back our schools, our streets and our sense of safety with stricter gun laws, background checks and more modern technology like the fingerprint unlocking device that is standard on cell phones now.
sgardner35

The real question on gun control - CNN.com - 0 views

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shared by sgardner35 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The President reminded the audience that Americans have different relationships with gun ownership because we live in "different realities." A black high-schooler in Chicago, where 55 people were shot in the past seven days, for example, has a very "different reality" from the high-schooler in a rural area who grew up shooting a rifle for sport.
  • The room was split between people who are willing to try, even if there's no guarantee, and those who need a guarantee -- proof -- before they will try. Between optimism and resignation.The majority of Americans, Republicans and gun owners support universal background checks and closing the so-called "gun show loophole." In fact, one objection that came up repeatedly pointed up a grim irony: Obama's step forward is so small that "it won't work."
  • He said that there were 30,000 American's who were killed by gun violence. What if we could just lower it to 28,000? What if we could spare 2,000 families from the heartbreak of that kind of loss? Shouldn't we try?
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  • Over and over, the President explained that his proposal will not affect most people's ability to buy a gun and it will not eliminate all gun violence. He repeatedly stated it will eliminate current channels that criminals do take advantage of to purchase guns. If one of every 30 guns sold online is purchased by a felon, as the President suggested, why wouldn't we try and stop that from happening?Tonight, the President wa
  • modest, respectful and reasonable. He was there to listen and to have a conversation. It was a conversation about gun control yes, but it was wrapped inside a bigger theme -- the nature of change.
Javier E

On Grand Strategy (John Lewis Gaddis) - 0 views

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grand strategy history decision-making

shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • minds. Ordinary experience, he pointed out, is filled with “ends equally ultimate . . . , the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others.” The choices facing us are less often between stark alternatives—good versus evil, for instance—than between good things we can’t have simultaneously. “One can save one’s soul, or one can found or maintain or serve a great and glorious State,” Berlin wrote, “but not always both at once.”
  • We resolve these dilemmas by stretching them over time. We seek certain things now, put off others until later, and regard still others as unattainable. We select what fits where, and then decide which we can achieve when. The process can be difficult: Berlin emphasized the “necessity and agony of choice.” But if such choices were to disappear, he added, so too would “the freedom to choose,” and hence liberty itself.24
  • only narratives can show dilemmas across time. It’s not enough to display choices like slivers on a microscope slide. We need to see change happen, and we can do that only by reconstituting the past as histories, biographies, poems, plays, novels, or films. The best of these sharpen and shade simultaneously: they compress what’s happening in order to clarify, even as they blur, the line between instruction and entertainment. They are, in short, dramatizations. And a fundamental requirement of these is never to bore.
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  • When Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) asks the president how he can reconcile so noble an aim with such malodorous methods, Lincoln recalls what his youthful years as a surveyor taught him: [A] compass . . . [will] point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms
  • chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp . . . , [then] what’s the use of knowing true north?
  • The real Lincoln, as far as I know, never said any of this, and the real Berlin, sadly, never got to see Spielberg’s film. But Tony Kushner’s screenplay shows Fitzgerald’s linkage of intelligence, opposing ideas, and the ability to function: Lincoln keeps long-term aspirations and immediate necessities in mind at the same time. It reconciles Berlin’s foxes and hedgehogs with his insistence on the inevitability—and the unpredictability—of choice:
  • Whether we approach reality from the top down or the bottom up, Tolstoy seems to be saying, an infinite number of possibilities exist at an indeterminate number of levels, all simultaneously. Some are predictable, most aren’t, and only dramatization—free from the scholar’s enslavement to theory and archives—can begin to represent them.
  • what is “training,” as Clausewitz understands it? It’s being able to draw upon principles extending across time and space, so that you’ll have a sense of what’s worked before and what hasn’t. You then apply these to the situation at hand: that’s the role of scale. The result is a plan, informed by the past, linked to the present, for achieving some future goal.
  • I think he’s describing here an ecological sensitivity that equally respects time, space, and scale. Xerxes never had it, despite Artabanus’ efforts. Tolstoy approximated it, if only in a novel. But Lincoln—who lacked an Artabanus and who didn’t live to read War and Peace—seems somehow to have achieved it, by way of a common sense that’s uncommon among great leaders.
  • It’s worth remembering also that Lincoln—and Shakespeare—had a lifetime to become who they were. Young people today don’t, because society so sharply segregates general education, professional training, ascent within an organization, responsibility for it, and then retirement.
  • This worsens a problem Henry Kissinger identified long ago: that the “intellectual capital” leaders accumulate prior to reaching the top is all they’ll be able to draw on while at the top.37 There’s less time now than Lincoln had to learn anything new.
  • A gap has opened between the study of history and the construction of theory, both of which are needed if ends are to be aligned with means. Historians, knowing that their field rewards specialized research, tend to avoid the generalizations
  • Theorists, keen to be seen as social “scientists,” seek “reproducibility” in results: that replaces complexity with simplicity in the pursuit of predictability. Both communities neglect relationships between the general and the particular—between universal and local knowledge—that nurture strategic thinking.
  • concrete events in time and space—the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment—this alone contained the truth,
  • Collaboration, in theory, could have secured the sea and the land from all future dangers. That would have required, though, the extension of trust, a quality with strikingly shallow roots in the character of all Greeks.
  • The only solution then is to improvise, but this is not just making it up as you go along. Maybe you’ll stick to the plan, maybe you’ll modify it, maybe you’ll scrap it altogether. Like Lincoln, though, you’ll know your compass heading, whatever the unknowns that lie between you and your destination. You’ll have in your mind a range of options for dealing with these, based—as if from Machiavelli—upon hard-won lessons from those who’ve gone before.
  • The past and future are no more equivalent, in Thucydides, than are capabilities and aspirations in strategy—they are, however, connected.
  • The past we can know only from imperfect sources, including our own memories. The future we can’t know, other than that it will originate in the past but then depart from it. Thucydides’ distinction between resemblance and reflection—between patterns surviving across time and repetitions degraded by time—aligns the asymmetry, for it suggests that the past prepares us for the future only when, however imperfectly, it transfers. Just as capabilities restrict aspirations to what circumstances will allow.
  • Insufficiency demands indirection, and that, Sun Tzu insists, requires maneuver: [W]hen capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far; when far away, that you are near. Offer an enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. . . . When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. . . . Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. . . . Keep him under a strain and wear him down. Opposites held in mind simultaneously, thus, are “the strategist’s keys to victory.”
  • it was Pericles who, more than anyone else, unleashed the Peloponnesian War—the unintended result of constructing a culture to support a strategy.
  • By the mid-450s Pericles, who agreed, had finished the walls around Athens and Piraeus, allowing total reliance on the sea in any future war. The new strategy made sense, but it made the Athenians, as Thucydides saw, a different people. Farmers, traditionally, had sustained Athens: their fields and vineyards supplied the city in peacetime, and their bodies filled the ranks of its infantry and cavalry when wars came. Now, though, their properties were expendable and their influence diminished.
  • If Athens were to rely upon the ardor of individuals, then it would have to inspire classes within the city and peoples throughout the empire—even as it retained the cohesiveness of its rival Sparta, still in many ways a small town.
  • Pericles used his “funeral oration,” delivered in Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War’s first year, to explain what he hoped for. The dead had given their lives, he told the mourners, for the universality of Athenian distinctiveness: Athens imitated no one, but was a pattern for everyone. How, though, to reconcile these apparent opposites? Pericles’ solution was to connect scale, space, and time: Athenian culture would appeal to the city, the empire, and the ages.
  • The city had acquired its “friends,” Pericles acknowledged, by granting favors, “in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in [its] debt; while the debtor [knows] that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift.” Nevertheless, the Athenians had provided these benefits “not from calculations of expediency, but in the confidence of liberality.” What he meant was that Athens would make its empire at once more powerful and more reassuring than that of any rival.
  • It could in this way project democracy across cultures because insecure states, fearing worse, would freely align with Athens.22 Self-interest would become comfort and then affinity.
  • The Athenians’ strategy of walling their cities, however, had reshaped their character, obliging them restlessly to roam the world. Because they had changed, they would have to change others—that’s what having an empire means—but how many, to what extent, and by what means? No one, not even Pericles, could easily say.
  • Equality, then, was the loop in Pericles’ logic. He saw both it and empire as admirable, but was slow to sense that encouraging one would diminish the other.
  • Like Lincoln, Pericles looked ahead to the ages. He even left them monuments and sent them messages. But he didn’t leave behind a functional state: it would take well over two millennia for democracy again to become a model with mass appeal.
  • as Thucydides grimly observes, war “brings most men’s character to a level with their fortunes.”
  • “Island” strategies require steady nerves. You have to be able to watch smoke rise on horizons you once controlled without losing your own self-confidence, or shaking that of allies, or strengthening that of adversaries.
  • For the abstractions of strategy and the emotions of strategists can never be separated: they can only be balanced. The weight attached to each, however, will vary with circumstances. And the heat of emotions requires only an instant to melt abstractions drawn from years of cool reflection.
  • if credibility is always in doubt, then capabilities must become infinite or bluffs must become routine. Neither approach is sustainable: that’s why walls exist in the first place.
  • he encouraged his readers to seek “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a solitary affliction.
  • But to know the past only in static terms—as moments frozen in time and space—would be almost as disabling, because we’re the progeny of progressions across time and space that shift from small scales to big ones and back again. We know these through narratives, whether historical or fictional or a combination of both.
  • No one can anticipate everything that might happen. Sensing possibilities, though, is better than having no sense at all of what to expect. Sun Tzu seeks sense—even common sense—by tethering principles, which are few, to practices, which are many.
  • Clausewitz’s concept of training, however, retains its relevance. It’s the best protection we have against strategies getting stupider as they become grander, a recurring problem in peace as well as war. It’s the only way to combine the apparent opposites of planning and improvisation: to teach the common sense that comes from knowing when to be a hedgehog and when a fox.
  • Victories must connect: otherwise they won’t lead anywhere. They can’t be foreseen, though, because they arise from unforeseen opportunities. Maneuvering, thus, requires planning, but also improvisation. Small triumphs in a single arena set up larger ones elsewhere, allowing weaker contenders to become stronger.
  • The actions of man, Kennan concluded, “are governed not so much by what he intellectually believes as by what he vividly realizes.”
  • Nor is it clear, even now, whether Christianity caused Rome’s “fall”—as Gibbon believed—or—as the legacies of Augustus suggest—secured Rome’s institutional immortalities. These opposites have shaped “western” civilization ever since. Not least by giving rise to two truly grand strategies, parallel in their purposes but devised a thousand years apart
  • Augustine shows that reality always falls short of the ideal: one can strive toward it, but never expect to achieve it. Seeking, therefore, is the best man can manage in a fallen world, and what he seeks is his choice. Nevertheless, not all ends are legitimate; not all means are appropriate. Augustine seeks, therefore, to guide choice by respecting choice. He does this through an appeal to reason: one might even say to common sense.
  • A peaceful faith—the only source of justice for Christians—can’t flourish without protection, whether through toleration, as in pre-Constantine Rome, or by formal edict, as afterward.20 The City of God is a fragile structure within the sinful City of Man. It’s this that leads Christians to entrust authority to selected sinners—we call it “politics”—and Augustine, for all his piety, is a political philosopher.
  • Augustine concluded that war, if necessary to save the state, could be a lesser evil than peace—and that the procedural prerequisites for necessity could be stated. Had provocation occurred? Had competent authority exhausted peaceful alternatives? Would the resort to violence be a means chosen, not an end in itself? Was the expenditure of force proportionate to its purposes, so that it wouldn’t destroy what it was meant to defend?
  • No one before Augustine, however, had set standards to be met by states in choosing war. This could be done only within an inclusionary monotheism, for only a God claiming universal authority could judge the souls of earthly rulers. And only Augustine, in his era, spoke so self-confidently for Him. The
  • Augustine’s great uncertainty was the status of souls in the City of Man, for only the fittest could hope to enter the City of God. Pre-Christian deities had rarely made such distinctions: the pagan afterlife was equally grim for heroes, scoundrels, and all in between.25 Not so, though, with the Christian God: behavior in life would make a huge difference in death. It was vital, then, to fight wars within rules. The stakes could hardly be higher.
  • Alignment, in turn, implies interdependence. Justice is unattainable in the absence of order, peace may require the fighting of wars, Caesar must be propitiated—perhaps even, like Constantine, converted—if man is to reach God. Each capability brings an aspiration within reach, much as Sun Tzu’s practices tether his principles, but what’s the nature of the tether? I think it’s proportionality: the means employed must be appropriate to—or at least not corrupt—the end envisaged. This, then, is Augustine’s tilt: toward a logic of strategy transcending time, place, culture, circumstance, and the differences between saints and sinners.
  • a more revealing distinction may lie in temperament: to borrow from Milan Kundera,37 Machiavelli found “lightness of being” bearable. For Augustine—perhaps because traumatized as a youth by a pear tree—it was unendurable.
  • “I judge that it might be true that fortune is arbiter of half our actions, but also that she leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern.” Fifty percent fortune, fifty percent man—but zero percent God. Man is, however precariously, on his own.
  • States, Machiavelli suggests, operate similarly. If governed badly, men’s rapacity will soon overwhelm them, whether through internal rebellion or external war. But if run with virtù—his untranslatable term for planning without praying40—states can constrain, if not in all ways control, the workings of fortune, or chance. The skills needed are those of imitation, adaptation, and approximation.
  • Machiavelli commends the study of history, “for since men almost always walk on paths beaten by others and proceed in their actions by imitation . . . , a prudent man should always enter upon the paths beaten by great men, and imitate those who have been most excellent, so that if his own virtue does not reach that far, it is at least in the odor of it.”
  • What, then, to do? It helped that Machiavelli and Berlin had lightness of being, for their answer is the same: don’t sweat it. Learn to live with the contradictions. Machiavelli shows “no trace of agony,” Berlin points out, and he doesn’t either:
  • Eternal truths have little to do with any of this, beyond the assurance that circumstances will change. Machiavelli knows, as did Augustine, that what makes sense in one situation may not in the next. They differ, though, in that Machiavelli, expecting to go to Hell, doesn’t attempt to resolve such disparities. Augustine, hoping for Heaven, feels personally responsible for them. Despite his afflictions, Machiavelli often sees comedy.42 Despite his privileges, Augustine carries a tragic burden of guilt. Machiavelli sweats, but not all the time. Augustine never stops.
  • “Lightness of being,” then, is the ability, if not to find the good in bad things, then at least to remain afloat among them, perhaps to swim or to sail through them, possibly even to take precautions that can keep you dry. It’s not to locate logic in misfortunes, or to show that they’re for the best because they reflect God’s will.
  • Augustine and Machiavelli agree that wars should be fought—indeed that states should be run—by pre-specifiable procedures. Both know that aspirations aren’t capabilities. Both prefer to connect them through checklists, not commandments.43
  • Augustine admits, which is why good men may have to seek peace by shedding blood. The greater privilege, however, is to avert “that calamity which others are under the necessity of producing.” Machiavelli agrees, but notes that a prince so infrequently has this privilege that if he wishes to remain in power he must “learn to be able not to be good,” and to use this proficiency or not use it “according to necessity.”51 As fits man’s fallen state, Augustine sighs. As befits man, Machiavelli simplifies.
  • As Machiavelli’s finest translator has put it: “[J]ustice is no more reasonable than what a person’s prudence tells him he must acquire for himself, or must submit to, because men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation.”53
  • princes need advisers. The adviser can’t tell the prince what to do, but he can suggest what the prince should know. For Machiavelli this means seeking patterns—across time, space, and status—by shifting perspectives. “[J]ust as those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains . . . and to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop mountains,
  • Machiavelli embraces, then, a utilitarian morality: you proportion your actions to your objective, not to progress from one nebulous city to another, but because some things have been shown to work and others haven’t.60
  • Who, then, will oversee them? They’ll do it themselves, Machiavelli replies, by balancing power. First, there’ll be a balance among states, unlike older Roman and Catholic traditions of universality. Machiavelli anticipates the statecraft of Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck,
  • But Machiavelli understands balancing in a second and subtler sense, conveyed more explicitly in The Discourses than in The Prince: [I]t is only in republics that the common good is looked to properly in that all that promotes it is carried out; and, however much this or that private person may be the loser on this account, there are so many who benefit thereby that the common good can be realized in spite of those few who suffer in consequence.64 This idea of an internal equilibrium within which competition strengthens community wouldn’t appear again until Adam Smith unveiled an “invisible hand” in The Wealth of Nations (1776), until the American Founding Fathers drafted and in The Federalist justified constitutional checks and balances (1787–88), and until Immanuel Kant linked republics, however distantly, with Perpetual Peace (1795).
  • Machiavelli’s great transgression, Berlin concluded, was to confirm what everyone knows but no one will admit: that ideals “cannot be attained.” Statecraft, therefore, can never balance realism against idealism: there are only competing realisms. There is no contest, in governing, between politics and morality: there is only politics. And no state respects Christian teaching on saving souls. The incompatibilities are irreconcilable. To deny this is, in Berlin’s words but in Machiavelli’s mind, to “vacillate, fall between two stools, and end in weakness and failure.”
  • And approximation? “[P]rudent archers,” Machiavelli points out, knowing the strength of their bow, “set their aim much higher than the place intended, not to reach such height with their arrow, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to achieve their plan.”41 For there will be deflection—certainly from gravity, perhaps from wind, who knows from what else? And the target itself will probably be moving.
  • Augustine’s City of God no longer exists on earth. The City of Man, which survives, has no single path to salvation. “[T]he belief that the correct, objectively valid solution to the question of how men should live can in principle be discovered,” Berlin finds, “is itself in principle not true.” Machiavelli thus split open the rock “upon which Western beliefs and lives had been founded.” It was he “who lit the fatal fuse.”
  • Machiavelli’s blood ran colder than was ordinary: he praised Cesare Borgia, for example, and he refused to condemn torture despite having suffered it (Augustine, never tortured, took a similar position).75 Machiavelli was careful, however, to apportion enormities: they should only forestall greater horrors—violent revolution, defeat in war, descent into anarchy, mass killing, or what we would today call “genocide.”
  • Berlin sees in this an “economy of violence,” by which he means holding a “reserve of force always in the background to keep things going in such a way that the virtues admired by [Machiavelli] and by the classical thinkers to whom he appeals can be protected and allowed to flower.”76 It’s no accident that Berlin uses the plural. For it comes closer than the singular, in English, to Machiavelli’s virtù, implying no single standard by which men must live.
  • “[T]here are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational,” Berlin insists, “capable of understanding . . . and deriving light from each other.” Otherwise, civilizations would exist in “impenetrable bubble[s],” incomprehensible to anyone on the outside. “Intercommunication between cultures in time and space is possible only because what makes men human is common to them, and acts as a bridge between them. But our values are ours, and theirs are theirs.”
  • Perhaps there are other worlds in which all principles are harmonized, but “it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.”77 By shattering certainty, Machiavelli showed how. “[T]he dilemma has never given men peace since it came to light,” Berlin lightly concludes, “but we have learnt to live with it.”
  • Posterity has long regarded Augustine and Machiavelli as pivots in the history of “western” thought because each, with enduring effects, shifted long-standing relationships between souls and states.
  • Philip promises obedience to God, not his subjects. Elizabeth serves her subjects, fitting God to their interests. The king, looking to Heaven, venerates. The queen, feet on earth, calculates. The differences test the ideas of Augustine and Machiavelli against the demands of statecraft at the dawn of the modern age.
  • Relishing opposites, the queen was constant only in her patriotism, her insistence on keeping ends within means, and her determination—a requirement for pivoting—never to be pinned down.
  • Pivoting requires gyroscopes, and Elizabeth’s were the best of her era. She balanced purposefulness with imagination, guile, humor, timing, and an economy in movement that, however extravagant her display, kept her steady on the tightrope she walked.
  • Machiavelli, thinking gyroscopically, advised his prince to be a lion and a fox, the former to frighten wolves, the latter to detect snares. Elizabeth went him one better by being lion, fox, and female, a combination the crafty Italian might have learned to appreciate. Philip was a grand lion, but he was only a lion.
  • princes can through conscientiousness, Machiavelli warned, become trapped. For a wise ruler “cannot observe faith, nor should he, when such observance turns against him, and the causes that made him promise have been eliminated. . . . Nor does a prince ever lack legitimate causes to color his failure to observe faith.”46
  • What we like to recall as the Elizabethan “golden age” survived only through surveillance and terror: that was another of its contradictions, maintained regretfully with resignation.
  • The queen’s instincts were more humane than those of her predecessors, but too many contemporaries were trying to kill her. “Unlike her sister, Elizabeth never burned men for their faith,” her recent biographer Lisa Hilton has written. “She tortured and hanged them for treason.”60 Toleration, Machiavelli might have said, had turned against Elizabeth. She wanted to be loved—who wouldn’t? It was definitely safer for princes, though, to be feared.
  • “The failure of the Spanish Armada,” Geoffrey Parker has argued, “laid the American continent open to invasion and colonization by northern Europeans, and thus made possible the creation of the United States.” If that’s right, then the future pivoted on a single evening—August 7, 1588—owing to a favorable wind, a clever lord admiral, and a few fiery ships. Had he succeeded, Philip would have required Elizabeth to end all English voyages to America.4
  • In contrast to Spain’s “new world” colonies—and to the territories that France, more recently, had claimed (but barely settled) along the banks of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—British America “was a society whose political and administrative institutions were more likely to evolve from below than to be imposed from above.”10 That made it a hodgepodge, but also a complex adaptive system.
  • The principles seem at odds—how can supremacies share?—but within that puzzle, the modern historian Robert Tombs has suggested, lay the foundations of England’s post-Stuart political culture: [S]uspicion of Utopias and zealots; trust in common sense and experience; respect for tradition; preference for gradual change; and the view that “compromise” is victory, not betrayal. These things stem from the failure of both royal absolutism and of godly republicanism: costly failures, and fruitful ones.
Javier E

Trump Tweets Attack on John McCain - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...585193

trump sick disorder

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • A culture lives or dies based on its allegiance to unwritten rules of conduct and unstated norms, on the signals sent about what kind of conduct constitutes good character and honor and what kind of conduct constitutes dishonor and corruption
  • But that reality can’t make us indifferent or cynical when it comes to holding those in authority to reasonable moral standards. After all, cultures are shaped by the words and deeds that leaders, including political leaders, validate or invalidate.
  • the other reason we should pay attention to the tweets and other comments by the president is that they are shafts of light that illuminate not only his damaged soul, but his disordered personality.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • It doesn’t take a person with an advanced degree in psychology to see Trump’s narcissism and lack of empathy, his vindictiveness and pathological lying, his impulsivity and callousness, his inability to be guided by norms, or his shamelessness and dehumanization of those who do not abide his wishes.
  • His condition is getting worse, not better—and there are now fewer people in the administration able to contain the president and act as a check on his worst impulses.
  • Whether the worst scenarios come to pass or not is right now unknowable. But what we do know is that the president is a person who seems to draw energy and purpose from maliciousness and transgressive acts, from creating enmity among people of different races, religions, and backgrounds, and from attacking the weak, the honorable, and even the dead.
Javier E

On gun violence, we are a failed state - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-9065-e55346f6de81_story.html

guns debate gop failed state crisis trump nra

shared by Javier E on 19 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • The surest sign a political regime is failing is its inability to do anything about a problem universally seen as urgent that has some obvious remedies. And it’s a mark of political corruption when unaccountable cliques block solutions that enjoy broad support and force their selfish interests to prevail over the common good.
  • On gun violence, the United States has become a corrupt failed state.
  • Whatever happens, we can’t ban assault weapons, we can’t strengthen background checks, we can’t do anything.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Memo to the media: Stop saying in somber, serious tones that we must do more about mental health. This might well be true, but in the context of crimes such as those at Stoneman Douglas High, offering such sentiments is to be complicit in propaganda by pretending that a cover story is actually on the leve
  • In no other country are the words “mental health” so empty. They are muttered by politicians who have no history of caring in the least about programs to help those with psychological or psychiatric difficulties. But they need to say something to rationalize their allegiance to a gun lobby that appears to be utterly indifferent to mass murder.
  • In corrupt failed states, politics is about lying and misdirection. On guns, our debate is a pack of lies and evasions. In no other country is the phrase “thoughts and prayers” a sacrilege, a cover for cowardice.
  • We should not have to point out over and over that while mental illness exists everywhere, other countries do not have killing sprees comparable to ours.
  • At the heart of our political system’s failure to address the epidemic of violence is the Republican Party’s decision to become a paid agent of the gun manufacturers’ lobby. The party of law and order cares about neither if doing so means causing the least disturbance to the National Rifle Association.
  • Aggravating our difficulty in regulating weapons is the vast overrepresentation of rural states in the U.S. Senate, which makes some Democrats wary of taking on the NRA. This is another classic problem of failed regimes: Their structures are no longer capable of responding to current needs.
knudsenlu

White House vows to help arm teachers and backs off raising age for buying guns - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html

guns teachers US history crisis culture trump

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The White House on Sunday vowed to help provide “rigorous firearms training” to some schoolteachers and formally endorsed a bill to tighten the federal background checks system, but it backed off President Trump’s earlier call to raise the minimum age to purchase some guns to 21 years old from 18 years old.
  • “We are committed to working quickly because there’s no time to waste,” she said on a conference call with reporters on Sunday evening. Invoking past mass school shootings, she continued, “No student, no family, no teacher and no school should have to live the horror of Parkland or Sandy Hook or Columbine again.”
  • “This plan is weak on security and an insult to the victims of gun violence,” Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) said in a statement. “When it comes to keeping our families safe, it’s clear that President Trump and Congressional Republicans are all talk and no action.”
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  • Trump has said he was personally moved by the shooting — and by the persistent and impassioned calls for action from some of the teenage survivors as well as parents of the victims — and elevated the issue of school safety in his administration. He has called for raising the minimum age for purchasing an AR-15 or similar-style rifles from 18 to 21 years old.
  • The administration will start working with states to provide “rigorous firearms training” to teachers and other school personnel who volunteer to be armed, said Andrew Bremberg, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. The White House has not proposed offering states new funding for this training.
  • Lastly, the administration wants to better integrate mental health, primary care and family services programs, and the president has ordered a full audit and review of the FBI tip line, he said. The FBI has said it ignored a warning that 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz might attack a school just weeks before he allegedly carried out the rampage in Parkland.
  • While some gun-control advocates welcomed the move, others argued that it would be better for Congress to pass legislation banning the devices. Federal officials had in years past concluded that they could not legally regulate bump stocks, and the new move to do so is likely to be met with lawsuits from manufacturers of the devices. The NRA does not oppose regulating bump stocks under existing law, but it does object to new legislation.
anonymous

White House proposes arming teachers, backpedals on raising age to buy guns - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

politics US crisis trump culture policy

shared by anonymous on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration on Sunday night proposed providing some school personnel with "rigorous" firearms training and backed a bill to improve criminal background checks on gun buyers, but backpedaled on the idea of increasing the minimum age to buy certain firearms -- a policy President Donald Trump had said he would support.
  • The proposals, which come more than three weeks after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, also include a plan to establish a commission chaired by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that will recommend policy and funding proposals for school violence prevention, including possible age restrictions on some firearms purchases. The commission does not have a set timeline of when it will report its findings, although an official said it would be within one year.
  • Trump first floated the idea of arming teachers and school officials after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month -- an idea that was met with immediate criticism.
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  • Federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, also will partner with states and local governments to support a public awareness campaign modeled on the department's "see something, say something" anti-terrorism campaign to encourage the awareness and reporting of suspicious activity, the administration announced.
  • Trump is proposing an expansion and overhaul of mental health programs, including those that help identify and treat those who may be a threat to themselves or others, the administration announced.
  • Trump is also calling for a review of the statutory and regulatory privacy protections to determine if any changes or clarifications are needed to improve coordination between mental health and other health care professionals, school officials, and law enforcement personnel.
  • The commission plans to focus on several areas, including age restrictions for certain firearm purchases; current entertainment rating systems; youth consumption of violent entertainment; best practices for school building and campus security and threat assessment and violence prevention; plans for integration and coordination of federal resources to help prevent and mitigate shootings at schools; and opportunities to improve access to mental health treatment, including through efforts to raise awareness of mental illness and the effectiveness of treatment.
  • While the congressman says the recommendations for congressional actions would be "a small, positive first step," he said he believes they are "insufficient."
knudsenlu

Why is the gun industry so afraid of the long arm of the law? | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-industry-lawsuits-protection

gun industry law Politics US history crisis

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • A 2005 law protects the companies from lawsuits over gun crime – but if the case against them is as weak as they claim, why do they need such coddling?
  • n the wake of the mass killing at a school in Parkland, Florida, Americans are again embroiled in a debate about guns, and the consensus (at least outside of Congress) seems to be that it’s beyond time for sensible and effective gun laws.
  • Less clear is what those laws might be. Which ones would be the most effective in preventing the kind of killing sprees to which Americans have grown far too accustomed? And which ones would prevent the thousands of deaths that don’t grab headlines, but still make the United States’ gun-slaughtered body count an outlier among peacetime nations? Some are obvious: banning the bump stocks that make it possible to turn a legal gun into what amounts to an automatic machine gun; barring convicted violent criminals and those with domestic violence restraining orders against them from owning guns; requiring robust background checks for every single gun purchase; and strengthening licensing requirements so that, like driving a car, anyone who owns a gun has to actually know how to use one. Perhaps less obvious, but just as important: treating gun manufacturers like any other company
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  • The question is what liability gun manufacturers or sellers have in making, marketing a selling a product that kills thousands every year, and whether, for example, they are negligent in selling weapons, like the AR-15, that many argue have no place outside of a combat zone and are predictable weapons of mass death.
  • And yet they seem awfully nervous about having to defend themselves in court. Yes, lawsuits are expensive and time-consuming, but gun manufacturers aren’t exactly vulnerable little guys. The American legal system has mechanisms in place for tossing out baseless lawsuits, and surely some brought against gun makers and sellers will be summarily tossed.
  • We don’t know a whole lot about how the gun industry deals with the violence, death and destruction its products bring about because the whole industry operates under a Congress-approved veil of secrecy. We do know that victims have been unjustly stymied, denied even the chance to have their voices heard in court. No good happens in the shadows, and no industry does the right thing if it’s permitted to operate partly outside of the law. Getting rid of the PLCAA won’t end gun violence. But it would let victims be heard, and it would bring a little transparency to the shadowy, coddled gun industry.
malonema1

James Fallows on the Reinvention of America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...556856

US history politics

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • After a several-year immersion in parts of the country that make the news mainly after a natural disaster or a shooting, or for follow-up stories on how the Donald Trump voters of 2016 now feel about Trump, I have a journalistic impulse similar to the one that dominated my years of living in China. That is the desire to tell people how much more is going on, in places they had barely thought about or even heard of, than they might have imagined.
  • At the time Deb and I were traveling, sociologists like Robert Putnam were documenting rips in the social fabric. We went to places where family stories matched the famous recent study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton, showing rising mortality among middle-aged whites without a college degree for reasons that include chronic disease, addiction, and suicide. In some of the same cities where we interviewed forward-moving students, civic leaders, and entrepreneurs, the photographer Chris Arnade was portraying people the economy and society had entirely left behind. The cities we visited faced ethnic and racial tensions, and were struggling to protect local businesses against chain stores and to keep their most promising young people from moving away. The great majority of the states and counties we spent time in ended up voting for Donald Trump.
  • Serious as the era’s problems are, more people, in more places, told us they felt hopeful about their ability to move circumstances the right way than you would ever guess from national news coverage of most political discourse. Pollsters have reported this disparity for a long time. For instance, a national poll that The Atlantic commissioned with the Aspen Institute at the start of the 2016 primaries found that only 36 percent of Americans thought the country as a whole was headed in the right direction. But in the same poll, two-thirds of Americans said they were satisfied with their own financial situation, and 85 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with their general position in life and their ability to pursue the American dream. Other polls in the past half-dozen years have found that most Americans believe the country to be on the wrong course—but that their own communities are improving.
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  • I make no pretense that our proposed answers to those questions are precise or scientific. We traveled as broadly as we could. We listened; we learned. We were looking for civic success stories, and we found them. But we also ended up in places where well-intentioned efforts had failed. So we steadily adjusted our conclusions. We ended up convinced that the national prospect is more promising than we’d felt before we started—full of possibilities that the bleak trench warfare of national politics inevitably obscures.
  • America is becoming more like itself again. More Americans are trying to make it so, in more places, than most Americans are aware. Even as the country is becoming worse in obvious ways—angrier, more divided, less able to do the basic business of governing itself—it is becoming distinctly better on a range of other indicators that are harder to perceive. The pattern these efforts create also remains hidden. Americans don’t realize how fast the country is moving toward becoming a better version of itself.
  • During the Pennsylvania part of Romney’s tour, which then went on to Ohio, we stayed in a cheap motel in the hard-luck coal-country town of Hazleton, where the median household income, in the low $30,000s, was much less than the national level of more than $50,000 and the unemployment rate, about 15 percent at the time, was much greater. The few visible signs of after-dark life were bodegas on downtown Wyoming Street, serving the city’s growing Latino population. When we got back from dinner at a small Mexican restaurant, we channel surfed to a local-access TV station and saw Lou Barletta, the longtime Republican mayor of Hazleton who had recently made it into Congress as part of the 2010 Tea Party wave, warn that ongoing immigration was a threat to Hazleton’s safety and quality of life. As mayor, Barletta had been a proto-Trump, championing a city ordinance that, among other anti-immigrant provisions, declared English the “official language” of Hazleton and required that official city business be conducted in English only. The measures were eventually tossed by federal courts.
  • Were we mistaking anecdotes and episodes for provable trends? This is the occupational hazard of journalism, and everyone in the business struggles toward the right balance of observation and data. But the logic of reporting is that something additional comes from traveling, asking, listening, seeing. This is particularly true in detecting a sense of changed course. A political movement, a new technological or business possibility—I have learned through the decades that enthusiasm in any of these realms does not guarantee world-changing success, but it’s an important marker. (The visionary California entrepreneurs I wrote about in the 1980s were confident that their Osborne and Kaypro computers would change the world. They were wrong. The visionary California entrepreneurs I met at Apple in those same years were confident that their dreams would come true. They were right.) And enthusiasm is what we have seen.
  • “Across the country, we’re seeing significant growth in local officials’ training for civic engagement, and the appearance of many new online platforms and other tools to connect citizens and their governments,” Pete Peterson, the dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, in California, told me. Peterson ran down a list of cities illustrating the effects of a new emphasis on engagement—starting, to my surprise, with the Los Angeles–area city of Bell. In 2010, Bell was the object of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times showing corruption in the city’s administration top to bottom. (For instance, the city manager of this small, low-income city had engineered pay for himself of well over $1 million a year.) The series was followed by arrests, trials, and prison sentences. “That city has seen nothing less than a civic renaissance, with new leadership and a public much more involved in the future of the city,” Peterson said. “It’s an amazing before-and-after illustration of what happens when people get engaged”—for example, involving citizens in decisions about what had been a notably secretive city-budgeting process.
  • In Wichita, Kansas; in Bend, Oregon; in Duluth, Minnesota; in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; in Fresno, we found people who had already worked in the most expensive and “elite” cities or who had been recruited for opportunities there, and decided instead that the overall life balance was better someplace smaller and less expensive. Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL and now the CEO of the technology-investment firm Revolution, has for several years led “Rise of the Rest” tours across the country to promote new tech businesses and support existing ones in places other than the famous tech centers. “For half a century, there’s been a brain drain, as people who grew up in the ‘rest of America’ left their hometowns for better opportunities elsewhere,” Case told me recently. Case himself grew up in Hawaii but built his companies in the Washington, D.C., area. “We’re starting to see less of that brain drain. We’re seeing more graduates stay in place, in cities like Pittsburgh or Columbus, and a boomerang of people returning to where they’re from—for lifestyle reasons, and because they can see that their communities are rising and opportunities are increasing, and they’d like to be part of what’s going on.”
  • There is of course evidence that this has happened, in the form of the bigotry that has been unleashed since 2017. In the months after Donald Trump took office, we checked back with communities where we’d met immigrants and refugees. Some places had seen a nasty shift, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and police became newly aggressive and local racists felt empowered. A few months before the election, we interviewed Catholic nuns and secular volunteers in Garden City, Kansas, who were bringing surplus food and medical supplies to poor households, many of whose members were immigrants working in the area’s vast beef-packing complex. A few months after the election, a white-extremist hate group in Garden City was arrested while plotting to blow up an apartment building where African immigrants and refugees lived. In Dodge City, we met and wrote about a rising, respected young city-government official named Ernestor de la Rosa. His parents had brought him to the U.S. from Mexico when he was a child, and he had stayed in the country as a “Dreamer,” on a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals waiver, while working toward an advanced degree at Wichita State. Trump carried Dodge City more than two to one. But people we spoke with there after the election said they never intended their preference in national politics to lead to the removal of trusted figures like de la Rosa.
runlai_jiang

Trump Bucks Republican Orthodoxy on Guns - Washington Wire - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...capital-journal-guns-thursd

gun control

shared by runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Photo: iStock/Getty Images By Joshua Jamerson Mar 1, 2018 7:18 am ET 0 COMMENTS Save Article Save Remove View Saved Articles <circ
  • He also dashed conservative hopes that he would support a move now for gun owners who legally carry concealed firearms in one state to carry them in the other 49 states, a long-sought goal of the National Rifle Association.
  • he bucked Republican orthodoxy by suggesting the swift removal of guns from people who are potentially mentally ill,
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • he continued to seek a legislative response to the deaths of 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., high school two weeks ago
  • His comments came the same day&nbsp;Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods–two of the country’s biggest gun sellers–said they both would no longer sell guns to anyone under 21 years old.
  • with Democrats saying they doubted the president’s words would yield immediate results, and several key Republicans saying they remained opposed to the Manchin-Toomey legislation that the president said he favored.&nbsp;
  • Mr. Trump has staked out positions on controversial issues in the past, only to surprise some lawmakers with an apparent change of heart later.
  • &nbsp;For more than 20 years, federal law has effectively halted the government’s ability to research gun violence. Now,&nbsp; a bipartisan group of lawmakers&nbsp;is taking another look at the restrictions…C
  • Hope Hicks, the longtime Trump confidant and White House communications director, is resigning. Ms. Hicks, 29 years old, told the president in recent weeks that she wanted to leave the White House to explore outside opportunities, Rebecca Ballhaus and Peter Nicholas report.
  • The bipartisan legislation would relax dozens of rules for small to medium-size banks, shaking up the banking sector with policy changes that could encourage deal-making and make it easier for banks to exp
  • several banks for information about their relationships with Jared Kushner and his finances, Emily Glazer, Erica Orden a
  • News of federal inquiries concerning Kushner Cos. has emerged in recent months, including by prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and by the Securities and Exchange Commission report
  • The Pentagon is pushing to make the F-35 combat jet cheaper and will take over some repair work to prevent the world’s most expensive military program from becoming unaffordable.
  • runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18
     
    Trump promised to restrict gun purchase but the reliability is still a question mark
runlai_jiang

'Like a pinball machine': Lawmakers struggle to negotiate with an erratic Trump - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-ae5a-16e60e4605f3_story.html

bipartisan meeting politics policy

shared by runlai_jiang on 05 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • As part of an effort to protect young “dreamers” from deportation in exchange for border wall funding, Trump convened a bipartisan meeting at the White House in January.
  • “It really suggests that his effectiveness is compromised as long as his word is unreliable.” Trump’s style poses challenges for members of both parties, observers say.
  • Fresh uncertainty about where Trump stands on guns came Friday as White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders fielded questions from reporters about whether the president remains committed to a proposal to raise the age to purchase rifles and shotguns to 21 from 18 — an idea opposed by the NRA.
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  • Sanders then offered a new twist, saying Trump thinks the idea probably has “more potential” at the state level than the federal level. (States already have the ability to set a higher age for such purchases. To date, only two — Illinois and Hawaii — have done so.)
  • Sanders also stressed that Trump does not necessarily support “universal” background checks, despite his use of that word previously. “Universal” can mean different things to different people, she said.
  • Others are less charitable, saying that Trump’s flexibility stems from a lack of deeply rooted convictions on many issues. “He’s going with the television headlines from day to day instead of following a policy strategy,”
  • When asked last week to assess Trump’s reliability as a negotiating partner, however, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) argued that Congress is the one charged with coming up with policy measures.
  • Besides stalled pushes on immigration and guns, Trump has also proposed significant investment in the country’s ailing infrastructure. But when Trump finally delivered a 53-page plan to Capitol Hill last month, the document was widely panned by Democrats and largely met with silence from the GOP.
  • Trump also initially pledged to leave Medicaid intact but later embraced cuts to the program, which provides health insurance to the poor.
  • Trump has since talked repeatedly about the importance of respecting the flag, but he has not pushed Congress to advance any legislation imposing consequences for its desecration.
  • He went to CPAC and was hailed as a conquering hero, and a week later, he moves to the left of many Democrats on gun control,” Heye said. Trump’s policy inconsistencies are sure to complicate and even stymie whatever legislative agenda he has this year, leaving a vacuum of policy details that lawmakers then attempt to fill.
  • I knew walking out of that meeting that the White House was going to have to dial back some of what the president said,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said. “The president’s sort of lack of policy foundation allows him to flow where he thinks where the country is going.”
  • “The president has two powers under the Constitution: One is to sign legislation. One is to veto legislation,” he said. “Obviously, he’s important. But the executive is not the primary policymaker. It’s the Congress.”
  • runlai_jiang on 05 Mar 18
     
    Trump's unreliability led to different opinions of the bipartisan participants in a meeting that he just held.
Javier E

Coronavirus Contact Tracing: Apple and Google Team Up to Enable Virus Tracking - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ronavirus-contact-tracing.html

tracing contact tracking tech pandemic crisis apple google

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The technology giants said they would embed a feature in iPhones and Android devices to enable users to track infected people they’d come close to.
  • The technology giants said they were teaming up to release the tool within several months, building it into the operating systems of the billions of iPhones and Android devices around the world. That would enable the smartphones to constantly log other devices they come near, enabling what is known as “contact tracing” of the disease. People would opt in to use the tool and voluntarily report if they became infected.
  • underscores the seriousness of the health crisis and the power of the two companies whose software runs almost every smartphone in the world. Apple and Google said their joint effort came together in just the last two weeks.
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  • With the tool, people infected with the coronavirus would notify a public health app that they have it, which would then alert phones that had recently come into proximity with that person’s device. The companies would need to get public-health authorities to agree to link their app to the tool.
  • There are already third-party tools for contact tracing, including from public health authorities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In March, the government of Singapore introduced a similar coronavirus contact-tracing app, called TraceTogether, that detects mobile phones that are nearby.
  • One challenge for third-party apps is that they must run constantly — 24 hours a day, seven days a week — to be effective. Google said some Android smartphone manufacturers shut down those applications to save battery life.
  • Apple and Google said their tool would also constantly run in the background if people opt to use it, logging nearby devices through the short-range wireless technology Bluetooth. But it would eat up less battery life and be more reliable than third-party apps, they said.
  • “This data could empower members of the general population to make informed decisions about their own health in terms of self-quarantining,” said Dr. Reid. “But it doesn’t replace the public health imperative that we scale up contact tracing in the public health departments” around the world.
  • Other phones will constantly check those servers for the broadcast beacons of devices they had come near in the past 14 days. If there is a match, those people will receive an alert that they had likely come into contact with an infected person.
  • Apple and Google said they were discussing how much information to include in those alerts with health officials, aiming to strike a balance between being helpful while also protecting the privacy of those who have the coronavirus.
  • Once someone reports his or her infection to a public-health app, the tool will send the phone’s so-called broadcast beacons, or anonymous identifiers connected to the device, to central computer servers.
  • Apple and Google said they would make the tool’s underlying technology available to third-party apps by mid-May and publicly release the tool “in the coming months.” The companies said the tool would not collect devices’ locations — it only tracked proximity to other devices — and would keep people anonymous in the central servers.
  • The European Commission, the executive of the 27-nation bloc, said on Wednesday that “a fragmented and uncoordinated approach risks hampering the effectiveness” of such apps.
  • “The danger is, as you roll out these voluntary solutions and they gain adoption, it’s more likely that they are going to become compulsory,” said Mr. Soltani, a former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission.
krystalxu

These members of the Liberal Gun Club say they can be both left-leaning and support gun rights - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...story

support gun liberal club

shared by krystalxu on 25 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • They’re called the Liberal Gun Club, just one of a number of left-leaning gun clubs now in operation, who seem to support less gun restrictions and agree with the NRA on some points.
  • After giving it a try, researching the issue and having too many arguments with her gun-loving, former Marine husband, Ed Smith, she changed her views.
  • Members of the Liberal Gun Club say they also face some flak from liberal friends and coworkers.
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  • Lara and Ed Smith said they think it makes sense to have background checks when you purchase your first firearm.
draneka

'It looks like we're afraid of foreigners': Army turns away some green-card holders - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...s-away-some-green-card-holders

politics

shared by draneka on 19 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The U.S. Army has stopped enlisting some immigrants who are legal&nbsp;permanent residents&nbsp;while mandating lengthy delays for others,&nbsp;part of a controversial effort across the military to tighten security in the ranks by subjecting&nbsp;foreign-born recruits to tougher background checks.
  • “If you’re going to be deployed in more than 100 countries to fight a global war, you can’t be afraid of foreigners.”
  • Those citizens have a legal right to enlist, said Stock, who is an immigration attorney.
rerobinson03

Opinion | Why America Can't Fix Its Gun Violence Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-gun-violence.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • We know what causes America’s gun violence problem. Why can’t we seem to do anything about it? Here are some of the most popular and persuasive explanations.
  • In the minds of many gun control proponents, American life has become — or perhaps always was — a zero-sum game in which one party’s freedom to exist in peace has lost out to another’s prerogative to kill. In this view, mass death is simply the cost gun owners are willing to inflict on the country for the right to bear arms.
  • he different stories Americans tell themselves about the roots of gun violence preclude shared understanding: As long as they disagree about the cause of the problem, they will disagree about how to fix it. “Given the significant proportion of citizens who own guns,” the authors conclude, “the prospect for policy changes that address gun‐related causes of mass shootings is unlikely.”
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  • Already a counter-majoritarian institution, the Senate was made even more so by the rise of the modern filibuster in the 20th century, which allows a minority to block majority-supported legislation. That means most substantive legislation must get 60 votes in the Senate to pass — often an exceedingly difficult threshold to reach.
  • It was a statement that exemplified a common strain of thought among gun control proponents, one that casts the N.R.A. as the sine qua non of our national deadlock on the issue. As my colleague Nicholas Kristof has explained, the N.R.A. used to be a more moderate organization: It favored tighter gun laws in the 1920s and 1930s, and as recently as the 1960s supported — albeit more grudgingly — some limits on guns.
  • “The N.R.A. is powerful for precisely the reason most potent progressive organizations are powerful,” David French has written in National Review. “Like those progressive counterparts, the N.R.A. is an effective part of a larger community, and it is effective precisely because it persuasively expresses the will of its members and allies.” In his view, the N.R.A. does not manipulate people into supporting gun rights; rather, it reflects and channels the desires of people who already do
  • Gun control proponents often argue that the Second Amendment was meant to protect the right of state militias, not individuals, to bear arms. This interpretation is disputed by gun rights proponents, but not exclusively: The historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who favors the Second Amendment’s repeal, has argued that it was expressly designed to enshrine not only the right but also the obligation of individual colonial settlers to violently appropriate Native land and to control Black populations, both free and enslaved.
  • This interpretive turn has led to calls for the Second Amendment’s repeal, including from the retired justice John Paul Stevens. Justice Stevens was one of the four dissenters in the Heller case, whose ruling he believed could be overturned only with a new constitutional amendment that voided the second. Doing so, he wrote in The Times in 2018, “would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”
  • But none of them — not universal background checks, not red flag laws, not even a ban on assault-style weapons — would confront the core issue: America simply has too many guns.That is the view of Mr. Lopez, who contends that stamping out gun violence would require a Green New Deal-size plan that offers solutions at the scale of the problem. “If the key difference between America and other countries is how many more guns the U.S. has, then something has to be done to quickly reduce the number of firearms here,” he writes. “It could mean banning more types of guns — perhaps all semiautomatic weapons or all handguns — and coupling that with an Australian-style mandatory buyback program, which the research supports.”
ethanshilling

President Joe Biden's First News Conference - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-news-today

US Politics biden conference

shared by ethanshilling on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden will face reporters in his first formal news conference Thursday afternoon, using the stately backdrop of the White House to promote the benefits of his economic recovery efforts, call for action on gun control and respond to criticism about his handling of the border with Mexico.
  • It will be Mr. Biden’s first high-stakes grilling by reporters since taking office more than two months ago. Since then, his advisers have carefully controlled his interactions with the press, which have included one-on-one interviews and some limited opportunities for reporters to ask questions during brief appearances.
  • In the wake of two mass shootings in a week, the president will probably be asked why gun control has not been a more pressing priority for his administration.
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  • Mr. Biden said this week that Congress should tighten background checks for gun buyers and renew the ban on assault weapons, which expired years ago.
  • Mr. Biden has said that responding to the coronavirus crisis is his No. 1 responsibility. In recent months, the numbers of cases and deaths have fallen, in part because of the accelerating pace of vaccinations.
  • The president campaigned on reversing former President Donald J. Trump’s immigration agenda, and he moved quickly to do so during his first hours in office.
  • Reporters will most likely press Mr. Biden on how he intends to resolve the immediate issue of border facilities crowded with children.
  • The administration is poised to announce sanctions on Russia for a series of actions, including the SolarWinds cyberattack, which compromised U.S. government agencies and companies.
  • Fresh off passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which is intended to help the economy recover and to finance the virus response, Mr. Biden is expected to soon propose another round of spending on climate change and infrastructure repairs that could total an additional $3 trillion.
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