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Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee Celebrates Her 70 years on the Throne - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...queen-elizabeth-jubilee.html queen elizabeth new york times
shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • LONDON — With columns of Scots and Irish guards, throngs of Union Jack-clad admirers and waves of aircraft roaring overhead, Queen Elizabeth II celebrated 70 years on the throne Thursday, earning tributes from world leaders and ordinary people for one of history’s great acts of constancy.
  • “You are the golden thread that binds our two countries, the proof of the unwavering friendship between our nations,” said President Emmanuel Macron of France, speaking in English in a videotaped greeting.
  • It was only the first of four days of festivities, known collectively as the queen’s Platinum Jubilee. But it was perhaps the grandest, featuring a military parade with 1,200 officers and soldiers from the Household Division, hundreds of Army musicians, 240 horses, a 41-gun salute and a 70-aircraft flyover.
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  • In the ensuing decades, the queen has become an irreplaceable figure in Britain, central to its self-identity.
  • That the queen made it to this Platinum Jubilee at all was far from given. She contracted the coronavirus in February and has talked about how the ordeal left her exhausted. She lost her husband, Prince Philip, last year, and her fragile health has forced her to cancel multiple public appearances, including two major events on the royal calendar: a remembrance service for the war dead and the state opening of Parliament.
  • “I like democracies, but I have a fascination with monarchical displays of power,” said Nichola Persic, an Italian exchange student who left his college in Canterbury, England, at dawn to stake out a position along the parade route. “And it’s nice to be a part of something people will remember.”
  • Strictly speaking, Elizabeth has not yet set the longevity record for any monarch.
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Is the Marriage Between Democracy and Capitalism on the Rocks? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ooks-democracy-capitalism.html democracy capitalism compatibility analysis books
shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Wolf, the chief economics commentator for The Financial Times, worries that after an efflorescence of democratic capitalism, “that delicate flower” is beginning to wither. Most of his ire is directed at an unhinged financial system that has encouraged a “rentier capitalism” and a “rigged” economy.”
  • “Capitalism cannot survive in the long run without a democratic polity, and democracy cannot survive in the long run without a market economy,” he writes. Capitalism supplies democracy with resources, while democracy supplies capitalism with legitimacy
  • Not so, insists Martin Wolf in his new book, “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.
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  • What Friedman believed in was capitalism, or what he called “economic freedom.” Political freedom might come — but capitalism, he said, could do just fine without it.
  • the corporate funders of “Free to Choose” set out to make their case.
  • it was still a time when capitalism’s most enthusiastic supporters evidently felt the need to win the public over to a vision of free markets and minimal government
  • The documentary series “Free to Choose,” which aired on public television in 1980
  • He and other observers are trying to make sense of what might happen next — and, befitting our current bewilderment, they offer a range of perspectives. Some, like Wolf, hope the relationship can be repaired; others argue that the pairing has always been fraught, if not impossible.
  • he has also read his Marx and Engels, looking askance at their solutions while commending them for how “brilliantly” they described capitalism’s relentlessness and omnivorousness. Left to its own devices, capitalism expands wherever it can, plowing its way through national boundaries and local traditions — making it marvelously dynamic or utterly ruinous, and not infrequently both.
  • In Wolf’s case, his anguished tone reflects the scale of his own disillusionment. Born in 1946 in postwar England, he recalls in his preface how “the world seemed solid as I grew up.” He describes the feelings of “confidence” in democracy and capitalism that flourished with the collapse of the Soviet Union
  • Yet the “democratic capitalism” that Wolf wants to preserve was, even by his own lights, short-lived. Democracy itself — or “liberal democracy” with universal suffrage, which Wolf says is the kind of democracy he means — is a “political mayfly.” Democratic capitalism ended, in his account, with the financial crisis of 2008
  • Robert Reich has offered another measure, arguing that democratic capitalism, at least in the United States, began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and ended with Reagan, when “corporate capitalism” took over.
  • The left-wing German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck stakes out a decidedly different position, suggesting that the tendency to equate “democratic capitalism” with a few decades of postwar plenty is to misinterpret a “historical compromise between a then uniquely powerful working class and an equally uniquely weakened capitalist class
  • In “How Will Capitalism End?” (2016), Streeck argues that it’s not compromise but the cascade of crises following the postwar boom — inflation, unemployment, market crashes — “that represents the normal condition of democratic capitalism.” Where Wolf wistfully invokes a “delicate flower,” Streeck writes contemptuously of a “shotgun marriage.”
  • the historian Gary Gerstle explores in his fascinating and incisive “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order” (2022). Before the New Deal order started to falter in the late 1960s and ’70s, Gerstle writes, a majority of Americans believed that capitalism should be managed by a strong state; in the neoliberal order that followed, a majority of Americans believed that the state should be constrained by free markets. Each order began to break down when its traditional ways of solving problems didn’t seem to work
  • capitalism, according to Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, has obtained the status of civic religion. In “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” the authors argue that industry groups and wealthy donors have engaged in a concerted campaign to promote “market fundamentalism” — “a vision of growth and innovation by unfettered markets where government just gets out of the way.”
  • The main implication of “The Big Myth” seems to be that “market fundamentalism” is so horrifically egregious — enriching the few and despoiling the planet — that Americans had to be plied with propaganda to believe in it.
  • as Gerstle’s book shows, neoliberal ideas proved so seductive because they also happened to dovetail with the stories that Americans wanted to tell about themselves, emphasizing individuality and freedom.
  • A new generation of swashbuckling billionaires entertain the prospect of secession, using their money to realize fantasies of escape, whether through seasteading or spaceships. The book quotes one seasteading enthusiast declaring, “Democracy is not the answer,” but merely “the current industry standard.”
  • Slobodian’s excellent if discomfiting new book, “Crack-Up Capitalism” (forthcoming in April), explores other neoliberal evasions of the nation-state: tax havens, special economic zones, gated communities — enclaves that are “freed from ordinary forms of regulation.
  • in “Globalists” (2018) the historian Quinn Slobodian argues that neoliberals have found ways not just to liberate markets but to “encase” them in international institutions, thereby shielding capitalist activities from democratic accountability. He observes that neoliberals were especially alarmed after World War II by decolonization, adopting a condescending “racialized language” that pitted “the rational West,” with its trade rules and property laws, against a postcolonial South, “with its ‘emotional’ commitment to sovereignty.”
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China Eastern Pilots Were Experienced, Adding to Mystery of Crash - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-eastern-crash-pilot.html
shared by criscimagnael on 25 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The pilot of the China Eastern Airlines flight that crashed in southern China with 132 people aboard was an industry veteran with more than 6,000 hours of flying time.
  • His co-pilot was even more experienced, having flown since the early days of China’s post-Mao era, training on everything from Soviet-model biplanes to newer Boeing models.
  • How they piloted the Boeing 737 will be closely examined as investigators seek to explain what is probably China’s worst air disaster in more than a decade. Experts have said it is unlikely that anyone survived the crash.
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  • On Thursday, rescuers said they had found engine components, part of a wing and other “important debris” as they searched the mountainside in a rural part of the Guangxi region for a fourth day.
  • Mr. Zhang, who was born in 1963, was one of China’s most experienced pilots,
  • A day earlier, the workers had found a black box, believed to be the cockpit voice recorder, which could provide investigators with crucial details. Officials said it was damaged but that its memory unit was relatively intact. The plane’s second black box, which records flight data, has yet to be recovered.
  • Their past performance was “very good,” Sun Shiying, the chairman of China Eastern Airlines’ Yunnan branch, said on Wednesday. When reached by phone, an airline representative declined to answer further questions about the crew.
  • At the main crash site, a state broadcaster showed the workers digging with shovels around a large piece of wreckage that the reporter described as a wing, which bore part of the China Eastern logo and was perched on a steep, barren slope fringed by dense thickets of now-flattened bamboo. Heavy rains had left the roads slick and inundated the earth with muddy pools.
  • Over his career as a commercial pilot with China Yunnan, which later merged with China Eastern, Mr. Zhang flew four different models of aircraft and accumulated 31,769 hours of flight experience.
  • The airline commonly paired young pilots with older pilots, and Mr. Zhang had mentored more than 100, CAAC News said. Mr. Yang was one of them.
  • Experts said that investigating the crash, which involved a sudden dive from cruising altitude in good weather, would require a close look at both the aircraft and the pilots, including the possibility that the plane was deliberately brought down. But they stressed that the cause was far from determined.
  • “Certainly an intentional downing is always a part of any investigation, and especially with this particular flight profile,” said Hassan Shahidi, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit organization created after World War II to promote aviation safety. But he cautioned that it was “premature to jump onto any possibilities.”
  • “If the captain were intending to commit suicide, they’d have to overcome the other flight crew members,” Mr. Marks said.
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Stalin's Long Shadow - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...stalins-long-shadow.html stalin russia history
shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Although Russians know more about Stalin’s crimes than they did ever before, many politicians and historians want to pull him out of the shadows and celebrate him for his role in the industrialization of the young Soviet state and the victory over Nazi Germany.
  • For the 60th anniversary of Stalin’s death, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace conducted another Stalin poll. It found that Stalin is the uncontested No.1 on the Russians’ list of great historical figures, ahead of Lenin, Marx and Peter the Great. In 1989, only 12 percent of Russians felt that way. Today it’s 50 percent.
  • In 1994, 27 percent of Russians had a positive view of Stalin. In 2011 it was 45 percent. Fifty percent of the respondents thought that Stalin was a wise leader who brought might and prosperity to the Soviet Union. Yet at the same time, 68 percent agreed that he was a cruel tyrant guilty of the death of millions of innocent citizens. Sixty percent also said it was more important that under his leadership the Soviet people won World War II.
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Student Debt and the Crushing of the American Dream - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...crushing-of-the-american-dream university financial debt economic consequences social cultural crisis policy
shared by Javier E on 13 May 13 - No Cached
  • The crisis that is about to break out involves student debt and how we finance higher education. Like the housing crisis that preceded it, this crisis is intimately connected to America’s soaring inequality, and how, as Americans on the bottom rungs of the ladder strive to climb up, they are inevitably pulled down
  • This new crisis is emerging even before the last one has been resolved, and the two are becoming intertwined. In the decades after World War II, homeownership and higher education became signs of success in America.
  • Student debt for graduating seniors now exceeds $26,000, about a 40 percent increase in just seven years. But an “average” like this masks huge variations.
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  • almost 13 percent of student-loan borrowers of all ages owe more than $50,000, and nearly 4 percent owe more than $100,000
  • Some 17 percent of student-loan borrowers were 90 days or more behind in payments at the end of 2012. When only those in repayment were counted — in other words, not including borrowers who were in loan deferment or forbearance — more than 30 percent were 90 days or more behind
  • America is distinctive among advanced industrialized countries in the burden it places on students and their parents for financing higher education. America is also exceptional among comparable countries for the high cost of a college degree, including at public universities. Average tuition, and room and board, at four-year colleges is just short of $22,000 a year, up from under $9,000 (adjusted for inflation) in 1980-81.
  • Compare this more-than-doubling in tuition with the stagnation in median family income, which is now about $50,000, compared to $46,000 in 1980 (adjusted for inflation).
  • it was not surprising that total student debt, around $1 trillion, surpassed total credit-card debt last year
  • the challenge of controlling student debt is even more unsettling. Curbing student debt is tantamount to curbing social and economic opportunity.
  • What economists call “human capital” — investing in people — is a key to long-term growth. To be competitive in the 21st century is to have a highly educated labor force, one with college and advanced degrees. Instead, we are foreclosing on our future as a nation.
  • It’s a vicious cycle: lack of demand for housing contributes to a lack of jobs, which contributes to weak household formation, which contributes to a lack of demand for housing.
  • As bad as things are, they may get worse.
  • Interest rates on federal Stafford loans were set to double in July, to 6.8 percent.  Good news came on Friday: it appears that there is a temporary reprieve, as Republicans have come around. But the stay would be temporary and would not address a more fundamental issue: if the Federal Reserve is willing to lend to the banks that caused the crisis at just 0.75 percent, shouldn’t it be willing to lend to students, who will be crucial to our long-term recovery, at an appropriately low rate?
  • a real long-term solution requires rethinking how we finance higher education. Australia has designed a system of publicly provided income-contingent loans that all students must take out. Repayments vary according to individual income after graduation. This aligns the incentives of the providers of education and the receivers. Both have an incentive to see that students do well. It means that if an unfortunate event happens, like an illness or an accident, the loan obligation is automatically reduced. It means that the burden of the debt is always commensurate with an individual’s ability to repay. The repayments are collected through the tax system, minimizing the administrative costs.
  • Some wonder how the American ideal of equality of opportunity has eroded so much. The way we finance higher education provides part of the answer. Student debt has become an integral part of the story of American inequality. Robust higher education, with healthy public support, was once the linchpin in a system that promised opportunity for dedicated students of any means. We now have a pay-to-play, winner-take-all game where the wealthiest are assured a spot, and the rest are compelled to take a gamble on huge debts, with no guarantee of a payoff.
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After Trump, conservatives should stop longing for the past - and learn a little humili... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...st-and-learn-a-little-humility conservatism reform history culture crisis interpretation subsidiarity individualism nostalgia
shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • He explains the illusory appeal of nostalgia-driven politics in the United States, the kind that Trump stokes in coarse, simplistic terms.
  • he offers a path forward for the American right after this campaign, whether it is adjusting to life in Trump’s America or coping again with another electoral setback.
  • Levin wants a humbler, more local conservatism, one less concerned with tearing down Washington or promoting hyper-individualism than with creating space for America’s “mediating institutions” of family and community to blossom
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  • This vision involves “a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them,” Levin writes, “and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life.”
  • Levin understands the allure of nostalgia; indeed, he believes that almost all contemporary politics is based on it
  • These competing nostalgias, though more sophisticated than Trump’s, are no less misguided, and lead to bad politics and policy.
  • Sure, there is plenty to long for, Levin says. In the early decades of the post-World War II era, the United States enjoyed “relative cultural cohesion, low economic inequality, high confidence in national institutions, and widespread optimism about the nation’s prospects” (especially if you were white and male). But that was a unique pivot point in U.S. history, a time when the country was straddling two opposing forces that would define the American century: consolidation and diffusion.
  • The first half of the 20th century, Levin contends, was an age of consolidation, with a peerless industrial economy, a strong centralized government and a relatively uniform cultural identity shaped by a powerful mass media.
  • In the century’s second half, by contrast, the U.S. economy became more diversified and deregulated, while cultural conformity broke down in favor of individualism and the politics of personal identity.
  • for a fleeting moment at midcentury, it enjoyed the best of both. “The social, political, and economic forms of American life at midcentury made possible a degree of prosperity and cohesion that in turn enabled many Americans to flourish,”
  • “Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern,”
  • Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us.”
  • This stale — and stalemated — debate leaves people discouraged with politicians who don’t seem engaged with their current struggles. “In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration,”
  • the nostalgia of the traditional political class is also pernicious and “blinding,” Levin argues, because it keeps us from grappling with the real problems assaulting us in the age of diffusion
  • “In liberating many individuals from oppressive social constraints, we have also estranged many from their families and unmoored them from their communities, work, and faith,”
  • “Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative.” Their incessant focus on religious liberty, for example, while important, may be counterproductive, “a fundamentally plaintive and inward-looking minority asking to protect what it has and in essence to be left alone,”
  • In unleashing markets to meet the needs and wants of consumers, we have freed them also to treat workers as dispensable and interchangeable.
  • In pursuing meritocracy, we have magnified inequality.”
  • “In loosening the reins of cultural conformity and national identity we have weakened the roots of mutual trust.
  • he worries that the price of this new freedom has been high. “We have set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation that we are still afraid to acknowledge as the distinct social dysfunction of our age of individualism, just as crushing conformity was the characteristic scourge of an era of cohesion and national unity,”
  • The answer to all this is the pursuit of what Levin describes as a “modernized politics of subsidiarity — that is, of putting power, authority and significance as close to the level of interpersonal community as reasonably possible.”
  • He is most concerned with the thicket of institutions in the middle — families, schools, religious organizations, all the things usually lumped together as civil society.
  • “we should see it as an effort to open up the space between them — the space where a free society can genuinely thrive.” Our objective should be to “channel power and resources to the mediating institutions of society and allow for bottom-up problem solving that takes a variety of specialized, adapted forms.”
  • It is a very Tocquevillian vision, with a dash of Catholic social teaching thrown in. No doubt, to yearn for the renewal of these traditional institutions is its own kind of nostalgia.
  • So how do we go about strengthening families, religious organizations, schools and all those mediating institutions?
  • He calls for a “mobility agenda,” with economic growth spurred by tax and regulatory reform
  • a more competitive and low-cost health-care system, lower budget deficits — all part of a standard conservative recipe.
  • He proposes education reform that includes more professional certificates, apprenticeships “and other ways of gaining the skills for well-paid employment that do not require a college degree.”
  • Levin’s intention here is less to offer detailed proposals than to shift the locus of policymaking itself — and to infuse it with greater humility. “There is not much that public policy can do,” he admits, “to create communities that do a better job of encouraging constructive behavior: it could, however, do less harm, and it could leave room for such communities to form, and protect the space in which they take root and grow.”
  • The result is a bifurcated America, torn between wealth and poverty, order and disorder. “Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions — family, community, church, unions, and others — fade and falter.”
  • Instead, social and religious conservatives should “assert themselves by offering living models of their alternative to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age.”
  • In other words, less hectoring and lecturing, less trying to remake the culture at large, and more strengthening one’s “near-at-hand community,” Levin writes. He calls this approach “subcultural traditionalism
  • he sees it in “civic groups that channel their energies into making neighborhoods safe and attractive, or into helping the poor, or protecting the vulnerable, or assimilating immigrants, or helping fight addiction
  • in schools that build character and inculcate the values parents think are most important; in religious congregations that mold themselves into living communities of like-minded families, and that turn their faiths into works to improve the lives of others;
  • in the work of teachers and students who are committed to liberal learning and engagement with the deepest questions.”
  • Such a localized focus, Levin maintains, is not “an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.”
  • I suspect the fulfillment of Levin’s vision would require a party and a movement that grasp the exhaustion of their current approach. A November defeat, especially a landslide, might accomplish that
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An Unprecedented President - Yuval Levin | National Review - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...cedented-president-yuval-levin presidency crisis politics trump
shared by Javier E on 21 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • the presidency is for the most part a pre-defined role in a larger political drama—a niche that can be occupied by different people with different goals and characters, and used by them to their different ends while largely keeping its shape.
  • Trump’s way of speaking about his vision and intentions suggests his case will be different. He did not really run to occupy the presidency as it exists, and does not seem to think of himself as stepping now into a role he is obliged to carry out.
  • He ran to disrupt a broken system, and to be himself but with more power and authority.
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  • He is our president, but he has not taken on the job with any clear sense of the presidency as a distinct function and office which he should now stretch and bend to embody.
  • This has not been easy to accept, and so we have tended implicitly to wait for the moment when Trump would put aside his childish antics and step up into the role. Or else we have inclined to think about the prospects for Trump’s presidency in terms whether he would be too strong or too weak a president
  • But this is probably the wrong way to think about what Trump is doing. He is not filling the role in a certain way. He is playing a different role. He is being himself. 
  • Trump seems inclined to leave largely unfilled the part traditionally played by the president in our system while playing another part formed around the peculiar contours of his bombastic, combative, and at times surely disordered personality.
  • That means that Trump’s team, the Congress, the courts, and the public will need to confront the implications of both the absence of a more traditional president and the presence of a different and unfamiliar kind of figure at the heart of the constitutional order. These are two distinct problems. 
  • The presence of a bombastic populist in the White House could force some common sense on a political culture too dominated by abstract sloganeering.
  • Responding to the presence of this unusual figure at the heart of our politics with an effort to formulate responsible applications of his political instincts could redound to the good in some cases. 
  • But there are obviously dark sides to both facets too. The absence of an executive eager to play his complex part could easily drive our constitutional system badly out of balance and leave it unfocused and hapless
  • And in foreign policy it looks likely to undermine the post-World War II system of liberal-democratic alliances in which the President of the United States has had a distinct role to play for seven decades, about which Trump appears to know or care very little
  • And the presence of an undisciplined, aggressive performance artist at the heart of our system of government, a figure whose excesses are not structurally counterbalanced by others in the system (in the way that the excesses of the traditional presidency are), could alter the public’s expectations of government and politics in ways decidedly unhelpful to American constitutionalism. 
  • The morning after the election, I suggested we might think of this as a standing crisis in the executive—and that these years would yield many important opportunities, but also grave risks. The transition period has left me with the same sense
  • President Trump’s term seems less likely than that of any modern president’s to be defined by the role of the presidency in our system of government—not just by the limits of that role but even by its general form. Instead, to a greater degree than any modern president, his time in office seems likely to be shaped by his own character and personality. This is not good news. 
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Downed WWII bomber found in Pacific 72 years later - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html wwii cnn US History
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  • Downed WWII bomber found in Pacific 72 years later
  • As World War II raged in 1944, an American bomber took off on a mission with three crew members on board.
  • For 72 years, the TBM-1C Avenger lay on the ocean floor and with it, the remains of the crew.
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  • It was yet another success for Project RECOVER, an organization that blends old-school archival research with new-school sonar technology to find aircraft of Americans MIA, or missing in action.
  • For two months, the sonar scanned. And then, success.
  • The process began, as all the searches do, with intensive research at the National Archives, interviews with veterans, and a dig through old military photographs.
  • "This is more than reconnecting with history; it's about locating the missing to enable the U.S. government to bring them home for a proper burial,
  • The government will use personal items, such as dog tags, dental records and DNA to identify them
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Official conservatism has been brain-dead for a while - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...as-been-brain-dead-for-a-while conservatism gop provocateur
shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Yiannopoulos  — a raving, crude white nationalist with zero interest in anything approaching conservative theory or history — is, in the eyes of the biggest conservative confab’s organizer, an ideal speaker (if not for the sex-with-children issue.) That in a nutshell is the problem of the right.
  • As political groupings and causes have gotten stale, the figures left running these groups are intellectually unserious or downright perverse
  • The old “three-legged stool of conservatism” has been moldy for years now.
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  • This segment of the right flipped from insisting on ideological purity to caring nothing about ideology. It’s now about winning, holding power and sneering at anyone not from “real” America.
  • Social conservatives lost on same-sex marriage, have lived with decades of Roe v. Wade and threw their lot in with Donald Trump, who embodies every grotesque habit and quality they’ve ranted about for years (e.g., infidelity, dishonesty, crudeness, cruelty). That leg is gone.
  • The economic leg has rotted away as well. Supply-side tax cuts have no sell with the general public (tax cuts for the rich!), and fiscal-discipline/small-government conservatives are nowhere to be found in Congress (which moves ahead on its own national health-care plan, peddles a “border adjustment tax” and looks to splurge on red ink).
  • In the foreign-policy realm, it’s not clear where the party is headed — but President Trump and his ilk seem bent on destroying the international liberal order, throwing their weight behind despots and blowing up international institutions that have existed since the end of World War II.
  • In the place of ideas and relevant policy, the right is now drenched in cultural resentment and fixated on keeping out immigrants.
  • The right’s rejection of all elites, including the entire mainstream media, has morphed into a rejection of objective truth.
  • Unqualified, ignorant people are preferred over qualified, knowledgeable public servants.
  • Loyalty to a person is the paramount consideration in staffing.
  • Only in a party in such dire straits — where resentment toward coastal elites became the defining feature — could Yiannopoulos  have gotten as far as he did.
  • The conservative movement — neither conservative nor a movement at this point — lies prostrate, reduced to a set of tribal identifiers (climate change denial, cultural resentment, xenophobia).
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'I buried my son in the grave that was meant for me' - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...city-of-the-dead
shared by maxwellokolo on 03 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 03 Mar 17
     
    By Euan McKirdy, Pamela Boykoff & Will Ripley Photography by Linus Escandor II The following story contains images that may be disturbing for some readers. Nearly 10 months ago, Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines and turned the country into a battlefield in his war on drugs.
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Democratic Presidents Are Better for the Economy - Bloomberg - 1 views

www.bloomberg.com/...re-better-for-the-economy.html US president performance economic statistics comparative historical
shared by Javier E on 30 Jun 12 - Cached
  • After three years in office, President Barack Obama has enough of a record to judge against the economic performances of other recent presidents. The rankings can help you cast a more informed vote in November
  • In “The President as Economist: Scoring Economic Performance From Harry Truman to Barack Obama,” I compare the 12 presidents since World War II using 17 economic indicators, including growth in gross domestic product, rate of unemployment, inflation, population below the poverty line, increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, savings and investment rates, exports and trade balances, federal budget growth, and debt and federal taxes as a share of GDP.
  • The book examines each indicator for each administration, and boils down the many aspects of a president’s economic performance to a single score. The scores are derived using basic statistical methods, including averaging each president’s indicators, then determining standard deviations from the mean. These methods produce a common unit of comparison for indicators that are expressed in different units, such as growth rates and shares of GDP.
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  • Presidents Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson rank first through third.
  • Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush make up the bottom three.
  • President Ronald Reagan is No. 8, just one slot above President Obama.
  • there are six Republicans and six Democrats, so if we take the average for Democratic and Republican presidents we can make a head-to-head party comparison
  • The Democratic presidents scored substantially higher than the Republican presidents, with a score of 26.95. Republican presidents scored -26.95.
  • Five out of six Democrats reduced the national debt as a percentage of GDP, while four out of six Republicans raised it. The story is similar on budget deficits, with five of the top six performances recorded by Democrats and four of the bottom five recorded by Republicans.
  • With respect to GDP growth, three of the top four performers were Democrats and four of the bottom five were Republicans. In reducing the poverty rate, the top three were Democrats and two of the bottom three were Republicans. The Democrats also had a better record on employment.
  • Republicans had better records on reducing inflation, achieving four of the top five performances, while Democrats had four of the bottom five showings. Republicans also did well in lowering tax revenue as a percentage of GDP, claiming the top five spots.
  • what does this tell us about Obama? When all of the indicators are combined, he ranks ninth out of 12, one position below Reagan but above Bush 41, Carter and Bush 43. Obama is also well below the midpoint that falls between Clinton and Nixon. For Republicans who view Reagan as an economic miracle- maker and Obama as, well, something less than that, it might come as a shock that Obama falls next in line in economic performance.
  • Lined up against his contemporaries after 1977, Obama ranks third out of six.
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The Segmentation Century - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-segmentation-century.html europe convergence values crisis historical optimism history
shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 12 - Cached
  • Niebuhr noticed a secular religion that was especially strong in the years after World War II. It was the faith that historical forces were gradually bringing about “the unification of mankind.”
  • Old nationalisms would fade away, many people believed. Transportation and communications technologies would unite people. Values would converge.
  • As communications technology has become more global, people’s tastes have become more parochial, not less.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • only 2 percent of Europeans live in a different European nation than their country of citizenship.
  • you see stark values differences across the Continent.
  • Less than 40 percent of Danes believe that work is a “very important” part of their lives, compared with roughly 65 percent of the French.
  • levels of social and political trust have been declining almost everywhere except the Nordic countries. If there’s convergence, in other words, it’s in our increasing agreement that we don’t trust each other.
  • How do you govern amid divergence? If multilateral organizations can’t bind nations, do we simply resort to an era of regional hegemons — or chaos?
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Yes, Mr. Kristof, This Is America < Killing the Buddha - 0 views

killingthebuddha.com/...yes-mr-kristof-this-is-america bigotry US toleration history racism
shared by Javier E on 28 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • at what time in American history have particular groups not been the subject of bigotry?
  • Unfortunately, contemporary Islamophobia is not a stain against the otherwise spotless canvas of American history. If anything, that canvas is filthy and should be acknowledged as such.
  • Rather than viewing the “shameful interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the disgraceful refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe” as rare, exceptional tests in American history, we need to view those events as constitutive elements of the American experience. Was America not American prior to the abolishing of slavery? Was America not American prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, during the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the Zoot Suit Riots, or the pursuit of Manifest Destiny? Anti-miscegenation laws were belatedly toppled in the ’60s, but today 37% of Americans would not approve of a family member marrying outside of his or her race. Are those people not American?
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Matt Ridley on Sugata Mitra's Web-Based Education Project - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4584804575645070639938954.html education autodidact schooling internet learning
shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • He is convinced that, with the Internet, kids can learn by themselves, so long as they are in small groups and have well-posed questions to answer. He now goes into schools and asks a hard question that he thinks the students will not be able to answer, such as: "How do you stop something moving?" or "Was World War II good or bad?" He gives them no clue where to start, but—crucially—he insists that the school restrict the number of Internet portals in the class to one for every four students. One child in front of a computer learns little; four discussing and debating learn a lot. What happens next is entirely up to the students. All they know is that Dr. Mitra is coming back to be told what they have found. He arrives with a second question that links the learning more closely to the curriculum, such as: "Who was Isaac Newton?" and then "What's the connection between Newton and stopping things moving?" The kids teach themselves the laws of motion. Of course, the Internet is fallible as a source, but so are teachers and textbooks. For the noncontroversial topics that make up the curriculum, even Wikipedia is pretty good.
  • On their own, children can get about 30% of the knowledge required to pass exams. To go further, Dr. Mitra supplements SOLE with e-mediators, or the "granny cloud" as he calls it: amateur volunteers who use Skype to help kids learn online.
  • plenty of people educate themselves. Is it possible for everybody to be an autodidact, now that knowledge is so accessible online?
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Germany's Cuts vs. America's Stimulus - Economic Scene - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...23leonhardt.html economics stimulus crisis policies budget financial
shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Well, it turns out the German boom didn’t last long. With its modest stimulus winding down, Germany’s growth slowed sharply late last year, and its economic output still has not recovered to its prerecession peak. Output in the United States — where the stimulus program has been bigger and longer lasting — has recovered. This country would now need to suffer through a double-dip recession for its gross domestic product to be in the same condition as Germany’s.
  • Hoover’s austere instincts worsened the Depression. Roosevelt’s postelection reversal helped, but he also prolonged the Depression by raising taxes and cutting spending in 1937. Only the giant stimulus program known as World War II finally ended the Depression. When the private sector is hesitant to spend, the government has to — or no one will. Our recent crisis serves up the same lesson. Germany isn’t even the best example. Its response to the crisis has had some successful features, like an hours-reduction program to minimize layoffs, and Germany’s turn to austerity has not been radical. Britain’s has been radical, with a tax increase having already taken effect and deep spending cuts coming. Partly as a result, Britain’s economy is now in worse shape than Germany’s.
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The Creature Connection - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...15why.html pets animals human bonding
shared by Javier E on 14 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • the willingness to anthropomorphize was critical to the domestication of wild animals and forming bonds with them.
  • the rapid growth of the middle class in 19th-century France gave rise to the cartoonishly pampered Fifi. “By 1890, luxury and pet ownership went hand in hand,”
  • In this country, pet keeping didn’t get serious until after World War II. “People were moving to the suburbs, ‘Lassie’ was on television, and the common wisdom was pets were good for raising kids,” said Dr. Herzog in an interview. “If you wanted a normal childhood, you had to have a pet.”
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The Social Contract - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ugman-the-social-contract.html income wealth class government policy
shared by Javier E on 24 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.
  • over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent
  • there has been a major shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work: tax rates on corporate profits, capital gains and dividends have all fallen, while the payroll tax — the main tax paid by most workers — has gone up.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • one-fourth of those with incomes of more than $1 million a year pay income and payroll tax of 12.6 percent of their income or less, putting their tax burden below that of many in the middle class.
  • On one side, we have the claim that the rising share of taxes paid by the rich shows that their burden is rising, not falling. To point out the obvious, the rich are paying more taxes because they’re much richer than they used to be.
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A Strategy for National Security, Focused on Sustainability - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...focused-on-sustainability.html US strategy national security alternative diplomacy sustainable
shared by Javier E on 04 May 11 - No Cached
  • “We must recognize that security means more than defense,” they write. After ending the 20th century as the world’s most powerful country, “we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable form of energy.”
  • In their paper, the officers argue that the United States has to move from “containment” — the foreign policy established after World War II to limit the expansion and influence of the Soviet Union — to what they call “sustainment” or sustainability.
  • The first priority, they write, should be “intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the country’s security may require “a hard look at the distribution of our treasure,” arguing that the historic focus on defense and protectionism has meant the neglect of international development and diplomacy. And with technology piercing the isolation of nations, they write that the United States has a stake in helping countries held down by illiteracy and poverty.
  • the country must face the demands for water, food, land and energy.
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Kunstmuseum Bern Obtains Trove From Gurlitt Collection - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lius-gurlitt-nazi-era-art.html culture history
shared by mollyharper on 24 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • mollyharper on 24 Nov 14
     
    BERLIN - The Swiss museum named as the sole heir to a trove of art amassed by a Nazi-era art dealer and kept hidden for decades will accept the bequest, made by the dealer's reclusive son just before he died last May, the museum's director said on Monday. The museum would seek to set a new standard in handling Nazi-looted art, by having a privately funded team of experts comb the history of each piece before it came into the museum's possession. An agreement reached between the museum, the German government and the state of Bavaria pledged to handle the collection with a high level of transparency. The more than 1,000 works have been in the custody of the German authorities since Mr. Gurlitt died at his Munich home in May. Trustees of the museum, which is the oldest in Switzerland and has a permanent collection focused largely on the history of Swiss art, deliberated for half a year before deciding to accept the pieces. Mr. Gurlitt devoted his life to guarding the collection his father had amassed, much of it during World War II when he served as one of four art dealers commissioned to purchase pieces for a Führermuseum envisioned by Hitler.
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