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Start-up investors issue warnings as boom times 'unambiguously over' - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...-times-unambiguously-over.html investors US
shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Y Combinator said companies have to “understand that the poor public market performance of tech companies significantly impacts VC investing.”
  • Slow your hiring! Cut back on marketing! Extend your runway!The venture capital missives are back, and they’re coming in hot.With tech stocks cratering through the first five months of 2022 and the Nasdaq on pace for its second-worst quarter since the 2008 financial crisis, start-up investors are telling their portfolio companies they won’t be spared in the fallout, and that conditions could be worsening.
  • It’s a stark contrast to 2021, when investors were rushing into pre-IPO companies at sky-high valuations, deal-making was happening at a frenzied pace and buzzy software start-ups were commanding multiples of 100 times revenue. That era reflected an extended bull market in tech, with the Nasdaq Composite notching gains in 11 of the past 13 years, and venture funding in the U.S. reaching $332.8 billion last year, up sevenfold from a decade earlier. according to the National Venture Capital Association.
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  • As it turns out, technology demand only increased and the Nasdaq had its best year since 2009, spurred on by low interest rates and a surge in spending on products for remote work.
  • “Companies that recently raised at very high prices at the height of valuation inflation may be grappling with high burn rates and near-term challenges growing into those valuations,” Shakir told CNBC in an email. “Others that were more dilution-sensitive and chose to raise less may now need to consider avenues for extending runway that would have seemed unpalatable to them just months ago.”
  • “Our companies heeded that advice and most companies are now prepared for winter,” Lux wrote.
  • “This time, many of those tools have been exhausted,” Sequoia wrote. “We do not believe that this is going to be another steep correction followed by an equally swift V-shaped recovery like we saw at the outset of the pandemic.”Sequoia told its companies to look at projects, research and development, marketing and elsewhere for opportunities to cut costs. Companies don’t have to immediately pull the trigger, the firm added, but they should be ready to do it in the next 30 days if needed.
  • And among companies that are still private, staff reductions are underway at Klarna and Cameo, while Instacart is reportedly slowing hiring ahead of an expected initial public offering. Cloud software vendor Lacework announced staffing cuts on Friday, six months after the company was valued at $8.3 billion by venture investors.“We have adjusted our plan to increase our cash runway through to profitability and significantly strengthened our balance sheet so we can be more opportunistic around investment opportunities and weather uncertainty in the macro environment,” Lacework said in a blog post.
  • Shakir agreed with that assessment. “Like many, we at Lux have been advising our companies to think long term, extend runway to 2+ years if possible, take a very close look at reducing burn and improving gross margins, and start to set expectations that near-term future financings are unlikely to look like what they may have expected six or 12 months ago,” she wrote.
  • Lux highlighted one of the painful decisions it expects to see. For several companies, the firm said, “sacrificing people will come before sacrificing valuation.”But venture firms are keen to remind founders that great companies emerge from the darkest of times. Those that prove they can survive and even thrive when capital is in short supply, the thinking goes, are positioned to flourish when the economy bounces back.
  • conditions.”CORRECTION: This story was updated to reflect that cloud software vendor Lacework raised $1.3 billion in growth funding at a valuation of $8.3 billion.
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Conservative Party Wins Big in South Korean Local Elections - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ea-election-conservatives.html
shared by criscimagnael on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • President Yoon Suk-yeol’s governing party won​ 12 of the 17 races for big-city mayors and provincial governors
  • The results on Wednesday were a decisive victory for Mr. Yoon, who won the presidential race by a razor-thin margin in March and was inaugurated just three weeks ago. Although this week’s elections were only held at the local level, the results were seen as an early referendum on Mr. Yoon’s performance as leader.
  • The election​ results were a stunning setback for the Democratic Party. During the last local elections four years ago, it won 14 of the same 17 races for leaders of big cities and provinces.
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  • During the campaign for this week’s elections, the P.P.P. urged voters to support Mr. Yoon’s government so that it could push its agenda at a time when North Korea’s recent weapons tests highlighted the growing nuclear threat on the Korean Peninsula. The Democratic Party appealed for support by billing itself as the only party able to “check and balance” Mr. Yoon’s conservative government.
  • But Mr. Moon and Mr. Trump both left office without having removed any of North Korea’s nuclear missiles.
  • During his campaign, Mr. Yoon signaled a shift in South Korea’s policy on North Korea, emphasizing enforcing sanctions and strengthening military deterrence against the North. When he met with President Biden in Seoul last month, the two leaders agreed to discuss expanding joint military exercises.
  • The elections on Wednesday also filled hundreds of low-level local administrative seats. The P.P.P. won a majority of those races as well, according to the National Election Commission.
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Germany isn't turning its back on NATO. It only looks that way. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ny-ukraine-weapons-nato-russia germany foreign policy
shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • What some commentators abroad see as appeasement, cowardice and the triumph of economic interests over security concerns, many Germans see as a grown-up, sensible and conciliatory approach to foreign policy. (A recent poll found that 59 percent of Germans supported the decision not to send arms to Kyiv.) Germans view themselves as enlightened, having moved beyond power politics, the national interest and militarism.
  • The idea of deterrence, or of the military being an element of geopolitical power needed for strong diplomacy, is foreign to most German citizens.
  • y she is referring to. They read the 20th century, and 1933-1945 in particular, as a lesson in the evils of geopolitics and militarism, and they internalized the post-1989 “end of history” narrative better than anyone else.
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  • In a debate about the Russia-NATO standoff carried by my local German radio station, the dominant view was that de-escalation and diplomacy are what’s needed, with one listener commenting, “I am against weapons in general,” and another warning that nobody should talk about war since, “If you talk about something, it becomes possible.”
  • After the end of the Cold War, Germany spent decades insulated from the harsh world of power politics; most Germans believed that countries were converging toward a system that marginalized military power and favored economic power and legal proceedings. Now that great power competition and military conflicts are back, Germany does not know what to do.
  • Many decision-makers and voters in Germany remain deeply committed to the hope that all conflicts can be solved through dialogue under international law and international organizations such as the United Nations — as if all conflict resulted from misunderstandings instead of competing interests.
  • In a 2020 poll, only 24 percent of Germans said they considered that under some circumstances war could sometimes be necessary to achieve justice, while over 51 percent said war is never necessary.
  • Nonetheless, an increasing number of Germans are beginning to argue that one might also draw a different lesson from history — such as that it is not a good idea to try to appease aggressors.
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As Women's Marches Gain Steam in Pakistan, Conservatives Grow Alarmed - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...akistan-aurat-march-women.html
shared by criscimagnael on 07 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The reaction to Pakistan’s first women’s march was relatively mild: criticism and condemnation from Islamist parties and conservatives, who called the participants “anti-religion” and “vulgar.”
  • That did not deter the organizers of the 2018 march in Karachi, the significance of which reverberates to this day.
  • powerful figures in Pakistan want the event banned altogether.
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  • Women planning to join the Aurat Marches, as they are called — Urdu for “women’s march” — have faced countless threats of murder and rape, along with accusations that they receive Western funding as part of a plot to promote obscenity in Pakistan.
  • Last year, opposition peaked when Islamist groups demonstrated in major cities, accusing the marchers of using blasphemous slogans — a crime punishable by death in Pakistan, accusations of which have provoked lynchings and murders.
  • The first Aurat March was organized by a small group of women in the port city of Karachi, who hoped to draw attention to the violence, inequality and other challenges faced by women across the country.
  • “We had held discussions and mobilized women in various communities, collected funds by small contributions from individuals, and wrote a manifesto to articulate demands related to women’s bodily rights to the government and Pakistani society,” Ms. Kermani said.
  • “Younger feminists who were inspired by a series of global women’s marches took their rage against violence, moral policing and lack of bodily or sexual choices for women and marginalized genders to the streets,” s
  • “My body, my choice,” and performed an Urdu version of a Chilean protest song, “A Rapist in Your Path,” that assails rape culture and victim-shaming.
  • the protesters had even highlighted L.G.B.T.Q. rights, a bold move in Pakistan.
  • Some Islamist parties responded to the marches’ growing popularity by organizing their own “modesty march.” In 2020, conservatives filed court petitions in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the Aurat Marches.
  • A newspaper published a front-page story that referred to the marchers as prostitutes.
  • “If the government allows the march, we will use a baton to stop it.”
  • “Save our daughters.”
  • “As a minority, we feel increasingly insecure,” Mrs. Masih said. “At the workplace, we fear anyone can harm us on the false allegations of blasphemy, and at our homes, we fear that our daughters could be kidnapped and converted to Islam
  • They campaigned against the physically intrusive “virginity tests” often inflicted on women who bring accusations of rape, and a court in the northern city of Lahore banned them last year. The government has also passed a measure allowing the chemical castration of convicted rapists, another demand of the marchers.
  • “We were and are scared, but we know that without putting ourselves in such a dangerous situation we cannot bring change,” Ms. Kermani said.
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Opinion | Russia's War in Ukraine: This Is How World War III Begins - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sia-ukraine-world-war-iii.html russia war ukraine response invasion
shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • World War II didn’t so much begin as it gathered, like water rising until it breaches a dam. We, too, have been living through years of rising waters, though it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for much of the world to notice.
  • did Putin have any reason to think, before Feb. 24, that he wouldn’t be able to get away with his invasion?
  • He didn’t. Contrary to the claim that Putin’s behavior is a result of Western provocation — like refusing to absolutely rule out eventual NATO membership for Ukraine — the West has mainly spent 22 years placating Putin through a long cycle of resets and wrist slaps.
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  • The Biden administration now faces the question of whether it wants to bring this cycle to an end.
  • the administration continues to operate under a series of potentially catastrophic illusions.
  • Refusing to impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine may be justified because it exceeds the risks NATO countries are prepared to tolerate. But the idea that doing so could start World War III ignores history and telegraphs weakness
  • Americans squared off with Soviet pilots operating under Chinese or North Korean cover in the Korean War without blowing up the world. And our vocal aversion to confrontation is an invitation, not a deterrent, to Russian escalation.
  • Bottom line: Expect him to double down. If he uses chemical weapons, as Bashar al-Assad did, or deploys a battlefield nuclear weapon, in keeping with longstanding Russian military doctrine, does he lose more than he gains? The question answers itself.
  • He wins swiftly. He terrifies the West. He consolidates power. He suffers consequences only marginally graver than the ones already inflicted. And his fellow travelers in Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang take note.
  • How does the next world war begin? The same way the last one did.
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Salvadoran authorities are committing 'massive' human rights violations, with nearly 2%... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html human rights cnn authorities
shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Salvadoran authorities have committed "massive" human rights violations, including thousands of arbitrary detentions and violations of due process, torture, and ill-treatment, according to a new report from Amnesty International.
  • The report, released Thursday, found that since late March, nearly 2% of the country has been detained, with at least 18 people having died in state custody.
  • More than 36,000 people have been detained since
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  • "Hopefully, just as they care because we have captured criminals, they would care about our children, about our elderly, about our working people, about the innocent Salvadorans who have suffered at the hands of those same criminals," he said during a speech before the Legislative Assembly.
  • In one instance, a 16-year-old, who was arrested in April and held for 13 days for being an alleged member of an illegal group, was chained to a wall of the detention center, where he said he was beaten by police. Later, he was transferred to youth detention center, where he was beaten by gang members, who he said also threw a bag of urine at his head, it said.
  • Many of the detainees are being held without due process "purely because the authorities view them as having been identified as criminals in the stigmatizing speeches of President Bukele's government, because they have tattoos, are accused by a third party of having alleged links to a gang, are related to someone who belongs to a gang, have a previous criminal record of some kind, or simply because they live in an area under gang control, which are precisely the areas with high levels of marginalization and that have historically been abandoned by the state," according to Amnesty.
  • Bukele, the self-proclaimed "world's coolest dictator," took office in June 2019 with broad support, after promising to stand tough against gang violence
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The New York Times' trans coverage is under fire. The paper needs to listen | Arwa Mahd... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-trans-coverage-open-letters trans debate nyt
shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.
  • “In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”
  • This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.
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  • The second letter was signed by more than 100 LGBTQ+ and civil rights groups, including Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign. It expressed support for the contributor letter and accused the Times of platforming “fringe theories” and “dangerous inaccuracies”. It noted that while the Times has produced responsible coverage of trans people, “those articles are not getting front-page placement or sent to app users via push notification like the irresponsible pieces are”. And it observed that rightwing politicians have been using the Times’s coverage of trans issues to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.
  • Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communication, put out a statement stating that the organization pursues “independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care”. While that was all very diplomatic, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, and opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, sent around a rather more pointed newsroom memo condemning the letters on Thursday.
  • “It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism,” Kahn wrote in the memo. “In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort … We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
  • Here’s the thing: there is no clear-cut line between advocacy and journalism. All media organizations have a perspective about the world and filter their output (which will, of course, strive to be fairly reported) through that perspective. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Like it or not, the Times is involved in advocacy. It just needs to step back for a moment and think about who it’s advocating for.
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Did politics cut 'systemic' from AP African American studies plan? - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...n-american-studies-controversy African-American studies AP course syllabus controversy culture history us politics
shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • A politically charged adjective popped up repeatedly in the evolving plans for a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies. It was “systemic.”
  • DeSantis, a potential presidential candidate, has accused the course architects of promoting “a political agenda.” He also criticized an early course plan’s references to Black queer studies and “intersectionality,” a concept that helps explain overlapping forms of discrimination that affect Black women and others.
  • Then the word vanished. “Systemic,” a crucial term for many scholars and civil rights advocates, appears nowhere in the official version released Feb. 1. This late deletion and others reflect the extraordinary political friction that often shadows efforts in the nation’s schools to teach about history, culture and race.
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  • a senior College Board official now acknowledges the organization was mindful of how “systemic” and certain other words in the modern lexicon of race in America would receive intense scrutiny in some places.
  • Jason Manoharan, vice president for AP program development. He said the College Board worried some phrases and concepts had been “co-opted for a variety of purposes” and were being used as “political instruments.” So the organization took a cautious approach to the final edits even as it sought to preserve robust content on historical and cultural impacts of slavery and racial discrimination.
  • “We wanted this course to be adopted by 50 states, and we wanted as many students and teachers as possible to be able to experience it,” Manoharan said. His acknowledgment underscored the inherent politics behind promoting a course that deals so squarely with race in America.
  • John K. Thornton, a professor of African American studies and history at Boston University, who contributed to the planning, said he was pleased the course opens with five weeks on early Africa. But he lamented that reparations and Black Lives Matter ended up only as optional research topics. “It did upset me a little bit,” he said. “Those things obviously feel very much a part of what a college course is about.”
  • The February 2022 version declared that students should learn how African American communities combat effects of “systemic marginalization.” An April update paired “systemic” with discrimination, oppression, inequality, disempowerment and racism. A December version said it was essential to know links between Black Panther activism and “systemic inequality that disproportionately affected African Americans.”
  • Teresa Reed, dean of music at the University of Louisville, said her work as one of 13 members of the AP African American studies committee resembled similar assignments she has undertaken for other AP courses. Reed supports the African American studies course plan and said it will continue to be revised as pilot teachers give feedback. She said she saw no evidence of political meddling in the course design. “That was absolutely not my experience,”
  • Two luminaries in the field, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, both of Harvard University and both of whom advised the College Board, also issued statements vouching for the course.
  • The first 81-page draft of the course plan, in February 2022, drew topics and sources from the syllabi of introductory classes at historically Black universities, Ivy League schools and other prominent institutions. The College Board said it was produced as a preview for 200 college professors at a March 2022 symposium. Faculty recommended cutting 20 percent to 25 percent of the proposed topics, the College Board said, and as much as half of suggested readings.
  • The April version, 299 pages, was the pilot course guide, a road map for teachers before classes began in the fall. It included much more detail on goals, essential knowledge and potential source material. It also made an important switch on contemporary issues: Certain lessons on reparations, incarceration and movements for Black lives became optional and would not be covered on the AP exam. At this stage, the guide included a week of instruction on Black feminism, womanism and intersectionality, and it used the word “systemic” nine times.
  • One of the most consequential decisions made last year was to set aside significant time — ultimately, three weeks — near the end of the course for a research paper of up to 1,500 words on a topic students would choose. The project will count for 20 percent of the AP score for those who seek college credit.
  • Among 40 sample topics in the official plan are Black Lives Matter; intersectionality; reparations debates; gay life and expression in Black communities; and Black conservatism.
  • College Board officials point to the development of an extensive digital library for the course — including a 1991 text on intersectionality from Crenshaw — as evidence that they are not censoring writers or voices. Crenshaw teachers, they say, use the course framework as a starting point to design their own syllabi of readings and assignments.
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Ancient DNA Reveals History of Hunter-Gatherers in Europe - The New York Times - 0 views

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

www.wsj.com/...-is-the-wests-war-now-5d468bdb ukraine war history west crisis policy us europe
shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • A year later, the war in Ukraine has become, to a large extent, the West’s own. True, no American or NATO soldiers are fighting and dying on Ukrainian soil. But the U.S., its European allies and Canada have now sent some $120 billion in weapons and other aid to Ukraine, with new, more advanced military supplies on the way. If this monumental effort fails to thwart President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, the setback would not only undermine American credibility on the world stage but also raise difficult questions about the future of the Western alliance.
  • “In many ways, we’re all-in, and we’re all-in because the realization has dawned in Europe that showing weakness to President Putin, showing no response to his atrocities, only invites him to go further and further,” said Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, a Dutch politician and member of parliament. “We have also realized that it is not only the safety and security of Ukraine that is at stake but also our own.”
  • The Russian military’s mixture of unexpected ineptitude and shocking cruelty has pulled the U.S. and allies deeper and deeper into the conflict. With one self-imposed constraint falling after another, Western goals have gradually moved from preventing the obliteration of Ukraine to supporting its military victory over Russia.
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  • It’s a more ambitious commitment that carries much higher risks—but also strategic rewards—for the Western alliance.
  • “Nobody thought the Russians would start a medieval war in the 21st century,” said Sen. James Risch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This conflict is going to change the face of Europe as much as World War II did.”
  • In Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere, the West’s geopolitical adversaries are calculating whether the U.S. and its allies have the stamina and cohesion to defend the rules-based international order that has benefited the West for decades.
  • In particular, the future of Taiwan and the South China Sea is closely linked to the West’s record in Ukraine.
  • “If Putin wins in Ukraine, the message to him and other authoritarian leaders will be that they can use force to get what they want. This will make the world more dangerous and us more vulnerable.”
  • The Munich conference capped several weeks in which the U.S. and its allies have dramatically expanded the scope of their military aid, an indication that Mr. Putin’s expectation that the West will eventually tire of helping Ukraine hasn’t materialized just yet
  • Both sides believe they can win on the battlefield, and little room exists for peace negotiations. Ukraine is preparing offensives to regain the roughly 18% of its territory still occupied by Moscow, including the Crimea peninsula and parts of the eastern Donbas region that Mr. Putin seized in 2014. Russia has declared four Ukrainian regions, none of which it fully controls, to be its own sovereign territory and seeks, at the very least, to conquer those lands. Mr. Putin, in a speech on Tuesday, indicated that his aspirations remain much broader, referring to Russia’s “historical territories that are now called Ukraine.”
  • A year into Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, Ukraine’s own military industries have been shattered by Russian missile strikes, and its reserves of Soviet-vintage weapons are running out. By now, Kyiv can keep fighting only as long as Western assistance continues apace
  • “The next months will be very critical. If, say, another Ukrainian offensive fails, if it becomes the public narrative that it’s going to be a stalemate, support in the West might drop—perhaps not substantially, but some of the politicians will see the writing on the wall,
  • “In diplomacy, morality is part of the public narrative, but rarely part of the real decision-making process. But Ukraine’s case was one of the examples in history when you can argue that sympathy based on moral arguments was a game changer,”
  • “Some governments acted the way they did not merely based on their practical considerations but under enormous pressure of their public opinion. And that public opinion was based on moral compassion for the victim of the aggression.”
  • Mr. Putin has tried to counter the Ukrainian message by appealing to fear. On the first morning of the war, he alluded to nuclear weapons to deter the West from helping Ukraine.
  • “Putin is threatening Armageddon, and the Russians are doing it all the time, sometimes in oblique ways and sometimes in a more direct way,
  • “But when you actually poke at that and provide weapons gradually over time, there hasn’t been the catastrophic response that Putin promised.”
  • “boiling the frog.” As the U.S. began to introduce new weapons systems, it did so slowly and, initially, in limited numbers. None of these individual decisions were of sufficient scope to provoke a dramatic escalation by Moscow. But over the past 12 months, the cumulative effect of these new weapons has transformed the balance of power on the battlefield and enabled a string of strategic Ukrainian victories.
  • “If you look at the arc of Western involvement, no one would have predicted where we are now six months ago, and the same goes for six months before that. It’s a crisis response that has evolved into a policy—a policy that, probably, no one would have prescribed at the outset,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. who has urged caution on arming Ukraine
  • “The West is also the frog that is boiling itself. With each incremental increase in assistance, qualitative or quantitative, we become accustomed to that being normal, and the next one doesn’t seem so extreme,”
  • “There is a dynamic here where we become desensitized to what is going on. We are in a bit of a slow-moving spiral that shows no signs of letting up.”
  • In 2014, after Mr. Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and triggered a bloody war in the eastern Donbas region, covertly sending troops and heavy weapons across the border, the American and European response was limited to sanctions that only marginally affected Russia’s economy.
  • Back in 1991, President George H.W. Bush viewed Ukraine’s desire for freedom as a dangerous nuisance. That year, just months before the Soviet Union’s collapse, he delivered to the Ukrainian parliament his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech, urging Ukrainians to abandon “suicidal nationalism” and permanently remain under the Kremlin’s rule.
  • Other analysts and policy makers argue that the true danger lies in excessive caution over accelerating Western military involvement. “We have been slow in delivering certain capabilities. We keep climbing the stairs, but it goes through a tortuous process, and in the meantime Ukrainians are dying,” said ret. Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “It has taken the Pentagon a long time to come to the realization that Ukraine can win, and will win, especially if we give them what they need. There has been all too much defeatist hand-wringing.”
  • At the time, President Barack Obama resisted calls to help Ukraine militarily as he sought Mr. Putin’s cooperation on his presidency’s main foreign-policy priority, the nuclear deal with Iran
  • Ukraine, Mr. Obama said in an interview with the Atlantic in 2016, “is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” All the evidence of the past 50 years, he added, suggested that Russian (and Chinese) decision-making wouldn’t be influenced by “talking tough or engaging in some military action.”
  • Mr. Biden, speaking in front of U.S., Polish and Ukrainian flags to a cheering crowd in Warsaw on Tuesday, had a different message. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia,” he pledged. “Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed.”
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Distorted Reality - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • The first of my many blessings,” she told the Senate this week, “is the fact that I was born in this great nation.”
  • She is not an advocate of critical race theory or other progressive ideas about education. She has never taken a public position on hot-button school issues like whether young children should be taught about gender identity.
  • She has often praised law enforcement, including her proud mention this week that her brother and two of her uncles worked as police officers.
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  • It has become an argument over a nominee who does not exist — one who does not respect America, is not truly religious, coddles child abusers and terrorists and has highly developed views about the importance of “woke” education.
  • Conspiracy theories and unfair accusations have a long history in American politics, of course. But they have often remained on the margins. Today, distortions and falsehoods have moved to the center of politics.
  • While neither party is entirely innocent, there is a fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats. False claims regularly flow from the leaders of the Republican Party —
  • The Jackson hearings have become the latest example. Several Republican senators — including Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz yesterday — have tried to portray her as soft on child pornographers. Their argument depends on a misleading cherry-picking of facts from cases she has heard.
  • Woke education has become another focus of the hearings, with Republicans like Cruz and Marsha Blackburn trying to portray Jackson as an advocate for it. In truth, she has not taken a position on the issues that fall under that category.
  • That was apparently enough for the Republican National Committee to tweet an image of her this week, with her initials — KBJ — crossed out and replaced with CRT, an abbreviation for critical race theory.
  • The only time Jackson appears to have mentioned critical race theory publicly was in a 2015 speech. It was part of a list of disciplines that she said had an intellectual connection to criminal sentencing, including administrative law, philosophy, psychology and statistics.
  • There is one broader political risk here for Democrats, though: imagining that Republicans are simply playing to their base by making these misleading criticisms of Jackson. They are also trying to appeal to swing voters.
  • Most Americans oppose cutting police budgets, for instance. Many believe that allowing all transgender girls to compete in girls’ sports can be unfair to other girls. Many voters — and not just white voters — think that liberals focus too much on racial identity.
  • “One thing that is striking about this hearing,” Lori Ringhand, a legal scholar, told The Times, “is how little effort we are seeing to engage the nominee on her views about actual legal issues.”
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California gas prices: If Gov. Newsom's $400 rebate plan gets approved, how soon could ... - 0 views

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  • CALIFORNIA -- Californians shouldering the nation's highest gas prices could soon get a tax break, free rides on public transit and up to $800 on debit cards to help pay for fuel under a proposal revealed Wednesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, but how soon could taxpayers start seeing the money?Gas prices have soared in recent weeks, the result of pandemic-induced inflation and Russia's invasion of Ukraine
  • State governments across the country have been debating what to do about it, with the most popular choices being slashing fuel taxes or offering rebates to taxpayers.Last week, the governors of Maryland and Georgia signed laws temporarily suspending their state's gas taxes, while Georgia on Wednesday also offered $1.1 billion in refunds to taxpayers in a separate action.California's average gas prices hit a new state record Wednesday at $5.88 per gallon, more than $2 higher than it was a year ago, according to AAA. California has the second-highest gas tax in the country at 51 cents per gallon. But the state's Democratic leaders have been wary of suspending the gas tax because they fear oil companies would not pass along the savings to drivers.
  • RELATED: Are California drivers paying a hidden gas fee?
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  • "This package is also focused on protecting people from volatile gas prices, and advancing clean transportation," Newsom said.Rebates like the ones Newsom is proposing take time to deliver, with the governor's office saying people could see the money by July.Rising fuel prices are a tricky policy issue for Newsom, who is trying to wean the state off fossil fuels. He has signed executive orders aimed at banning the sale of new gas-powered cars in the state by 2035 and halting all oil extraction by 2045.He has proposed a total of $10 billion in funding over six years to boost zero-emission vehicle production and build charging stations.
  • Newsom's plan must be approved by the Legislature, where Democrats dominate both the Assembly and the Senate. Democratic leaders, however, don't like the idea of giving money to rich people.They have been discussing their own rebate proposal, one that would give $200 rebates to every taxpayer and their children with taxable income less than $125,000 for single filers and $250,000 for joint filers. That means a family of five would get $1,000 while a single parent with two children would get $600.
  • A spokesperson for Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon called Newsom's idea "consistent with the Speaker's goal of providing targeted financial relief to Californians most in need" but stressed the idea is "in the very early stages."Newsom's plan is similar to a separate proposal floated last week by more moderate Democrats in the state Assembly that would give every taxpayer $400, regardless of income.
  • "People need relief now," said Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher. "We've got now, like, four different competing plans amongst the Democrats. These guys are going to negotiate against themselves for weeks to months and who knows what we're going to get."
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The librarians uniting to battle school book ban laws - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...story librarians school us
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  • Last fall, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter to the state's school board association saying public schools shouldn't have "obscene" books and called on certain books about gender and sexual orientation, among others, to be removed.
  • Texas is the latest state to introduce legislation concerning how controversial subjects including race and even the Holocaust are taught in schools.There have been over 122 such bills introduced across the country since last year.Books focusing on LGBTQ and racial issues that critics say are inappropriate for students are being banned across the country. Now, some librarians are joining together to protest those bans.
  • who advocate for students' freedom to read books. They came together in November 2021 in response to Republican Texas Rep. Matt Krause's request that schools inform him if they carry books that focus on LGBTQ and racial issues.FReadom Fighters started as a social media movement with the hashtag "#FReadom" in protest of Krause's request, and then blossomed into activism.
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  • While Foote and some librarians are fighting for these books to stay on shelves, others disagree and are fighting to keep them off."I felt that I had a duty as a parent, because this type of material is so over the top in terms of inappropriateness … I felt I had a duty as a parent, to warn other parents and to bring it to the attention of the school board, because quite honestly, you know, I didn't know at that moment who's making these decisions as to what books are put into our school library," Stacy Langton, a Virginia mother and co-founder of Mama Grizzly, a conservative grassroots organization that she says aims to protect "our children's learning environments."
  • In other states, including North Carolina, Maine and Missouri, Republicans have begun campaigns targeting books that deal with segregation and racism.However, according to an American Library Association poll, 71% of Americans are opposed to banning books.
  • "It's just really important that we understand that just because we read something or watch a TV show or read a newspaper article, it doesn't mean we personally or our students are going to go out and enact anything they read about. Books just have ideas in them, and ideas cause us to think, and we can use our own minds to make critical decisions. And as educators ... we train students to ask critical questions like, 'Where did this data come from? And who wrote this? What is their point of view?'" Foote said."And I think that if parents considered that point of view, then they would understand that we're all in this together as partners," she added.
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DNA Confirms Oral History of Swahili People - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ancient-swahili-dna.html Africa origins Swahili Islam influence ethnic roots culture dna analysis
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  • A long history of mercantile trade along the eastern shores of Africa left its mark on the DNA of ancient Swahili people.
  • A new analysis of centuries-old bones and teeth collected from six burial sites across coastal Kenya and Tanzania has found that, around 1,000 years ago, local African women began having children with Persian traders — and that the descendants of these unions gained power and status in the highest levels of pre-colonial Swahili society.
  • long-told origin stories, passed down through generations of Swahili families, may be more truthful than many outsiders have presumed.
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  • The Swahili Coast is a narrow strip of land that stretches some 2,000 miles along the Eastern African seaboard — from modern-day Mozambique, Comoros and Madagascar in the south, to Somalia in the north
  • In its medieval heyday, the region was home to hundreds of port towns, each ruled independently, but with a common religion (Islam), language (Kiswahili) and culture.
  • Many towns grew immensely wealthy thanks to a vibrant trading network with merchants who sailed across the Indian Ocean on the monsoon winds. Middle Eastern pottery, Asian cloths 0c 0c and other luxury goods came in. African gold, ivory and timber 0c 0c went out — along with a steady flow of enslaved people, who were shipped off and sold across the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf. (Slave trading later took place between the Swahili coast and Europe as well.)
  • A unique cosmopolitan society emerged that blended African customs and beliefs with those of the foreign traders, some of whom stuck around and assimilated.
  • Islam, for example, arrived from the Middle East and became an integral part of the Swahili social fabric, but with coral-stone mosques built and decorated in a local, East African style
  • Or consider the Kiswahili language, which is Bantu in origin but borrows heavily from Indian and Middle Eastern tongues
  • The arrival of Europeans, beginning around 1500, followed by Omani sailors some 200 years later, changed the character of the region
  • over the past 40 years, archaeologists, linguists and historians have come to see Swahili society as predominantly homegrown — with outside elements adopted over time that had only a marginal impact.
  • That African-centric version of Swahili roots never sat well with the Swahili people themselves, though
  • They generally preferred their own origin story, one in which princes from present-day Iran (then known as Persia) sailed across the Indian Ocean, married local women and enmeshed themselves into East African society. Depending on the narrative source, that story dates to around 850 or 1000 — the same period during which genetic mixing was underway, according to the DNA analysis.
  • “It’s remarkably spot on,” said Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the Royal Agricultural University of England
  • “This oral tradition was always maligned,”
  • “Now, with this DNA study, we see there was some truth to it.”
  • The ancient DNA study is the largest of its kind from Africa, involving 135 skeletons dating to late-medieval and early-modern times, 80 of which have yielded analyzable DNA.
  • To figure out where these people came from, the researchers compared genetic signatures from the dug-up bones with cheek swabs or saliva samples taken from modern-day individuals living in Africa, the Middle East and around the world.
  • The burial-site DNA traced back to two primary sources: Africans and present-day Iranians. Smaller contributions came from South Asians and Arabs as well, with foreign DNA representing about half of the skeletons’ genealogy
  • “It’s surprising that the genetic signature is so strong
  • Gene sequences from tiny power factories inside the cell, known as mitochondria, were overwhelmingly African in origin. Since children inherit these bits of DNA only from their mothers, the researchers inferred that the maternal forbearers of the Swahili people were mostly of African descent.
  • By comparison, the Y chromosome, passed from father to son, was chock-full of Asian DNA that the researchers found was common in modern-day Iran. So, a large fraction of Swahili ancestry presumably came from Persian men
  • Dr. Reich initially assumed that conquering men settled the region by force, displacing the local males in the process. “My hypothesis was that this was a genetic signature of inequality and exploitation,”
  • hat turned out to be a “naïve expectation,” Dr. Reich said, because “it didn’t take into account the cultural context in this particular case.”
  • In East Africa, Persian customs never came to dominate. Instead, most foreign influences — language, architecture, fashion, arts — were incorporated into a way of life that remained predominantly African in character, with social strictures, kinship systems and agricultural practices that reflected Indigenous traditions.
  • “Swahili was an absorbing society,” said Adria LaViolette, an archaeologist at the University of Virginia who has worked on the East African coast for over 35 years. Even as the Persians who arrived influenced the culture, “they became Swahili,”
  • One major caveat to the study: Nearly all the bones and teeth came from ornamental tombs that were located near grand mosques, sites where only the upper class would have been laid to rest.
  • the results might not be representative of the general populace.
  • Protocols for disinterring, sampling and reburying human remains were established in consultation with local religious leaders and community stakeholders. Under Islamic law, exhumations are permitted if they serve a public interest, including that of determining ancestry,
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The Only Way to Deal With the Threat From AI? Shut It Down | Time - 0 views

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  • An open letter published today calls for “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-
  • This 6-month moratorium would be better than no moratorium. I have respect for everyone who stepped up and signed it. It’s an improvement on the margin
  • he rule that most people aware of these issues would have endorsed 50 years earlier, was that if an AI system can speak fluently and says it’s self-aware and demands human rights, that ought to be a hard stop on people just casually owning that AI and using it past that point. We already blew past that old line in the sand. And that was probably correct; I agree that current AIs are probably just imitating talk of self-awareness from their training data. But I mark that, with how little insight we have into these systems’ internals, we do not actually know.
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  • The key issue is not “human-competitive” intelligence (as the open letter puts it); it’s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence. Key thresholds there may not be obvious, we definitely can’t calculate in advance what happens when, and it currently seems imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing.
  • Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.”
  • It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers.
  • Absent that caring, we get “the AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, and you are made of atoms it can use for something else.”
  • Without that precision and preparation, the most likely outcome is AI that does not do what we want, and does not care for us nor for sentient life in general. That kind of caring is something that could in principle be imbued into an AI but we are not ready and do not currently know how.
  • The likely result of humanity facing down an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss
  • To visualize a hostile superhuman AI, don’t imagine a lifeless book-smart thinker dwelling inside the internet and sending ill-intentioned emails. Visualize an entire alien civilization, thinking at millions of times human speeds, initially confined to computers—in a world of creatures that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow. A sufficiently intelligent AI won’t stay confined to computers for long. In today’s world you can email DNA strings to laboratories that will produce proteins on demand, allowing an AI initially confined to the internet to build artificial life forms or bootstrap straight to postbiological molecular manufacturing.
  • There’s no proposed plan for how we could do any such thing and survive. OpenAI’s openly declared intention is to make some future AI do our AI alignment homework. Just hearing that this is the plan ought to be enough to get any sensible person to panic. The other leading AI lab, DeepMind, has no plan at all.
  • An aside: None of this danger depends on whether or not AIs are or can be conscious; it’s intrinsic to the notion of powerful cognitive systems that optimize hard and calculate outputs that meet sufficiently complicated outcome criteria.
  • I didn’t also mention that we have no idea how to determine whether AI systems are aware of themselves—since we have no idea how to decode anything that goes on in the giant inscrutable arrays—and therefore we may at some point inadvertently create digital minds which are truly conscious and ought to have rights and shouldn’t be owned.
  • I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.
  • the thing about trying this with superhuman intelligence is that if you get that wrong on the first try, you do not get to learn from your mistakes, because you are dead. Humanity does not learn from the mistake and dust itself off and try again, as in other challenges we’ve overcome in our history, because we are all gone.
  • If we held anything in the nascent field of Artificial General Intelligence to the lesser standards of engineering rigor that apply to a bridge meant to carry a couple of thousand cars, the entire field would be shut down tomorrow.
  • We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems
  • Many researchers working on these systems think that we’re plunging toward a catastrophe, with more of them daring to say it in private than in public; but they think that they can’t unilaterally stop the forward plunge, that others will go on even if they personally quit their jobs.
  • This is a stupid state of affairs, and an undignified way for Earth to die, and the rest of humanity ought to step in at this point and help the industry solve its collective action problem.
  • When the insider conversation is about the grief of seeing your daughter lose her first tooth, and thinking she’s not going to get a chance to grow up, I believe we are past the point of playing political chess about a six-month moratorium.
  • The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. If the policy starts with the U.S., then China needs to see that the U.S. is not seeking an advantage but rather trying to prevent a horrifically dangerous technology which can have no true owner and which will kill everyone in the U.S. and in China and on Earth
  • Here’s what would actually need to be done:
  • Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs
  • Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithm
  • Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.
  • Frame nothing as a conflict between national interests, have it clear that anyone talking of arms races is a fool
  • Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange, and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.
  • when your policy ask is that large, the only way it goes through is if policymakers realize that if they conduct business as usual, and do what’s politically easy, that means their own kids are going to die too.
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A Hamline Adjunct Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job. - The Ne... - 0 views

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  • University officials and administrators all declined interviews. But Dr. Miller, the school’s president, defended the decision in a statement.“To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith,” Dr. Miller’s statement said, adding, “It was important that our Muslim students, as well as all other students, feel safe, supported and respected both in and out of our classrooms.”
  • In a December interview with the school newspaper, the student who complained to the administration, Aram Wedatalla, described being blindsided by the image.
  • There are, however, a range of beliefs. Some Muslims distinguish between respectful depictions and mocking caricatures, while others do not subscribe to the restriction at all.
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  • The painting shown in Dr. López Prater’s class is in one of the earliest Islamic illustrated histories of the world, “A Compendium of Chronicles,” written during the 14th century by Rashid-al-Din (1247-1318).Shown regularly in art history classes, the painting shows a winged and crowned Angel Gabriel pointing at the Prophet Muhammad and delivering to him the first Quranic revelation. Muslims believe that the Quran comprises the words of Allah dictated to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel.
  • The image is “a masterpiece of Persian manuscript painting,” said Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan. It is housed at the University of Edinburgh; similar paintings have been on display at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And a sculpture of the prophet is at the Supreme Court.Dr. Gruber said that showing Islamic art and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad have become more common in academia, because of a push to “decolonize the canon” — that is, expand curriculum beyond a Western model.
  • Dr. Gruber, who wrote the essay in New Lines Magazine defending Dr. López Prater, said that studying Islamic art without the Compendium of Chronicles image “would be like not teaching Michaelangelo’s David.”
  • Yet, most Muslims believe that visual representations of Muhammad should not be viewed, even if the Quran does not explicitly prohibit them. The prohibition stems from the belief that an image of Muhammad could lead to worshiping the prophet rather than the god he served.
  • The administration, he said, “closed down conversation when they should have opened it up.”
  • Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, said he regularly shows images of the Prophet Muhammad in class and without Dr. López Prater’s opt-out mechanisms. He explains to his students that these images were works of devotion created by pious artists at the behest of devout rulers.“That’s the part I want my students to grapple with,” Dr. Safi said. “How does something that comes from the very middle of the tradition end up being received later on as something marginal or forbidden?”
  • Dr. López Prater, a self-described art nerd, said she knew about the potential for conflict on Oct. 6, when she began her online lecture with 30 or so students.She said she spent a few minutes explaining why she was showing the image, how different religions have depicted the divine and how standards change over time.“I do not want to present the art of Islam as something that is monolithic,” she said in an interview, adding that she had been shown the image as a graduate student. She also showed a second image, from the 16th century, which depicted Muhammad wearing a veil.
  • Four days after the class, Dr. López Prater was summoned to a video meeting with the dean of the college of liberal arts, Marcela Kostihova.
  • After the class ended, Ms. Wedatalla, a business major and president of the university’s Muslim Student Association, stuck around to voice her discomfort.Immediately afterward, Dr. López Prater sent an email to her department head, Allison Baker, about the encounter; she thought that Ms. Wedatalla might complain.Ms. Baker, the chair of the digital and studio art department, responded to the email four minutes later.“It sounded like you did everything right,” Ms. Baker said. “I believe in academic freedom so you have my support.”
  • As Dr. López Prater predicted, Ms. Wedatalla reached out to administrators. Dr. López Prater, with Ms. Baker’s help, wrote an apology, explaining that sometimes “diversity involves bringing contradicting, uncomfortable and coexisting truths into conversation with each other.”
  • Ms. Wedatalla declined an interview request, and did not explain why she had not raised concerns before the image was shown. But in an email statement, she said images of Prophet Muhammad should never be displayed, and that Dr. López Prater gave a trigger warning precisely because she knew such images were offensive to many Muslims. The lecture was so disturbing, she said, that she could no longer see herself in that course.
  • Dr. López Prater said that no one in class raised concerns, and there was no disrespectful commentary.
  • Dr. Kostihova compared showing the image to using a racial epithet for Black people, according to Dr. López Prater.“It was very clear to me that she had not talked to any art historians,” Dr. López Prater said.
  • A couple of weeks later, the university rescinded its offer to teach next semester.
  • Dr. López Prater said she was ready to move on. She had teaching jobs at other schools. But on Nov. 7, David Everett, the vice president for inclusive excellence, sent an email to all university employees, saying that certain actions taken in an online class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”
  • Dr. López Prater, who had only begun teaching at Hamline in the fall, said she felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over her head, but the shock soon gave way to “blistering anger at being characterized in those terms by somebody who I have never even met or spoken with.” She reached out to Dr. Gruber, who ended up writing the essay and starting the petition.
  • At the Dec. 8 forum, which was attended by several dozen students, faculty and administrators, Ms. Wedatalla described, often through tears, how she felt seeing the image.“Who do I call at 8 a.m.,” she asked, when “you see someone disrespecting and offending your religion?”Other Muslim students on the panel, all Black women, also spoke tearfully about struggling to fit in at Hamline. Students of color in recent years had protested what they called racist incidents; the university, they said, paid lip service to diversity and did not support students with institutional resources.
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Opinion | The Superyachts of Billionaires Are Starting to Look a Lot Like Theft - The N... - 0 views

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  • taking on the carbon aristocracy, and their most emissions-intensive modes of travel and leisure, may be the best chance we have to boost our collective “climate morale” and increase our appetite for personal sacrifice — from individual behavior changes to sweeping policy mandates.
  • the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.
  • The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitan
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  • Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht.
  • France’s minister of the environment, dismissed calls to regulate yachts and chartered flights as “le buzz” — flashy, populist solutions that get people amped up but ultimately only fiddle at the margins of climate change.
  • Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, which rivals the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Irelan
  • Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still, and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.
  • this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” as the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallie
  • In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change, they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother, when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony, a $150 million, 333-foot superyacht?
  • making these overgrown toys a bit more costly isn’t likely to change the behavior of the billionaires who buy them. Instead, we can impose new social costs through good, old-fashioned shaming.
  • “kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws,” one Twitter user wrote.
  • When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.
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Opinion | Blue Lives Matter and How the Thin Blue Line Came to Jan. 6 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thin-blue-line-capitol.html blue pollice flag BLM
shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • a now-familiar variant of the American flag: white stars on a black field, with alternating black and white stripes, except for the stripe immediately beneath the union, which is blue.
  • as a political totem it is undeniably powerful. A merger of the American flag with a symbol representing the police, the thin blue line flag has become a potent statement in its own right.
  • First introduced in the 2010s, it quickly became the dominant popular symbol of the police, flown in pride, solidarity, memoriam, defiance. It was something more than that, too. Beyond a marker of professional affiliation, it was a symbol of personal identity, one that was not restricted to members of law enforcement — one that could even, eventually, be used against them.
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  • But it starts an ocean away, during the Crimean War, 169 years ago.
  • Almost as soon as the phrase was coined, its definition was broadened to become shorthand for the British military more generally, particularly its courage in the face of long odds or superior numbers.
  • “Between the law-abiding elements of society and the criminals that prey upon them,” Mr. Parker said, “stands a thin blue line of defense — your police officer.” The police, in his vision, weren’t just protecting public safety; they were combating the decline of Western civilization, the rise of Communism, the moral laxity of postwar America, the decay of the nuclear family, and so on.
  • Like other mash-ups of identity flags with the American flag, the thin blue line flag is a rallying point for a marginalized identity, a way to lay claim to the American birthright, a demand for long-denied respect
  • Mr. Parker’s vision went beyond policing as a profession. In 1965, he told a civil rights commission investigating the Watts riots that “the police of this country, in my opinion, are the most downtrodden, oppressed, dislocated minority in America.” This belief, a half-century later, would animate an identity politics that blurred the blue line.
  • Blue Lives Matter is not just an expression of support and solidarity for the police, but a response to and rejection of Black Lives Matter. It suggests that it is not Black people whose lives are undervalued by society, but police officers.
  • The thin blue line would become the dominant metaphor for the police. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan said the thin blue line held back “a jungle which threatens to reclaim this clearing we call civilization”; in 1993, President Bill Clinton called it “nothing less than our buffer against chaos, against the worst impulses of this society.”
  • As the L.G.B.T. American flag does, it exploits a visual pun, but much less playfully: The blue line divides America against itself.
  • Blue Lives Matter is a movement that belies the simplicity of its name: It can certainly mean that the police deserve respect for doing a critical and dangerous job. But it can also mean that overzealous racial politics have inverted the criminal justice system, punishing the peacekeepers, coddling the criminals and turning those who carry a badge into the most embattled and victimized group in the nation. Blue Lives Matter transformed policing into a tribal affiliation.
  • This blossoming identity was an opportunity for any politician bold enough to take it. While trust in the police was dropping among Black and Hispanic Americans, it actually was rising for white Americans
  • Donald Trump was particularly well suited to take advantage of the rise of policing as identity politics. His entrance onto the political scene in the 1980s was his call for the reinstatement of the death penalty and less oversight of police.
  • The Trump campaign cast the Democrats as enemies of law and order who sought to incubate riots in American cities and chaos at the border.
  • Mr. Trump claimed that while the Democratic ticket stood with “rioters and vandals,” he stood with “the heroes of law enforcement.”
  • After Mr. Trump’s prophecy came true and the soft coup of representative democracy denied him a second term, when his supporters rallied for one last stand on the grassy field in front of the Capitol, it was inevitable that they would see themselves as bearing the mantle of law and order, a thin blue line smashing through a thin blue line.
  • In the aftermath of Jan. 6, when the nation saw that flag held aloft by the rioters who attacked the Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone (he says they literally beat him with it), the thin blue line flag has become increasingly controversial among police officers. In 2023, the Los Angeles Police Department banned its public display on the job. In an email explaining his decision to his officers, Chief Michel Moore lamented that “extremist groups” had “hijacked” the flag.
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Carole Hooven On Harvard's Existential Crisis - 0 views

andrewsullivan.substack.com/...hooven-on-harvards-existential harvard crisis university education culture politics woke DEI excellence
shared by Javier E on 06 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • The most salutary aspect of this whole affair is that it has really helped expose the core disagreement in our current culture war. One side believes, as I do, that individual merit exists, and should be the core criterion for admission to a great university, regardless of an individual’s racial or sexual identity, and so on. The other side believes that merit doesn’t exist at all outside the oppressive paradigm of racial and sexual identity, and that membership in a designated “marginalized” group should therefore be the core criterion for advancement in academia.
  • so they discriminate against individuals on the grounds of their race before they consider merit.
  • For example: If you are black and in the fourth lowest decile of SATs and GPAs among Harvard applicants, you have a higher chance of getting into Harvard (12.8 percent admitted) than an Asian-American in the very top decile (12.7 admitted). It’s rigged, which is why it was shut down by SCOTUS.
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  • there is no debate. There’s a trade-off. But once you make identity a core qualification, you’re opening up a whole world of racist anti-racism.
  • Most Americans believe in individual merit, and advancement regardless of identity. Harvard and our new elite believe that our society is so structured as an enduring “white supremacy” that merit can only be considered after you have accounted for the effects of “intersectional oppression.”
  • each moment of truth puts a crack in the stifling, authoritarian edifice of DEI. We can bring this corruption to light. We can hold them to account. I’m certainly more hopeful about the future of liberal society now than I was a month ago.
  • the only way to cover it all up, of course, is to abolish testing students entirely (which is what so many elite colleges and universities are now doing) or to give all students an A or an A-, making any distinctions of excellence irrelevant.
  • When push comes to shove, when there is a finite number of places available, you’re in a zero-sum predicament. You have to pick between a smarter student of the wrong race and a weaker student of the right race. In the end at Harvard, being in the right race — not merit — determines your chances.
  • The more people see this for the systemic racism it is, the sooner we can throw this neo-Marxist cuckoo out of the liberal nest, and return to the airing of all ideas, regardless of the subject matter or the identity of the students
  • That’s how you can claim, as Gay does, that “diversity” and “excellence” go hand in hand, when obviously, at some point they can and do conflict.
  • The response to all this from the CRT crowd has been to insist — ever more strongly — that Gay is simply and only a victim of racism, or, in woke terminology, a victim of misogynoir. The fact that a white female university president at those same hearings lost her job before Gay did — and without any plagiarism questions — doesn’t count.
  • In the Congressional hearings, moreover, she showed little gravitas, grace, or ability to think on her feet. She has largely hidden from public view since the plagiarism revelations — not a good instinct for a leader of a huge, public-facing institution like Harvard. She is, quite obviously, a run-of-the-mill woke academic, who was promoted at breakneck speed because of her race and sex, and found herself quickly out of her depth.
  • When you look instead at what she has done as an administrator, which is where she has been focused more recently, you see it has almost all been about hiring on the basis of sex and race, persecuting heretical members of racial minorities, and removing paintings of dead white dudes. She is, at least, consistent.
  • And let’s be honest: we can all see with our own eyes that subordinating merit to race and sex is how Gay got her position. Her work, beyond the sloppy dime-store plagiarism, would be underwhelming for an average member of any faculty in the country. But for a Harvard president, it’s astonishingly mid
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Opinion | This Is the Actual Danger Posed by D.E.I. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iversity-unconstitutional.html DEI opposition analysis history
shared by Javier E on 14 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • D.E.I. Short for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the term — like the related progressive concepts of wokeness and critical race theory — used to have an agreed-upon meaning but has now been essentially redefined on the populist right. In that world, D.E.I. has become yet another catchall boogeyman, a stand-in not just for actual policies or practices designed to increase diversity, but also a scapegoat for unrelated crises.
  • the immense backlash from parts of the right against almost any diversity initiative is a sign of the extent to which millions of white Americans are content with their vastly disproportionate share of national wealth and power.
  • Outside the reactionary right, there is a cohort of Americans, on both right and left, who want to eradicate illegal discrimination and remedy the effects of centuries of American injustice yet also have grave concerns about the way in which some D.E.I. efforts are undermining American constitutional values, especially on college campuses.
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  • For instance, when a Harvard scholar such as Steven Pinker speaks of “disempowering D.E.I.” as a necessary reform in American higher education, he’s not opposing diversity itself. Pinker is liberal, donates substantially to the Democratic Party and “loathes” Donald Trump. The objections he raises are shared by a substantial number of Americans across the political spectrum.
  • , the problem with D.E.I. isn’t with diversity, equity, or inclusion — all vital values.
  • First, it is a moral necessity for colleges to be concerned about hateful discourse, including hateful language directed at members of historically marginalized groups. Moreover, colleges that receive federal funds have a legal obligation
  • I’ll share with you three pervasive examples
  • In the name of D.E.I., all too many institutions have violated their constitutional commitments to free speech, due process and equal protection of the law.
  • Yet that is no justification for hundreds of universities to pass and maintain draconian speech codes on campus, creating a system of unconstitutional censorship that has been struck down again and again and again in federal court. Nor is it a justification for discriminating against faculty members for their political views or for compelling them to speak in support of D.E.I.
  • There is a better way to achieve greater diversity, equity, inclusion and related goals. Universities can welcome students from all walks of life without unlawfully censoring speech. They can respond to campus sexual violence without violating students’ rights to due process. They can diversify the student body without discriminating on the basis of race
  • Second, there is a moral imperative to respond to sexual misconduct on campus.
  • that is no justification for replacing one tilted playing field with another. Compelled in part by constitutionally problematic guidance from the Obama administration, hundreds of universities adopted sexual misconduct policies that strip the most basic due process protections from accused students. The result has been systematic injustice
  • The due process problem was so profound that in 2019 a state appellate court in California — hardly a bastion of right-wing jurisprudence — ruled that “fundamental fairness” entitles an accused student to cross-examine witnesses in front of a neutral adjudicator.
  • Third, it is urgently necessary to address racial disparities in campus admissions and faculty hiring — but, again, not at the expense of the Constitution.
  • it is difficult to ignore the overwhelming evidence that Harvard attempted to achieve greater diversity in part by systematically downranking Asian applicants on subjective grounds, judging them deficient in traits such as “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected.” That’s not inclusion; it’s discrimination.
  • Our nation has inflicted horrific injustices on vulnerable communities. And while the precise nature of the injustice has varied — whether it was slavery, Jim Crow, internment or the brutal conquest of Native American lands — there was always a consistent theme: the comprehensive denial of constitutional rights.
  • But one does not correct the consequences of those terrible constitutional violations by inflicting a new set of violations on different American communities in a different American era. A consistent defense of the Constitution is good for us all,
  • The danger posed by D.E.I. resides primarily not in these virtuous ends, but in the unconstitutional means chosen to advance them.
  • Virtuous goals should not be accomplished by illiberal means.
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