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Javier E

How Will the Coronavirus Change Us? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...610558

pandemic effects history crisis culture politics

shared by Javier E on 07 May 20 - No Cached
  • Although medical data from the time are too scant to be definitive, its first attack is generally said to have occurred in Kansas in March 1918, as the U.S. was stepping up its involvement in the First World War.
  • Estimates of the final death toll range from 17 million to 100 million, depending on assumptions about the number of uncounted victims. Almost 700,000 people are thought to have died in the United States—as a proportion of the population, equivalent to more than 2 million people today.
  • Garthwaite matched NHIS respondents’ health conditions to the dates when their mothers were probably exposed to the flu. Mothers who got sick in the first months of pregnancy, he discovered, had babies who, 60 or 70 years later, were unusually likely to have diabetes; mothers afflicted at the end of pregnancy tended to bear children prone to kidney disease. The middle months were associated with heart disease.
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  • Other studies showed different consequences. Children born during the pandemic grew into shorter, poorer, less educated adults with higher rates of physical disability than one would expect
  • the microorganisms likely killed more people than the war did. And their effects weren’t confined to European battlefields, but spread across the globe, emptying city streets and filling cemeteries on six continents.
  • Unlike the war, the flu was incomprehensible—the influenza virus wasn’t even identified until 1931. It inspired fear of immigrants and foreigners, and anger toward the politicians who played down the virus
  • killed more men than women, skewing sex ratios for years afterward. Can one be sure that the ensuing, abrupt changes in gender roles had nothing to do with the virus?
  • the accompanying flood of anti-Semitic violence. As it spread through Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the Low Countries, it left behind a trail of beaten cadavers and burned homes.
  • In northern Italy, landlords tended to raise wages, which fostered the development of a middle class. In southern Italy, the nobility enacted decrees to prevent peasants from leaving to take better offers. Some historians date the separation in fortunes of the two halves of Italy—the rich north, the poor south—to these decisions.
  • When the Black Death began, the English Plantagenets were in the middle of a long, brutal campaign to conquer France. The population losses meant such a rise in the cost of infantrymen that the whole enterprise foundered. English nobles did not occupy French châteaus. Instead they stayed home and tried to force their farmhands to accept lower wages. The result, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, nearly toppled the English crown. King Richard II narrowly won out, but the monarchy’s ability to impose taxes, and thus its will, was permanently weakened.
  • The coronavirus is hitting societies that regarded deadly epidemics as things of the past, like whalebone corsets and bowler hats.
  • The American public has not enjoyed its surprise reentry into the world of contagion and quarantine—and this unhappiness seems likely to have consequences.
  • People sought new sources of authority, finding them through direct personal experience with the world and with God.
  • With the supply of European workers suddenly reduced and the demand for labor relatively unchanged, medieval landowners found themselves in a pickle: They could leave their grain to rot in the fields, or they could abandon all sense of right and wrong and raise wages enough to attract scarce workers
  • Within a few decades, Cohn wrote, hysteria gave way to sober observation. Medical tracts stopped referring to conjunctions of Saturn and prescribed more earthly cures: ointments, herbs, methods for lancing boils. Even priestly writings focused on the empirical. “God was not mentioned,” Cohn noted. The massacres of Jews mostly stopped.
  • the lesson seems more that humans confronting unexpected disaster engage in a contest for explanation—and the outcome can have consequences that ripple for decades or centuries.
  • Columbus’s journey to the Americas set off the worst demographic catastrophe in history
  • Somewhere between two-thirds and nine-tenths of the people in the Americas died. Many later European settlers, like my umpteen-great-grandparents, believed they were coming to a vacant wilderness. But the land was not empty; it had been emptied—a world of loss encompassed in a shift of tense.
  • Absent the diseases, it is difficult to imagine how small groups of poorly equipped Europeans at the end of very long supply chains could have survived and even thrived in the alien ecosystems of the Americas
  • “I fully support banning travel from Europe to prevent the spread of infectious disease,” the Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle remarked after President Trump announced his plan to do this. “I just think it’s 528 years too late.”
  • a possible legacy of Hong Kong’s success with SARS is that its citizens seem to put more faith in collective action than they used to
  • The result will be, among other things, a test of how much contemporary U.S. society values the elderly.
  • The speed with which pundits emerged to propose that the U.S. could more easily tolerate a raft of dead oldsters than an economic contraction indicates that the reservoir of appreciation for today’s elders is not as deep as it once was
  • the 2003 SARS epidemic in Hong Kong. That epidemic, which killed about 300 people, was stopped only by heroic communal efforts. (As a percentage of the population, the equivalent U.S. death toll would be about 15,000.)
  • For Native peoples, the U-shaped curve was as devastating as the sheer loss of life. As an indigenous archaeologist once put it to me, the epidemics simultaneously robbed his nation of its future and its past: the former, by killing all the children; the latter, by killing all the elders, who were its storehouses of wisdom and experience.
  • Past societies mourned the loss of collective memory caused by epidemics. Ours may not, at least at first.
cdavistinnell

Saudi Arabia moves: 24 hours that shook the Middle East - CNN - 0 views

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

Saudi Arabia terrorist missile Middle East Iran Lebanon Israel

shared by cdavistinnell on 07 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • A 24-hour sequence of political bombshells began on Saturday afternoon, when Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced his resignation from the Saudi capital of Riyadh, blindsiding his country's political establishment. Hours later, Saudi Arabia's official news agency reported that the country's military had intercepted a Yemen-borne ballistic missile over Riyadh.
  • Some of Saudi Arabia's most high-profile princes and businessmen were being sacked and detained in an anti-corruption drive led by bin Salman.
  • The events serve as an opening salvo for a new period in the region's crisis-ridden history, analysts say.
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  • "I think the end of ISIS, the so-called Islamic State, does not really mean the end of geostrategic struggles," London School of Economics Professor Fawaz Gerges told CNN's George Howell.
  • "I want to tell Iran and its followers that they are losing their interferences in the Arab nation affairs. Our nation will rise just as it did before and the hands that want to harm it will be cut,"
  • Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the remarks were a "wake-up call" to "take action" against Iran.
  • The missile launch was the first time the heart of the Saudi capital has been attacked.
Javier E

Trump Tax Plan Benefits Wealthy, Including Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wealthy-middle-class-poor.html

tax trump plan economic politics policy

shared by Javier E on 28 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • It’s a venerable principle that lower tax rates encourage corporate investment. But a study of a 2003 cut in the tax rate on corporate dividends found no discernible impact on investment. The finding would not have surprised Mr. Bush’s Treasury secretary at the time, Paul O’Neill, who was fired for opposing the plan. “You find somebody who says, ‘I do more R & D because I get a tax credit for it,’ you’ll find a fool,” Mr. O’Neill, a former Alcoa chairman, said at the time.
  • Mr. Trump’s plan also continues a long-term march away from progressive taxation. The federal income tax is the centerpiece of a longstanding bipartisan consensus that wealthy Americans should pay an outsize share of the cost of government.
  • But successive rounds of tax cuts have eroded that premise
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  • In 1980, the wealthiest Americans paid 59 percent of their income in taxes while the middle 20 percent of Americans paid 24.5 percent. After the Bush tax cuts, the wealthiest Americans paid 34.7 percent of their income in taxes, while Americans in the middle income brackets paid 16.1 percent.
  • Under President Barack Obama, Congress increased taxation of upper-income households. Mr. Trump is seeking to resume the long-term trend toward flattening the curve. Upper-income households would get large tax cuts; lower-income households would get none.
  • The administration said Wednesday that it was committed “to ensure that the reformed tax code is at least as progressive as the existing tax code.” That language, however, applies only to personal income taxes. The proposed reduction of business taxes and the elimination of the estate tax would both disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans.
abbykleman

Activists Rush to Save Government Science Data - If They Can Find It - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-data-rescue-science.html

shared by abbykleman on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 11 Mar 17
     
    But concern about the vulnerability of scientific information has also focused attention on a nonpartisan problem of digital-age government: Much of the scientific information so painstakingly collected over the decades, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, remains held only by the government, scattered on thousands of servers in hundreds of departments where it may not be backed up and could be impossible to find.
davisem

'Bomb violence with mercy': anti-terror ad goes viral in Middle East | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rror-ad-goes-viral-middle-east

shared by davisem on 30 May 17 - No Cached
  • A Ramadan TV ad by a Middle Eastern telecommunications company in which victims of terrorism confront a suicide bomber and urge society to “bomb violence with mercy” has provoked a heated debate in the region, with some praising its attempt to tackle extremism and others criticising it for using victims of bombings and a simplistic portrayal of terrorists.
  • As the suicide bomber travels to his destination, he is confronted by victims of terrorism, covered in blood and dirt, including a child actor playing the role of Omran Daqneesh, the child from Aleppo whose bloodied image after he survived an airstrike by the Syrian government was seen around the world.
  • The Zain spot faced criticism from social media users even as some praised its tackling of a sensitive topic, with many Syrians condemning its use of an actor to play Omran, pointing out that the boy was wounded in an airstrike by the regime of Bashar al-Assad rather than in an attack by Muslim extremists.
krystalxu

US Sanctions on Iran: Good or Bad News for China? | The Diplomat - 0 views

thediplomat.com/...ran-good-or-bad-news-for-china

US politics crisis policy trump sanctions Iran China Diplomat

shared by krystalxu on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The sanctions list includes three separate networks linked to supporting Iran’s missile program, which the U.S. opposes.
  • He told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in March that the JCPOA was “catastrophic for America, Israel, and the whole of the Middle East.”
  • China’s economic relations with Iran were largely untouched by the series of U.S. sanctions adopted by Trump’s predecessors over the past decade.
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  • some Chinese believe the new sanctions will create valuable opportunities for China’s interests in the Middle East.
  • The Iranians, while valuing China’s economic relations with their country during the past few years of intense sanctions, now hope to establish new connections with the West to get more advanced technology and management skills.
  • Besides the economic challenge for China, the more serious and long-term challenge is political.
  • it will be a challenge for China to decide whom to support.
  • sentiments after the new round of sanctions may push China into an embarrassing international position.
  • For China, the U.S. sanction may become big challenges, not only to China-U.S. relation, but also to China’s relations with Iran and to the OBOR initiative in the Middle East.
krystalxu

China - Trade | history - geography | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Trade

China history culture trade economics economic

shared by krystalxu on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Trade has become an increasingly important part of China’s overall economy, and it has been a significant tool used for economic modernization.
  • In 1965 China’s trade with other socialist countries made up only about one-third of the total.
  • The principal efforts were made in Asia—especially to Indonesia, Burma (Myanmar), Pakistan, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka)—but large loans were also granted in Africa (Ghana, Algeria, Tanzania) and in the Middle East (Egypt).
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  • Taiwan also has become an important trading partner.
  • The lowest unit is the enterprise union committee. Individual trade unions also operate at the provincial level, and there are trade union councils that coordinate all union activities within a particular area and operate at county, municipal, and provincial levels. At
  • The great bulk of China’s exports consists of manufactured goods, of which electrical and electronic machinery and equipment and clothing, textiles, and footwear are by far the most important.
  • Women have been a major labour presence in China since the People’s Republic was established. Some two-fifths of all women over age 15 are employed.
  • Regionally, almost half of China’s imports come from East and Southeast Asia, and some one-fourth of its exports go to the same countries.
  • From the 1950s to the ’80s, the central government’s revenues derived chiefly from the profits of the state enterprises, which were remitted to the state.
  • More recently, however, reforms of the social security system have involved moving the responsibility for pensions and other welfare to the provinces.
  • All parts of China, except certain remote areas of Tibet, are accessible by rail, road, water, or air.
  • The construction of these smaller railways is encouraged by the central government, and technical assistance is provided by the state railway system when it is thought that the smaller railways can stimulate regional economic development.
  • Coal has long been the principal railway cargo.
  • Since the late 1950s there has been a change in railway-construction policy.
  • Since 1960 hundreds of thousands of workers have been mobilized to construct major lines in the northwest and southwest.
  • These projects, which were coordinated on a national level, contrast to the pattern prevailing before World War II, when foreign-financed railroads were built in different places without any attempt to coordinate or standardize the transport and communications system.
  • A major new line runs southward from Beijing to Kowloon (Hong Kong) via Fuyang and Nanchang and eases strain on the other north-south trunk lines.
  • Of the three highways, one runs westward across Sichuan into Tibet; another extends southwestward from Qinghai to Tibet; and the third runs southward from Xinjiang to Tibet.
  • By the 1980s many vehicles, especially automobiles, were imported. Domestic automobile manufacture grew rapidly after 1990 as individual car ownership became increasingly possible, and it emerged as one of China’s major industries. Several foreign companies have established joint ventures with Chinese firms.
aleija

Americans Are Finally Eating Less - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-are-finally-eating-less.html

health US culture

shared by aleija on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • After decades of worsening diets and sharp increases in obesity, Americans’ eating habits have begun changing for the better.
  • Calories consumed daily by the typical American adult, which peaked around 2003, are in the midst of their first sustained decline since federal statistics began to track the subject, more than 40 years ago. The number of calories that the average American child takes in daily has fallen even more — by at least 9 percent.
  • More than a third of American adults are still considered obese, putting them at increased risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
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  • Americans are still eating far too few fruits and vegetables and far too much junk food, even if they are eating somewhat less of it, experts say.
  • By 2003, 60 percent of Americans said they wanted to lose weight, according to Gallup, up from 52 percent in 1990 and 35 percent in the 1950s.
  • Consumption of fruits and vegetables remains low; consumption of desserts remains high. Instead, people appear to be eating a little less of everything. Although consumption in nearly every category has been “cut some,” said Mr. Popkin, “the food part of our diet is horrendous and remains horrendous.”
aleija

U.S. life expectancy: Americans are dying young at alarming rates - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-8397-a955cd542d00_story.html

health US culture

shared by aleija on 26 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Despite spending more on health care than any other country, the United States has seen increasing mortality and falling life expectancy for people ages 25 to 64, who should be in the prime of their lives. In contrast, other wealthy nations have generally experienced continued progress in extending longevit
  • Although earlier research emphasized rising mortality among non-Hispanic whites in the U.S., the broad trend detailed in this study cuts across gender, racial and ethnic lines. By age group, the highest relative jump in death rates from 2010 to 2017 — 29 percent — has been among people ages 25 to 34.
  • About a third of the estimated 33,000 “excess deaths” that the study says occurred since 2010 were in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana — the first two of which are critical swing states in presidential elections. The state with the biggest percentage rise in death rates among working-age people in this decade — 23.3 percent — is New Hampshire, the first primary state.
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  • “It’s supposed to be going down, as it is in other countries,” said the lead author of the report, Steven H. Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “The fact that that number is climbing, there’s something terribly wrong.”
  • The opioid epidemic is a major driver of the worrisome numbers, but far from the sole cause. The study found that improvements in life expectancy, largely because of lower rates of infant mortality, began to slow in the 1980s, long before the opioid epidemic became a national tragedy
  • Some of it may be due to obesity, some of it may be due to drug addiction, some of it may be due to distracted driving from cellphones
  • Given the breadth and pervasiveness of the trend, “it suggests that the cause has to be systemic, that there’s some root cause that’s causing adverse health across many different dimensions for working-age adults.”
  • The risk of death from drug overdoses increased 486 percent for midlife women between 1999 and 2017; the risk increased 351 percent for men in that same period. Women also experienced a bigger relative increase in risk of suicide and alcohol-related liver disease.
  • The all-cause death rate — meaning deaths per 100,000 people — rose 6 percent from 2010 to 2017 among working-age people in the United States
  • There’s something more fundamental about how people are feeling at some level — whether it’s economic, whether it’s stress, whether it’s deterioration of family,” she said. “People are feeling worse about themselves and their futures, and that’s leading them to do things that are self-destructive and not promoting health.”
  • . The general trend: Life expectancy improved a great deal for several decades, particularly in the 1970s, then slowed down, leveled off, and finally reversed course after 2014, decreasing three years in a row.
  • Obesity is a significant part of the story. The average woman in America today weighs as much as the average man half a century ago, and men now weigh about 30 pounds more
  • Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton, whose much-publicized report in 2015 highlighted the death rates in middle-aged whites, published a paper in 2017 pointing to a widening gap in health associated with levels of education, a trend dating to the 1970s. Case told reporters their research showed a “sea of despair” in the United States among people with only a high school diploma or less. She declined to comment on the new report.
  • “When they get up into their 20s, 30s and 40s, they’re carrying the risk factors of obesity that were acquired when they were children. We didn’t see that in previous generations.”
  • Most people in the United States are overweight — an estimated 71.6 percent of the population ages 20 and older, according to the CDC. That figure includes the 39.8 percent who are obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher in adults (18.5 to 25 is the normal range). Obesity is also rising in children; nearly 19 percent of the population ages 2 to 19 is obese.
  • The average life expectancy in the United States fell behind that of other wealthy countries in 1998 and since then, the gap has grown steadily. Experts refer to this gap as America’s “health disadvantage.”
  • Death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, liver disease and dozens of other causes have been rising over the past decade for young and middle-aged adults, driving down overall life expectancy in the United States for three consecutive years, according to a strikingly bleak study published Tuesday that looked at the past six decades of mortality data.
  • The 33,000 excess deaths are an estimate based on the number of all-cause midlife deaths from 2010 to 2017 that would be expected if mortality was unchanged vs. the number of deaths actually recorded by medical examiners.
  • Outside researchers praised the study for knitting together so much research into a sweeping look at U.S. mortality trends.“This report has universal relevance. It has broad implications for all of society,” said Howard Koh, a professor of public health at Harvard University who was not part of the research team.
  • The average life expectancy in the United States fell behind that of other wealthy countries in 1998, and since then the gap has grown steadily. Experts refer to this gap as the United States’ “health disadvantage.”
  • For example, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, cigarette companies aggressively marketed to women, and the health effects of that push may not show up for decades.
  • Obesity is a significant part of the story. The average woman in the United States today weighs as much as the average man half a century ago, and men now weigh about 30 pounds more. Most people in the United States are overweight — an estimated 71.6 percent of the population age 20 and older, according to the CDC. That figure includes the 39.8 percent who are obese, defined as having a body mass index of 30 or higher in adults (18.5 to 25 is the normal range). Obesity is also rising in children; nearly 19 percent of the population age 2 to 19 is obese.
katherineharron

Cuomo, Newsom and Trump's early pandemic praise vanished - CNNPolitics - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 13 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Nearly a year ago, New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that all nonessential workers in the state would have to stay home. The announcement was one of many that marked the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
  • But, just as history has shown us time and time again, a year turned out to be a lifetime in their political careers
  • Cuomo, Newsom and Trump all experienced classic examples of a rally-around-the-flag event. When a crisis hits, constituents give their leading politicians bumps in the polls. These bumps rarely ever last -- a lesson all three of these politicians have now learned. Cuomo was probably seen as the biggest hero of the early days of the pandemic. He gave daily news conferences that became must-see television for many. He even wrote a book about leadership.
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  • Cuomo's favorable rating jumped to 77%. Just two months earlier, his favorable rating had been 44% -- a paltry figure for a Democrat from a blue state. close dialogThe world is watching as the Biden administration takes office.Get updates on US politics delivered to your inbox daily. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.The world is watching as the Biden administration takes office.Get updates on US politics delivered to your inbox daily. Please enter aboveSign Me UpBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Success! See you in your inbox.</
  • California was one of the earliest states hit in the pandemic, and most voters applauded Newsom's response. His approval rating among likely voters in Public Policy Institute of California polling topped out at 64% in May 2020. That was up from 52% in February 2020 and 49% in January 2020. Newsom, though, has been criticized for how he handled lockdowns and business and school reopenings during the last year
  • His favorable rating is down to 44% and a mere 36% of voters want him to run for reelection, according to a March Quinnipiac University poll. The one piece of good news for Cuomo is that most Democrats (60%) have a favorable view of the governor, a slim majority (50%) want him to run again in 2022 and just 21% want him to resign.
  • More prominently, Cuomo is dealing with multiple allegations of inappropriate behavior toward women. The attorney general's office is investigating the claims, and the state Assembly speaker has allowed an impeachment investigation to begin. Many state and federal officials are calling on Cuomo to resign.
  • Still, the fact that Newsom is facing a recall and that his approval rating is averaging only about 50% right now is not a great position for a Democrat in California. Of course, both Cuomo and Newsom are in better political shape than Trump. While Trump ended up losing the election, at least in part to his response to the pandemic, voters actually had rallied around him early.
  • By the summer, Trump's overall approval rating dropped into the low 40s. He consistently low on who would better handle the pandemic compared with Democrat Joe Biden, who's now president. Indeed, Trump may very well have won the election without the pandemic. His approval rating on the economy was better than that of any of the incumbents who had lost in the last 45 years before him.
katherineharron

US Coronavirus: Michigan's Covid-19 crisis could be a sign of what's to come for the US, expert says - CNN - 0 views

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

covid

shared by katherineharron on 12 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • As the US races to vaccinate more Americans, Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations are rising, predominantly among younger people who haven't yet gotten a shot.
  • Some experts worry this might only be the start of what's to come in the next weeks. Michigan is already in the middle of a violent surge
  • "Michigan is really the bellwether for what it looks like when the B.1.1.7 variant ... spreads in the United States," Dr. Celine Gounder told CNN on Sunday. "It's causing a surge in cases and it's causing more severe disease, which means that even younger people, people in their 30s, 40s and 50s are getting very sick and being hospitalized from this."
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  • Michigan's surge is a combination of two factors, Gounder says: the spread of the B.1.1.7 variant combined with people relaxing on mitigation measures before enough residents are vaccinated.
  • Florida has the highest number of cases of the variant, followed by Michigan, Minnesota and Massachusetts, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • Experts say it's more contagious, may cause more severe disease and may potentially be more deadly. And it's rapidly spreading across the country.
  • Here's why: It takes about two weeks after the Pfizer and Moderna second doses and about two weeks after the Johnson &amp; Johnson vaccine before people are immune, she said. Meanwhile, Gounder added, "the incubation period, which is the time from when you are exposed to when you are infected with coronavirus, is four to five days."close dialogSign up for the Results Are In NewsletterGet the latest expert advice to live a healthier and happier lifeSign me upNo, ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourPrivacy PolicySign up for the Results Are In NewsletterGet the latest expert advice to live a healthier and happier lifePlease enter aboveSign me upNo, ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourPrivacy PolicyYou have successfully subscribed.By subscribing you agree to ourPrivacy Policyclose dialog
  • "So there is no way that a surge in vaccination is going to help curb this when transmission is happening right now," she said.
  • the only thing that will curb transmission right now are measures that take effect immediately.
  • Michigan is now reporting thousands of new Covid-19 cases daily, when just weeks ago, state data showed the daily reported case count was as low as 563 cases.
  • "Hospitals are being inundated," Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, told CNN. "Michigan needs to shut down."
rerobinson03

Opinion | How Joe Biden Can Win a Nobel Peace Prize - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-hamas-biden.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 24 May 21 - No Cached
  • The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, led by Abu Mazen, was dealt a significant blow when President Donald Trump last year managed to get the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan to each normalize relations with Israel — without waiting for a Palestinian-Israeli peace deal.
  • Israel managed to keep a lid on all of it. But it is not hard to imagine, had it continued or if it flares up again, that this would severely stress Israel’s army and police and economy. Israel has not faced that kind of multi-front threat since the Jewish state was founded in 1948.
  • s the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland put it last week, a new connected generation of progressive left-wing activists in America and in Europe is reframing the Israeli-Palestinian struggle not as a conflict between two national movements, “but as a straightforward matter of racial justice. Note the placards at last weekend’s demonstration in London: Palestine Can’t Breathe and Palestinian Lives Matter.”
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  • And I would worry about something else as well: As Hamas makes itself the vanguard of the Palestinian cause — and becomes its face — more and more progressives will come to understand what Hamas is — an Islamo-fascist movement that came to power in Gaza by a 2007 coup against the Palestinian Authority, during which, among other things, it threw a rival P.A. official off a 15-story rooftop.
  • This is not a “progressive” organization — and Hamas will not enjoy indefinitely the free pass it has gotten from the left because it is fighting Netanyahu
  • Indeed, what Kissinger began in 1973 and Jimmy Carter completed at Camp David was only possible because all these leaders actually agreed to ignore the core problem
  • So, my message to Biden would be this: You may be interested in China, but the Middle East is still interested in you. You deftly helped to engineer the cease-fire from the sidelines. Do you want to, do you dare to, dive into the Middle of this new Kissingerian moment?
katherineharron

Biden White House would welcome Trump's help in promoting vaccine - CNNPolitics - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 15 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The White House said it would welcome former President Donald Trump's help in promoting the coronavirus vaccine to his supporters but says there are other ways to convince conservatives to get the shot.
  • "I discussed it with my team and they say the thing that has more impact than anything Trump would say to the MAGA folks is what the local doctors, what the local preachers, what the local people in the community say," Biden said at the White House on Monday.
  • Earlier, the White House laid out how it was reaching conservatives with vaccine messaging, even as officials acknowledged a Democratic president did not carry the same weight among that population as other public figures.Read More"If former President Trump woke up tomorrow and wanted to be more vocal about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine certainly we'd support that," press secretary Jen Psaki said at a Monday's White House briefing.close dialogThe world is watching as the Biden administration takes office.Get updates on US politics delivered to your inbox daily. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.The world is watching as the Biden administration takes office.Get updates on US politics delivered to your inbox daily. Please enter aboveSign Me UpBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Success! See you in your inbox.//assets.b
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, have said Trump's voice in promoting the vaccine would go far in convincing Republicans to get it.
  • Trump has made small efforts to promote the vaccine, including in a speech at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, but he did not appear in a public service announcement featuring former presidents that was released last week.Psaki noted those presidents -- Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter -- "did not need an engraved invitation" to promote the vaccine.
  • "The President's goal is to vaccine all Americans, not just those who voted for him," she said. "We know we need to meet everyone where they are, and that includes conservatives."
ethanshilling

Liberals Grow Impatient With President Biden's Foreign Policy Decisions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ecisions-liberal-reaction.html

biden Policy Politics

shared by ethanshilling on 18 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Earlier this week, Biden administration officials passed around with bemusement some words of praise from an unexpected source: Jared Kushner.
  • In an opinion essay for The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Kushner, former President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser on Middle East issues, said that President Biden “did the right thing” and had “called Iran’s bluff” by refusing to make new concessions to lure Tehran into talks about restoring a nuclear deal abandoned by the Trump administration.
  • “I would take this in the Biden White House as a giant, blinking red light that maybe what I’m doing is not right because Jared Kushner is finding ways to praise it,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama who worked closely on the 2015 nuclear agreement
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  • Iran is just one of several foreign policy issues frustrating Mr. Biden’s base two months into his presidency.
  • The Middle East, which Biden officials hope to de-emphasize as they turn America’s attention to China, is the source of many complaints. Topping the list is Mr. Biden’s decision not to unilaterally rejoin the Iran nuclear deal by reversing harsh sanctions imposed on Tehran by Mr. Trump after he abandoned the agreement in 2018.
  • After seeing Mr. Biden deliver a transformational $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, progressives are asking why his foreign policy feels so conventional.
  • Some prominent liberals call those moves welcome, but also low-hanging fruit, and say that on matters requiring harder trade-offs and political courage, Mr. Biden is too risk-averse.
  • On Wednesday, Mr. Biden fueled the discontent when he conceded in an interview with ABC News that it would be “tough” to meet a May 1 deadline, set under the Trump administration, to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, a high priority for liberals impatient to end what they call “endless” American wars.
  • “The Biden administration has bought the Trump analysis that these sanctions give America leverage, even though the sanctions didn’t give Trump any leverage on Iran,” said Joseph Cirincione, a longtime arms control expert who consulted closely with Obama administration officials over the nuclear deal.
  • Critics of Mr. Biden’s early Middle East policy have focused their attention on Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the region.
  • Mr. McGurk helped shape Mr. Biden’s decision, decried on the left, not to directly punish Prince Mohammed even after the White House declassified an intelligence report that found that he, the de facto Saudi leader, approved the operation that led to the murder of Mr. Khashoggi in 2018.
  • Even before that disclosure, many liberals complained that “the Biden foreign policy team includes no one who has been a clear and consistent opponent of our disastrous interventions across the world,”
  • On Tuesday, a group of Democratic Senate and House members called for a $12 billion increase to the U.S. international affairs budget to fund diplomacy.
  • Ms. Lee is also among those weary of extended deadlines for withdrawals from Afghanistan like the one Mr. Biden hinted at on Wednesday.“We’ve got to bring our troops home,” she said, “and we’ve got to do that quickly.”
xaviermcelderry

Is Quarantine Giving You Headaches, Back Pain, and More? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617672

Quarantine Covid

shared by xaviermcelderry on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • One morning in May, I rolled out of bed to find that my hip flexors were at it again. Dragging my rolled-up yoga mat to the middle of the floor to arrange my body into the now-familiar contortion—one leg straight back, the other forward and bent against the floor, then switch—I tried to piece together what was going on. Like most Americans, I hadn’t been on an airplane since February. I had been sitting at home virtually all the time, a situation of relative comfort and incredible luck. But in the weeks that followed, I folded my body into pigeon pose again and again, with minimal returns. As I lost hip flexibility, I also gained other problems, which accumulated over the next several months—low-grade headaches, sore shoulders, a stiff neck, dry skin.Recommended ReadingHow Your Laptop Ruined Your LifeAmanda MullAfter the Pandemic, the Office Dress Code Should Never Come BackAmanda MullAmericans Got Tired of Looking Bad on ZoomAmanda MullRecommended ReadingHow Your Laptop Ruined Your LifeAmanda MullArticleRecirc_itemMedia__1z
  • And people aren’t just working in more challenging physical circumstances; they’re also spending more time doing it. “In the office, people work for eight or nine hours, but now they find themselves working 10 or 12 hours at home just because there’s no commute time,” Natalia Ruiz, a physical therapist at NYU Langone Orthopedic Center, told me of her patients. “Expectations of productivity have increased because you’re working from home.” In her practice, she’s seen more complaints of back and neck pain, but also more “repetitive strain” injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis in the hands and forearms, and pinched nerves in the elbows.
  • For people who aren’t of working age, the orthopedic concerns are a little different. Elderly people, who are at the highest risk from the virus itself, have also experienced some of the worst physical consequences of isolation. “The elderly are not taking their walks and are getting weaker in their legs,” Singh said. “They are losing confidence in their gait, which causes further weakness, and they enter a vicious cycle.” Many people have sharply reduced their exercise this year as gyms have closed, or they fear catching the coronavirus at those that have reopened, but for younger adults, who are generally more physically fit and less prone to injury, regaining some movement in creative ways is easier, and novel, unsupervised exercise is less risky (although Singh noted that he has seen some injuries from people who have used their new Pelotons vigorously but incorrectly).
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  • Even for people who spent their workdays indoors and on a computer before the pandemic, the routine of going into work—the process of getting dressed, going outside, getting in a car or boarding a train, interacting with co-workers, attending a meeting or two, and maybe going to happy hour afterward—likely provided enough variation and visual novelty to head off some of the vision problems people are having now.
  • The pandemic also seems to be causing a litany of skin and hair issues, according to research provided by the American Academy of Dermatology, some of which has not yet been published and has yet to be peer-reviewed.
Javier E

Why Financial Confessionals Go Viral - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...600358

rich standards cost of living consumption

shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The country’s 10 percent really do feel strapped, and really don’t understand how much better they have it than the 90 percent below them.
  • “We worked really hard to make sure we had diaries from all 50 states and from a huge range of income levels,” says Lindsey Stanberry, who launched Refinery29’s “Money Diaries” and is now an editor at CNBC’s Make It. “But our most popular ones were definitely men and women making six figures,” putting them in the top 10 percent and sometimes the top 1 percent of the income distribution.
  • In these viral budgets and diaries, urban professionals—they are almost always urban professionals—describe spending on $7 lattes and $70 bikini waxes and $70,000 private-school tuition. Some describe themselves as middle-class. Many describe themselves as unable to sav
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  • But the diaries and budgets demonstrate some of the real pressures such families face. For one, the cost-of-living crisis forcing middle-class families out of big cities also taxes the rich families within them
  • Our ideal of a middle-class lifestyle is the same as it has always been,” says Sam Dogen, the founder of Financial Samurai, the site that published that $350,000-a-year budget. “Own a house, have a car, have a couple children, and retire by 65. These ideals haven’t changed. But it seems like it’s taking greater income to get there or to maintain that type of lifestyle.
  • That social myopia also means that people’s perceptions of what it means to be “rich” have stratified. In surveys, individuals making less than $25,000 say that making $293,000 a year makes you rich. People with incomes over $120,000 say something more like half a million dollars.
  • “It isn’t just money; it’s time,” he adds. “These are intensive jobs, often done out of the bounds of a normal workday. I think the rise of the high-octane couple has increased this sense of generalized household stress, which no amount of money can buy you out of.”
  • The seeming cluelessness of the viral budget-makers also reveals the way that income inequality and geographic inequality have physically isolated the rich: Today people are more likely to know and live around people who earn what they earn, and less likely to know and live around anyone else
  • Moreover, many 10-percenter families have two earners with high-intensity jobs. “Highly educated women are now likely to be married to highly educated men, with both pursuing relatively high-paying careers,” says Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution. “That makes it much more economically efficient to subcontract out the work of having a household, like mowing the lawn or doing child care.
  • it is remarkable how often in these diaries luxuries become necessities—things families have to spend on, rather than things they choose to spend on.
katherineharron

Elizabeth Warren has a real opportunity to make this right (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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

election

shared by katherineharron on 22 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Sen. Elizabeth Warren's silence on how she plans to pay for Medicare for All has turned into a problem at an important moment in her campaign. Right as she has become one of the clear frontrunners in the Democratic race — if not the frontrunner — she walked out of the fourth Democratic debate a bit bruised from her unwillingness to answer the question about whether she would raise taxes to pay for the benefits.
  • The plan will likely involve a package that mixes higher taxes and other revenue streams in exchange for eliminating the deductibles and premiums as well as other out-of-pocket expenses. Warren might make some adjustments to proposed benefits to lower the high estimates that are currently being projected. But to take control of this debate, Warren needs to offer more than a policy brief about finance. She has the chance to turn this challenge into an opportunity to make this part of her signature issue — restoring security to middle class Americans. It's an issue that has gotten drowned out with all the emphasis on health care.
  • While Barack Obama was in office, Warren made a name for herself by fighting for middle-class families and offering real solutions to the economic struggles that they faced on matters such as debt. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she fought to protect the rights of average Americans in the world in the financial sector.
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  • To win this debate among Democrats and in the national electorate, she needs to show that her plan will provide the most efficient, cost-effective and equitable health care system possible. Given the increased costs that patients are continuing to experience, even with the Affordable Care Act, Warren needs to explain why costs would rise even more dramatically if Congress doesn't go big. It will be crucial to demonstrate that by providing the public with immense leverage over providers, through government insurance, the country would finally be able to contain and drive down costs in the long-term and make the obligations from patients more predictable.
  • Solving the tax question is not enough. The only way to turn Medicare for All into a campaign theme that can win broad political support in the fall election will be to reframe the issue toward something greater than costs. Warren has an opportunity to make the case that this is not a left-of-center idea but in fact a way to bring greater security to all middle-class families.
Javier E

Wait a Minute. How Can They Afford That When I Can't? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...financial-security-envy.html

wealth rich spending education inequality

shared by Javier E on 07 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Sharon (not her real name), who lives in Westchester County, N.Y., has relatives who have paid her children’s full college tuition and give the family additional help.
  • Not only do people want to play down their inherited wealth or money from family “but they actively try to hide it,” Mr. Conley said. “We have this ideology of individualism and worshiping of the self-made man or woman.”
  • theoretically, there’s a correlation between getting more because you work harder, said Evan Polman, a professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Business. “Inheritance is a violation of that correlation.”
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  • So, why does this matter? What if we don’t know where our neighbors got the money for that new deck? Few would want everyone’s financial status to be transparent.
  • this secrecy helps reinforce the idea that it is only individual choices, not laws and policies, as well as our national history, that comes into building wealth.
  • “It seems like a straight-up cultural issue, but public policy plays a role in how we view secrecy about money and also the consequences that secrecy has,” said Mr. Wherry, who is also director of the Dignity and Debt Network. People need to understand others are in a similar situation — struggling to pay for college or retirement or health care — to realize it’s not a personal failing and to push for reforms.
  • “The secrecy surrounding money may also differ to some extent in countries with higher rates of unionization,” Mr. Conley said, “where salaries are more transparent.”
  • Some say we’re focusing on the wrong thing if we’re looking at the outward signs of wealth. The reality now is that if we’re going to envy our neighbors, it shouldn’t be for their BMW or new swimming pool. It should be for their fat 401(k) or gold-plated health insurance, because the ability to put away large amounts of money to secure our future and our children’s future is the sign of real wealth now.
  • The top 1 percent of households still spend money on conspicuous consumption but “the thing that really separates them is their spending on inconspicuous consumption,
  • Over the last few decades, wealthy people have increased how much of their spending they direct to education and retirement, compared with members of the middle class, whose expenditures in those areas have remained more or the less the same.
  • For example, in 2014, the last year of Ms. Currid-Halkett’s analysis, the top 1 percent of American earners — those making at least $340,000 annually — directed, on average, 6 percent of their total expenditures to education. According to her research, that percentage has climbed significantly since 1996.
  • Only about 1 percent of the expenditures of the middle class — people making about $40,000 to $60,000 annually in 2014 — was devoted to education, a number that has stayed static for almost two decades,
  • And about 20 percent of the top earners’ expenditures go to personal insurance and pensions — an annual average of $32,500 in 2014 — compared with just under $4,000 or about 8 percent for the middle class.
  • biggest signifier of class divide in America today,”
Javier E

Opinion | The Revolt Against Populism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...populism-protests.html

populism global elite middle-class growth corruption legitimacy working class

shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • We all know now what many of us didn’t appreciate then: Globalized democratic capitalism was going to spark a backlash. It led to growing economic and cultural clashes between the educated urbanites, who thrived, and the rural masses, who were left behind. It was too spiritually thin, too cosmopolitan and deracinated. People felt that their national cultures were being ripped away from them.
  • All across the world, members of the new middle classes feel trapped and abandoned. As Fareed Zakaria noted recently, the I.M.F. sees a world economy that is in a “synchronized slowdown” and growing at “its slowest pace since the global financial crisis.”
  • The second thing the populists have brought is corruption. Trump’s quid pro quo attempt with Ukraine is of a piece with the corrupt practices ushered in by populists all around the world. They vowed to smash the rules, but it turns out it was mostly for self-enrichment and self-protection.
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  • The populist/authoritarian regimes are losing legitimacy. The members of the urban middle class in places like Hong Kong and Indonesia are rising up to protect the political and social freedoms.
  • The overall message is that the flaws of liberal globalization are real, but the populist alternative is not working.
  • the big question is, what’s next? What comes after the failure of populism?
  • The big job ahead for leaders in almost all these nations is this: Write a new social contract that gives both the educated urban elites and the heartland working classes a piece of what they want most
  • The working classes who have been supporting populists need a way to thrive in the modern economy and a sense they are respected contributors to their national project. The educated elites want their democratic freedoms protected and to live in ethnically diverse pluralistic societies.
Javier E

How We Are Ruining America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ow-we-are-ruining-america.html

inequality class classism structural

shared by Javier E on 11 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • The most important is residential zoning restrictions.
  • zoning restrictions in the nation’s 220 top metro areas lowered aggregate U.S. growth by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009
  • Reeves’s second structural barrier is the college admissions game.
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  • It’s no wonder that 70 percent of the students in the nation’s 200 most competitive schools come from the top quarter of the income distribution.
  • With their admissions criteria, America’s elite colleges sit atop gigantic mountains of privilege, and then with their scholarship policies they salve their consciences by offering teeny step ladders for everybody else.
  • We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.
  • American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”
  • In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.
  • To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality. 1019 Comments
  • the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.
  • Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.
  • Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life. As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids
  • Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
  • Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.
  • Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else
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