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Javier E

California Criminology Professor Is Charged With Arson - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iminology-professor-arson.html

arson mental illness california professor Culture

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • In California, the number of arson arrests jumped during the pandemic: 120 arson arrests were reported by Cal Fire in 2020 compared with 70 the year before. Arson offenses had been declining nationwide for the past few decades, but F.B.I. numbers show about 13 arson offenses per 100,000 people in 2020, about a 20 percent increase from the previous year.
  • Mr. Nordskog, who has interviewed more than 300 arsonists in his career, says it is a crime that crosses race and gender lines. The Hollywood portrayal of serial arsonists excited by fire and doing it for a thrill applies to a small subset of arsonists, he said
  • more common are people frustrated with their jobs or family life or suffering mental health crises. “Most arsonists are just angry people,”
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  • In interviews, former students described Mr. Maynard as anxious, troubled and, at times, inappropriate. One said he often taught his classes during the pandemic via Zoom from a darkened bedroom, revealing details about an ailing father, a lawsuit against his former landlord and his battles with his mental health.
  • Last year, his life appearing to unravel further, Mr. Maynard lived in his car, according to court documents. As he traversed Northern California, he sent messages to students that included rantings, as well as links to YouTube videos — meandering footage of trees and mountains — in which he ruminated on the state of the world. He also appeared fascinated by arson.
woodlu

Why Russia has never accepted Ukrainian independence | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ccepted-ukrainian-independence

politics history crisis

shared by woodlu on 26 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Yeltsin did not just want what Mr Kravchuk had achieved in Ukraine for economic reasons. Independence would, he felt, be crucial to consolidating his power and pursuing liberal democracy. And Ukraine—never, until the 19th century, a well-defined territory, and home to various ethnic enclaves and deep cultural divides—becoming an independent unitary state within its Soviet borders set a precedent for Russia to define itself the same way, and refuse independence to restive territories such as Chechnya.
  • That was why the Russian republic was one of the first three polities in the world to recognise it as an independent state.
  • if a world in which Ukraine, Russia and indeed Belarus were completely independent from the Soviet Union was attractive, one in which they were not tied to each other in some other way was very troubling to a Russian like Yeltsin.
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  • It was not just that Ukraine was the second-most-populous and economically powerful of the remaining republics, its industries tightly integrated with Russia’s. Nor was it the question of what was to happen to the nuclear forces stationed there but still notionally under the command of Soviet authorities in Moscow. It went deeper.
  • The need to let the Baltic states go was clear—and when they left the Soviet Union in 1990, Solzhenitsyn, Yeltsin and most of Russia rallied against revanchist attempts to keep them in. Much the same was true of Central Asia and the Caucasus; they were colonies. Belarus and Ukraine were part of the metropolitan core. The bonds which tied “Little Russians” (ie Ukrainians), “Great Russians” and Belarusians together, Solzhenitsyn argued, must be defended by all means short of war.
  • For centuries Ukraine had anchored Russia’s identity. As the centre of the storied medieval confederation known as Kyivan Rus, which stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, Kyiv was seen as the cradle of Russian and Belarusian culture and the font of their Orthodox faith.
  • Being united with Ukraine was fundamental to Russia’s feeling of itself as European.
  • Instead the shooting down of planes, along with the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, the seizure of Crimea, the reassertion that the legacy of Kyivian Rus meant the nations must be shackled together and the reversion of Belarus to dictatorship—that all came later, a sequence of events which led, 30 Decembers later, to 70,000 or more Russian troops on the border of Ukraine and, in a ghastly sideshow, thousands of Middle Eastern refugees stuck in the Belovezh forest itself. The once seemingly settled question of post-Soviet relations between the three nations has once again become an overriding geopolitical concern.
  • The agreement reached, in draft form, at 4am on Sunday morning achieved those aims with a rather neat piece of casuistry. For Russia simply to have followed Ukraine into independence would have left moot the question of the Soviet Union’s residual powers. So instead they abolished the union itself.
  • The Soviet Union had been formed, in 1922, through a joint declaration by four Soviet republics—the Transcaucasian republic and the three represented at Viskuli. With the Transcaucasian republic long since dismembered, the presidents dissolved by fiat what their forebears had bound together. In its place they put a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—Mr Kravchuk would not allow any use of the word “union”—with few clearly defined powers which any post-Soviet state would be welcome to join. There was to be no special relationship between the Slavic three.
  • The importance of Ukraine was not an abstract matter to him. Like Solzhenitsyn, he was the child of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father. He grew up singing Ukrainian songs and reading Gogol, who reimagined his native country’s folk magic as rich poetry after moving to St Petersburg. The Soviet Union had meant that Mr Gorbachev and others like him, whatever their parentage, could partake in both identities.
  • disassembling a multi-ethnic empire of 250m people was still a subject of huge trepidation. As Solzhenitsyn had written in “Rebuilding Russia”, “The clock of communism has stopped chiming. But its concrete edifice has not yet crumbled. And we must take care not to be crushed beneath its rubble instead of gaining liberty.” The fact that in that rubble, if rubble there was to be, there would be the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, spread between four separate countries (the three Slavic ones and Kazakhstan), frightened statesmen around the world.
  • “the Kyivan myth of origins…became the cornerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mongol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire.” Russian empire required Ukraine; and Russia had no history other than one of empire. The idea of Kyiv as just the capital of a neighbouring country was unimaginable to Russians.
  • When, as the economy worsened, Mr Gorbachev went to President George Bush for $10bn-15bn, Bush’s top concern was the nuclear threat. The same worry had led him to oppose Ukraine’s secession in a speech given just before the August coup. “Do you realise what you’ve done?” Mr Gorbachev demanded of Mr Shushkevich. “Once Bush finds out about this, what then?”
  • Yeltsin was overcome by a sense of lightness and freedom. “In signing this agreement,” he later recalled, “Russia was choosing a different path, a path of internal development rather than an imperial one…She was throwing off the traditional image of ‘potentate of half the world’, of armed conflict with Western civilisation, and the role of policeman in the resolution of ethnic conflicts. The last hour of the Soviet empire was chiming.” Maybe the convoluted interdependency of Russia and Ukraine did not matter as much as people thought; maybe democratic nationhood was enough. Maybe the problem had been a failure of imagination.
  • His foreign supporters stood by him too, and the following year a security agreement saw America, Britain and Russia guarantee respect for Ukraine’s integrity within its existing borders—which is to say, including Crimea—in exchange for its giving up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union. Ukraine was grateful; the West saw further evidence of a transition towards a liberal, democratic Russian state.
  • Yeltsin’s unburdened moment among the trees had been that of a man who did not want to, and did not have to, rule an empire. He consciously rejected not just the Soviet Union’s ideology and central planning, but also the tools of statecraft that had held it together—repression and lies. To him, the market economy was a condition for freedom, not a substitute for it. His successor, Vladimir Putin, also embraced capitalism. But he saw no need for it to bring freedom with it, and had no problem with a state run through repression and lies. He thus reversed Yeltsin’s democratic project and, though not at first territorially imperialist himself, took the country down the other side of Brzezinski’s fork. It is that which puts Russia and its Slavic neighbours in such a parlous position today.
  • But when pollsters asked people what they expected of their incoming president, reducing this corruption was not their highest priority. The standing of the state was. Russians wanted a strong state and one respected abroad. As Mr Putin’s successful manifesto put it,
  • “A strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. Society desires the restoration of the guiding, organising role of the state.” When, shortly after his election, Mr Putin restored the Soviet anthem, it was not as a symbol of reverting to central planning or rebuilding an empire. It was a signal that the strong state was back. State power did not mean the rule of law or a climate of fairness. It did not have, or need, an ideology. But it did have to take on some of the “geopolitical reality” that the meeting in Viskuli had stripped from the Soviet Union.
  • The strong state which provided an effective cover for kleptocracy in Mr Putin’s Russia was not an option for Mr Kuchma’s similarly oligarchic Ukraine. It had no real history as a state, let alone a strong one. Its national myth was one of Cossacks riding free. So in Ukraine the stealing was instead dressed up in terms of growing into that distinctive national identity. The essence of the argument was simple. As Mr Kuchma put it in a book published in 2003, “Ukraine is not Russia”.
  • And the West, spooked by the increased belligerence Russia had shown in Georgia, was taking a keen interest in Ukraine. The EU offered the country an association agreement which would allow Ukrainians to enjoy the benefits of a deep and comprehensive free-trade agreement and free travel across Europe.
  • Mr Kuchma could have used force against them; Mr Putin encouraged him to do so. But various considerations, including Western opprobrium, argued against it.
  • Perhaps most fundamental was his sense that, as a Ukrainian president, he could not thus divide the Ukrainian nation. He stayed his hand and allowed a second vote. Viktor Yushchenko, pro-Western and Ukrainian-speaking, beat Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt thug from Donbas (the easternmost part of the country and, save Crimea, the most ethnically Russian) who had claimed victory the first time round. The “Orange revolution”, as the protest came to be known, was a serious setback for Mr Putin—all the more so when a similar uprising in Georgia, the Rose revolution, put another pro-Western state on his borders.
  • Mr Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 came at a time when the global financial crisis had choked the Russian economy.
  • The degree to which Ukraine was not Russia became clearer, though, in 2004, when a rigged presidential election saw hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protesting in the streets.
  • A year earlier a group of economists had told Mr Putin that a customs union with Ukraine would be a smart move. What was more, such a deal would preclude Ukraine’s association with the EU. Pursuing it was thus a way for Mr Putin to achieve three things at once: push back against the West; give Russia a victory that would prove its importance; and help the economy.
  • Mr Yanukovych did not want to be Russia’s vassal. Nor did he share western Europe’s values—especially when applied to matters of anti-corruption. But eventually he had to choose a side. At a secret meeting in Moscow in November 2013, as European leaders were preparing to sign their agreement with Ukraine, he was promised a $15bn credit line with $3bn paid up front. He ditched the European deal. And at 4am on November 30th his goons bludgeoned a few dozen students protesting against his betrayal in Kyiv’s Independence Square, known as Maidan.
  • This was far worse, for Mr Putin, than the Orange revolution. Ukraine had made geopolitical reality, to coin a phrase, of the independence it had claimed two decades before. Its demands for dignity resonated with Russia’s middle class and some of its elite, making it a genuinely dangerous example. So Mr Putin annexed Crimea and started a war in Donbas.
  • According to Russian state media, Mr Putin was not undermining a revolution against a corrupt regime quite like his own; he was protecting the Russian people and language from extermination at the hands of western Ukrainian fascists. The relevance to Russia of the issues that had led to what was being called in Ukraine “the revolution of dignity” was thus obscured
  • the annexation was supported by nearly 90% of the Russian population.
  • tract published in both Russian, Ukrainian and English in July 2021, Mr Putin described how the inheritors of “Ancient Rus” had been torn apart by hostile powers and treacherous elites, and how Ukraine had been turned from being “not Russia” into an anti-Russia, an entity fundamentally incompatible with Russia’s goals.
  • All baloney. Mr Putin did not attack Ukraine in order to honour or recreate an empire, whether Russian or Soviet. He attacked it to protect his own rule; the history is window-dressing. At the same time, following Brzezinski, for Russia to be something other than a democracy it has to at least be able to think of itself as an empire. And in Russia, empire requires Ukraine—now more deeply opposed to union with Russia than ever before.
  • “The Russian state, with its severe and inflexible interior, survived exclusively because of its tireless expansion beyond its borders. It has long lost the knowledge [of]—how to survive otherwise.”
  • The only way Russia can escape chaos, he argued, is to export it to a neighbouring country.
  • What he did not say was that Mr Putin’s export of chaos, and violence, to that end has severed the ties between the Slavic nations and their peoples in a way which the collapse of the Soviet empire did not.
  • Ukraine is not a province, or a colony; it is a beleaguered nation in a messy, perilous process of self-realisation. Belarus, for its part, is a grim illustration of how “severe and inflexible” things have to get in order to stop such aspirations welling up. Mr Lukashenko has met a nationalist resurgence with ever more brutal and well-orchestrated repression—a bloody irony given that he helped start it.
  • Like Ukraine, Belarus had no real history of statehood; all that Mr Lukashenko had given it since 1994 was a rough approximation of its Soviet past, fascism with Stalinist trappings. But the idea of something better had taken hold.
  • But change is afoot; it can be seen in the way that demography increasingly trumps regional allegiance. Even in the east nearly 60% of those born since 1991 see their future as in the EU—countrywide, the figure is 75%. All told 90% want Ukraine to stay independent, and nearly 80% are optimistic about its future.
  • That is why Alexei Navalny was first poisoned and is now jailed. As the leader of the opposition to Mr Putin he has championed the idea of Russia not as an empire but as a civic nation: a state for the people. It is why Russia has recently become much more repressive. It is why Mr Putin cannot tolerate a true peace on his borders.
  • Unlike Ukrainians and Belarusians, Russians cannot separate themselves from Russia, so they have to change it from within. They cannot do that in a forest retreat, or with a few phone calls. But only through such change will they become truly independent of the Soviet Union.
lucieperloff

A Slow-Motion Climate Disaster: The Spread of Barren Land - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...limate-change-barren-land.html

climate brazil policy

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • But on a recent day, with temperatures approaching 100 degrees, the river had run dry, the crops would not grow and the family’s 30 remaining cattle were quickly consuming the last pool of water.
  • Scientists agree with her grandfather. Much of Brazil’s vast northeast is, in effect, turning into a desert — a process called desertification that is worsening across the planet.
  • But local residents, faced with harsh economic realities, have also made short-term decisions to get by — like clearing trees for livestock and extracting clay for the region’s tile industry — that have carried long-term consequences.
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  • Satellite images and field tests show that 13 percent of the land has already lost its fertility, while nearly the rest of the region is at risk.
  • Brazil’s northeast, the world’s most densely populated drylands, with roughly 53 million people, is among the most at risk.
  • Instead, higher temperatures and less rain combine with deforestation and overfarming to leave the soil parched, lifeless and nearly devoid of nutrients, unable to support crops or even grass to feed livestock.
  • Those entrepreneurs began paying landowners for their mud, and in a few years, dozens of ceramics plants employed hundreds of people.
  • Increasing deforestation in Brazil has alarmed officials around the world because it threatens the Amazon rain forest’s ability to pull carbon from the atmosphere.
  • At his small plant recently, a few dozen laborers laid out thousands of tiles to dry in the midday sun.
  • Factories make the tiles by mixing water with clay, and then firing the result in a wood-burning oven. All those ingredients — water, wood and clay — are in short supply here.
  • The operation consumes 60 to 75 cubic meters of wood a week, or enough to fill five large dump trucks.
  • That can have a devastating effect. The soil and clay they extract is crucial for retaining a proper balance of nutrients and moisture in the surrounding land.
  • In 2010, during another difficult dry season, Mr. Dantas said his family almost ran out of money. To feed themselves and their cattle, they decided to cash in on their mud.
  • But in 2010, instead of planting, the family watched four men with shovels excavate and haul away the soil. It took them three months. They paid about $3,500 for the clay.
Javier E

Opinion | Everyone's Moving to Texas. Here's Why. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...move-to-texas.html

texas california living standard comparison

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Texas’ climate risks. Houston will not do well on a warming planet — it is economically dependent on the oil and gas industry and is threatened by hurricanes and a surge in sea levels. But other big cities, including Dallas and Fort Worth, face more moderate risks, especially compared to many cities in California. Yes, Texas is very hot and likely to get hotter; but if a lot of other American cities also begin to get very hot, Texas cities might not feel as overheated by comparison. In addition to the risk of heat stress, Texas also faces the possibility of water shortages, but that will be true across much of the West, including California’s population centers.
  • living through California’s tinderbox years has convinced me to keep an eye on climate dangers; while forecasts on climate risk are inexact, making some effort to anticipate its danger when deciding where to live feels more responsible than ignoring it. And when people in California are paying a million dollars above asking price for homes in areas of high and increasing wildfire risk, isn’t that something like ignoring it?
  • You might argue that it’s too speculative to take into account something as broad and complex as climate change when deciding where to live. And more important, there’s no real escape from a long-term planetary disaster — even if you move to some place with lovely weather, your life is bound to be altered in significant ways as habitability shifts elsewhere on the globe.
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  • What Texans will not have to worry about as much are wildfires, the scourge of so much of California, and the attendant air pollution, though experts predict increases in wildfires in Texas. It’s true that Texas’ less extreme fire risk is related to something precious about California that Texas lacks — abundant trees and mountains in major metro areas, or really any of California’s striking natural beauty. But nobody said living through climate change would be pretty.
  • There is a concept in behavioral economics known as a “Minsky moment,” which describes when a bull market suddenly wises up to its own unsustainability, causing a collapse in prices.
  • Jesse Keenan, an associate professor at the Tulane University School of Architecture who studies how climate change affects housing markets, told me that a Minsky moment could be coming for high-priced homes in at-risk coastal cities. As home lenders, insurance companies and other players in the real estate business begin to better understand their exposure to climate risks, they may raise premiums or force disclosure requirements that could lower home values.
  • At the moment, buying a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, looks like a safe investment. But lately I have begun to obsess about the uncertainty built into the changing weather. What if three fire seasons from now proves to be one fire season too many — and, in a blink, the housing market into which we’ve invested so much of our future implodes? “In a way, climate change could begin to look like a foreclosure crisis,” Keenan told me.
Javier E

The Beekeepers Who Don't Want You to Buy More Bees - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...companies-colony-collapse.html

bees conservation

shared by Javier E on 21 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • he and other beekeepers, as well as a broad variety of leading conservationists, have come to a very different conclusion: The craze for honey bees now presents a genuine ecological challenge. Not just in Slovenia, but around the world.
  • “If you overcrowd any space with honey bees, there is a competition for natural resources, and since bees have the largest numbers, they push out other pollinators, which actually harms biodiversity,” he said, after a recent visit to the B&B bees. “I would say that the best thing you could do for honey bees right now is not take up beekeeping.”
  • there is a widespread and now deeply rooted belief that the global population of honey bees has been running dangerously low for more than a decade.
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  • The notion has spurred a boom in beekeeping, most notably among corporations eager to demonstrate their green bona fides.
  • A malady originally dubbed disappearing disease had been afflicting honey bees for decades. In the fall of 2006, an American beekeeper named Dave Hackenberg checked on his 400 hives and found that in many, most of the worker bees had disappeared. Other beekeepers started to report that they were losing upward of 90 percent of their colonies. The phenomenon was renamed colony collapse disorder. The cause remains unclear, but experts tend to blame pesticides, an invasive parasite, a reduction in forageable habitat and climate change. An alarm was sounded, and “save the bees” became a rallying cry.
  • “There are now more honey bees on the planet than there have ever been in human history.”
  • The number of beehives around the world has risen by nearly 26 percent in the last decade, to 102 million from 81 million.
  • Still, the save-the-bees narrative persists. Its longevity stems from confusion about what kind of bees actually need to be rescued. There are more than 20,000 species of wild bees in the world, and many people don’t realize they exist. That’s because they don’t produce honey and live all but invisibly, in ground nests and cavities like hollow tree trunks. But they are indispensable pollinators of plants, flowers and crops.
  • Researchers have found that many species of wild bees are, in fact, declining. So trying to save them makes eminent sense. But hobbyists and corporations, not to mention luminaries like Beyoncé and Queen Camilla, are drawn only to the seven or so species of honey bees — the one group supported by a multibillion-dollar agribusiness and that doesn’t need the help.
  • Hives are now getting installed at what beekeeping association leaders say is a record pace. As with the B&B Hotel, they are typically motivated by an impulse to do something positive for the environment that is also highly visible — an apiary form of greenwashing
  • New York City has a similar problem, says Andrew Coté, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association. In February, MoMA asked him to install the hives it recently showed off. He declined.“The population is already overwhelming the finite floral resources,” he said. “We don’t need more honey bees here.”
  • Today, hives are so ubiquitous in some places, especially urban areas, that the amount of honey each yields is dropping. Slovenia now produces less honey than it did 15 years ago, according to government figures, even though it has more than doubled the number of hives in the country. That’s because there is not enough nectar to go around, said Matjaz Levicar, a Slovenian beekeeping instructor, and honey bees are consuming it to survive rather than turning it into honey.
Javier E

Why Putin Made Peace With the Soviets' Archenemies - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671533

russia history culture

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • military historian Antony Beevor suggests that it could be as many as 12 million people. Other estimates range higher still
  • The Whites unleashed their own terror. “We were forbidden to shoot prisoners,” wrote one White soldier. “They were to be killed with a sabre or the bayonet. Ammunition was too precious and had to be kept for combat.” Some captured Reds were burned alive, while Cossacks would whip Reds to death “with metal ramrods, bury them in the ground up to their neck and then cut off the head with their sabre, or castrate them, and hang them on trees in their dozens.
  • White forces sometimes paused their pursuit of the Reds to carry out pogroms; during the civil war, an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 Jews were murdered. About such things my beloved uncle Boris did not speak (nor did I, more than 50 years ago, know what to ask him), except to acknowledge, in his memoirs, that in fighting the Communists his fellow Whites “tended not to take prisoners.”
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  • One more aspect of the Russian Civil War reverberates directly with the conflict we are now watching play out. The war was not just about who would rule Russia, but about whom Russia would rule.
  • Both sides had little but hatred for these non-Russian independence movements, especially the one in Ukraine, a land so rich in grain, iron, and coal.
Javier E

The juvenile viciousness of campus anti-Semitism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675991

campus anti-Semitism

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • This behavior is all the more appalling because it comes disproportionately from a privileged class of young men and women who are rationalizing their moral destitution for the sake of a transitory sense of self-satisfaction
  • Some students will claim that their behavior is protected by freedom of speech. I agree: I would object to any agency of the United States government stopping these students from speaking their minds, and I defend the right of any American to speak without being subjected to threats of violence from bullies and brutes.
  • But speech, and how we express ourselves, carries deep social (and, one day, professional) consequences. In the long term,
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  • I am concerned that students who think they are merely engaging in an energizing campus protest do not realize the damage they are doing to their community—and the moral tumor they are implanting into their developing character.
  • Anti-Semitism, even if adopted stupidly or indirectly, is a moral rot that today’s students will one day have to either recant or endure. Many of them, I wager, will eventually feel shame about what they thought were righteous actions. And I worry that they (like many of today’s extreme right-wing voters and activists in America) will find themselves so far up the tree of rationalizations that they will never be able to climb back down. After enough time serving the insidious impulse to defend the indefensible, they will find themselves changed people.
criscimagnael

What Canada Doesn't Know About Its Guns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gun-laws-canada.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • A drone lifted off from Michigan this month and flew across the St. Clair River toward Port Lambton, Ontario. Its spooked pilot aborted the landing after being spotted by a neighbor, leaving the police to later fish the drone out of a tree and discover 11 handguns strapped to it with plastic bags, tape and carabiner clips.
  • The problem is also glaring on the U.S.-Mexico border. Last August, Mexico sued 10 American gunmakers, blaming them for fueling violence in Mexico.
  • The spillover across Canada’s border with the United States extends beyond the guns themselves to the shared grief and calls for increased firearms regulations in the wake of mass shootings, including two just this month: 10 people were killed in a racist attack in a Buffalo supermarket on May 14; and 19 students and two teachers were killed on Tuesday at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
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  • Two years ago, after the deadliest mass shooting in Canada’s history took place in Nova Scotia, his government banned military-style assault weapons. Last week, it carried out previously announced firearms record-keeping regulations.
  • As of May 18, Canadians who purchase a nonrestricted firearm, basically a rifle or shotgun, must provide identification as well as a valid firearms license. Businesses are required to keep these records, which may be viewed by the police with a warrant.
  • “Conservatives very much associate themselves now with the opposition to gun control, but that wasn’t always the case,” Blake Brown, a history professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, told me. He said that Liberals and Conservatives passed firearms control measures in the 1950s and 1960s, and that both parties strengthened Canada’s gun laws in the years following the 1989 Montreal massacre.
  • “Certainly there have been periods in American history where they’ve been more aggressive in gun control than in Canada,” he said. “But, overall, the trend has been that Canada has seen themselves differently when it comes to firearms.” That has led to stricter gun laws amid fears of importing American gun violence.
  • It found that shotguns and rifles in Canada’s illegal market generally enter the system through legal purchases. That’s unlike illicit handguns, it said, which tend to be smuggled into Canada.
  • Since there is no systemic data collection on the origins of crime guns, one internal Statistics Canada presentation I read emphatically placed it in the “What we don’t know” category.
  • Without gun tracing and better data, the full picture of the United States’ effect on gun crimes in Canada will remain incomplete and based on haphazardly-tracked incidents like that of the gun-toting drone.
Javier E

We're All Ukrainians Now - The French Press - 0 views

frenchpress.thedispatch.com/...were-all-ukrainians-now

patriotism home nationalism history crisis ukraine arrogance superiority imperialism NATO defense

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • As we confront the crisis in Ukraine, it helps us understand patriotism itself—how a healthy patriotism extends our sphere of concern, and how an unhealthy nationalism restricts us and narrows our focus, leaving us often indifferent to the suffering of others. 
  • there is also a serious geopolitical challenge unfolding in Europe and a deep moral injury threatening Ukraine. And it demands our attention as well, and not just in strategic terms.
  • The moral dimension should weigh on us all. Indeed, moral injuries can cut the deepest and leave the most bitter legacies. Moral concern can and should bind us together, out of empathy for profound loss. 
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  • In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis outlines the ways in which citizens should love their nations.
  • healthy patriotism is rooted in this deep and natural sense of home, it rebukes any sense of chauvinism or xenophobia. “In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination it produces a good attitude towards foreigners,” Lewis says, “How can I love my home without coming to realise that other men, no less rightly, love theirs.” 
  • “As the family offers us the first step beyond self-love,” writes Lewis, “so this offers us the first step beyond family selfishness.” 
  • Critically, love of country rooted in love of home “is not in the least aggressive.” It “asks only to be let alone.” That’s not to say that it’s pacifistic, but “it becomes militant only to protect what it loves.” 
  • he uses a key word—“home.” He compares the love of your country to the “love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights, sounds and smells.” 
  • , it is “not in the least aggressive.” It “asks only to be let alone.” As a nation that has endured its own aggressive attacks, how can we not empathize? How can we not do what we reasonably can to deter Russian aggression and help Ukrainians defend themselves?
  • It is this sense of peace and place that echoes in the prophet Micah’s words: “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.”
  • No one claims that Ukraine is a perfect country.
  • Because
  • The chauvinist has no concern beyond our borders. The angry critic says we have no right to demonstrate concern, so long as we are still so flawed
  • In fact, it is our understanding of the value of our national home—and the deeply destabilizing and violent pain of the loss of others’ national homes—that leads to the network of defensive alliances that has maintained great power peace for so long.
  • NATO is not “American imperialism.” Our defensive alliances in Asia aren’t the result of “imperial overreach.” To continue the comparison to home, a defensive alliance is akin to a neighborhood watch, where neighbors look after and protect each other.
  • It is no coincidence, however, that the unhealthy nationalism of the modern incarnation of America First does seek to repeat those past mistakes
  • the reason isn’t just tactical or strategic, it’s philosophical—rooted in temptations and vices that Lewis warns against in the Four Loves. 
  • Essentially, the warning is against a sense of superiority—about both the past and present. As Lewis said, a love of country can lead to a “particular attitude to our country’s past” that has “not quite such good credentials as the sheer love of home.” 
  • “The actual history of every country is full of shabby and even shameful doings … The heroic stories,” Lewis writes, “if taken to be typical, give a false impression of it
  • Why is that dangerous? Why is it so important to understand history in full?
  • At worst we can hold the “firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others.” This belief “can produce asses that kick and bite.” “On the lunatic fringe,” Lewis warned, “It may shade off into that popular Racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid.”
  • Interestingly enough, the sense of superiority can create the same outcome as the sense of national self-loathing you sometimes see on far-left and far-right.
  • But this moment should cast our existing obligations in a different light, reaffirming their immense value.
  • the result is similar—an insular people, focused on themselves.
  • A criminal regime is on the verge of kicking down the door of a national home, and our nation should stand with the innocent, with those who wish to be left alone. We are all Ukrainians now. 
peterconnelly

White House to be lit orange for gun violence awareness - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

gun awareness

shared by peterconnelly on 04 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The White House will be illuminated in orange Friday night in honor of National Gun Violence Awareness Day, as the nation has been shaken by a recent string of deadly mass shootings.
  • Several other government buildings -- including California's Capitol dome and City Hall in New York City -- will also be lit up in orange over the weekend.
  • President Joe Biden on Thursday issued an appeal for stricter gun laws, including a ban on assault weapons, tougher background check laws and a higher minimum age of purchase.
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  • Project Orange Tree, an organization started by Pendleton's friends after a youth panel discussion about her death, began the movement to wear orange to raise awareness and honor her.
  • The idea comes from hunters who wear the color to alert fellow hunters to their presence.
Javier E

Ancient DNA Reveals History of Hunter-Gatherers in Europe - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-hunter-gatherers-europe.html

history europe migrations hunter-gatherer

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • in a pair of studies published on Wednesday 0c, researchers have produced the most robust analysis yet of the genetic record of prehistoric Europe.
  • Looking at DNA gleaned from the remains of 357 ancient Europeans, researchers discovered that several waves of hunter-gatherers migrated into Europe.
  • The studies identified at least eight populations, some more genetically distinct from each other than modern-day Europeans and Asians
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  • They coexisted in Europe for thousands of years, apparently trading tools and sharing cultures. Some groups survived the Ice Age, while others vanished,
  • when farmers arrived in Europe about 8,000 years ago, they encountered the descendants of this long history, with light-skinned, dark-eyed people to the east, and possibly dark-skinned and blue-eyed people to the west.
  • “We lack still an understanding of why these movements were triggered. What happened here, why it happened — it’s strange.”
  • Modern humans arose in Africa and expanded to other continents about 60,000 years ago
  • These early Europeans have almost no genetic link to younger remains of hunter-gatherers. It appears that the first modern humans in Europe may have disappeared along with the Neanderthals
  • he oldest DNA of modern humans in Europe, dating back 45,000 years, undermines such a simple story. It comes from people who belonged to a lost branch of the human family tree. Their ancestors were part of the expansion out of Africa, but they split off on their own before the ancestors of living Europeans and Asians split apart.
  • About 33,000 years ago, as the climate turned cold, a new culture called the Gravettian arose across Europe. Gravettian hunters made spears to kill woolly mammoths and other big game. They also made so-called Venus figurines that might have represented fertility.
  • When the glaciers retreated, some descendants of the Fournol continued living in Iberia. But others expanded north as a new population, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called GoyetQ2. “It really seems like a peopling of Europe after the last glacial maximum,
  • Dr. Posth and his colleagues found DNA in Gravettian remains scattered across Europe. The scientists had expected all of the individuals to have come from the same genetic population, but instead found two distinct groups: one in France and Spain, and another in Italy, the Czech Republic and Germany.
  • “They were very distinct, and this was a very big surprise to us because they practiced the same archaeological culture,”
  • Dr. Posth and his colleagues named the western population the Fournol people, and found a genetic link between this group and 35,000-year-old Aurignacian remains in Belgium.
  • They called the eastern group Vestonice, and discovered that they share an ancestry with 34,000-year-old hunter-gatherers who lived in Russia.
  • That genetic gulf led Dr. Posth and his colleagues to argue that the Fournol and Vestonice belonged to two waves that migrated into Europe separately. After they arrived, they lived for several thousand years sharing the Gravettian culture but remaining genetically distinct.
  • It’s clear from the new study that they were not isolated entirely from each other. In Belgium, the scientists found 30,000-year-old remains with a mix of Fournol and Vestonice ancestry.
  • About 26,000 years ago, the two groups faced a new threat to their survival: an advancing wall of glaciers. During the Ice Age, from 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, European hunter-gatherers were shut out of much of the continent, surviving only in southern refuges.
  • the refuge of the Iberian Peninsula, the region now occupied by Spain and Portugal, by studying DNA in the teeth of a 23,000-year-old man found in a cave in southern Spain. His DNA revealed that he belonged to the Fournol people who lived in Iberia before the Ice Age. The researchers also found genetic markers linking him to a 45,000-year-old skeleton discovered in Bulgaria.
  • When these groups arrived in Europe, Neanderthals had already been living across the continent for more than 100,000 years. The Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago, perhaps because modern humans outcompeted them with superior tools.
  • The Vestonice, by contrast, did not survive the Ice Age. When the glaciers were at their most expansive, the Vestonice may have endured for a time in Italy. But Dr. Posth and his colleagues found no Vestonice ancestry in Europeans after the Ice Age. Instead, they discovered a population of hunter-gatherers that appeared to have expanded from the Balkans, known as the Villabruna. They moved into Italy and replaced the Vestonice.
  • For several thousand years, the Villabruna were limited to southern Europe. Then, 14,000 years ago, they crossed the Alps and encountered the GoyetQ2 people to the north. A new population emerged, its ancestry three parts Villabruna to one part GoyetQ2.
  • This new people, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called Oberkassel, expanded across much of Europe, replacing the old GoyetQ2 population.
  • another climate shift could explain this new wave. About 14,000 years ago, a pulse of strong warming produced forests across much of Europe. The Oberkassel people may have been better at hunting in forests, whereas the GoyetQ2 retreated with the shrinking steppes.
  • To the east, the Oberkassel ran into a new group of hunter-gatherers, who probably arrived from Russia. The scientists named this group’s descendants, who lived in Ukraine and surrounding regions, the Sidelkino.
  • in Iberia, there were no great sweeps of newcomers replacing older peoples. The Iberians after the Ice Age still carried a great deal of ancestry from the Fournol people who had arrived there thousands of years before the glaciers advanced. The Villabruna people moved into northern Spain, but added their DNA to the mix rather than replacing those who were there before.
  • When the first farmers arrived in Europe from Turkey about 8,000 years ago, three large groups of hunter-gatherers thrived across Europe: the Iberians, the Oberkassel and the Sidelkino. Living Europeans carry some of their gene
  • The Sidelkino people in the east had genes associated with dark eyes and light skin. The Oberkassel in the west, in contrast, probably had blue eyes and may have had dark skin
  • These three groups of hunter-gatherers remained isolated from each other for about 6,000 years, until the farmers from Turkey arrived. After this advent of agriculture, the three groups began mixing, the scientists found. It’s possible that the spread of farmland forced them to move to the margins of Europe to survive. But over time, they were absorbed into the agricultural communities that surrounded them.
  • every continent will likely have its own history of hunter-gatherer migrations.
  • it is now possible to extract human DNA from cave sediments rather than searching for bones and teeth.
lilyrashkind

Cleanup Begins After Tornado Outbreak Across the South | The Weather Channel - Articles from The Weather Channel | weather.com - 0 views

weather.com/...new-orleans-mississippi-storms

south weather us

shared by lilyrashkind on 25 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • A deadly tornado ripped through New Orleans.The twister was part of a severe weather outbreak across the South.Homes were ripped apart and cars flipped from Texas to Alabama.Damage assessments and surveys continued across the South Wednesday as residents began the long cleanup after homes were ripped apart, cars flipped over and at least two people killed in an outbreak of severe weather that included multiple tornadoes.
  • Authorities said the person killed Tuesday night in St. Bernard Parish was Connor Lambert, 25, the Associated Press reported.A neighbor told nola.com that Lambert had returned home in his truck just as the storm was starting to hit. After the tornado passed, the neighbor saw the destruction and ran over and started calling for Lambert.A news release from St. Bernard Parish Sheriff James Pohmann said Lambert died of "multiple blunt force injuries."
  • New Orleans Area Damage Consistent With At Least EF-3 Tornado, NWS SaysInitial surveys by the National Weather Service show the damage in Arabi was caused by at least an EF-3 tornado, which has winds between 158 mph and 206.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The Federal Emergency Management Agency wants people in storm-affected areas to remember that generators can cause carbon monoxide poisoning or fires.Generators should never be operated inside or adjacent to a building, enclosed area or open windows.According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission: "One generator produces as much CO as hundreds of cars. It can incapacitate and kill consumers within minutes."Six people in Louisiana died of carbon monoxide poisoning from generators in the days following Hurricane Ida in August, according to the state health department.
  • Girl in Wheelchair Rescued From 'Wizard of Oz' HouseOne of the seven people reported injured in Arabi, a community adjacent to New Orleans, was a girl in a wheelchair who was rescued from a house that the tornado lifted off its foundation and dropped in the middle of the road, nola.com reported.
  • How to Help Victims in LouisianaThe United Way of Southeast Louisiana is taking public donations for its Tornado Relief Fund, with all proceeds earmarked for immediate relief efforts and long-term rebuilding.“Nearly two thirds of households in the affected areas of St. Bernard and Orleans parishes don’t earn enough to save for disasters and many are still recovering from Hurricane Ida’s impacts,” Michael Williamson, UWSELA President and CEO, said in a news release. Cash donations as well as supplies including diapers, baby formula and toiletries are needed. Details on how to contribute can be found here.
  • Damage Reported in 12 Mississippi CountiesHomes were damaged in a dozen Mississippi counties as the storms moved through Tuesday, according to the state's emergency management agency. At least two people were injured – one in Holmes County, to the north of Jackson, and one to the south in Copiah County.The update said severe weather, tornadoes, hail, damaging winds and flash flooding all impacted parts of the state, with multiple reports of fallen trees across roads and power lines.
  • Power Outages Linger in Several AreasSome 14,000 homes and businesses are without power in Louisiana and Mississippi as of about 10:15 a.m. CDT, according to PowerOutage.us.Most of the Louisiana outages are in Orleans and St. Bernard parishes. In Mississippi, most of them are in the central part of the state. More than 19,000 outages are being reported in Texas.
Javier E

A Revolution Is Coming for China's Families - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...lopment-welfare-state-3c1e0091

china revolution demographics aging implications economic cultural political

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • In January Beijing announced that the country’s total population shrank in 2022—a decade earlier than Western demographers had been forecasting as recently as 2019.
  • one rapidly approaching demographic problem has flown under Beijing’s radar: the crisis of the Chinese family, the foundation of Chinese society and civilization.
  • The Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically unprecedented transition. Extended kinship networks will atrophy nationwide, and the widespread experience of close blood relatives will disappear altogether for many
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  • This is a delayed but inescapable consequence of China’s birth trends from the era of the notorious one-child policy (1980-2015)
  • Beijing thus far has ignored this looming crisis because planners don’t prepare for things they don’t track. Officials don’t regard data on the family as relevant to statecraft or security. So statistics tally males and females—not uncles, sisters, cousins, widows.
  • We estimate past patterns and project trends through demographic modeling—simulations replicating China’s available population numbers—while “building” family trees consistent with those figures. We can approximate nationwide changes in China’s extended family networks in the past with reasonable validity and describe what lies ahead with fair confidence.
  • we are only now living through the era of “peak kin” in China. In terms of sheer numbers, Chinese networks of blood relatives were never nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century.
  • Because of dramatic postwar improvements in health and mortality, men and women in their 40s today have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960.
  • China’s “kin explosion” may be an important, heretofore unobserved factor in China’s remarkable economic performance since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.
  • China’s withering of the family is set to collide with a tsunami of new social need from the country’s huge elderly population, whose ranks will more than double between 2020 and 2050
  • China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese history.
  • A “kin famine” will thus unfold unforgivingly over the next 30 years—starting now. As it intensifies, the Chinese family—the most important institution protecting Chinese people against adversity in bad times and helping them seize opportunity in good times—will increasingly falter in both these crucial functions.
  • China is now on the cusp of a severe and unavoidable “kin crash,” driven by prolonged subreplacement fertility
  • by 2050 at least half of China’s overall pool of male military-age manpower will be made up of only children. Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will presage lineage extinction for many Chinese families.
  • The reliability and durability of familial bonds of duty will be an increasingly critical question—perhaps even a matter of life and death for many, including frail and impecunious elders in the Chinese hinterlands
  • growing numbers of men in decades ahead will enter old age without spouses or children—the traditional sources of support for the elderly.
  • by 2050, 18% of China’s men in their 60s will have no living descendants, twice the fraction today.
  • who will look after these unfortunates?
  • Still worse than the macroeconomic implications of old-age dependency may be the effect of China’s family crisis on the so-called micro-foundations of the national economy—the little things that make markets work.
  • Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi networks, a distinctive form of special relationships and professional connections, have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. The proliferation of blood relatives was likely a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s phenomenal upswing.
  • the kin dearth may prove an economic depressant well beyond what current “head count” projections suggest.
  • China’s coming family revolution could easily conduce to a rise in personal risk aversion. Risk aversion may in turn dampen mobility, including migration.
  • Less migration means less urbanization, which means less growth—and possibly still more pessimism and risk aversion.
  • If the waning of the family requires China to build a huge social welfare state over the coming generation, as we surmise it will, Beijing would have that much less wherewithal for influencing events abroad through economic diplomacy and defense policy.
  • By 2050 living parents and in-laws will outnumber children for middle-aged Chinese men and women. Thus exigency may overturn basic familial arrangements that have long been taken for granted. The focus of the family in China will necessarily turn from the rearing of the young to the care of the old.
  • Autocracies are typically tolerant of casualties—but maybe not in the only-child China of today and the decades ahead.
  • Failure to contemplate the implications of the coming changes in Chinese family structure could prove a costly blind spot for the Communist Party. Blind spots expose governments to the risk of strategic surprise. The consequences of social, economic and political risks tend to be greatest when states aren’t prepared for them.
Javier E

Politics needs a dose of realism, not optimism | Comment | The Times - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...realism-not-optimism-05jppc36v

realism politics culture crisis history pandemic expectations

shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • We cannot continue to offer healthcare free at the point of use. Those (like me) who can pay should be charged. We cannot expect to inherit our elderly parents’ houses and so require the state to pay for their old-age care. We middle classes have no right to enjoy rail travel vastly subsidised by the general taxpayer. I have no right to an old person’s London travel card saving me thousands a year when young people on a tenth of my salary must pay — nor to a winter fuel allowance.
  • The taxpayer should not be subsidising public-school education for the small minority who benefit from it. Pensioners should not, regardless of our wealth, expect increases in our pensions that exceed the increases working people get. Britain should not be merrily promising substantial increases in defence spending when we already shoulder a disproportionate burden in the defence of freedom.
  • Year on year we are loading bigger national bills on to the ever-smaller proportion of the population who are actually working. People are retiring earlier then demanding to be kept expensively alive for longer
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  • Yet would people vote for a politician honest enough to say these things? No. We force them to lie then complain they’re liars. It is we who are the hypocrites. Whence comes this persistent, subterranean sense of British entitlement, even as the economy on which it depends begins to sink?
  • The elastication of any link between what we demand and our ability to afford it began long ago but it has been sharply accelerated by the Covid-19 lockdowns: by the idea we could retreat into our living rooms and expect public money to come feathering electronically down into our bank accounts like falling leaves from the Treasury’s magic money tree, until it was safe to go back to work. To this day many haven’t even bothered to do that, as early pensions replace furlough.
Javier E

Sixty years on from the Cuban missile crisis, the US has learned its lessons - but Putin has not | Vladislav Zubok | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...issile-crisis-us-putin-ukraine

missile cuba lessons putin ukraine war history crisis

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • They itched to rectify a military balance that was tipped in favour of the US. The Cuban revolutionaries also approved. Nobody, however, asked Khrushchev what would happen if the Americans discovered the missiles en route to Cuba, before they were ready, or if they reacted violently to them once they were installed. There was no “plan B”.
  • This failure was compounded by sloppy Soviet planning. The head of the Strategic Missile Force, Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, promised Khrushchev that Americans would not discover Soviet missiles because palm trees would cover them. One expert, who knew Cuba’s vegetation better, wanted to object, only to have his superior press on his foot under the table, to make him shut up. The tradition of telling bosses what they wanted to hear while sweeping awkward realities under the rug is not Soviet-Russian monopoly. Yet tradition truly flourished under the Soviets, and warped their decision-making, even in life-and-death situations.
  • There is a whole library of excellent books by US historians on the Cuban missile crisis. Innumerable conferences, seminars and “games” have taken place in an attempt to learn the lessons. No wonder that Biden, his people and the US military no longer share the Kennedy-era “gung-ho” approach to nuclear war. On the contrary, they are extremely careful and attentive to the slightest dangers of escalation in Ukraine. And they are determined that a taboo on the use of nuclear weapons should be maintained.
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  • Ukrainians are aware of their new superiority in conventional arms and want to press their advantage to the maximum.
  • In Moscow, the environment is quite the opposite. Putin, his propagandists and top military no longer say “nuclear war must not be waged”. Instead, they seem to be stoking fears of nuclear conflict. The story of Khrushchev’s gamble and retreat is rarely discussed, and its details have not been digested by the current cohort of decision-makers. Many crucial files still remain secret and forgotten, gathering dust in archives
  • Nuclear escalation seems to be a joker that Putin wants to keep in play. What will he do if more retreat and humiliation come his way? The discussion tends to go in circles, focusing on Putin’s megalomania and his habit of surprising people. All of which leaves a room for a disconcerting level of uncertainty. Clearly, Putin intends to keep it that way. So far, the Russian ruler links the preservation of Russia’s “sovereignty” not to successful diplomacy but to nuclear deterrence and, if need be, brinkmanship.
  • The Ukrainian offensive, backed by US weapons and intelligence, has become part of a precarious web of international security. Will the Ukrainians push to regain all their lost territory or stop at the border of Crimea? Will they start shelling Sevastopol with US-provided missile launchers? If they do, the pressure on Putin to escalate would increase enormously
  • Imagine what Kennedy would have done in October 1962 had the Cubans been given the opportunity to shell cities in Florida. If the Kremlin has no more conventional ways to escalate, the temptation to use a tactical nuclear device will grow.
  • As his delusional gamble in Ukraine produces one military retreat after another, Putin has to find an exit. We simply have no means of knowing what kind of an exit he will choose, and whether it will come with a bang.
Javier E

Most-read 2022: Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey? | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...r-eastern-turkeymost-read-2022

civilization Anatolia ancient turkey history

shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle. The expression of the stone head is doleful, to the point of grimacing
  • Karahan Tepe (pronounced Kah-rah-hann Tepp-ay), which is now emerging from the dusty Plains of Harran, in eastern Turkey, is astoundingly ancient. Put it another way: it is estimated to be 11-13,000 years old.
  • The obsession with the penis is obvious – more so, now we have the benefit of hindsight provided by Karahan Tepe and the other sites. Very few representations of women have emerged from the Tas Tepeler so far; there is one obscene caricature of a woman perhaps giving birth. Whatever inspired these temple-towns it was a not a benign matriarchal culture. Quite the opposite, maybe.
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  • Karahan Tepe, and its penis chamber, and everything that inexplicably surrounds the chamber – shrines, cells, altars, megaliths, audience halls et al – is vastly older than anything comparable, and plumbs quite unimaginable depths of time, back before agriculture, probably back before normal pottery, right back to a time when we once thought human ‘civilisation’ was simply impossible.
  • After all, hunter gatherers – cavemen with flint arrowheads – without regular supplies of grain, without the regular meat and milk of domesticated animals, do not build temple-towns with water systems.
  • Taken together with its age, complexity, sophistication, and its deep, resonant mysteriousness, and its many sister sites now being unearthed across the Harran Plains – collectively known as the Tas Tepeler, or the ‘stone hills’ – these carved, ochre-red rocks, so silent, brooding, and watchful in the hard whirring breezes of the semi-desert, constitute what might just be the greatest archaeological revelation in the history of humankind.
  • The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer’s day in 1994, had made an irreversibly profound discovery – which would eventually lead to the penis pillars of Karahan Tepe, and an archaeological anomaly which challenges, time and again, everything we know of human prehistory.
  • in late 1994 the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to the site of Gobekli Tepe to begin his slow, diligent excavations of its multiple, peculiar, enormous T-stones, which are generally arranged in circles – like the standing stones of Avebury or Stonehenge. Unlike European standing stones, however, the older Turkish megaliths are often intricately carved: with images of local fauna. Sometimes the stones depict cranes, boars, or wildfowl: creatures of the hunt. There are also plenty of leopards, foxes, and vultures. Occasionally these animals are depicted next to human heads.
  • over time archaeological experts began to accept the significance. Ian Hodden, of Stanford University, declared that: ‘Gobekli Tepe changes everything.’ David Lewis-Williams, the revered professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, said, at the time: ‘Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.’
  • Urfa man now has a silent hall of his own in one of Turkey’s greatest archaeological galleries. More importantly, we can now see that Urfa man has the same body stance of the T-shaped man-pillars at Gobekli (and in many of the Tas Tepeler): his arms are in front of him, protecting his penis
  • ‘Gobekli Tepe upends our view of human history. We always thought that agriculture came first, then civilisation: farming, pottery, social hierarchies. But here it is reversed, it seems the ritual centre came first, then when enough hunter gathering people collected to worship – or so I believe – they realised they had to feed people. Which means farming.’ He waved at the surrounding hills, ‘It is no coincidence that in these same hills in the Fertile Crescent men and women first domesticated the local wild einkorn grass, becoming wheat, and they also first domesticated pigs, cows and sheep. This is the place where Homo sapiens went from plucking the fruit from the tree, to toiling and sowing the ground.’
  • People were already speculating that – if you see the Garden of Eden mythos as an allegory of the Neolithic Revolution: i.e. our fall from the relative ease of hunter-gathering to the relative hardships of farming (and life did get harder when we first started farming, as we worked longer hours, and caught diseases from domesticated animals), then Gobekli Tepe and its environs is probably the place where this happened
  • ‘I believe Gobekli Tepe is a temple in Eden’. It’s a quote I reused, to some controversy, because people took Klaus literally. But he did not mean it literally. He meant it allegorically.
  • ‘We have found no homes, no human remains. Where is everyone, did they gather for festivals, then disperse? As for their religion, I have no real idea, perhaps Gobekli Tepe was a place of excarnation, for exposing the bones of the dead to be consumed by vultures, so the bodies have all gone
  • I do definitely know this: some time in 8000 BC the creators of Gobekli Tepe buried their great structures under tons of rubble. They entombed it. We can speculate why. Did they feel guilt? Did they need to propitiate an angry God? Or just want to hide it?’ Klaus was also fairly sure on one other thing. ‘Gobekli Tepe is unique.’
  • These days Gobekli Tepe is not just a famous archaeological site, it is a Unesco World-Heritage-listed tourist honeypot which can generate a million visitors a year. It is all enclosed by a futuristic hi-tech steel-and-plastic marquee (no casual wandering around taking photos of the stones and workers
  • Necmi shows me the gleaming museum built to house the greatest finds from the region: including a 11,000 year old statue, retrieved from beneath the centre of Sanliurfa itself, and perhaps the world’s oldest life size carved human figure
  • This number is so large it is hard to take in. For comparison the Great Pyramid at Giza is 4,500 years old. Stonehenge is 5,000 years old. The Cairn de Barnenez tomb-complex in Brittany, perhaps the oldest standing structure in Europe, could be up to 7,000 years old.
  • Aslan tells me how archaeologists at Gobekli have also, more recently, found tantalising evidence of alcohol: huge troughs with the chemical residue of fermentation, indicating mighty ritual feasts, maybe.
  • he explains how scientists at Karahan Tepe, as well as Gobekli Tepe, have now found evidence of homes.
  • The builders lived here. They ate their roasted game here. They slept here. And they used, it seems, a primitive but poetic form of pottery, shaped from polished stone. They possibly did elaborate manhood rituals in the Karahan Tepe penis chambe
  • Yet still we have no sign at all of contemporary agriculture; they were, it still appears, hunter gatherers, but of unnerving sophistication.
  • Another unnerving oddity is the curious number of carvings which show people with six fingers. Is this symbolic, or an actual deformity? Perhaps the mark of a strange tribe?
  • Karahan Tepe is stupefyingly big. ‘So far,’ he says, ‘We have dug up maybe 1 per cent of the site’ – and it is already impressive. I ask him how many pillars – T stones – might be buried here. He casually points at a rectangular rock peering above the dry grass. ‘That’s probably another megalith right there, waiting to be excavated. I reckon there are probably thousands more of them, all around us. We are only at the beginning. And there could be dozens more Tas Tepeler we have not yet found, spread over hundreds of kilometres.’
  • Karahan too was definitely and purposely buried. That is the reason Necmi and his team were able to unearth the penis pillars so quickly, all they had to do was scoop away the backfill, exposing the phallic pillars, sculpted from living rock.
  • the most remarkable answer of all, and it is this: archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are, at this moment, digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilisation, which has been buried in Mesopotamia for ten thousand years. And it was all buried deliberately.
Javier E

Fake News: It's as American as George Washington's Cherry Tree - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-how-america-went-haywire.html

fantasy individualism culture crisis politics history

shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • What happens next in American history, according to Andersen, happens without malevolence, or even intention. Our national character gels into one that’s distinctly comfortable fogging up the boundary between fantasy and reality in nearly every realm.
  • Enterprising businessmen quickly figure out ways to make money off the Americans who gleefully embrace untruths. The 1800s see an explosion of water cures and homeopathy and something called mesmerism,
  • Cody was in this way the father of Hollywood, the industry that did the most, Andersen says, to break down the mental barriers between the real and unreal.
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  • In the 1960s fantasyland goes into overdrive. Psychedelics, academic scholarship and the New Age movement conspire to make reason and reality the realms of idiots and squares.
  • After the Kennedy assassinations, conspiracy theories become not just a fringe hobby but a “permanent feature of the American mental landscape.” U.F.O. sightings explode, and the stories become ever more elaborate
  • In the meantime, a kind of comfort with small fibs settles into the populace. When Andersen was young, he recalls, it was rare to see a woman over 50 whose hair was not gray or white. And apparently there were only eight plastic surgeons in all of Manhattan. But the market for hair color and plastic surgery explodes, as America starts writing its “national fiction of permanent youthfulness.”
  • the most persistent thread in “Fantasyland” is Christianity — the astounding number of Americans who believe in heaven and angels, which most of Europe gave up decades ago
  • Andersen reserves a starring role for the secular spiritualists. They were supposed to be a counterpoint to narrow-minded evangelicals, but Andersen says the New Agers committed an even greater sin than the faithful. What Anne Hutchinson started, Gestalt therapy finished off in the ’60s. Fritz Perls, a psychotherapist and Gestalt founder, simply put it: “I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine.” Or put more simply: You do you.
  • If there’s a flaw in this book, it’s repetitiveness. Andersen seems by nature a collector. He goes for wide rather than deep. So he doesn’t examine, for example, how we would separate the junk from the gems
  • What we Americans need, it would seem, is something more powerful. A story to end all stories, preached by someone with the fire of Anne Hutchinson. A collective delusion so seductive that it will have us all, in Locke-step, bowing down to reason and reality.
  • our real progenitors were the Puritans, who passed the weeks on the trans-Atlantic voyage preaching about the end times and who, when they arrived, vowed to hang any Quaker or Catholic who landed on their shores. They were zealots and also well-educated British gentlemen, which set the tone for what Andersen identifies as a distinctly American endeavor: propping up magical thinking with elaborate scientific proof.
  • In Andersen’s telling, you can easily trace the line from the self-appointed 17th-century prophet Anne Hutchinson to Kanye West: She was, he writes, uniquely American “because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality,” a total stranger to self-doubt.
  • As he explains in what must have been an alarmingly self-confirming last chapter: Donald Trump is “stupendous Exhibit A” in the landscape of “Fantasyland,” a fitting leader for a nation that has, over the centuries, nurtured a “promiscuous devotion to the untrue.”
Javier E

Opinion | We're Asking the Wrong Question About Kamala Harris and Race - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...kamala-harris-race.html

race identity blackness culture history

shared by Javier E on 25 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • Harris often mentions the South Asian half of her heritage, but in traditional American discourse, it feels off to categorize her as simply South Asian — like Aziz Ansari or Mindy Kaling — and leave it there. Yet calling her just Black, as a kind of shorthand, feels right. Blackness is treated as blacking out, so to speak, whatever other race is involved. Most people default to this perspective — myself included.
  • This approach contradicts not just logic, but also itself. In contrast to the centuries-old “one-drop rule” that segregationists have invoked to describe the indelible ancestral stain of so-called Black blood, enlightened people are supposed to believe that race is purely a social construct, with no biological basis. If so, then why does having some Black forebears make you Black, regardless of the rest of the family tree?
  • I’ve fielded questions from people from France to Japan about why Obama is considered Black, rather than both Black and white. The question always feels naïve to me at first, but if you imagine stepping outside our particular national framework, it’s the foreigner who is making sense and the American version that is weird.
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  • Today, those who express different ideas about racial identity often encounter serious resistance. When Tiger Woods, the child of two mixed-race people, announced himself to be “Cablinasian” — as a combination of Caucasian, Black, American Indian and Asian — he was mocked as not knowing who he is. The writer Thomas Chatterton Williams encountered skepticism when he said he couldn’t see his blond, blue-eyed child as Black.
  • all signs indicate that my children are growing up in a world that’s very different from the one I grew up in. I experienced plenty of passing instances of racism, even as a student at fancy private schools. But it’s been a half century now. Experiences of the kind Harris has recounted, of suburban white kids whose parents told them not to play with her because she was Black, have been alien to my girls so far.
  • If someday they decide not to define themselves as Black, it will not be because they are ashamed or in some kind of denial. It will be because the world has changed, and we should be thankful for that.
  • American discourse is, happily, becoming more amenable to the idea that a person who is half Black can be two things rather than just one
  • What is most important is that Harris, Obama and other people of mixed racial heritage can now get as far as they have. As for our habit of processing Blackness as foundational — much as Strom Thurmond did — it will be ever more absurd as the races mix further over the coming generations. On this custom, history will look upon us in puzzlement.
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