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anonymous

Hard and Soft Threats to Democracy - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/-and-soft-threats-to-democracy

democracy conspiracy misinformation

shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • an assortment of QAnon kooks has taken to claiming that Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20 was unconstitutional and that Donald Trump will be returning in splendor on March 4 for the real inauguration.The rumors swirling about the possibility of violence on March 4 were given legitimacy on Wednesday, when the Capitol Police released a statement saying, “We have obtained intelligence that shows a possible plot to breach the Capitol by an identified militia group on Thursday, March 4.”
  • Meaning that domestic terrorists have succeeded in shutting down the government again. This time it happened without anyone breaching a single security fence. The threat of another national security event, however remote, was enough for them to win
  • At Wednesday’s hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray, for example, instead of focusing on the individuals who planned the attack and the spectacular security failures that allowed it to unfold, senators spent much of their time promoting or refuting, depending on their party affiliation, the claim that Antifa was responsible.
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  • The fact that, for some reason, it took President Trump’s Department of Defense more than three hours to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol on January 6 doesn’t concern former Vice President Mike Pence, who was targeted by the mob. He finally broke his silence on Wednesday—only to push an op-ed based on the big election lie and blasting “leftists” who “want you powerless at the ballot box.”
  • the threat to our democracy is coming from conspiracy theorists in the Republican party
cartergramiak

How Coronavirus Has Changed New York City Transit, in One Chart - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nyc-transit-covid.html

politics US Culture economics pandemic

shared by cartergramiak on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • At 8:30 on weekday mornings, there is now enough space in the Main Concourse at Grand Central Terminal for travelers to walk at least six feet apart. Most move at a stroll rather than the New York City speedwalk. Early last year, about 160,000 people passed through the station each weekday. Ridership is now less than a quarter of that.
  • Keeping the city’s buses and subways moving has been crucial for transporting medical and essential workers, but, with fewer riders, the city’s public transit organization is facing its worst budget crisis in history.
  • Neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, which are home to more people of color and families with lower annual income than most parts of Manhattan, are also home to many of the city’s essential workers — and have retained more of their subway riders. Those subway stations report closer to 40 percent of their pre-pandemic ridership.
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  • In March, the M.T.A. implemented rear-door boarding on buses to keep passengers distanced from drivers until plastic partitions could be installed around the driver’s seats. On local buses, the fare box is near the front door, so the policy effectively eliminated fares on those routes. When those partitions were completed in September, fares were reinstated and ridership dropped a second time.
  • For New York City to hit its climate goals, it will be critical for more people to use public transit, bikes or walking to commute than before the pandemic. When offices and businesses begin to reopen, more flexible remote options for workers could also be friendly for the planet.
  • “If you think of a place like New York City, the challenges around owning a car, like parking and traffic, will not have gone away after the pandemic, and the benefits of biking to work or taking public transit will also still be there.”
lmunch

Opinion: Look at everything the GOP wants to cancel - CNN - 0 views

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

cancel Culture Politics US Trump policy gop

shared by lmunch on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This week we saw GOP elected officials and Fox News in full conniption mode falsely claiming that Democrats wanted to cancel Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. The reality, though, is that it's the GOP that is the party of cancel culture.
  • But facts don't matter when it comes to Republicans trying to distract from their lack of policies to help Americans in need or score political points.
  • Over on GOP TV, aka Fox News, there was a lot of time spent discussing Mr. Potato Head being "canceled." While channels such as CNN and MSNBC carried live Tuesday's testimony by FBI Director Christopher Wray about the details of the January 6 insurrection incited by Trump, Fox News did not.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Just last Sunday, Trump announced to cheers of the right-wing audience at CPAC his plan to "get rid of" (aka "cancel") the 17 GOP members of Congress who voted to hold him accountable for his role in the January 6 attack on our Capitol.
  • Then there are the Republicans across the country trying to cancel access to the ballot box. In Pennsylvania, a battleground state Biden won, GOP lawmakers have announced proposals to "cancel" no-excuse mail-in ballots. The reason is obvious as Pennsylvania Democrats used mail-in ballots at three times the rate of Republicans in 2020.
  • In Arizona, a state Biden won by around 10,500 votes, GOP officials have alarmingly introduced a bill that would allow the GOP-controlled state legislature to "cancel" everyone's vote and award the state's electoral votes to the person of their choosing. Wow, talk about cancel culture!
katherineharron

Police reform: Joe Biden stands down at a critical juncture as activists demand change nearly a year after George Floyd shooting - CNN Politics - 0 views

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

biden

shared by katherineharron on 16 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Nearly a year after the police killing of George Floyd, pressure is mounting on President Joe Biden and members of Congress to show they are committed to holding police officers accountable for misconduct, excessive force and negligence
  • Brooklyn Center’s former police chief suggested that the shooting was accidental, and Potter made her first court appearance Thursday after being charged with second degree manslaughter.
  • Biden exhibited caution this week when addressing the death of another Black man and backed away from his campaign promise to create a police reform commission
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Biden’s decision to stand down was a puzzling development given that there is no indication whatsoever that the Democratic legislation – which would create a national registry of police misconduct, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, and overhaul qualified immunity protections for police officers – has any chance in the 50-50 Senate after it passed the House in March without GOP support.
  • The deep fissures in the Democratic party over what to do on the issue of policing have put Democrats in a difficult spot. During the 2020 elections, Republican hammered their Democratic opponents over radical calls to “defund the police” – attempting to portray all Democrats as sympathetic to a view that is held by a small minority.
  • It’s a major reason why congressional leaders like House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, the No. 3 Democrat in the chamber, were quick to refute Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s argument that there should be “no more policing,” because, in her view, it cannot be reformed. “We’ve got to have police,” Clyburn said in an interview this week with CNN’s Don Lemon.
  • Protests erupted this week after the death of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man who was shot by veteran Minnesota police officer Kimberly Potter in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center after he was initially pulled over for an expired tag and police learned that he had an outstanding warrant for a gross misdemeanor weapons charge.
  • Biden’s reticence reflects not only the deadlock in the deeply divided Congress, but also the fact that Democrats are still struggling to refine their message on police reform – knowing the issue will be a vulnerability at the ballot box in 2022 and 2024.
  • “There’s never gonna be justice for us,” Wright’s mother, Katie Wright, told reporters on Thursday. “Justice would bring our son home, knocking on the door with a big smile, coming in the house, sitting down eating dinner with us, going out to lunch, playing with his one-year-old – almost two-year-old-son, giving him a kiss before he walks out the door.”
  • in another difficult case, the Chicago Civilian Office of Police Accountability released body-worn camera footage Thursday that shows a police officer shooting 13-year-old Adam Toledo last month.
  • “The officer screamed at him, ‘Show me your hands,’ Adam complied, turned around, his hands were empty when he was shot in the chest at the hands of the officer,” Weiss-Ortiz told reporters Thursday. “If you’re shooting an unarmed child with his hands in the air, it is an assassination.”
  • Biden’s cautious posture on policing issues since he has become President reflects the arms-length distance that he has maintained from the progressive left on a number of politically-fraught issues, including calls from some Democrats to expand the size of the Supreme Court, the suggestion that he should be doing more on gun control following a recent spate of mass shootings, and fulfilling his own promise to raise the cap set on refugee admissions.
  • “I want to make it clear again: There is absolutely no justification – none – for looting, no justification for violence. Peaceful protest, understandable,” Biden said Monday. “We do know that the anger, pain, and trauma that exists in the Black community in that environment is real – it’s serious, and it’s consequential. But it will not justify violence and/or looting.”
  • t this pivotal moment when the nation is once again focused on the need to end these all-too-common occurrences, Biden seems uniquely positioned to take a leading role in brokering a compromise with Congress after his lifetime of work on crime and justice legislation.
  • Democrats’ sensitivity to those attacks was magnified this week by the swift response to Tlaib, a liberal Democrat, when she tweeted Monday that Wright’s death was not accident and “policing in our country is inherently & intentionally racist.
  • “This is not about policing. This is not about training. This is about recruiting. Who are we recruiting to be police officers? That to me is where the focus has got to go. We’ve got to have police officers,” Clyburn told Lemon on “CNN Tonight.”
  • But as incomprehensible police shootings multiply with devastating consequences for the families, there is a fierce urgency in this moment, particularly as the nation waits for the verdict in the Chauvin trial. Justice in policing might be “a cause” that is more convenient for Biden to tackle later in his presidency. But by standing down and waiting for others to act, he may well miss this moment.
aleija

Opinion | We Were Born to Be Wild - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...th-day-nature-environment.html

Culture Climate Change

shared by aleija on 19 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • For songbirds, visiting a feeder or a birdbath is like going to a rave unmasked. If one of them is sick, others will also get sick. And by “others,” I mean more than just birds: Many avian viruses, bacteria and funguses can infect human beings and their pets, too.
  • I find all creatures fascinating, and have ever since I was a little girl, but I pay more attention to them now because I know how much harder my species is making life for all the others.
  • During my childhood in the 1960s, it was common to see people casually throwing trash out of their car windows, but these days human indifference to the natural world tends to be better hidden, even from ourselves.
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  • Market forces have worked hard to make sure we don’t notice the depredations we’re complicit in: the microplastics that pollute our waterways every time we wash a fleece jacket or a polyester blouse, the toilet tissue that’s destroying the boreal forest, the poisons we spray on our yards — up to 10 times as much, per acre, as farmers use — because they are marketed to us as benign “applications.”
  • Many people no longer feel a connection to the natural world because they no longer feel themselves to be a part of it. We’ve come to think of nature as something that exists a car ride away. We don’t even know the names of the trees in our own yards.
  • Nature is all around us anyway, and I’m not talking about just the songbirds and the cottontail rabbits in any suburban neighborhood. I’m talking about the coyote holed up in a bathroom at Nashville’s downtown convention center; the red-tailed hawks nesting in Manhattan; the raccoon climbing a skyscraper in St. Paul, Minn.; the black bear lounging in a Gatlinburg, Tenn., hot tub; the eastern box turtle knocking on my friend Mary Laura Philpott’s front door.
  • Recognizing that kinship will do more than keep our fellow creatures safer. It will also keep us safer, and make us happier, too.
Javier E

Why Does the Myth of the Confederate Lost Cause Persist? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618711

myth Lost Cause confederacy history memory

shared by Javier E on 10 May 21 - No Cached
  • A few years ago, I decided to travel around America visiting sites that are grappling—or refusing to grapple—with America’s history of slavery. I went to plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, and historical landmarks. As I traveled, I was moved by the people who have committed their lives to telling the story of slavery in all its fullness and humanity. And I was struck by the many people I met who believe a version of history that rests on well-documented falsehoods.
  • For so many of them, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth.
  • “I don’t mind that they come on Memorial Day and put Confederate flags on Confederate graves. That’s okay,” she said. “But as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need a Confederate flag on—” She stumbled over a series of sentences I couldn’t follow. Then she collected herself and took a deep breath. “If you’re just talking about history, it’s great, but these folks are like, ‘The South shall rise again.’ It’s very bothersome.”
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  • She told me that she’d attended a Sons of Confederate Veterans event once but wouldn’t again. “These folks can’t let things go. I mean, it’s not like they want people enslaved again, but they can’t get over the fact that history is history.”
  • I thought about friends of mine who have spent years fighting to have Confederate monuments removed. Many of them are teachers committed to showing their students that we don’t have to accept the status quo. Others are parents who don’t want their kids to grow up in a world where enslavers loom on pedestals. And many are veterans of the civil-rights movement who laid their bodies on the line, fighting against what these statues represented. None of them, I thought as I looked at the smile on Gramling’s face, is a terrorist.
  • Gramling then turned his attention to the present-day controversy about Confederate monuments—to the people who are “trying to take away our symbols.” In 2019, according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were nearly 2,000 Confederate monuments, place names, and other symbols in public spaces across the country. A follow-up report after last summer’s racial-justice protests found that more than 160 of those symbols had been removed or renamed in 2020.
  • Gramling said that this was the work of “the American ISIS.” He looked delighted as the crowd murmured its affirmation. “They are nothing better than ISIS in the Middle East. They are trying to destroy history they don’t like.”
  • Founded in 1896, the Sons of Confederate Veterans describes itself as an organization of about 30,000 that aims to preserve “the history and legacy of these heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause.” It is the oldest hereditary organization for men who are descendants of Confederate soldiers. I was wary of going to the celebration alone, so I asked my friend William, who is white, to come with me.
  • That myth tried to rewrite U.S. history, and my visit to Blandford showed how, in so many ways, it had succeeded.
  • It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.
  • The early 1900s saw a boom in Confederate-monument building. The monuments were meant to reinforce white supremacy in an era when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. They were also intended to teach new generations of white southerners that the cause their ancestors had fought for was just.
  • “I think everybody should learn the truth,” Jeff said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.“What is that truth?” I asked.
  • The Louisville Daily Courier, for example, warned nonslaveholding white southerners about the slippery slope of abolition: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?” The paper threatened that Black men would sleep with white women and “amalgamate together the two races in violation of God’s will.”
  • “Everybody always hears the same things: ‘It’s all about slavery.’ And it wasn’t,” he said. “It was about the fact that each state had the right to govern itself.”He pointed to a tombstone about 20 yards away, telling me it belonged to a “Black gentleman” named Richard Poplar. Jeff said Poplar was a Confederate officer who was captured by the Union and told he would be freed if he admitted that he’d been forced to fight for the South. But he refused.
  • But the reality is that Black men couldn’t serve in the Confederate Army. And an 1886 obituary suggests that Poplar was a cook for the soldiers, not someone engaged in combat.
  • Some people say that up to 100,000 Black soldiers fought for the Confederate Army, in racially integrated regiments. No evidence supports these claims, as the historian Kevin M. Levin has pointed out, but appropriating the stories of men like Poplar is a way to protect the Confederacy’s legacy. If Black soldiers fought for the South, how could the war have been about slavery? How could it be considered racist now to fly the Dixie flag?
  • I asked Jeff whether he thought slavery had played a role in the start of the Civil War. “Oh, just a very small part. I mean, we can’t deny it was there. We know slave blocks existed.” But only a small number of plantations even had slaves, he said.It was a remarkable contortion of history, reflecting a century of Lost Cause propaganda.
  • Two children ran behind me, chasing a ball. Jeff smiled. He told me that he doesn’t call it the “Civil War,” because that distorts the truth. “We call it the ‘War Between the States’ or ‘of Northern Aggression’ against us,” he said. “Southern people don’t call it the Civil War, because they know it was an invasion … If you stayed up north, ain’t nothing would’ve happened.”
  • I asked him what he believed the cause of the Civil War had been. “How do I put this gently?” he said. “People are not as educated as they should be.” They’re taught that “these men were fighting to keep slavery legal, and if that’s what you grow up believing, you’re looking at people like me wearing this uniform: ‘Oh, he’s a racist.’ ” He said he’d done a lot of research and decided the war was much more complicated.
  • I thought that scenario was unlikely; cities have spent millions of dollars on police protection for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, people far more extreme than the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I found it a little ironic that these monuments had been erected in part to instill fear in Black communities, and now Jason was the one who felt scared.
  • The typical Confederate soldier hadn’t been fighting for slavery, he argued. “The average age was 17 to 22 for a Civil War soldier. Many of them had never even seen a Black man. The rich were the ones who had slaves. They didn’t have to fight. They were draft-exempt. So these men are going to be out here and they’re going to be laying down their lives and fighting and going through the hell of camp life—the lice, the rats, and everything else—just so this rich dude in Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta, Georgia, or Memphis, Tennessee, can have some slaves? That doesn’t make sense … No man would do that.”
  • But the historian Joseph T. Glatthaar has challenged that argument. He analyzed the makeup of the unit that would become Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and pointed out that “the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery.” Almost half either owned enslaved people or lived with a head of household who did, and many more worked for slaveholders, rented land from them, or had business relationships with them.
  • Many white southerners who did not own enslaved people were deeply committed to preserving the institution. The historian James Oliver Horton wrote about how the press inundated white southerners with warnings that, without slavery, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors.
  • I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it”—I kept coming back to Gramling’s words. That comment was revealing. Many places in the South claim to be the originator of Memorial Day, and the story is at least as much a matter of interpretation as of fact. According to the historian David Blight, the first Memorial Day ceremony was held in Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1865, when Black workmen, most of them formerly enslaved, buried and commemorated fallen Union soldiers.
  • The proposition of equality with Black people was one that millions of southern white people were unwilling to accept. The existence of slavery meant that, no matter your socioeconomic status, there were always millions of people beneath you. As the historian Charles Dew put it, “You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”
  • Once one of the most successful sugarcane enterprises in all of Louisiana, the Whitney is surrounded by a constellation of former plantations that host lavish events—bridal parties dancing the night away on land where people were tortured, taking selfies in front of the homes where enslavers lived. Visitors bask in nostalgia, enjoying the antiques and the scenery. But the Whitney is different. It is the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on enslaved people. The old plantation house still stands—alluring in its decadence—but it’s not there to be admired. The house is a reminder of what slavery built, and the grounds are a reminder of what slavery really meant for the men, women, and children held in its grip.
  • Like Blandford, the Whitney also has a cemetery, of a kind. A small courtyard called the Field of Angels memorializes the 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish from 1823 to 1863. Their names are carved into granite slabs that encircle the space. My tour guide, Yvonne, the site’s director of operations, explained that most had died of malnutrition or disease. Yvonne, who is Black, added that there were stories of some enslaved mothers killing their own babies, rather than sentencing them to a life of slavery.
  • Before the coronavirus pandemic, the Whitney was getting more than 100,000 visitors a year. I asked Yvonne if they were different from the people who might typically visit a plantation. She looked down at the names of the dead inscribed in stone. “No one is coming to the Whitney thinking they’re only coming to admire the architecture,” she said.
  • Did the white visitors, I asked her, experience the space differently from the Black visitors? She told me that the most common question she gets from white visitors is “I know slavery was bad … I don’t mean it this way, but … Were there any good slave owners?”
  • “I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system … You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does that sound?”
  • But so many Americans simply don’t want to hear this, and if they do hear it, they refuse to accept it. After the 2015 massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston led to renewed questions about the memory and iconography of the Confederacy, Greg Stewart, another member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told The New York Times, “You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters.”
  • So much of the story we tell about history is really the story we tell about ourselves. It is the story of our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. They are the stories Jeff tells as he sits watching the deer scamper among the Blandford tombstones at dusk. The stories he wants to tell his granddaughters when he holds their hands as they walk over the land. But just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.
  • Would Jeff’s story change, I wonder, if he went to the Whitney? Would his sense of what slavery was, and what his ancestors fought for, survive his coming face-to-face with the Whitney’s murdered rebels and lost children? Would he still be proud?
Javier E

Thieves of experience: On the rise of surveillance capitalism - 0 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=8608

tech brain science knowledge memory distraction smartphone learning creativity reasoning problem-solving silicon valley elite surveillance capitalism psychology

shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way
  • Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one
  • but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.
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  • there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on
  • hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.
  • Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.
  • All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”
  • “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”
  • This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists
  • Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.
  • it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.
  • spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.
  • competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives
  • “The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.
  • What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not
  • Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.
  • Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public
  • Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc
  • As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.
  • The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,”
rerobinson03

Telling Stories of Slavery, One Person at a Time - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...museum-slavery-exhibition.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • “For the longest time, it was mainly displayed as an item that speaks about riches and world power,” said Valika Smeulders, who leads the history department at the Rijksmuseum. In 2013, one of the museum’s curators noticed the images on the lid, she added. “He saw that human beings were being purchased. That allowed us to look at the box in a new way, to relate it to the social history of slavery.”
  • From the 17th century through the 19th century, they enslaved more than a million people, according to the museum’s historians, buying them at trading posts the companies ran in Africa and Asia and transporting them en masse across oceans, creating large-scale forced migrations.
  • Slavery was forbidden in the Netherlands, but it was legal — and crucial to the profitable plantations — in Dutch colonies such as Brazil, Indonesia and Suriname. Goods produced by enslaved people for the companies included sugar, coffee, gold, pepper, tobacco, cotton, nutmeg and silver.
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  • “In the Netherlands, when people did have lessons about slavery, it was usually about the United States and the cotton plantations in the South,” she said. “The story of slavery is the North American story. That’s why it’s important to make sure that it’s clear that it’s not American history, or even colonial history. It’s our national history.”
mattrenz16

Opinion: Naomi Osaka's courageous choice - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Twenty-three-year-old tennis player and four-time Grand Slam singles champion Naomi Osaka stunned the tennis community this week by dropping out of the in-progress French Open, one of the year's major tournaments, announcing on social media that she will "take some time away from the court."
  • That is why forcing her to choose between her mental health and a few media sound bites was entirely unnecessary. We don't need to hear from her to appreciate her skill on the court. We do not need to drive her out of her career in order to punish her for failing to perform.
  • In attempting to force her hand, they essentially forced her out. Enter email to sign up for the CNN Opinion newsletter. "close dialog"Get CNN Opinion's newsletter for the latest thoughts and analysis on today's news.Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1376914 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1376914 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: auto;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-tVcUlRZ> *:first-child {background-color: transparent;background-size: contain;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 660px;text-align: left;padding: 25px 0 15px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-BpRQ7DR {width: 310px;padding: 15px 0 15px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf {width: auto;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-family: CNN Business,CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 24px;line-height: 1.1em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-element-1376914-oUX5Jvf> *:first-child {font-size: 16px;padding: 6px 0 0;line-height: 1.2;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376914 .bx-group-1376914-PZ8dLrW {width: 660px;padding: 0;min-width: 550px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campa
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • But Open organizers didn't stop there, issuing a news release threatening to expel her from the tournament if she kept it up.
  • And so, she quit. Read More
  • Her decision was surprising, but not entirely out of the blue. Earlier, Osaka had announced that she would be opting out of the tournament's "mandatory" media interviews, citing mental health concerns, including a history of depression.
  • Osaka first came into the spotlight at the 2018 US Open when her historic win against Serena Williams received boos from a crowd convinced that Williams was unfairly targeted by the umpire. What should have been an extraordinarily joyous occasion, her first major victory and the event that catapulted her into public recognition, was instead one that made her cry, both immediately following the match and when she went to collect her trophy. ESPN declared that "Naomi Osaka was denied her magic moment."
  • Simply put, it's because the world has unrealistic expectations of celebrities and athletes. We believe the public nature of their fame entitles us access to their private lives. In several recent interviews, such as one with podcaster Dax Shepard, Prince Harry has talked openly of his own mental health struggles and of the pressures he and his wife, Meghan Markle, have felt as objects of media fascination, pressures so severe that Markle thought of suicide.
  • Many of her fellow athletes agreed with her decision. Steph Curry tweeted, "you shouldn't ever have to make a decision like this -- but so damn impressive taking the high road when the powers that be don't protect their own. major respect @naomiosaka." Martina Navratilova tweeted her support of Osaka, noting that "as athletes we are taught to take care of our body, and perhaps the mental & emotional aspect gets short shrift. This is about more than doing or not doing a press conference." Serena Williams offered her support, too.
  • Some tennis players, of course -- including Rafael Nadal and Sofia Kenin -- have come out to say that speaking to reporters is part of the job. But just because something has been part of the job needn't mean it should be, or that it should be for everyone. Osaka didn't just decide she didn't feel like giving interviews. She was forced to make a choice, and she chose herself. That takes courage, courage that is a shame she had to muster at all. Because in the end, the tennis world has lost a great, at least for now -- a point that deserves much more attention.
aidenborst

Opinion: Michael Flynn is playing with fire - CNN - 0 views

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

US politics Trump history crisis Culture policy GOP Michael-Flynn coup

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • It's hard to get a grip on what's happened to one-time war hero, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn.
  • Flynn, a former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, shockingly appeared to support a military coup in the United States during a Sunday keynote address to a Dallas conference organized by supporters of QAnon conspiracy theories.
  • An audience member at the Dallas event asked Flynn: "I want to know why what happened in Minamar (sic) can't happen here?" The audience raucously cheered this question. Flynn replied, "No reason. I mean, it should happen here. No reason. That's right." Again, the audience cheered heartily. Enter email to sign up for the CNN Opinion newsletter. "close dialog"Healing a divided country starts with listening. Sign up for refreshing takes from every perspective. Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Thanks for Subscribing!Continue ReadingBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy."close dialog"/* effects for .bx-campaign-1376913 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1376913 *//* custom css from creative 52220 */.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 42px;}@media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-row-image-logo img { height: 35px;}}/*Validation border*/.bxc.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-row-validation .bx-input { border-color: #B50000; /*Specify border color*/ border-width: 1px; box-shadow: none; background-color: transparent; color: #B50000; /*Specify text color*/}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1376913 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 220px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;vertical-align: middle;padding: 10px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 20px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-group-1376913-y4M7jyO {width: 660px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-group-1376913-y4M7jyO {text-align: center;width: 315px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1376913 .bx-element-1376913-tVcUlRZ {padding: 0;width: au
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • On Monday, Flynn seemed to be trying to dial back, saying on social media that he doesn't support a military coup. Yet Flynn's comments in Dallas Sunday were made on video, which can be seen here by anyone who wants to judge Flynn's response for themselves.
  • Flynn's recent musings about coups, martial law and overturning legitimate presidential elections are all a very long way from the period after 9/11, when he served in the elite Joint Special Operations Command as a highly regarded intelligence officer in Afghanistan and Iraq.
  • Flynn was so well thought of that he was eventually promoted to lieutenant general and to run the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), but Flynn's overseers in the Obama administration thought he was an ineffective manager of DIA, a large agency with 17,000 employees, and in 2014 he was pushed out of his post.
  • After Trump won the presidency in 2016, he appointed Flynn his national security adviser, a post in which he served for the record briefest amount of time; only 24 days.
  • Flynn was fired for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the content of conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the presidential transition. Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the same issue.
  • Trump pardoned Flynn, but the eradication of his conviction doesn't seem to have impacted Flynn's continuing lack of good judgment: Calling for the overturning of a legitimate presidential election; floating the imposition of martial law and appearing to approve of a coup in the United States.
aleija

In Rural Virginia, a Militia Tries to Recruit a New Ally: The County Government - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...virginia-county-militia-.html

shared by aleija on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • After Virginia passed gun laws, conservatives began invoking the state’s colonial-era constitution, which calls for a “well regulated militia.”
  • whereas a militia was “the last best hope” when liberties are threatened by “a tyrannical government,” then be it resolved: Halifax County would support a local militia.
  • But not everyone saw this fight as just about gun policy. It was also about power.
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  • n the winter of outrage that followed, gun owners poured into Richmond, crowded county board meetings and formed paramilitary groups in one county after another.
  • Throughout one of the most tumultuous political years in memory, armed paramilitary groups have marched: crowding into statehouse galleries, violently defending public monuments and now planning to show up at the polls on Election Day.
  • “Virginia is not the Virginia it used to be,” lamented John Sharp, a supervisor in Bedford County, which passed a militia resolution in May. “We’re outvoted.”
  • “Biden’s coming for us; there will be a war,” said Paul Cangialosi, who works with the Virginia Militia Alliance, created after last year’s election to organize armed groups across the state. “We don’t fix this at the ballot box, I hate to say it. We’re too divided.”
  • The founders saw militias, Mr. Abbott explained, as preventing “governments who had the majority from being able to impose their will on people who didn’t want their will.”
  • “If we do this tonight, what we’re doing is we’re just provoking or enhancing the possibility that we’re going to have civil unrest,” he said, talking of the fatal shootings at the August protests in Kenosha, Wis.
katherineharron

CNN Poll: Americans are divided on what causes problems in US elections - CNN Politics - 0 views

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

biden

shared by katherineharron on 03 May 21 - No Cached
  • the American public is divided over whether the bigger problem with elections in America is that it is too hard to vote or that it is too easy to cheat,
  • about 3 in 10 Americans express doubts that President Joe Biden was elected legitimately, despite the lack of evidence of fraud or wrongdoing
  • 46% of Americans feel the bigger problem in elections is that the rules are not strict enough to prevent illegal votes from being cast, while 45% say the bigger issue is that the rules make it too difficult for eligible citizens who want to vote to cast a ballot.
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  • bills that would make the laws around voting more restrictive have advanced in closely contested states such as Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Michigan and Texas.
  • some less competitive states are making changes to ease access to voting, including in Delaware, Kentucky, Virginia and Washington.
  • The only rule change that a majority in both parties say would make elections more fair is ensuring that in-person early voting is available outside of business hours and on weekends (79% of Democrats, 52% of Republicans say so). On others, there is a wide gap.
  • Nearly two-thirds say elections would be more fair if the rules ensured that in-person early voting is available outside of normal business hours and on weekends (65%) and if voters were required to provide photo identification before they cast a ballot (64%). About half say elections would be more fair if two frequently discussed changes to voter registration practices were made: 51% say elections would be more fair if eligible voters were automatically registered to vote when they turn 18 (just 17% say that would make elections less fair), and 48% say they would be more fair if voters could register at their polling place on Election Day (23% say that would make elections less fair).
  • More say allowing that would make elections more fair (42%) than say it would make them less fair (36%), with 20% saying it wouldn’t change the fairness of US elections.
  • Limiting access to ballot drop boxes only when polls are open (41% less fair, 34% more fair) and making it illegal to provide food or water to people waiting in line to vote (39% less fair, 13% more fair, 46% no difference).
  • with 76% of Democrats saying that the rules make it too difficult to vote and 87% of Republicans saying that the rules are not strict enough to prevent illegal votes from being cast.
  • While 71% of Democrats say sending absentee ballot applications to all registered voters would make elections more fair, 69% of Republicans say that would make them less fair.
  • Although there is no evidence of fraud or wrongdoing in the 2020 election, many still say that Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to become president.
  • ut the share of Republicans who falsely say there is solid evidence that Biden did not win has dropped from 58% in January to 50% now.
saberal

Opinion | Biden's Ambitious Agenda for America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-speech.html

shared by saberal on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • I take back every bad thing that I said about Joe Biden during the primaries.President Biden is actually arguing for investing in Americans and America, even saying that trickle-down economics never worked.
  • Mr. Biden understands, like Lincoln (and modern Republicans), that you have to mold public sentiment, not just follow a mythical center to the right.
  • President Biden’s speech to Congress and the nation was a passing of the baton from squeezing American government into a smaller and smaller box (Ronald Reaganism) back to a more expansive and supportive role for government (Lyndon Johnsonism).
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  • The significance of President Biden’s speech was beyond all the policy agendas he laid out — we knew most of them already. Mr. Biden’s purpose (which I think was achieved) was to show that he is not Donald Trump, that he is an intelligent, plain-spoken, experienced public servant who is in control, and who can lay out his positions with down-to-earth words and logic and appeal to our hopes and dreams without using fear or lies. The simple, easy-to-follow quality of his speech was something I’m not sure even Barack Obama achieved.
  • And like many sermons, the main purpose was to soothe and reassure.
  • The Republicans were OK with the trillions President George W. Bush spent on America’s failed military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were OK with the trillions lost from President Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy.
  • In “You Don’t Actually Need to Reach Across the Aisle, Mr. Biden,” (Opinion guest essay, April 28), John Lawrence argues — correctly — that President Biden should not reach across the aisle to seek bipartisan support for his legislative program. Mr. Biden can and should promote another form of bipartisanship that, bypassing Republican legislators, addresses Republican voters.
  • He can and should highlight the partisanship of Republican legislators who fail to faithfully represent Republican voters, let alone Americans as a whole.
  • To accuse President Biden of seeking to divide our country, while supporting the refusal of his own party to make any attempt to support the president as he tries to move our country forward and bring the promise of the American dream to all of his fellow citizens, is disingenuous, to say the least.
lmunch

Florida Voting Rights: Republican Bill Adds New Limits - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lorida-voting-rights-bill.html

Florida Voting Rights

shared by lmunch on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Republicans in the Florida Legislature passed an election overhaul bill on Thursday that is set to usher in a host of voting restrictions in one of the most critical battleground states in the country, adding to the national push by G.O.P. state lawmakers to reduce voting access.
  • The new bill would limit the use of drop boxes; add more identification requirements for those requesting absentee ballots; require voters to request an absentee ballot for each election, rather than receive them automatically through an absentee voting list; limit who could collect and drop off ballots; and further empower partisan observers during the ballot-counting process. The legislation would also expand a current rule that prohibits outside groups from providing items “with the intent to influence” voters within a 150-foot radius of a polling location.
  • “There was no problem in Florida,” said Kara Gross, the legislative director and senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Everything worked as it should. The only reason they’re doing this is to make it harder to vote.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • But in 2020, more than 2.1 million Democrats cast mail ballots, compared with roughly 1.4 million Republicans, largely because of a Democratic push to vote remotely amid the pandemic and Mr. Trump’s false attacks on the practice. (The former president and his family, however, voted by mail in Florida in the June 2020 primary.)
  • And the G.O.P. effort carries risks: Was the Democratic surge in mail balloting a sign of a new normal for the previously Republican-dominated voting method, or a blip caused by the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic?
  • “So what’s the problem that we’re trying to fix?” Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democratic representative from Orlando, asked rhetorically. “Oh, here’s the problem: Florida Democrats cast 600,000 more vote-by-mail ballots.”
  • Other Republican legislators echoed language used by Mr. Trump and his allies during their challenges to the 2020 election.“I believe that every legal vote should count,” said Travis Hutson, a Republican senator from Northeast Florida. “I believe one fraudulent vote is one too many. And I’m trying to protect the sanctity of our elections.”
  • The bill was not without criticism from notable Republicans inside and outside the Legislature. D. Alan Hays, a conservative Republican who had previously served in the State Senate for 12 years and is now the election supervisor in Lake County, told his former colleagues at a legislative hearing last month that their bill was a “travesty.”
  • “Members, I’ve got no evidence for you on the chupacabra, and I got no evidence for you about ballot harvesting,” Ms. Driskell said. “But what I can tell you is this: that our system worked well in 2020, by all accounts, and everyone agreed. And that for so many reasons, we don’t need this bad bill.”
lmunch

Opinion | The Internet's 'Dark Patterns' Need to Be Regulated - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rnet-ecommerce-regulation.html

Dark Patterns Internet Regulation Policy Politics

shared by lmunch on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Consider Amazon. The company perfected the one-click checkout. But canceling a $119 Prime subscription is a labyrinthine process that requires multiple screens and clicks.
  • These are examples of “dark patterns,” the techniques that companies use online to get consumers to sign up for things, keep subscriptions they might otherwise cancel or turn over more personal data. They come in countless variations: giant blinking sign-up buttons, hidden unsubscribe links, red X’s that actually open new pages, countdown timers and pre-checked options for marketing spam. Think of them as the digital equivalent of trying to cancel a gym membership.
  • Last year, the F.T.C. fined the parent company of the children’s educational program ABCmouse $10 million over what it said were tactics to keep customers paying as much as $60 annually for the service by obscuring language about automatic renewals and forcing users through six or more screens to cancel.
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  • Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, for instance, used a website with pre-checked boxes that committed donors to give far more money than they had intended, a recent Times investigation found. That cost some consumers thousands of dollars that the campaign later repaid.
  • “While there’s nothing inherently wrong with companies making money, there is something wrong with those companies intentionally manipulating users to extract their data,” said Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Delaware Democrat, at the F.T.C. event. She said she planned to introduce dark pattern legislation later this year.
  • More than one in 10 e-commerce sites rely on dark patterns, according to another study, which also found that many online customer testimonials (“I wouldn’t buy any other brand!”) and tickers counting recent purchases (“7,235 customers bought this service in the past week”) were phony, randomly generated by software programs.
  • “The internet shouldn’t be the Wild West anymore — there’s just too much traffic,” said a Loyola Law School professor, Lauren Willis, at the F.T.C. event. “We need stop signs and street signs to enable consumers to shop easily, accurately.”
katherineharron

What it's been like fact-checking Joe Biden through 100 days - CNN Politics - 0 views

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

biden

shared by katherineharron on 03 May 21 - No Cached
  • Things have been quieter around here in presidential-fact-check land. Not because President Joe Biden is accurate all the time. He certainly isn’t. But through his first 100 days in the Oval Office, Biden has given us intermittent false claims rather than the staggering avalanche of daily wrongness we faced from his predecessor.
  • In late March and early April, Biden weighed in on the hot-button issue of the new Georgia elections law. And he either deceived or didn’t have his facts straight – wrongly suggesting that the law requires polling places to close at 5 p.m. (You can read a detailed fact check here.) While the new law does reduce voter access in other ways, Biden gave the law’s supporters ammunition to argue that the law’s opponents were being dishonest.
  • Biden said about 28% fewer public words than Trump through April 29 of their respective terms.
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  • When Biden does make public remarks, he is much more likely to be reading from a prepared text than the famously freewheeling Trump was. Biden’s prepared texts have been quite factual.
  • Trump used the social media service to deliver off-the-cuff and oft-inaccurate boasts and attacks. Biden prefers to post conventionally presidential messages, a large number of which do not contain checkable claims of any kind.
  • Biden claimed that the majority of undocumented immigrants in the US are not Hispanic (experts put the actual figure at two-thirds or more Hispanic), that China has more retired people than working people (it has hundreds of millions more working people than retired people), that community health centers would be sent one million Covid-19 vaccine doses a week (the plan was to send one million in the “initial phase” of the program, not every week), and that the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage would be $20 per hour today if it had been linked to inflation upon its creation (Biden was not even close – the White House said Biden got mixed up with another statistic).
  • Biden claimed the US was sending back “the vast majority of families” who arrived at the southern border. While the US was indeed expelling the majority of all migrants encountered at the border, it was sending back less than half of the families in particular.
  • Biden has made 29 total false claims in his first 100 days, about one every three-and-a-half days on average. That’s not cause for celebration. But I counted 214 false claims from Trump over his own first 100 days in office, more than two per day on average – and that was a very slow Trump period compared to what came later.
  • Biden’s push for additional gun control measures, he exaggerated about gun manufacturers’ immunity from lawsuits
  • Biden has sometimes been inaccurate in his attempt to favorably compare himself to Trump.
  • And Biden has repeatedly claimed that Trump signed a tax law that gave 83% of the benefits to the top 1%. In reality, that 83% figure is a think tank’s estimate for what would happen in 2027 if the law’s corporate tax cuts remained in place but its individual tax cuts expired as scheduled after 2025. Between 2018 and 2025, conversely, the think tank estimated that the top 1% would get between 20.5% and 25.3% of the benefits.
  • Boasting of how well he knows Chinese President Xi Jinping, Biden claimed three times in office that he has traveled 17,000 miles or more than 17,000 miles “with” Xi. As the Washington Post first noted, that number is nowhere close to accurate. Biden could have accurately made the same point by saying he has spent a lot of time with Xi.
  • In an impassioned flourish at the CNN town hall in February, Biden claimed the US spends almost $9 billion on a tax break “for people who own racehorses.” Experts have no idea where Biden got that figure for this tax break, and the White House declined to explain.
  • In my first fact check of Biden’s presidency, in January, I noted Biden was wrong when he told reporters that when he initially announced his goal of 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days, “you all said it’s not possible.” Biden switched to softer, accurate language in subsequent comments on the subject – saying in March, for example, that his goal was initially “considered ambitious” and that “some even suggested it was somewhat audacious.”
  • We aren’t throwing a party for the Biden team here; it would have been better if the administration hadn’t gotten it wrong in the first place. But after four years dealing with a Trump White House that appeared not to care about fact-checking at all, the Biden White House’s response was a welcome development.
martinelligi

Opinion | On Afghanistan, Biden Ditches the Generals - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-afghanistan-war.html

afghanistan conflict

shared by martinelligi on 18 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Awash in grief and anger, we invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 to hunt down Osama bin Laden and punish the Taliban for letting him turn a maze of caves into a launching pad to attack America.
  • Even then, it was clear that our attempt to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into model democracies was not going well. Touring those countries, Gates could barely leave the small secured zones.
  • Gates told reporters he had only just learned the “eye-opener” that the Taliban were attracting so many fighters because they paid more. Generals in Afghanistan said the Taliban were giving fighters $250 to $300 a month, while the Afghan Army was paying about $120. So Gates, employing the American way of throwing more money at a problem, got the recruits a raise to $240.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • As vice president, Biden was a lone voice in the Oval Office objecting to the surge in Afghanistan. He told Obama, if you let them, the generals will box you in and string it ou
  • Trump was shooting from the hip but his instinct to withdraw was right. And Biden was right to ignore dire warnings about what will happen when we leave. The Taliban cannot be trusted; they’re true believers in a medieval ideology. A power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban was never going to work.
rerobinson03

Suez Canal Blocked After Giant Container Ship Gets Stuck - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...suez-canal-blocked-ship.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • By Wednesday morning, more than 100 ships were stuck at each end of the 120-mile canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and carries roughly 10 percent of worldwide shipping traffic. Only the Panama Canal looms as large in the global passage of goods.
  • And if the ship is not freed within a few days, it would add one more burden to a global shipping industry already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, creating delays, shortages of goods and higher prices for consumers.
  • The ship’s size has magnified every challenge. Though a gust of wind may seem an improbable David to the ship’s Goliath, the containers stacked at least nine-high atop the deck would have acted like a giant sail, Capt. Konrad said, giving Tuesday’s high winds more surface area to push against.As container ships have grown in scale, culminating in a new generation of ultra-large ships that includes the 1,312-foot-long Ever Given, the Suez Canal and global ports have struggled to keep pace. Parts of the canal were widened several years ago, though not enough to eliminate the tension for pilots charged with navigating it. Crew sizes have not increased to match the vessels, said Capt. Konrad, and technology for piloting through narrow channels has not improved.
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  • But if the ship’s extraction takes longer, it could pose a substantial risk for an already-overwhelmed industry. Global trade has been disrupted as locked-down American consumers ordered vast quantities of factory goods from Asia, yielding a monthslong shortage of shipping containers, the metal boxes that carry parts and finished products around the globe.The blockage of the Suez Canal will affect the movement of things like exercise bikes and printers built in Chinese factories destined for American households, and soybeans grown on American farms and shipped to food processors in Southeast Asia.
  • ut first comes the technical quagmire of freeing the Ever Given. Pictures from the canal showed the container-laden ship sitting sideways at such an angle that the name of the company that operates it, Evergreen, was clearly visible from the ship behind it.“Ship in front of us ran aground while going through the canal and is now stuck sideways,” an Instagram user who gave her name as Julianne Cona, a ship’s engineer onboard another vessel, posted alongside a photo of the stricken ship on Tuesday evening. “Looks like we might be here for a little bit…”
anonymous

States sue to undo Biden pause on US oil & gas lease sales - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...iden-pause-us-oil-gas-76657181

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Thirteen states sued the Biden administration Wednesday to end a suspension of new oil and gas leases on federal land and water and to reschedule canceled sales of leases in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska waters and western states.
  • The suit specifically seeks an order that the government go ahead with a sale of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico that had been scheduled for March 17 until it was canceled; and a lease sale that had been planned for this year in Alaska's Cook Inlet.
  • Biden and multiple federal agencies bypassed comment periods and other bureaucratic steps required before such delays can be undertaken, the states claim in the lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in the federal court's Western District of Louisiana.
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  • The lawsuit notes that coastal states receive significant revenue from onshore and offshore oil and gas activity.
  • At a news conference, Landry accused the Biden administration of “effectively banning oil and gas activity that supports businesses, employees our workers and, also, as importantly, funds our coastal restoration projects.”
  • But a long-term halt to oil and gas sales would curb future production and could hurt states like Louisiana that are heavily dependent on the industry.
  • “This will not affect oil and gas production or jobs for years to come,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said when asked about the lawsuit's claims at a Wednesday briefing.
  • “Just as you're starting to have the communications get you to a point where you're feeling better about things and the permits are being issued probably isn't the best time to file litigation,” Edwards said.
  • Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and West Virginia are the other plaintiff states.Western Energy Alliance, an industry lobbying group based in Colorado, sued over the leasing suspension in federal court in Wyoming on the same day it was announced. The Biden administration had not responded to the complaint as of Wednesday.
cartergramiak

Opinion | Republicans Have Declared War on Coca-Cola and Baseball - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...licans-georgia-voting-law.html

politics Culture trump GOP

shared by cartergramiak on 07 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Are you a Republican voter irked by the state of American politics? If so, party leaders have some exciting marching orders for you: Dump your Diet Coke and shut off that episode of “NCIS” — or whatever ViacomCBS show you may be watching. Cash in your Delta plane tickets, close your Citibank account, flush your Merck meds and tell your kids not to ship you anything via UPS. And, oh, yeah, no patronizing Major League Baseball until further notice. Not the Yankees. Not the Dodgers. Not even the poor Pirates.
  • Ordinarily, Republicans enjoy a snuggly relationship with corporate America, which appreciates the party’s tax-slashing, antiregulatory inclinations. But the G.O.P.’s latest crusade hasn’t been so much pro-business as antidemocratic: pushing hundreds of measures in dozens of states that are expected to make voting more burdensome, especially for poor and minority communities.
  • This manipulation of the electoral system has sparked a fierce backlash. Activists, including some of Georgia’s faith leaders, have moved to organize boycotts against locally based companies they say did too little to oppose the bill. They also have called on companies to stop donating to lawmakers who backed it.
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  • The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has proclaimed corporations’ meddling “stupid” and released this ominous statement: “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order. Businesses must not use economic blackmail to spread disinformation and push bad ideas that citizens reject at the ballot box.”
  • On Friday, Major League Baseball turned up the heat, announcing that it is was pulling July’s All-Star Game and the M.L.B. draft out of the state.
  • As you’d imagine, the late-night comedians are having a field day with this mess. “Republicans say they’re going to boycott baseball,” riffed Jimmy Fallon on Monday. “They’re already boycotting the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. Soon their only sports will be golf and Jarts.”
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