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Barr Acknowledges Justice Dept. Has Found No Widespread Voter Fraud - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...william-barr-voter-fraud.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 02 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Attorney General William P. Barr acknowledged on Tuesday that the Justice Department has uncovered no voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” a striking repudiation of President Trump’s groundless claims that he was defrauded.
  • Mr. Barr has advanced Mr. Trump’s political agenda perhaps more than any other cabinet member, bringing the Justice Department as close to the White House as it has been since Watergate.
  • And Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, who has refused to recognize Mr. Trump’s election loss, moved closer to overtly accepting the reality that Mr. Biden would be in the White House next year as he discussed the prospects for more pandemic stimulus in 2021.
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  • Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer for Mr. Trump who has been at the forefront of promoting his election conspiracy theories, said that his team had gathered evidence of illegal voting in six states, backed up by sworn witness statements, and that the Justice Department had failed to investigate what the team had uncovered. 
  • There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the D.H.S. and D.O.J. have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that,” Mr. Barr said, referring to the Department of Homeland Security and his own department.
  • Mr. Barr had been mostly silent since the election, but some Republicans privately pushed him to publicly rebut Mr. Trump, according to a person told of those conversations. His comments may have been prompted by Mr. Trump’s increasingly specious election claims; the president suggested on Sunday that the Justice Department and the F.B.I. may have played a role in an election fraud.
  • Mr. Barr had given prosecutors the authority to examine allegations by Mr. Trump’s allies of voter ineligibility in Nevada and improperly dated mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. The results of those investigations have not been publicly disclosed, but Mr. Barr’s remarks suggested that any impropriety was too insignificant to change the election results.
  • “Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. They are not systemic allegations, and those have been run down; they are being run down,” he said. “Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand votes. They have been followed up on.”
  • But none, at least so far, have won Mr. Trump anything more significant than the ability to move his poll observers from 10 feet to six feet away from workers counting votes in Pennsylvania.
  • The campaign and its allies have now lost nearly 40 cases across the country as judge after judge — including some appointed by Mr. Trump — discredited the efforts as lacking both legal merit and convincing proof.
  • In the months before the November election, Mr. Barr had been one of the loudest voices sounding alarms about widespread fraud, claiming repeatedly in speeches and interviews that the potential for it was high and that it posed a grave danger to the election. Mr. Barr’s claims were often false or exaggerated and were widely refuted.
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Why So Many Men Stuck With Trump In 2020 | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...y-men-stuck-with-trump-in-2020 politics culture sexism masculinity support
shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • the COVID-19 pandemic may have played a large role in exacerbating gender divisions in the electorate. This split wasn’t enough for Trump to win this time, of course, but his attitude toward the coronavirus crisis may actually have been a bonus for some men, which could present a real challenge for Biden moving forward.
  • Overall, most Americans consistently disapproved of the way Trump handled the pandemic, but the AEI poll found one notable exception — men who identify as “completely masculine.”1
  • a majority (52 percent) of men who identified as completely masculine on the survey agreed that the Trump administration has a strategy on COVID-19
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  • When broken out by how masculine or feminine they identified themselves, completely masculine men were the only group where the majority (60 percent) said they had voted for Trump.
  • research conducted before the election found that these men, or men who fall into a similar category, were less likely to wear masks in the first place or take other precautions to stop the spread of COVID-19, including social distancing.
  • this conclusion lines up with a broader tendency among men to take fewer health precautions period — like wearing seat belts or going to the doctor regularly. Cassino said that traditional stereotypes around masculinity encourage men to shake off vulnerability, such as hiding a fear of illness and instead projecting strength
  • . “Reaffirming that you are traditionally masculine is itself a political statement today — a way to push back on changes to the way society is organized,” he said.
  • this reflects the extent to which Americans’ views about gender roles have become intertwined with their partisan identity,
  • “COVID-19 makes men focus more on their masculine identity than they otherwise would have, because they feel this pressure to say and demonstrate, ‘Yeah, this big scary medical crisis is happening, but it’s not going to affect me,’” Cassino said.
  • Republican men who identified as completely masculine were somewhat more likely than less-masculine Republican men to approve of the way Trump has handled the pandemic, although the difference wasn’t necessarily all that huge (79 percent compared with 69 percent).
  • One possible explanation is that the threat of business closures or other restrictions on the economy may have been alarming especially to men who identify as completely masculine. “Because employment and working is so central to American masculinity, job loss is seen as a threat to masculinity,”
  • by actively seizing on the spread of COVID-19 as an opportunity to emphasize his own brand of hypermasculinity and portray his opponent as weak and ineffective, Trump may have crafted a tailor-made pitch for men whose own sense of masculinity was threatened by the pandemic.
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Trump Leaves Hospital, Minimizing Virus and Urging Americans 'Not to Let It Dominate Yo... - 0 views

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  • Not to Let It Dominate Your Life
  • persuade Americans to take the pandemic seriously.
  • Mr. Trump has undermined public health experts trying to
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  • As your leader, I had to do that. I knew there’s danger to it, but I had to do it. I stood out front. I led.
  • he president’s dismissal of a virus that in recent weeks has been killing another 700 people each day in the United States set off alarm bells among health specialists who worried that it would send the wrong message to the public.
  • Doctors said the president had gone 72 hours without a fever and had normal blood oxygen readings after two earlier bouts of falling levels that led to him being given supplemental oxygen.
  • without immediately putting his mask back on even though staff members were nearby and he could still be contagious, according to medical studies of the virus timeline. At that point, he filmed the video, which was quickly uploaded to Twitter. A separate video, set to triumphal music, showed Marine One’s return and his saluting pose, and was posted online within an hour of his landing.The president looked stronger than he did on Friday when he was first taken to the hospital, but he did appear to breathe heavily once reaching the top of the White House stairs. He has been taking steroids that are known to produce a feeling of energy, even exhilaration, while suppressing pain or discomfort.After largely laying off Twitter, his favorite form of communication, for three days, Mr. Trump woke up Monday morning and began blasting out a string of messages in all capital letters in machine gun fashion shortly after 6 a.m., amplifying campaign messages like “LAW & ORDER. VOTE!” and “SAVE OUR SECOND AMENDMENT. VOTE!” By afternoon, he added, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
  • The three joined a growing list of people around the president who have tested positive, including Melania Trump, the first lady; Hope Hicks, a senior adviser;
  • ested negative on
  • His doctor said that Mr. Pence was not quarantining because he had not been close enough to any infected individuals for long enough to qualify as “a close contact.”
  • he is 74, male and overweight
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Nine Days in Wuhan, the Ground Zero of the Coronavirus Pandemic | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ro-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic china pandemic politics policy censorship origins
shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • By now, with worldwide infections at thirty-five million and counting, and with near-total silence on the part of the Chinese government, the market has become a kind of petri dish for the imagination.
  • One common Chinese conspiracy theory claims that the U.S. Army deliberately seeded the virus during the 2019 Military World Games, which were held in Wuhan that October. On the other side of the world, a number of Americans believe that the virus was released, whether accidentally or otherwise, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose research includes work on coronaviruses.
  • There’s no evidence to support these theories, and even the prevalent animal-market connection is unclear. There weren’t many wildlife dealers in the market—about a dozen stalls, according to most published reports—and Wuhan natives have little appetite for exotic animals.
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  • There are three hundred and twenty-one testing locations in the city, and the system is so extensive that in June, when Beijing suffered an outbreak, Wuhan hospitals sent seventy-two staffers to the capital to help with tests.
  • When Wuhan was sealed, the strategy of isolation was replicated throughout the city. Housing compounds were closed and monitored by neighborhood committees, with residents going out only for necessities.
  • Toward the end of the first month, the guidelines were tightened further, until virtually all goods were delivered. On February 17th, Fang Fang wrote, “Everyone is now required to remain inside their homes at all times.”
  • Meanwhile, approximately ten thousand contact tracers were working in the city, in order to cut off chains of infection, and hospitals were developing large-scale testing systems. But isolation remained crucial: patients were isolated; suspected exposures were isolated; medical workers were isolated.
  • Zhang said the experience of working through the pandemic had left him calmer and more patient. He drove more carefully now; he wasn’t in such a rush.
  • I often asked Wuhan residents how they had been personally changed by the spring, and there was no standard response. Some expressed less trust in government information; others said they had increased faith in the national leadership.
  • Wuhan had most recently reported a locally transmitted symptomatic case on May 18th. It’s the most thoroughly tested city in China: at the end of May, in part to boost confidence, the government tried to test every resident, a total of eleven million.
  • I never met a cabdriver who had been swab-tested less than twice, and a couple had been tested five times. Most of the cabbies had no relatives or friends who had been infected; swabbing was simply required by the city and by their cab companies.
  • “I tend to take a charitable view of countries that are at the beginning stage of epidemics,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me, in a phone conversation. According to her, it’s unrealistic to expect that any country could have stopped this particular virus at its source. “I’ve always believed that this thing was going to spread,” she said
  • The physician who handled testing told me that, on average, his hospital still recorded one positive for every forty thousand exams. Most of these positives were repeat patients: after having been infected during the initial run of the virus, they recovered fully, and then for some reason, months later, showed evidence of the virus again. So far, most of the positives had been asymptomatic, and the physician saw no indication that the virus was spreading in the city.
  • In town, there were few propaganda signs about the epidemic, and Wuhan newspapers ran upbeat headlines every morning (Yangtze Daily, August 29th, front page: “STUDENTS DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN SCHOOLS”). Movie theatres were open; restaurants and bars had no seating restrictions. At the Hanyang Renxinghui Mall, I saw barefaced kids playing in what may have been one of the last fully functioning ball pits on earth, a sight that seemed worthy of other headlines (“CHILDREN DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN WUHAN BALL PITS”).
  • Across town, colleges and universities were in the process of bringing back more than a million students. Wuhan has the second-highest number of students of any city in China, after Guangzhou.
  • Wuhan memories remained fresh, and the materials of documentation were also close at hand. People sometimes handed over manuscripts, and they took out their phones and pulled up photographs and messages from January and February. But I wondered how much of this material would dissipate over time.
  • In town, I met two Chinese journalists in their twenties who were visiting from out of town. They had been posted during the period of the sealed city: back then, anybody sent to cover events in Wuhan had to stay for the long haul.
  • One was a director of streaming media whom I’ll call Han, and he had found that government-run outlets generally wanted footage that emphasized the victory over the disease, not the suffering of Wuhan residents. Han hoped that eventually he’d find other ways to use the material. “It will be in the hard drive,” he said, tapping his camera.
  • After that, Yin reported on a number of issues that couldn’t be published or completed, and she often talked with scientists and officials who didn’t want to say too much. “One person said, ‘Ten years later, if the climate has changed, I’ll tell you my story,’ ” Yin told me. “He knew that he would be judged by history.” She continued, “These people are inside the system, but they also know that they are inside history.”
  • Such fare is much more popular in Guangdong, in the far south. It’s possible that the disease arrived from somewhere else and then spread in the wet, cool conditions of the fish stalls. A few Wuhan residents told me that a considerable amount of their seafood comes from Guangdong, and they suggested that perhaps a southerner had unwittingly imported the disease,
  • When I spoke with scientists outside China, they weren’t focussed on the government’s early missteps
  • In time, we will learn more, but the delay is important to the Communist Party. It handles history the same way that it handles the pandemic—a period of isolation is crucial. Throughout the Communist era, there have been many moments of quarantined history: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the massacre around Tiananmen Square. In every case, an initial silencing has been followed by sporadic outbreaks of leaked information. Wuhan will eventually follow the same pattern, but for the time being many memories will remain in the sealed city.
  • Wafaa El-Sadr, the director of ICAP, a global-health center at Columbia University, pointed out that Chinese scientists had quickly sequenced the virus’s genome, which was made available to researchers worldwide on January 11th. “I honestly think that they had a horrific situation in Wuhan and they were able to contain it,” she said. “There were mistakes early on, but they did act, and they shared fast.”
  • For much of El-Sadr’s career, she has worked on issues related to AIDS in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere. After years of research, scientists eventually came to the consensus that H.I.V. most likely started through the bushmeat trade—the first human was probably infected after coming into contact with a primate or primate meat.
  • El-Sadr views the coronavirus as another inevitable outcome of people’s encroachment on the natural world. “We are now living through two concomitant massive pandemics that are the result of spillover from animal to human hosts, the H.I.V. and the COVID pandemics,” she wrote to me, in an e-mail. “Never in history has humanity experienced something along this scale and scope.”
  • There’s a tendency to believe that we would know the source of the coronavirus if the Chinese had been more forthcoming, or if they hadn’t cleaned out the Huanan market before stalls and animals could be studied properly.
  • Yiwu He, the chief innovation officer at the University of Hong Kong, told me that the C.N.B.G. vaccine has already been given to a number of Chinese government officials, under an emergency-use approval granted by the authorities. “I know a few government officials personally, and they told me that they took the vaccine,” he said, in a phone conversation. He thought that the total number was probably around a hundred. “It’s middle-level officials,” he said. “Vice-ministers, mayors, vice-mayors.”
  • Daszak believes the virus probably circulated for weeks before the Wuhan outbreak, and he doubts that the city was the source. “There are bats in Wuhan, but it was the wrong time of year,” he told me. “It was winter, and bats are not out as much.”
  • His research has indicated that, across Southeast Asia, more than a million people each year are infected by bat coronaviruses. Some individuals trap, deal, or raise animals that might serve as intermediary hosts. “But generally it’s people who live near bat caves,”
  • Daszak said that he had always thought that such an outbreak was most likely to occur in Kunming or Guangzhou, southern cities that are close to many bat caves and that also have an intensive wildlife trade.
  • He thinks that Chinese scientists are probably now searching hospital freezers for lab samples of people who died of pneumonia shortly before the outbreak. “You would take those samples and look for the virus,” he said. “They’ll find something eventually. These things just don’t happen overnight; it requires a lot of work. We’ve seen this repeatedly with every disease. It turns out that it was already trickling through the population.”
  • Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization based in New York. EcoHealth has become the target of conspiracy theorists, including some who claim that the virus was man-made. Daszak and many prominent virologists say that anything created in a lab would show clear signs of manipulation.
  • There’s also speculation that the outbreak started when researchers accidentally released a coronavirus they were studying at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But there’s no evidence of a leak, or even that the institute has ever studied a virus that could cause a COVID-19 outbreak.
  • “Scientists in China are under incredible pressure to publish,” Daszak said. “It really drives openness and transparency.”
  • He has spent a good deal of time in Wuhan, and co-authored more than a dozen papers with Chinese colleagues. “If we had found a virus that infected human cells and spread within a cell culture, we would have put the information out there,” he said. “In sixteen years, I’ve never come across the slightest hint of subterfuge. They’ve never hidden data. I’ve never had a situation where one lab person tells me one thing and the other says something else. If you were doing things that you didn’t want people to know about, why would you invite foreigners into the lab?”
  • In April, President Trump told reporters that the U.S. should stop funding research connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shortly after Trump’s comments, the National Institutes of Health cancelled a $3.7-million grant to EcoHealth, which had been studying how bat coronaviruses are transmitted to people.
  • I asked Daszak why, if he has such faith in the openness of his Wuhan colleagues, the Chinese government has been so closed about other aspects of the outbreak. He said that science is one thing, and politics something else; he thinks that officials were embarrassed about the early mistakes, and in response they simply shut down all information.
  • At the beginning of July, China National Biotec Group, a subsidiary of a state-owned pharmaceutical company called Sinopharm, completed construction of a vaccine-manufacturing plant in Wuhan. The project began while the city was still sealed. “That’s the politically correct thing to do,” a Shanghai-based biotech entrepreneur told me. “To show the world that the heroic people of Wuhan have come back.”
  • But Peter Daszak, a British disease ecologist who has collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for sixteen years on research on bat coronaviruses, told me that it’s typical to fail to gather good data from the site of an initial outbreak. Once people get sick, local authorities inevitably focus on the public-health emergency. “You send in the human doctors, not the veterinarians,” he said, in a phone conversation. “And the doctors’ response is to clean out the market. They want to stop the infections.”
  • Pharmaceutical executives have also been expected to lead the way, like the construction manager who donned P.P.E. in order to escort his workers into the patient ward. “Every senior executive at Sinopharm and C.N.B.G. has been vaccinated,” He said. “Including the C.E.O. of Sinopharm, the chairman of the board, every vice-president—everyone.” The Chinese press has reported that vaccinations have also been administered to hundreds of thousands of citizens in high-risk areas around the world.
  • In the West, China’s image has been badly damaged by the pandemic and by other recent events. The country has tightened political crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and, in May, after Australia called for an investigation into the origins of the virus, China responded furiously, placing new tariffs and restrictions on Australian goods ranging from barley to beef.
  • But He believes that the situation is fluid. “All of these feelings can turn around quickly,” he told me. “I think that once China has a vaccine, and if they can help other countries, it can make a huge difference.”
  • There’s also a competitive element. “China wants to beat America,” He said. He believes that the C.N.B.G. vaccine will receive some level of approval for public use by the end of October. “Chinese officials are thinking that Donald Trump might approve a U.S. vaccine before the election,” he said. “So their goal is to have a vaccine approved before that.”
  • No matter how quickly the Chinese develop a vaccine, or how effectively they have handled the pandemic since January, it’s unlikely to make Westerners forget the mistakes and misinformation during the pandemic’s earliest phase.
  • Some of this is due to a cultural difference—the Chinese response to errors is often to look forward, not back. On January 31st, Fang Fang commented in her diary, “The Chinese people have never been fond of admitting their own mistakes, nor do they have a very strong sense of repentance.” It’s often hard for them to understand why this quality is so frustrating for Westerners. In this regard, the pandemic is truly a mirror—it doesn’t allow the Chinese to look out and see themselves through the eyes of others.
  • The pandemic illuminates both the weaknesses and the strengths of the Chinese system, as well as the relationship between the government and the people. They know each other well: officials never felt the need to tell citizens exactly what happened in Wuhan, but they understood that American-level casualties would have been shocking—given China’s population, the tally would have been more than a million and counting.
  • In order to avoid death on that scale, the government also knew that people would be willing to accept strict lockdowns and contribute their own efforts toward fighting the virus.
  • In turn, citizens were skilled at reading their government. People often held two apparently contradictory ideas: that the Party lied about some things but gave good guidance about others. More often than not, citizens could discern the difference. During the pandemic, it was striking that, when the Chinese indulged in conspiracy theories, these ideas rarely resulted in personally risky behavior, as they often did in the U.S.
  • Perhaps the Chinese have been inoculated by decades of censorship and misinformation: in such an environment, people develop strong instincts for self-preservation, and they don’t seem as disoriented by social media as many Americans are.
  • Early in the year, I corresponded by WeChat with a Wuhan pharmacist who worked in a hospital where many were infected. On February 26th, he expressed anger about the early coverup. “My personal opinion is that the government has always been careless and suppressed dissent,” he wrote. “Because of this, they lost a golden opportunity to control the virus.”
  • In Wuhan, we met a few times, and during one of our conversations I showed him what he had written in February. I asked what he would do now if he found himself in Li Wenliang’s position, aware of an outbreak of some unknown disease. Would he post a warning online? Contact a health official? Alert a journalist?The pharmacist thought for a moment. “I would tell my close friends in person,” he said. “But I wouldn’t put anything online. Nothing in writing.”
  • I asked if such an event would turn out differently now.“It would be the same,” he said. “It’s a problem with the system.”
  • He explained that, with an authoritarian government, local officials are afraid of alarming superiors, which makes them inclined to cover things up. But, once higher-level leaders finally grasp the truth, they can act quickly and effectively.
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The alarming reason people aren't going to drug stores as often - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html economics health healthcare coronavirus
shared by aleija on 15 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • People have been filling fewer prescriptions in stores during the pandemic with some doctor's offices closed, many elective procedures on hold and more shoppers switching to mail order. This has also choked off impulse purchases and unplanned items that customers grab when they visit stores to pick up their prescriptions.
  • Visits to drug stores fell around 12.8% from the prior year for the four weeks ending on October 4, according to market research firm IRI.
  • Additionally, some people have been visiting doctors offices and health clinics less often than usual in the pandemic for annual and routine checkups, say experts.
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  • This has meant fewer people are being diagnosed or treated for health conditions and thus do not need to renew their medications or fill new ones.
  • For someone with high blood pressure or diabetes, "if you miss those medications and your blood pressure gets too high, it could lead to a heart attack or a stroke,"
  • efore the coronavirus hit, Americans shopped an average of 4.4 stores each week, according to consulting firm McKinsey. By late May, that number had dropped to 2.8.
  • For the 31 weeks ending on October 3, sales at drug stores have inched up 2.5% from the same stretch last year, while they have increased 19.9% at grocery stores, according to Nielsen.
  • CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid are trying to fight back by offering home delivery and curbside pickup and improving their food selection.
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'Hijacked by anxiety': how climate dread is hindering climate action | Environmental ac... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...aralysing-effect-psychologists climate change anxiety mental health trauma obstacle
shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • They call it climate anxiety – a sense of dread, gloom and almost paralysing helplessness that is rising as we come to terms with the greatest existential challenge of our generation, or any generation.
  • an increasing number of psychologists believe the trauma that is a consequence of climate breakdown is also one of the biggest obstacles in the struggle to take action against rising greenhouse gas emissions
  • There is a growing sense that this trauma needs a therapeutic response to help people beyond paralysis and into action.
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  • anxiety may be the most rational response to the dizzying pace of the climate breakdown in 2020, but it is seldom the most helpful when it comes to affecting change on the scale needed to limit the unfolding crisis.
  • Hickman is part of the Climate Psychology Alliance, a coalition of psychologists working to help individuals and organisations address climate anxiety. The group is part of a growing chorus of voices advocating the use of psychological principles to help process the collective trauma of environmental breakdown and motivate action.
  • “When we look at this through the lens of individual and collective trauma, it changes everything about what we do and how we do it,”
  • “It helps us make sense of the variety of ways that people are responding to what’s going on, and the mechanisms and practices we need to come through this as whole as possible.”
  • anyone with a public voice has a responsibility to act as a guide, not as a doomsayer or cheerleader.
  • “We already know a lot about what the conditions are now that promote healing and promote working through trauma. It’s just that, for the most part, we haven’t yet applied that to a climate trauma context,”
  • the human psyche is hardwired to disengage from information or experiences that are overwhelmingly difficult or disturbing.
  • This is particularly true if an individual feels powerless to affect change. “For many of us, we’d literally rather not know because otherwise it creates such an acutely distressing experience for us as humans.
  • This makes communicating the reality of the climate crisis, and examining the complex societal structures behind it, a psychological dilemma with existential consequences
  • even among those who accept the dire predictions for the natural world, there are “micro-denials” that can block the ability to take action.
  • A mind intent on avoiding the stark reality of the climate crisis can slip into a defeated eco-nihilism or cling to the gung-ho optimism of a free-market “solutioneer”.
  • In this way, many are able to hold the idea of the climate crisis in mind, while continuing the behaviours that exacerbate it.
  • we have allowed ourselves to be hijacked by our own anxiety, our own urgency, our own recognition of the high stakes, such that it makes us tone deaf and blind to the human dimension of this story, which is that we all want to be heard and seen and respected and valued, and we all want to feel like we’re part of the solution. What we’re seeing right now is the impact of that.”
  • Hickman’s work in the UK includes psychological training for climate campaigners who want to get their messages across without triggering the defences that can cause people to shut down. The answer lies in a “ruthless compassion” – for ourselves and others – that acknowledges the extreme discomfort in confronting the crisis while still taking responsibility for the present,
  • “A measure of mental health is having the capacity to accurately emotionally respond to the reality in our world. So it’s not delusional to feel anxious or depressed. It’s mentally healthy,”
  • It gives rise to what she calls “radical hope”: a belief that meaningful action can make a difference, which is rooted in the reality of the crisis rather than a naive belief that it might not be as bad as we think
  • This “internal activism” can gently dismantle defences, while still demanding change, by acknowledging the desire to cling to our psychological defences and working around it
  • “We have to help people to navigate these feelings by increasing our emotional resilience and emotional intelligence. We need to talk around people’s defences. If their defences are triggered by what you’re saying you can forget it,” says Hickman. “They won’t hear you.”
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8 Million Have Slipped Into Poverty Since May as Federal Aid Has Dried Up - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ederal-aid-poverty-levels.html pandemic economics trump US
shared by cartergramiak on 15 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — After an ambitious expansion of the safety net in the spring saved millions of people from poverty, the aid is now largely exhausted and poverty has returned to levels higher than before the coronavirus crisis, two new studies have found.
  • The number of poor people has grown by eight million since May, according to researchers at Columbia University, after falling by four million at the pandemic’s start as a result of a $2 trillion emergency package known as the Cares Act.
  • The Cares Act included one-time payments for most households — $1,200 per adult and $500 per child — and a huge expansion of unemployment insurance.
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  • Now living on $350 a week plus food stamps, Ms. Jeffcoat and her husband have gone without electricity because they cannot afford generator fuel (their house is off the power grid) and have spent weeks without propane for cooking and hot showers. “We stick with cold meals — cereals,” she said.
  • “There’s just lots of opportunity that’s not being accessed — we’ve got to get people back to work,” said Jason Turner, who runs the Secretaries’ Innovation Group, which advises conservative state officials on aid policies. “I’m not as alarmed about poverty as I am about unemployment. Poverty is an arbitrary income threshold, and people who dip below it, they make adjustments. If you’re not working at all, that’s a huge deal. Physical and mental health declines, substance abuse goes up.”
  • “I’ve definitely found myself feeling a little more anxious — snappier with the children,” Ms. Jeffcoat said.
  • But some opponents of further assistance argue it has discouraged people from working.
  • Among individuals eligible for stimulus checks, about 30 percent failed to receive them, the Columbia researchers estimate. While most families received them automatically, those too poor to have filed tax returns had to apply.
  • Both studies showed poverty started to rise before the unemployment bonus expired in July, suggesting the stimulus checks, which arrived earlier, played an important role.
  • Still, the stories they tell are consistent. “The Cares Act was very successful,” Mr. Wimer said. “But one of its shortcomings was its temporary nature.”
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Opinion | How Trump Destroyed American Culture - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-arts-culture.html us trump Culture
shared by saberal on 29 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Because of the Trump administration’s barbaric family separation policy, 545 children may be lost to their parents forever. America has lost its status as a leading democracy.
  • Every moment spent thinking about Trump is a moment that could have been spent contemplating, creating or appreciating something else. Trump is a narcissistic philistine, and he bent American culture toward him.
  • The easiest place to quantify the cultural impoverishment of the Trump era is in book publishing. There have been so many books about Trump and the fallout from Trumpism that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada has written a book about all the Trump books
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  • Before Trump, I’d never had the feeling of wanting to fast-forward through the era I was living in, of longing to be in the future, looking back at how it all turned out.
  • Of course, it can be thrilling when art and entertainment are politically relevant. But when politics are so alarming that the rest of the world seems to recede, it creates cultural claustrophobia. Since Election Day 2016, writers, artists and critics have wondered what many forms of cultural production — novels, fine art, theater, fashion — mean “in the age of Trump.” It’s a cliché — one I know I’ve used — about the reorientation of almost everything around the monstrous fact of the Trump presidency.
  • Living in Trump’s panic-inducing eternal present is bad for art, but it’s also bad for imagination more broadly, including the imagination needed to conceive a future in which Trumpism is unthinkable.
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Trump Survived the Coronavirus, but He Can't Escape It | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...onavirus-but-he-cant-escape-it trump pandemic
shared by martinelligi on 27 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • But with just eight days to go until November 3rd, Trump has run into something he cannot escape: an alarming third wave of the coronavirus pandemic. “Prolong the pandemic: that’s all I hear about now,” the clearly frustrated President said, at a campaign rally in Lumberton, North Carolina, on Saturday afternoon. “Turn on television. COVID, COVID. COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID. A plane goes down. Five hundred people dead. They don’t talk about it. COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID. By the way, on November 4th, you won’t hear about it anymore.”
  • In the week before Trump’s speech on Saturday, total tests were up 3.8 per cent, according to the COVID Tracking Project. But the percentage increase in the number of new cases was more than five times the percentage increase in the number of tests—a clear indication that the virus is spreading much more rapidly than it was a few weeks ago.
  • But, taking the most recent polling as a whole, there is little sign of the big shift in critical states that Trump needs, and there is plentiful evidence that the pandemic is hurting him.
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  • Trump is describing the pandemic as better than it really is, and, of these people, more than three-quarters said that he’s doing it because he “wants to ignore a real problem.”
  • As Trump crisscrosses the country this week in an effort to rally his base and counteract Biden’s big advantage in paid media, he would love to change the subject—to Hunter Biden, the economy, immigration, anything but the pandemic. But nearly sixty million Americans have already voted, and the virus is still spreading rapidly. In a year defined by the coronavirus, it looks like the election may well be defined by it, too.
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With 'husbands' remark, Trump has sealed his fate with women (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html trump politics US Culture pandemic sexism opinion
shared by carolinehayter on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • As President Donald Trump pleaded for the support of suburban women at a Michigan rally Tuesday evening (amidst a pandemic and economic crisis that have caused a mass exodus of women from the workforce), he argued that he deserved their votes because "we're getting your husbands back to work."
  • The implications here -- that he believes all women have or should have husbands and that workplaces are the province of men -- are so sexist and outmoded that they will likely alarm American women who have long become accustomed to inappropriate treatment from their commander in chief.
  • Biden's support among White women (the ones Trump is clearly angling for when he says "suburban") is 18 points higher than that of Hillary Clinton when she ran against Trump four years ago. But, with these latest remarks, the President has probably put the final nail in his own reelection chances with many women voters.
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  • Before Tuesday, it would have been hard to imagine how Trump could have offended women more than he already has. The president has, of course, been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women (allegations he denies) and been caught on tape bragging that he can get away with sexual assault. He has regularly disparaged and demeaned women -- including his own daughter -- by talking about their appearances rather than their accomplishments and by calling them offensive names.
  • misogynist but not necessarily a sexist. On Tuesday evening, Trump made clear that he is both.
  • A man who is a misogynist, according to Cornell philosopher Kate Manne, punishes women who won't do what he wants. Trump's behavior has long made it evident that he fits this bill. Meanwhile, a sexist, Manne says, believes men are better than women at things like business or sports.
  • Before Tuesday's comments, it wasn't entirely clear that Trump was a sexist; he did put some women in powerful positions in his administration and in the Trump Organization. But by appealing to suburban women to support him because he's helping their husbands, Trump suggested he believes the workplace is the proper domain of men. This is textbook sexism.
  • rump's assumption that all women have -- or should have -- husbands is also terribly retrograde and offensive and will almost certainly be off-putting to single women (among others
  • His sexism isn't even the most jaw-dropping of the implications made by these offensive remarks
  • Trump says he's looking out for the husbands, but it's women themselves who need help getting back to work: over 800,000 of the 1.1 million people who left the workforce between August and September were women, according to the National Women's Law Center
  • This is unsurprising, since job losses have been especially concentrated in sectors where there are more women
  • moms have also been disproportionately taking on the impossible burdens of trying to juggle work, childcare, and home schooling while their kids have been home during the pandemic.
  • But the exodus of this many women from the workplace will also be terrible for the country overall, because it will deprive many organizations of the well-established benefits of women's leadership and influence.
  • Companies with more women and cultural diversity have significantly better financial outcomes, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. But it usually isn't enough to have just one or two women. Studies consistently find that women must make up at least 20-30% of an institution before they actually shape outcomes.
  • They suggest that he thinks that it is men who belong in the workplace and that women all are or should be married. I suspect that women will respond on Tuesday by putting Trump in his own rightful place -- and voting him out of office.
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Opinion | What Will Trump Do After Election Day? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-election-officials.html US politics election trump gop pandemic policy
shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • and it could be one of tumult, banners colliding, incidents at the polls and attempted hacks galore. More likely than not, it will end without a winner named or at least generally accepted.
  • America will probably awaken on Nov. 4 into uncertainty. Whatever else happens, there is no doubt that President Trump is ready for it.
  • They are worried that the president could use the power of the government — the one they all serve or served within — to keep himself in office or to create favorable terms for negotiating his exit from the White House.
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  • “at how profoundly divided we’ve become. Donald Trump capitalized on that — he didn’t invent it — but someday soon we’re going to have figure out how to bring our country together, because right now we’re on a dangerous path, so very dangerous, and so vulnerable to bad actors.”
  • I can’t know all their motives for wanting to speak to me, but one thing many of them share is a desire to make clear that the alarm bells heard across the country are ringing loudly inside the administration too, where there are public servants looking to avert conflict, at all costs.
  • History may note that the most important thing that happened that day had little to do with the religious leader and his large life, save a single thread of his legacy.
  • You don’t know Donald Trump like we do. Even though they can’t predict exactly what will happen, their concerns range from the president welcoming, then leveraging, foreign interference in the election, to encouraging havoc that grows into conflagrations that would merit his calling upon U.S. forces.
  • “That’s really him. Not the myth that’s been created. That’s Trump.”
  • He’d switch subjects, go on crazy tangents, abuse and humiliate people, cut them off midsentence. Officials I interviewed described this scenario again and again.
  • Even if it takes weeks or months before the result is known and fully certified, it could be a peaceful process, where all votes are reasonably counted, allowing those precious electors to be distributed based on a fair fight. The anxiety we’re feeling now could turn out to be a lot of fretting followed by nothing much, a political version of Y2K.Or not.
  • For Mr. Trump, the meeting was a face-to-face lifeline call. When he returned to Washington, he couldn’t stop talking about troop withdrawals, starting with Afghanistan. During his campaign, he had frequently mentioned his desire to bring home troops from these “endless wars.”
  • “were it Obama or Bush, or whatever, they’d meet Billy Graham’s grandson and they’d be like ‘Oh that’s interesting,’ and take it to heart, but then they’d go and they’d at least try to validate it with the policymakers, or their military experts. But no, with him, it’s like improv. So, he gets this stray electron and he goes, ‘OK, this is the ground truth.’ ”
  • Senior leadership of the U.S. government went into a panic. Capitol Hill, too. John Bolton, who was still the national security adviser then, and Virginia Boney, then the legislative affairs director of the National Security Council, hit the phones, calling more than a dozen senators from both parties.
  • “Is there any way we can reverse this?” he pleaded. “What can we do?”
  • Mr. Kelly was almost done cleaning out his office. He, too, had had enough. He and Mr. Trump had been at each other every day for months. Later, he told The Washington Examiner, “I said, whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man,’ someone who won’t tell you the truth — don’t do that.”
  • “I think the biggest shock he had — ’cause his assumption was the generals, ‘my generals,’ as he used to say and it used to make us cringe — was this issue of, I think, he just assumed that generals would be completely loyal to the kaiser,”
  • In February 2019, William Barr arrived as attorney general, having auditioned for the job with a 19-page memo arguing in various and creative ways that the president’s powers should be exercised nearly without limits and his actions stand virtually beyond review.
  • “President Trump serves the American people by keeping his promises and taking action where the typical politician would provide hollow words,” she said. “The president wants capable public servants in his administration who will enact his America First agenda and are faithful to the Constitution — these principles are not mutually exclusive. President Trump is delivering on his promise to make Washington accountable again to the citizens it’s meant to serve and will always fight for what is best for the American people.”
  • To replace Mr. Coats, Trump selected Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas, a small-town mayor-turned-congressman with no meaningful experience in intelligence — who quickly withdrew from consideration after news reports questioned his qualifications; he lacked support among key Republican senators as well.
  • There are many scenarios that might unfold from here, nearly all of them entailing weeks or even months of conflict, and giving an advantage to the person who already runs the U.S. government.
  • “sends letters constantly now, berating, asking for the sun, moon, stars, the entire Russia investigation, and then either going on the morning talk shows or calling the attorney general whenever he doesn’t get precisely what he wants.” The urgency, two F.B.I. officials said, ratcheted up after Mr. Trump was told three weeks ago that he wouldn’t get the “deliverables” he wanted before the election of incriminating evidence about those who investigated and prosecuted his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
  • The speculation is that they could both be fired immediately after the election, when Mr. Trump will want to show the cost paid for insufficient loyalty and to demonstrate that he remains in charge.
  • Nov. 4 will be a day, said one of the former senior intelligence officials, “when he’ll want to match word with deed.” Key officials in several parts of the government told me how they thought the progression from the 3rd to the 4th might go down.
  • A group could just directly attack a polling place, injuring poll workers of both parties, and creating a powerful visual — an American polling place in flames, like the ballot box in Massachusetts that was burned earlier this week — that would immediately circle the globe.
  • Would that mean that Mr. Trump caused any such planned activities or improvisations? No, not directly. He’s in an ongoing conversation — one to many, in a twisted e pluribus unum — with a vast population, which is in turn in conversations — many to many — among themselves.
  • “stand back and stand by” instructions? Is Mr. Trump telling his most fervent supporters specifically what to do? No. But security officials are terrified by the dynamics of this volatile conversation.
  • Conservative media could then say the election was being stolen, summoning others to activate, maybe violently. This is the place where cybersecurity experts are on the lookout for foreign actors to amplify polling location incidents many times over, with bots and algorithms and stories written overseas that slip into the U.S. digital diet.
  • Those groups are less structured, more like an “ideology or movement,” as Mr. Wray described them in his September testimony. But, as a senior official told me, the numbers on the left are vast.
  • That army Trump can direct in the difficult days ahead and take with him, wherever he goes. He may activate it. He may bargain with it, depending on how the electoral chips fall. It’s his insurance policy.
  • Inside the Biden campaign they are calling this “too big to rig.”
  • Races tend to tighten at the end, but the question is not so much the difference between the candidates’ vote totals, or projections of them, as it is what Mr. Trump can get his supporters to believe. Mr. Trump might fairly state, at this point, that he can get a significant slice of his base to believe anything.
  • There were enormous efforts to do so, largely but not exclusively by the Russians, in 2016, when election systems in every state were targeted.
  • The lie easily outruns truth — and the best “disinformation,” goes a longtime C.I.A. rule, “is actually truthful.” It all blends together. “Then the president then substantiates it, gives it credence, gives it authority from the highest office,” says the senior government official.
  • Mr. Trump will claim some kind of victory on Nov. 4, even if it’s a victory he claims was hijacked by fraud — just as he falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton’s three million-vote lead in the popular vote was the result of millions of votes from unauthorized immigrants.
  • In the final few weeks of the campaign, and during Mr. Trump’s illness, he’s done two things that seem contradictory: seeking votes from anyone who might still be swayed and consolidating and activating his army of most ardent followers.
  • The F.B.I. has been under siege since this past summer, according to a senior official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The White House is using friendly members of Congress to try to get at certain information under the guise of quote-unquote, oversight, but really to get politically helpful information before the election,”
  • “They’re the reason he took off the damned mask when he got to the White House” from Walter Reed, the official said. “Those people eat that up, where any reasonable, rational person would be horrified.
  • You ask it to be refilmed, and you take off your mask, which, in my mind, has become a signal to his core base of supporters that are willing to put themselves at risk and danger to show loyalty to him.”
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A record number of women will serve in the next Congress - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html election
shared by katherineharron on 13 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Mace defeated Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham, becoming one of a record number of women who will serve in the 117th Congress — and a record number of Republican women who will serve in the House.
  • With races still to be called, at least 141 women will serve in Congress next year, breaking the record of 127 set in 2019, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
  • That includes at least 116 women in the House — smashing the record of 102 also set in 2019 — and 25 in the Senate, although that number could shrink with California Sen. Kamala Harris' ascendancy to the vice presidency.
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  • Four of the nine Republican women in the Senate were vulnerable in this year's elections, but only Arizona Sen. Martha McSally was defeated, while appointed Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler's fate will be determined in a January runoff.
  • There will be at least six new women of color in Congress — four Democrats and two Republicans — including Democrats Cori Bush, who will be Missouri's first Black congresswoman, and Nikema Williams, who was elected to the late Rep. John Lewis' seat in Georgia.
  • But the majority of the 24 non-incumbent women joining Congress in January are White, including 13 Republicans and five Democrats.
  • At least 91 White women will serve in the 117th Congress, up from 79 this year.
  • his year, though, it's Republican women who have made significant gains. After electing only one new Republican woman to the House in the midterms, Republicans this year have elected at least 15 non-incumbent women.
  • That means the number of Republican women in the House will at least double. (Currently there are only 13 women in the House GOP conference, and two of them did not run for reelection.) Democrats are adding nine new women, which balances out those they lost to defeat and retirement, increasing their numbers to 89 for now.
  • Whereas Democratic women have long been boosted by the pro-abortion rights group EMILY's List, which stands for "Early Money is Like Yeast," Republicans have lacked comparable infrastructure to invest in female candidates
  • That attitude, at least, began to shift after 2018, when New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who had recruited more than 100 women as head of recruitment for the House GOP campaign arm, only to see one of them win, publicly sounded the alarm.
  • But while the campaign committee still does not play in primaries, its leadership acknowledged it had to do better electing diverse candidates — rallying behind another woman, Indiana Rep. Susan Brooks, as the head of recruitment for 2020 — and now proudly touting female candidates' success this year.
  • But by far the biggest reason for that success is that more Republican women raised their hands to run than ever before — in part because they saw what Democratic women did in 2018 — and more of them won primaries, which has traditionally been the biggest hurdle.
  • "Women around the country have watched other women before them be successful and realize, 'Hey, I can do it,'" said Iowa GOP Rep.-elect Ashley Hinson, who last week defeated Democratic Rep. Abby Finkenauer, one of the women who flipped a district in 2018.
  • "It was the perfect storm. We had competitive seats that were winnable and we had incredible women in those districts with prior legislative experience and who knew how to put a campaign together," said Julie Conway
  • Just as Democratic women were in 2018, Republican women this year were well-positioned to take advantage of a favorable environment.
  • "Being the first Republican woman elected to Congress in the state of South Carolina is deeply humbling," Mace said. "It reminds me that Democratic women do not hold a monopoly on breaking glass ceilings."
  • Women candidates often receive questions their male colleagues do not — like who's going to take care of their kids.
  • "The lady at the door, she thought I should be at home with my children. And I basically said, 'Well, I'm setting a good example for them.'"
  • The elected women agree the perspectives they bring to Congress are wanted — and needed.
  • Rep.-elect Carolyn Bourdeaux, the only Democrat who has so far flipped a competitive GOP-held district this year, won in the northeast Atlanta suburbs that are now the epicenter of the political battleground with the Senate majority hinging on two Georgia Senate seats.
  • "Many people here didn't even know that there were Democrats in their neighborhood," she said of the groundwork that that initial race laid.
  • Republicans have flipped eight Democrat-held seats, according to CNN projections so far, and women have delivered all but one of those wins. That means they're likely to face difficult reelections in the future, possibly against Democratic women.
  • "The whole idea of having 'girl seats' does not get us any closer to parity," she said.
  • A record 643 women ran for Congress in 2020 — 583 for the House and 60 for the Senate.
  • That is in part because as more women run for office, they are also more often running against each other, both in primaries and general elections. In 2016, women ran against each other in 17 House and Senate general election races, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics. In 2020, that grew to 51 races with women challenging each other.
  • "I've already gotten texts from other women who are interested in running here in Iowa since the election last week," said Hinson
  • "I do feel like it's gotten better over the years, but I see it more often than not, and it's true on both sides of the aisle. That's why I'm always encouraging women to run."
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How a Kennedy became a 'superspreader' of hoaxes on COVID-19, vaccines, 5G and more - T... - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...nedy-jr-medical-misinformation kennedy vaccine propaganda denial crisis
shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In 2017, after a meeting with then president-elect Mr. Trump in New York, Mr. Kennedy Jr. announced that he had been asked to chair a commission to review vaccine safety. The move alarmed doctors, epidemiologists and public health experts, who pointed out that Mr. Trump had previously raised concerns that vaccines cause autism.
  • Even though the commission never materialized, to Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s bitter disappointment, the fact that the meeting took place at all signals how closely conspiracy theories and misinformation have been interwoven in everyday politics.
  • “To some extent, conspiracy theories rule the day,” Prof. Offit told us.
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  • “You have [U.S. Republican senator] Lindsey Graham talking about the deep state; you could argue the President was elected around conspiracy theories. So Kennedy’s well placed to fit into that trend. He appeals to the notion that there are dark forces working against us.”
  • Larry Sabato, one of America’s leading political scientists, believes the confusion created by the President will find its denouement on Nov. 3, presidential election day, when “we’ll find out whether the truth matters in American politics.” Mr. Sabato said: “What is disturbing is that for tens of millions, it doesn’t matter anymore. We are in the postfactual era, not just in America, but around the world.
  • “Almost all of these theories are pretty, pretty darn boring. And I hate to complain about my job. It’s the same crap over and over again. Same theories, different nouns. There’s nothing to even QAnon, which people look at and say, ‘Oh my God, that’s so wacky.’ Well, the idea of a pedophile deep state working against the president is the plot of Oliver Stone’s JFK movie that came out 30 years ago. ... The idea that your enemies are pedophiles and Satanists and sex traffickers goes back millennia. So there’s really even nothing new there.”
  • Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s siblings Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and former congressman Joseph Kennedy, as well as niece Maeve Kennedy McKean, published an excoriating article in Politico claiming that “he has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines."
  • “We love Bobby,” they said, and praised his record on environmental issues. “However, on vaccines he is wrong.”
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Opinion | Covid-19 Is a Desperate Cry From the Suffering Natural World - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...inks-wildlife-environment.html pandemic crisis history culture
shared by lmunch on 16 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • What’s happening, it turns out, is that mink can catch Covid-19 from human beings and from each other. Several other species — dogs, cats, hamsters, tigers, monkeys and ferrets — have contracted the virus from people, but only mink, so far, have passed the virus back to us.
  • What makes the news from Europe so alarming is that Covid-19 can mutate as it jumps between humans and mink and back again. So far these mutations have not made the virus more easily transmissible or more likely to cause severe infection.
  • Danish officials made the extraordinary decision to kill every mink in the country — some 17 million animals.
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  • We have known for decades what happens when we put pressure on wild animals by degrading their habitats, interrupting their ecosystems, keeping them in cages or otherwise failing them. H.I.V., Lyme, bubonic plague, anthrax, Ebola — all are among the many animal pathogens that now infect human beings. The coronavirus pandemic is just the most recent example of what nature has been telling us all along.
  • “When diseases move from animals to humans, and vice versa, it is usually because we have reconfigured our shared ecosystems in ways that make the transition much more likely,” Ferris Jabr wrote in The New York Times Magazine back in June.
  • Our mistake was only partly in believing that the natural world was ours for the taking. Our mistake was also in failing to understand that we ourselves are part of the natural world. If this pandemic has taught us anything it’s that we cannot escape the world we have shaped.
  • For far too long, human beings believed they’d been given dominion over all the Earth. Now the slaughtered minks in Denmark — and all the creatures who are dying in this human-wrought and rapidly accelerating extinction — are teaching us what we need to do to save them and ourselves, too: We must change our lives.
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How Obama Sees This Moment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...obama-interviews.html politics US obama media
shared by ethanshilling on 17 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Barack Obama’s former vice president will soon have his old job. But he sees deep divisions that no president alone can heal.
  • We spend a lot of time viewing our politics through a backward gaze. We base polling estimates on assumptions about previous electorates. We compare Joe Biden’s performance in rural areas with how Barack Obama fared in those same districts a dozen years earlier.
  • But what if this moment has no parallel in our recent past? What if it’s bigger than just shifting coalitions — a moment when our whole system of information, politics and governance is breaking down?
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  • Even amid a raging pandemic, President Trump remains focused on spreading conspiracy theories about the election he lost, abetted by conservative news media outlets and disinformation campaigns on social media.
  • For more than a decade, pundits have griped about the inability of lawmakers to compromise and accomplish big things. But now, those intractable divisions have spread to the entire country, leaving us unable to form consensus on even the most basic of facts, like Mr. Biden’s victory or the need to wear masks to fight a deadly virus.
  • “America is the first real experiment in building a large, multiethnic, multicultural democracy. And we don’t know yet if that can hold. There haven’t been enough of them around for long enough to say for certain that it’s going to work.”
  • With the election over, the former president is pulling the fire alarm on our democracy. His comments to The Atlantic, NPR and CBS News are striking given that they are coming from a president who was known — and often critiqued — for his levelheaded, “no-drama Obama” style in office.
  • Mr. Obama doesn’t see his successor as the cause of rising populism, a movement he traces to the 2008 election when Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, energized her party’s base.
  • Rather, he blames the media environment, the decline of local news and the refusal of social media companies to take responsibility for conspiracy theories posted on their platforms. There is no longer a “common baseline of fact and a common story,” he said.
  • Mr. Obama even seemed to question whether he could win the presidency if he ran today.
  • Mr. Biden won the White House by promising a return to political norms, a vow that might be impossible to fulfill given the kinds of changes Mr. Obama denounced.
  • In the interviews, Mr. Obama didn’t offer Mr. Biden any easy solutions to these problems, beyond further regulating social media companies — and getting back to the basics of governance.
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Opinion | Is Amy Coney Barrett Joining a Supreme Court Built for the Wealthy? - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tt-business-supreme-court.html politics us policy
shared by saberal on 28 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Much of the public anxiety about Amy Coney Barrett — judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Notre Dame law professor and Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court — has focused on the question of abortion, and whether as a believer in originalism and a practicing Catholic she would be likely to vote to reverse Roe v. Wade.
  • Although we don’t usually think of it this way, the decisions of the Supreme Court have the power to affect the quality of the air we breathe, the pay we receive and the conditions under which we work, by determining what kinds of business and industry regulations are constitutional.
  • With a 6-3 conservative court, the country is at risk of having the few remaining tools that permit some limits on the power of business — like labor unions and environmental legislation — weakened still further.
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  • As a federal appeals judge, Judge Barrett has often ruled in ways friendly to employers. She has joined rulings that stopped a case in which the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission objected to a company that allegedly assigned workers to particular geographic locations based on race and ethnicity and that limit the scope of laws prohibiting age discrimination.
  • In the following decades, the court became publicly associated with liberalism and civil rights. But just as the conservatives of an earlier generation recognized that the courts could be used to override majorities that pushed for limitations of property rights, in the summer of 1971, the lawyer Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum for the United States Chamber of Commerce, “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.”
  • Soon after, Richard Nixon nominated Powell for the Supreme Court; he was a justice for 15 years, and his rulings helped to expand the First Amendment rights enjoyed by corporations, paving the way for Citizens United.
  • But these cases in themselves are less significant than the underlying question: Will the Supreme Court become once more what it was in the early 20th century
  • And it could mean that — as has so often been the case in recent years — workers, ordinary citizens and the very possibility of democratic governance will again lose out.
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FC95: The Age of Louis XIV, the "Sun King" (1643-1715) - The Flow of History - 2 views

www.flowofhistory.com/...FC95 Louis XIV history france
shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".
  • Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.
  • Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.
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  • Versailles Louis' religious faith was largely a superficial one attached to the elaborate ritual of the Catholic mass.  This love of ritual also showed itself in how Louis ran his court at his magnificent palace of Versailles, several miles outside of Paris.  Much of the reason for building Versailles goes back to the Fronde that had driven Louis from Paris as a young boy.  Ever since then, Louis had distrusted the volatile Paris mob and was determined to move the court away from the influence of that city.  Versailles was also the showpiece of Louis' reign, glorifying him as the Sun King with its magnificent halls and gardens.
  • Religion was one aspect of Louis' reign that illustrated the absolute nature of his monarchy quite well.  Louis himself was quite a pious Catholic, learning that trait from his mother.  However, in the spirit of the day, he saw religion as a department of state subordinate to the will of the king.  By the same token, not adhering to the Catholic faith was seen as treason. As a result, Louis gradually restricted the rights of the French Huguenots and finally, in 1685, revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given them religious freedom since the end of the French Wars of Religion in 1598.  This drove 200,000 Huguenots out of France, depriving it of some of its most skilled labor.  Thus Louis let his political and religious biases ruin a large sector of France's economy.
  • Results of Louis' reign The age of Louis XIV was important to European history for several reasons.  First of all, it saw the triumph of absolutism in France and continental Europe.  Versailles was a glittering symbol and example for other European rulers to follow.  Any number of German and East European monarchs modeled their states and courts after Louis XIV, sometimes to the point of financial ruin.  Second, Louis' wars showed the system of Balance of Power politics working better than ever.  French aggression was contained and the status quo was maintained.  All this had its price, since the larger sizes of the armies and the final replacement of the pike with the musket took European warfare to a new level of destruction.  Finally, Louis' reign definitely established France as the dominant power in Europe.  However, the cost was immense and left his successors a huge debt.  Ironically, the problems caused by Louis XIV's reign would help lead to the French Revolution in 1789 and the spread of democratic principles across Europe and eventually the world.
  • Louis' main goals were to expand France to its "natural borders": the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees.  This, of course, would make him enemies among the Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Spanish, and English.  Therefore, Louis' diplomacy had to clear the way to make sure he did not fight everyone at once.  For this purpose he skillfully used money to neutralize potential enemies (such as Charles II of England in the Secret Treaty of Dover) and extracted favorable terms from stalemate or losing situations.  But Louis could also make some fateful blunders to hurt his cause.  His obsessive hatred of the Dutch dominated his policy too much, as did his own self-confidence and arrogance in trying to publicly humiliate his enemies.  However, this just alarmed Louis' enemies more, especially the Dutch, Austrians, and English, who allied against Louis to preserve the balance of power.
  • Exhaustion on both sides finally led to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.  Louis' grandson took the throne of Spain and its American empire, but the French and Spanish thrones could not be united under one ruler.  Austria got the Spanish Netherlands to contain French aggression to the north.  Just as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had contained Hapsburg aggression, the Treaty of Utrecht contained French expansion.  Two years later Louis XIV was dead, with little to show for his vaunted ambitions as a conqueror except an exhausted economy and dissatisfied populace.
  • Just as Louis's palace at Versailles dominated European culture during the late 1600's and early 1700's, his diplomacy and wars dominated Europeans political history.  As Louis himself put it: "The character of a conqueror is regarded as the noblest and highest of titles."  Interestingly enough, he never led his troops in battle except for overseeing a few sieges from a safe distance.
  • I am the state. — Voltaire, incorrectly quoting Louis XIV
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The President hides from the public and fights for a job 'he has no apparent interest i... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html election trump
shared by katherineharron on 13 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • As the week has dragged on, reporters and anchors have been raising questions and raising their voices. "He hasn't taken questions from reporters in over a week," CNN's Kaitlan Collins noted on Thursday.
  • he hasn't even called into "Fox & Friends" or other friendly right-wing outlets. A seven-minute appearance at a Veterans Day ceremony was Trump's sole public appearance this workweek.
  • The most-read story on the Washington Post website on Thursday night was David Nakamura's story titled "As Trump stews over election, he mostly ignores the public duties of the presidency."
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  • "In essence," Jake Tapper said on "The Lead," Trump "appears to be desperately, even pathetically, fighting to keep a job that he has no apparent interest in responsibly performing."
  • "Trump has publicly disengaged from the battle against the coronavirus," they write, "at a moment when the disease is tearing across the United States at an alarming pace."
  • "By Factbase's count it's been a full week since Trump's last 'verbal public statement,' but he's tweeted and retweeted more than 200 times. In giving the tweets a closer look, Factba.se found that the president mentioned the election and Fox News more than Covid-19 despite the rising cases and deaths across the country. He's also been flagged for misinformation 49 times."
  • Trump "is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next, seeing how far he can push his case against his defeat and ensure the continued support of his Republican base. By dominating the story of his exit from the White House, he hopes to keep his millions of supporters energized and engaged for whatever comes next."
  • "There are moments in presidencies, and this is one of those moments, where it has not taken what would normally be a natural course of events. But I believe in law and order, and I believe the system will decide, and we will go on as a country and inaugurate a president."
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While Trump harps on the past, Covid-19 vaccine meeting offers glimmer of hope for the ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html covid
shared by katherineharron on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump has abdicated his leadership role on the pandemic as he pursues his undemocratic quest to overturn the election, but Americans could get the first real glimmer of hope that their lives will return to normal Thursday when a key advisory panel meets to discuss greenlighting the first Covid-19 vaccine.
  • On Wednesday, the US recorded the highest single day tally of more than 3,000 deaths -- and some communities continue to resist precautionary measures like mask mandates as a vocal few falsely claim that the pandemic does not exist.
  • Trump answered a question this week about why he wasn't including Biden aides in a vaccine summit by insisting the election still wasn't settled.
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  • President-elect Joe Biden's team has magnified the giant hurdles that loom for government officials as they try to ensure the smooth delivery of millions of vaccine doses within the 50 states and cities with different ideas about the best way to administer them.
  • Trump told guests that with the help of "certain very important people -- if they have wisdom and if they have courage -- we're going to win this election." The crowd chanted "four more years."
  • the crucial question is whether Trump and his administration are equipping the incoming Biden administration with the knowledge and tools they need to carry out an unprecedented vaccination operation as Trump's White House grudgingly passes the baton.
  • Trump is pursuing a new round in his quixotic bid to overturn the November election by attempting to intervene in a lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court.
  • There were signs Wednesday, however, that cooperation is slowly beginning to take shape behind the scenes. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that he has met with Biden's team -- a rare acknowledgment of the former vice president's victory from a top Trump official -- and he insisted that he wants "to make sure they get everything that they need."
  • "Twenty million people should get vaccinated in just the next several weeks, and then we'll just keep rolling out vaccines through January, February, March as they come off the production lines," Azar said, trying to offer a note of reassurance about continuity during an interview on CNN's New Day.
  • The vaccine distribution challenges surrounding a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic would normally be at the top of the agenda for any commander-in-chief. But unsurprisingly, Trump is refusing to acknowledge the potential problems as he spreads disinformation to his supporters, and his administration -- at his behest -- continues to target Biden's son Hunter, who revealed Wednesday that his taxes are under federal investigation.
  • "Unless a court makes some other decision, the Electoral College is the defining outcome of the presidential race," Moran said. Asked what would be next if Trump doesn't concede, Moran said: "There is a transition that just occurs -- occurs under our laws under the Constitution."
  • Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, a Republican, said "it is unhealthy for the well-being of the country" to continue debating the outcome of the election "once the presidential race has been determined."
  • The attorney representing Trump, John Eastman, is known for recently pushing a racist conspiracy theory -- that Trump himself later amplified -- claiming Vice President-elect Kamala Harris might not be eligible for the role because her parents were immigrants.
  • With hopes riding on the vaccine authorization discussion Thursday, the country continued to grapple with an alarming rise in cases around the country as medical professionals began to see the post-Thanksgiving spike materialize and some regions reverted to shutdowns to try to preserve hospital capacity.
  • "This is by far, the worst surge to date," Colfax said. "The reality is unfortunately proving to be as harsh as we expected. ... The vaccine will not save us from this current surge -- there is simply not enough time."
  • "The more terrible truth is that over 8,000 people, ... who were beloved members of their family, are not coming back. And their deaths are an incalculable loss to their friends and their family, as well as our community."
  • Though Trump has said that the vaccination program will "quickly and dramatically reduce deaths," a new White House task force report warns that the vaccine "will not substantially reduce viral spread, hospitalizations, or fatalities until the 100 million Americans with comorbidities can be fully immunized, which will take until the late spring."
  • The FDA is expected to conduct its authorization review between December 11 and the 14, with first shipment of the vaccine going out by December 15. Needles, syringes and other materials to deliver the vaccines are already on their way to states.
  • Gen. Gustave Perna, said that 2.9 million doses of vaccine will go out in the first shipment from Pfizer once the FDA grants emergency use authorization.
  • Initially the federal government expected to receive 6.4 million doses from Pfizer as the first shipment. But because the vaccine is administered in two doses, the math is more complicated. About 500,000 doses will be set aside as a reserve supply, and the remaining number was divided in half to set aside what is needed for the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, which brought down the total in the first shipment to 2.9 million doses.
  • "We just want to make sure that Americans understand exactly the science that went into this, understand the gold standard of the FDA and the approval process. We want to make sure that the vaccines are actually administered, and we're afraid that that won't happen," Ostrowski said.
9More

Opinion | What to Do About Facebook, and What Not to Do - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-experts.html facebook response reform crisis policy politics
shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Facebook’s alarming power. The company is among the largest collectors of humanity’s most private information, one of the planet’s most-trafficked sources of news, and it seems to possess the ability, in some degree, to alter public discourse. Worse, essentially all of Facebook’s power is vested in Zuckerberg alone.
  • This feels intolerable; as the philosopher Kanye West put it, “No one man should have all that power.”
  • Persily proposes piercing the black box before we do anything else. He has written draft legislation that would compel large tech platforms to provide to outside researchers a range of data about what users see on the service, how they engage with it, and what information the platform provides to advertisers and governments.
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  • Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School, has a neat way of describing the most basic problem in policing Facebook: “At present,” Persily has written, “we do not know even what we do not know” about social media’s effect on the world.
  • Rashad Robinson, president of the civil rights advocacy group Color of Charge, favored another proposed law, the Algorithmic Justice and Online Platform Transparency Act, which would also require that platforms release data about how they collect and use personal information about, among other demographic categories, users’ race, ethnicity, sex, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability status, in order to show whether their systems are being applied in discriminatory ways.
  • one idea as “unsexy but important”: Educating the public to resist believing everything they see online.
  • What we need, then, is something like a society-wide effort to teach people how to process digital information.
  • In his new book, “Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn’t Fear Facebook and the Future,” Robby Soave, an editor at Reason magazine, argues that the media and lawmakers have become too worked up about the dangers posed by Facebook.He doesn’t disagree that the company’s rise has had some terrible effects, but he worries that some proposals could exacerbate Facebook’s dominance — a point with which I agree.
  • But Soave will probably get what he wants. As long as there’s wide disagreement among politicians about how to address Facebook’s ills, doing nothing might be the likeliest outcome.
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