In the Face of Weighty Problems, Trump Focuses on Squabbles
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In the Face of Weighty Problems, Trump Focuses on Squabbles - The New York Times - 0 views
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The morning after North Korea launched a ballistic missile into the sea, apparently to test President Trump’s resolve in his first days in office, the new commander in chief wanted to make one thing very clear to the world: Mark Cuban, the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner, was not smart enough to have his job.
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“He backed me big-time but I wasn’t interested in taking all of his calls. He’s not smart enough to run for president!”
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The president might have been reacting to a report on Sunday in The New York Post that White House aides view Mr. Cuban as a potential campaign rival in 2020, or to comments Mr. Cuban made to The Fort Worth Star-Telegram on Friday warning corporate executives to be careful in their dealings with Mr. Trump.
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It offered a reminder three weeks into his tenure that even as he faces weighty problems, he is often preoccupied with the narrowest of gripes.
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He swiped at Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, for criticizing the counterterrorism raid in Yemen that resulted in the death of a Navy SEAL.
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Mr. Trump said Mr. McCain’s critique “only emboldens the enemy,” and in a pair of postings on Twitter, he said that the senator, who is the chairman of the Armed Services Committee and was taken prisoner during the Vietnam War, has “been losing for so long he doesn’t know how to win anymore.”
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Mr. Trump’s swing at Mr. Blumenthal was itself a function of yet another feud he has pursued, often in incendiary tones, against the judicial branch as it weighs the legality of his executive order banning travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
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He ratcheted up the insults during a speech to law enforcement officials from around the country, calling a hearing by a three-judge appeals court panel to review the stay “disgraceful” and comparing the intellect of the judges unfavorably with a poor student in high school.
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Days later, Mr. Trump blamed journalists in a posting in which he expressed pride in Ms. Trump, whom he said had been “abused and treated so badly by the media.”
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That Mr. Trump is willing, and even eager, to ignore those conventions, his aides say, is one reason his supporters adore him.
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“He doesn’t hold it back, he’s authentic and he’s not going to sit back, I think, when he feels very passionately about something.”
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“If you go back and listen to the tapes, they would talk privately with members of Congress or their staffs, and Nixon would say some pretty crazy things — about Jews, about people in the media who were out to get him — some of it was very petty, personal stuff,” Mr. Dallek said. “What is unusual is that President Trump is doing this publicly and it’s a near-daily occurrence, it’s multiple times a week.”
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In a post on Twitter responding to Mr. Trump’s insult on Sunday, Mr. Cuban shared a letter he had written to the president during his campaign last year, in which he advised Mr. Trump to drill down on policy specifics instead of improvisin
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This group believes Islam threatens America: 'It's a spiritual battle of good and evil.... - 0 views
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“They should be hauled out of Congress and taken to Guantánamo!” a military veteran said of the few dozen elected officials — including Hillary Clinton and the only two Muslim members of Congress — identified in the film as having connections to terrorists. “Can’t we get a law passed so we can go in and get these people the hell out of our government?”
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Trump’s election has presented a “God-given opportunity,” Loudon said. “The fate of the Western world” now depends on how they use it.
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“We have four years — the most important four years of our lives — to redouble the efforts,” he said. “If we blow it, our kids live in slavery. If we succeed, we can have a new golden age, not just in America, but all over the world.”
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White urged the group to start by calling, writing and visiting their lawmakers. He said he needed volunteers to “begin to do some deep research” into a list of about 400 addresses that he had compiled of mosques and Muslim-affiliated “entities” to begin to “connect the dots.”
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At the next meeting, he added, a visiting speaker would talk to them about “how to push back against building mosques in your communities.”
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White, a devout Christian, believes that sharia, the guiding laws and principles of Islam, are the embodiment of that evil; that the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamic movement that is a force in Middle Eastern politics, is working to spread sharia throughout America; and that CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, the majority of American mosques, and a host of other Muslim leaders and organizations are outgrowths of the Brotherhood on U.S. soil. The Trump administration has been considering adding the Brotherhood to its list of designated foreign terrorist organizations; ACT considers that a top priority.
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White hopes that Trump’s travel ban will prevail and that other Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, will be added. He wants mosques and American Muslim groups to denounce sharia or be disbanded, and he wants the government to bar people who associate with those groups from public office.
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The night before White visited the Capitol in Austin, a gunman who expressed support for nationalist and right-wing causes killed six people and wounded 19 others in an attack on a Quebec City mosque. The day before, a fire destroyed a mosque that had previously been burglarized and vandalized in Victoria, Tex. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Florida handed a 30-year sentence to a man who set a small-town mosque on fire because he saw the teachings of Islam as a threat.
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BBC News - Winter Olympics: Russia arrests five 'terror suspects' - 0 views
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Russian authorities say they have detained five members of a "banned international terrorist organisation" in the restive North Caucusus region.
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Russia earlier announced it was deploying more than 30,000 police and interior ministry troops to the region.
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The main concern is the threat of attack by Islamist militants. Security fears have been heightened after two suicide bomb attacks killed 34 people in the southern city of Volgograd on 29 and 30 December.
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The five suspects were in possession of "grenades, ammunition, and a homemade explosive device packed with shrapnel", the National Anti-Terrorism Committee said.
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A "controlled zone" near Olympic venues will limit access to people with tickets and proof of identity while another "forbidden zone" will be in place in large areas around Sochi.
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Abolitionist or Terrorist? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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There’s no doubt that Vesey was a violent man, who planned to attack and kill Charleston whites. But those who condemn him as a terrorist merely demonstrate how little we, as a culture, understand about slavery, and what it forced the men and women it ensnared to do.
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More than a decade ago, while I was giving a talk on Vesey in Charleston, a member of the audience challenged my view that what Vesey wished to accomplish — the freedom for his friends and family — could be a good thing, on the grounds that he went about it the wrong way. “Why not work within the system for liberation,” the man asked, or even “stage a protest march?”
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Although well intentioned, such questions reveal how far American society still has to travel before we reach a sophisticated understanding of the past. There was no “system” for Vesey to work within; his state had flatly banned private manumissions, or the freeing of slaves, in 1820. The only path to freedom was to sharpen a sword. Americans today can admire the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his 1963 nonviolent March on Washington, but his world was not Vesey’s, and we must understand that. Continue reading the main story Write A Comment Continue reading the main story
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It is ironic that such historical myopia should be found in Charleston, which today bills itself as one of the nation’s most historic cities. Each afternoon horse-drawn carriages transport tourists about its narrow streets. But as the fight over the Vesey statue suggests, tour guides tell at best an incomplete story.
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They often ignore, for example, the fact that of the roughly 400,000 Africans sold into what is now the United States, approximately 40 percent landed on Sullivan’s Island, a hellish Ellis Island of sorts just outside of Charleston Harbor. Today nothing commemorates that ugly fact but a simple bench, established by the author Toni Morrison using private funds.
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Three American teens, recruited online, are caught trying to join the Islamic State - T... - 0 views
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muslim terrorism recruiting internet social media islamist
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This year alone, officials have detained at least 15 U.S. citizens — nine of them female — who were trying to travel to Syria to join the militants. Almost all of them were Muslims in their teens or early 20s, and almost all were arrested at airports waiting to board flights.
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Authorities are closely monitoring Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks, where recruiters from the Islamic State aggressively target youths as young as 14.
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“This was not a spur-of-the-moment trip but rather a carefully calculated plan to abandon their family, to abandon their community, and abandon their country and join a foreign terrorist organization,” Hiller told the judge.
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Hamzah Khan grew up in a suburban American home with pretty shrubs out front and a basketball hoop in the back yard. He earned a Presidential Physical Fitness Award in the eighth grade and loved Naruto, the Japanese manga. He volunteered at his local mosque and represented Argentina in the National Model United Nations.
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The process is often called “cocooning” — shielding children from as much American culture as possible by banning TV, the Internet and newspapers and sending them to Islamic schools.
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Omer Mozaffar, a Muslim community leader who teaches theology at Loyola University Chicago and the University of Chicago, said many Muslim families appear to have sheltered their children from the culture around them.
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When Hamzah Khan was about 8 years old, the family got rid of the TV, because by then they had a computer with Internet access, which the parents carefully monitored. The children were allowed to watch cartoons and read news online, but they were not allowed to browse the Internet by themselves. “We didn’t want to expose them to adult stuff,” Zarine Khan said. “We wanted to preserve their innocence. We wanted to channel their intelligence into their studies and to becoming good human beings.”
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He said that since the 1991 Persian Gulf War and especially since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, some Muslims have felt “under siege” in the U.S. communities where they live. “There’s a defensiveness that compels parents to pull their kids out of everything,” Mozaffar said. “A lot of parents feel overwhelmed and don’t know what to do, so they try to isolate their children.”
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“Parents send them less for the Islamic tutelage and more for the sense of protecting them,” Mozaffar said. “They think ‘American’ equals ‘immoral,’ and there’s a common belief that if it’s more strict, it’s more pious. This is something I have to preach against all the time.”
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The result is often that American Muslim children find themselves caught between two worlds. They are American, but they feel their parents and their religious leaders trying to steer them away from American culture.
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That can leave them vulnerable to those who promise something better, a place where they are celebrated for their religion. And, recently, that message has often come in the form of the network of anonymous, persuasive recruiters on social media who lure youth to join the Islamic State. Quadri calls them “Sheik Google.”
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The evening before the teens tried to fly away forever, Zarine Khan said, she and her daughter sat together putting henna dye on each other in celebration of the upcoming Eid al-Adha holiday.
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GOP offers a lesson on how not to respond to terrorism | MSNBC - 0 views
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About 10 months ago, after terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, killing 11 people, congressional Republicans quickly began looking for ways to blame American leadership
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Republican field is dominated by candidates with no meaningful experience in or understanding of foreign affairs, and nearly all of whom continue to think the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was a great idea.
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A dark portrait of a vulnerable homeland – impotent against Islamic State militants, susceptible against undocumented refugees and isolated in a world of fraying alliances –
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The one reaction nearly every Republican candidate agreed on is a refusal to accept Syrian refugees – as if the real lesson of the Paris attacks is feeling less sympathy for ISIS’s victims
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the Republican’s rush toward “stop letting in refugees” is reminiscent of “the ‘travel ban now or we all die of Ebola’ fad of last year.”
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But there’s also the unnerving track record of many Republican officials – including would-be presidents – who seem to fall to pieces every time there’s a crisis
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The GOP’s responses to Friday night’s bloodshed was a discouraging reminder of a party that still doesn’t know what to do or say when mature leadership is required
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The rise of Donald Trump is a terrifying moment in American politics - Vox - 0 views
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It is undeniably enjoyable to watch Trump. He's red-faced, discursive, funny, angry, strange, unpredictable, and real. He speaks without filter and tweets with reckless abandon. The Donald Trump phenomenon is a riotous union of candidate ego and voter id. America's most skilled political entertainer is putting on the greatest show we've ever seen.
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Trump is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory. He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he's a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he's also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante.
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He's not a joke and he's not a clown. He's a man who could soon be making decisions of war and peace, who would decide which regulations are enforced and which are lifted, who would be responsible for nominating Supreme Court justices and representing America in the community of nations.
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He climbed to the top of the polls in this election by calling Mexicans rapists and killers. He defended a poor debate performance by accusing Megyn Kelly of being on her period. He responded to rival Ted Cruz's surge by calling for a travel ban on Muslims. When two of his supporters attacked a homeless man and said they did it because "Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported," he brushed off complaints that he's inspiring violence by saying his supporters are "very passionate."
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"All the other candidates say 'Americans are angry, and I understand.' Trump says, 'I’M angry.'" Trump doesn't offer solutions so much as he offers villains. His message isn't so much that he'll help you as he'll hurt them.
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Trump doesn't. He has the reality television star's ability to operate entirely without shame, and that permits him to operate entirely without restraint. It is the single scariest facet of his personality. It is the one that allows him to go where others won't, to say what others can't, to do what others wouldn't.
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When MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked Trump about his affection for Vladimir Putin, who "kills journalists, political opponents and invades countries," Trump replied, "He's running his country, and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country."
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It's a lie that if you put a frog into a pot of water and slowly turn up the heat the frog will simply boil, but it's a fact that if you put the American political system in a room with Trump for long enough we slowly lose track of how noxious he is, or we at least run out of ways to keep repeating it.
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Adam Serwer: White Nationalism's Deep American Roots - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth.
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King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it.
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“Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.
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What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents.
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Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.
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Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him
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Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide
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The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.
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In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.”
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In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.”
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Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people.
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In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.
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it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history. In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race. He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers
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The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.
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In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:
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The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States.
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Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that
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Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.”
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President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.
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Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.
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On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.
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A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
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In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants
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When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes. Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.
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Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.
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In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.
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Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land … We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”
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t was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.”
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Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”
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“It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.”
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Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.
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Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.
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He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe
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it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man.
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The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.
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two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.
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Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy.
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the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the U.S. didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.
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The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it
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historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name
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Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government.
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The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.
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That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity.
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The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.
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The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy.
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3 Lessons The White House Could Learn After The Downfall Of Another Trump Nominee : NPR - 0 views
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After the demise of yet another Trump administration nomination, it's worth taking a look at lessons learned. So far, the president has tried to blame Democrats as "obstructionists" for White House physician Ronny Jackson's downfall and described Jackson on Friday as an "American hero."
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Trump has always managed by instinct and gut — not by orderly process. And for him, the chaos that ensues is just part of his brand. But it doesn't always result in a successful Cabinet confirmation or policies that can withstand judicial scrutiny. Turning to Rear Adm. Jackson to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs surprised many on the White House staff, just like Trump's decision to rush out the travel ban in his first week in office or to impulsively announce steel tariffs on U.S. allies.
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Jackson and the president insist the allegations are false, but, in the end, neither was willing to fight them. After all, as Trump admitted, Jackson hadn't even asked for the job.
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"All I can tell you is we didn't initiate this discussion," Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, told NPR's Ari Shapiro on Tuesday before Jackson withdrew his nomination. "This discussion came when we were notified by folks who work with Adm. Jackson, folks in the military."
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Shulkin had clashed with other administration officials and says he was pushed out by people who wanted to privatize VA health care and allow big corporations to profit from treating veterans. Shulkin's critics say ethics problems did him in.
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As if he were teasing the next episode of a reality TV show, though, he wouldn't give a name, saying only that it will be "somebody with political capabilities."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates: Kanye West in the Age of Donald Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views
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West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.
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West lending his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Giulianism; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.
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It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a “travel ban,” which West is free to have never heard of
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West, in his own way, will likely pay also for his thin definition of freedom, as opposed to one that experiences history, traditions, and struggle not as a burden, but as an anchor in a chaotic world.
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It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community
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The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life | US news | The Gu... - 0 views
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When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.
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In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.
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One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.
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Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.
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Some 357,896 tests later, the country has more or less won the coronavirus war. On Friday only 91 new cases were reported in a country of more than 50 million.
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The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
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Though the decision to allow private and state labs to provide testing has increased the flow of test kits, the US remains starkly behind South Korea, which has conducted more than five times as many tests per capita. That makes predicting where the next hotspot will pop up after New York and New Orleans almost impossible.
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Today, 86,012 cases have been confirmed across the US, pushing the nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus league table – above even China.
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Most worryingly, the curve of cases continues to rise precipitously, with no sign of the plateau that has spared South Korea.
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Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government’s response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms. He told the Guardian: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”
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It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.
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If Trump’s travel ban did nothing else, it staved off to some degree the advent of the virus in the US, buying a little time. Which makes the lack of decisive action all the more curious.
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In the absence of sufficient test kits, the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially kept a tight rein on testing, creating a bottleneck. “I believe the CDC was caught flat-footed,” was how the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, put it on 7 March. “They’re slowing down the state.”The CDC’s botched rollout of testing was the first indication that the Trump administration was faltering as the health emergency gathered pace. Behind the scenes, deep flaws in the way federal agencies had come to operate under Trump were being exposed.
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In 2018 the pandemic unit in the national security council – which was tasked to prepare for health emergencies precisely like the current one – was disbanded. “Eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response,” Beth Cameron, senior director of the office at the time it was broken up, wrote in the Washington Post.
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It was hardly a morale-boosting gesture when Trump proposed a 16% cut in CDC funding on 10 February – 11 days after the World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency over Covid-19.
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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates the diagnostic tests and will control any new treatments for coronavirus, has also shown vulnerabilities. The agency recently indicated that it was looking into the possibility of prescribing the malaria drug chloroquine for coronavirus sufferers, even though there is no evidence it would work and some indication it could have serious side-effects.
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As the former senior official put it: “We have the FDA bowing to political pressure and making decisions completely counter to modern science.”
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Trump has designated himself a “wartime president”. But if the title bears any validity, his military tactics have been highly unconventional. He has exacerbated the problems encountered by federal agencies by playing musical chairs at the top of the coronavirus force.
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The president began by creating on 29 January a special coronavirus taskforce, then gave Vice-President Mike Pence the job, who promptly appointed Deborah Birx “coronavirus response coordinator”, before the federal emergency agency Fema began taking charge of key areas, with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, creating a shadow team that increasingly appears to be calling the shots.“There’s no point of responsibility,” the former senior official told the Guardian. “It keeps shifting. Nobody owns the problem.”
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So it has transpired. In the wake of the testing disaster has come the personal protective equipment (PPE) disaster, the hospital bed disaster, and now the ventilator disaster.Ventilators, literal life preservers, are in dire short supply across the country. When governors begged Trump to unleash the full might of the US government on this critical problem, he gave his answer on 16 March.In a phrase that will stand beside 20 January 2020 as one of the most revelatory moments of the history of coronavirus, he said: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment – try getting it yourselves.”
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In the absence of a strong federal response, a patchwork of efforts has sprouted all across the country. State governors are doing their own thing. Cities, even individual hospitals, are coping as best they can.
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Women trailblazers who inspire us right now (opinion - CNN - 0 views
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(CNN)In 2020, Women's History Month comes amid a time of social upheaval and global fear over the coronavirus pandemic and resulting political turmoil. While for many the 2020 presidential race is now an afterthought, this Women's History Month does also mark the departure of the last remaining women candidates from the 2020 presidential field -- during an election year that also marks the centennial of women's suffrage.
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Here is a glimpse at those inspiring stories and figures—who they are, what they've meant to these women in the past and what they mean to them now, looking forward in 2020 and beyond. As trailblazing tennis legend Billie Jean King once said to me, "Whatever you care about, you can make a difference. You really can. Don't ever underestimate yourself. Do not underestimate the human spirit."
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Madeleine Albright is the first woman to serve as US Secretary of State. She is the author of multiple books, including the shortly forthcoming "Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st-Century Memoir."
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In the United States, this story is perhaps best exemplified by Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross and one of the most celebrated figures in the nation's history. Her lifesaving work on Civil War battlefields and her lasting contributions to the betterment of society are a reminder of how much a determined woman can do.
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In this historic year of celebrating the 19th Amendment giving women the power of the vote, I'm still a believer in Bella's prediction because I have witnessed what can happen when women bring forward the full scope of our experiences as mothers, daughters and sisters, individually and collectively, to redefine power by how we use it and share it. From negotiating peace to leading toward climate justice, we have, as a global women's community, the opportunity to fully actualize Bella's faith in us.
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Although recent victories against these companies are encouraging, there is a long fight ahead of us still, and Rachel will continue to inspire. Because she never gave up, and she succeeded in banning DDT despite the vested interests of corporations and the government—despite the fact that she was secretly battling the cancer that killed her. In addition, I was always supported and encouraged by my mother.
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My first reaction to learning about Claudette Colvin was, "How did I not know about her until now?" In 1955, Claudette was 15 and living in Montgomery, Alabama. On her ride home from school one day, the driver ordered her to give up her seat to a white woman. Claudette refused, and two police officers dragged her off the bus in handcuffs.
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When I first met Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, I was a young, single mom on public assistance and food stamps. I was active in the community—serving as president of the Black Student Union, volunteering with the Black Panther Party, while raising two young boys. The time I spent on her campaign deeply impacted my life.
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As soon as she finished her speech, I offered to do anything I could for her campaign. But when she asked me if I was registered to vote, I admitted that I was not. She was not pleased. She looked at me and said: "Little girl, you can't change the system if you're on the outside looking in. Register to vote."
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Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm remains an inspiration to little girls and women everywhere, including myself, reminding us to strive for what's possible, unburdened by what's been. As my mother—another hero in my eyes—used to say, "You may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last."
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When the New York Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights passed 10 years ago, I knew I was both witnessing a massive historical achievement in that moment and riding the crest of a longer historical arc, lifted up by millions of women who have been fighting for respect and dignity for generations.
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Along with nearly one thousand other women from all over the world, I traveled to Brussels in May of 1989 for the first-ever international peace conference convened by women. Proudly hanging on the front of the European Parliament building was a banner: "WOMEN: GIVE PEACE A CHANCE."
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One of the people who has inspired me is Mariame Kaba, one of the nation's leading prison abolitionists and the founder of the organization Project NIA, which works to end youth incarceration. She's truly remarkable. One of the attributes I most admire about her is the resilience she embodies and the genuine sense of hope she exudes. She is deeply principled and warm hearted in her pursuit of justice. She said something years ago that has stayed with me: "Hope is a discipline." When things feel bleak, I come back to these words to maintain perspective and to persevere.
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In 1962, after two years studying chimpanzees, I went to Cambridge University to read for a PhD in ethology. There I was told there was a difference in kind between humans and other animals, that only we humans had personalities, minds, and emotions. But I had learned that this was not true from my childhood teachers, my wonderful mother and my dog, Rusty! So I refused to comply with this reductionist thinking. Eventually, because the chimpanzees are so similar to us biologically as well as behaviorally, most scientists accepted that we are part of the animal kingdom. But I received much criticism.
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Amelia Earhart broke the barrier for women in aviation, then Jackie Cochran founded the WASP, a WWII Women Pilots Service, paving the way for Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.
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And finally, suffragists rallied and marched for women's equality starting in 1848, seeking the basic right to vote and assure their voices were counted. It took over 50 years before their dream was realized and none of the brave early leaders lived to celebrate or exercise this important right. It opened so many doors for the next steps to true equality.
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More than 20 years ago in Beijing, Hillary Clinton stood in front of the United Nations World Conference on Women and declared that "human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights." Although Hillary's history-making speech was directed at the world, it felt like she was speaking directly to me. At the time, I was a young lawyer, but Hillary's words forced me to ask myself tough questions about what I was doing to make the world a better place.
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During times of uncertainty, it's important to reach for inspiration as a way to stay connected to what's possible. I'm grateful for my own mother, Lynette Schwartz, who taught me from a young age to always expect the unexpected and be prepared for the things that you cannot see. When I was growing up, I used to think that my mother was unnecessarily worried about everything and overly prepared. Her advice and habits have become especially helpful in the last few weeks as uncertainty spreads. Because of her, our home has become a sanctuary for those who don't have the same.
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The women of color who founded the movement we carry forward today are my inspiration. Their persistence to be seen and heard gives me strength to carry on in uncertain times. The term "women of color" was born in 1977 in Houston, Texas, at the first and only National Women's Conference. There, among more than 20,000 mostly white women, a cadre of Black, Latina, Asian American and Native women redefined the women's agenda to include race, class and solidarity. They inspired entire generations of us to step fully into our collective leadership and power. Now women of color—a majority of women in several states—are leading progressive reforms as voters, organizers and courageous elected leaders.
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I can still remember standing with my mother, Ann Richards, on the floor of the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. It was the first time we'd done anything like this together. As State Treasurer of Texas, Mom had been asked to give a speech seconding Walter Mondale's nomination for the presidency, and she asked me to go along. Even though her speech was the next day, it was the furthest thing from our minds while we waited for Mondale's running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, to take the stage. That night, she would become the first woman ever nominated as vice president on a major party ticket.
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As a young girl impacted by over-policing and over-incarceration in my communities, I was particularly grateful when I learned about the abolitionist movement that helped support enslaved Africans to gain their freedom. I would learn and relearn the brilliant story of Harriet Tubman—a young enslaved woman who would free herself from slavery and eventually free so many others including her entire family. This kind of bravery helped me assess the life I was living and created a courage in me that translated into the work I currently do today.
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In my life, I have had many moments of self-doubt when I have felt that I lacked the knowledge, the background, the expertise necessary to deal with vexing issues. Most women have had such experiences.
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Born into slavery and orphaned as a young woman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an uncompromising and courageous voice for race and gender justice. She resisted not just the terror of racism and the suffocation of sexism, but also the conventions that artificially limited advocacy against these "isms."
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When I wrote "American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country" an observation jumped out: in many instances in the remarkable progress of women in history, the first barrier breakers worked for years to be recognized in their fields, but never saw their success.
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We went out into one of the tiny rice-paddy villages, a cluster of six tin open-sided lean-to huts. It's a day's trek, by minibus from the little town of Bontoc, then by foot up and down steep hillsides and across fragile rope bridges, then teetering along thin strips of earth that divide the paddies. Finally we sit on the mud floor of one of the huts, drinking peanut coffee from a shared tin cup. Urban Filipinas speak English, some Spanish and only a little Filipino (Tagalog); the tribal people of the North have their own languages. One woman translates.
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Later that afternoon, each of us clutching at the ropes of a swaying bridge, my activist translator shouted to me that somehow, she must find the funding to start an adult literacy program for the women of this rice paddy. And so we all did. But Gunnawa is always with me. Because all of us need to know how to read the signs that tell us where we are. So we can know where we're going.
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Another Virus Victim: The U.S. as a Global Leader in a Time of Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-united-states.html
leadership global us china pandemic crisis leader history policy selfishness
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In the name of “America First,” President Trump has pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and questioned the usefulness of the United Nations and NATO, displaying his distaste for the multinational institutions the United States had constructed and led since World War II.
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As the coronavirus crisis escalates across the globe, the United States is stepping back further, abandoning its longtime role as a generous global leader able to coordinate an ambitious, multinational response to a worldwide emergency.
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During both the economic meltdown in 2008 and the Ebola crisis of 2014, the United States assumed the role of global coordinator of responses — sometimes imperfectly, but with the acceptance and gratitude of its allies and even its foes.
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But the United States is not taking those kinds of steps today.“There is from President Trump’s America a selfishness that is new,’’
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With Mr. Trump’s unembellished nationalism and slogan of “America First,’’ his efforts to blame first China and then Europe for the coronavirus, and his various misstatements of fact, “it means that America no longer serves the planet,’’
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“America was always strong on self-interest but it has been very generous,” he said. “That generosity seems to be gone, and that’s bad news for the world.’’
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“There is no U.S. global leadership and no U.S. model,’’ Ms. Major added. “Success would be that you manage the pandemic at home, rally allies around you, lead the alliance, supply global public goods and organize the global response, as with Ebola.”
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The suggestion that Mr. Trump tried to buy out the German company, “true or not, did not play well in the European media,” Mr. Westmacott said. “It felt more ‘America first’ than America in its traditional role of a big-hearted great power.’’
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The United States did provide some early aid to China. But in general, the administration has left even close allies to fend for themselves.
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Mr. Trump has defended his ban on all travel from the European Union, but he did not bother to consult with European leaders or even give them advance notice.
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it was the energetic French president, Emmanuel Macron, who called Mr. Trump twice in 10 days to suggest a G-7 virus summit by videoconference. Mr. Trump agreed, but left Mr. Macron to organize it.
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Germans and Europeans generally are angry about accusations from German officials that the Trump administration, and reportedly Mr. Trump himself, offered $1 billion to a German pharmaceutical company, Cure-Vac, to buy monopoly rights to a potential Covid-19 vaccine.
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Whatever the reality, “the point is that people think Trump is capable of that,’’ Ms. Major said. “That’s where we’ve arrived in the trans-Atlantic relationship, that people say, ‘Yes, that sounds right for the American president.’ ’’
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Instead, American institutions “don’t seem to be able to cope at home,” she said, and there is “a Trump response to act alone.’’
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“Seen from a distance, Trump’s performance has pretty much confirmed the views people over here already had of him — that it’s all about ‘me,’ with no acceptance of responsibility for earlier failures.’’
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The contrast is to China, which made huge mistakes at the onset of the crisis, but since then appears to have managed it effectively, using harsh quarantine measures others are studying.
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China is also now sending aid — needed respiratory and surgical masks, ventilators and medical personnel — to Italy and Serbia, which have condemned their European allies for not providing early and efficient help.
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On Wednesday, China offered the European Union as a whole two million surgical masks, 200,000 advanced N95 masks and 50,000 testing kits
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The Chinese billionaire Jack Ma has even offered aid to the United States, promising to send 500,000 virus test kits and a million protective masks.
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“There is a serious battle of narratives,’’ Ms. Major said. “And the Chinese have become good at what was once America’s tool, soft power.’’
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The Chinese, she said, are “trying to make everyone forget that a lot of what we’re experiencing is because of their domestic failure.’’
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even as China provides aid to Italy and Serbia, she said, “it is asking, ‘Where are your European friends?’ and giving the impression that China acts, is coordinating, leads.’’
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The United States “seems at least as fragmented as the European Union, if not more so,’’ said Marietje Schaake, a former European legislator now at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.
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“The U.S. looks more fragile in part because it lacks the social structures we have in Europe,” she added. “There is comfort in knowing that there is a bottom, a net that will catch you.’’
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In retrospect, the crisis may also mark a moment of fundamental global shift.“What will this mean in five years for great-power competition?” asked Ms. Major. “In 10 years will we say, ‘This is the moment that China rose and the U.S. declined,’ or will the U.S. rebound?”
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O'Hare, DFW coronavirus: 'Enhanced screening' bring delays, crowds to U.S. airports - T... - 0 views
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shortly after taking effect, the measures designed to prevent new infections in the United States created the exact conditions that facilitate the spread of the highly contagious virus, with throngs of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder in bottlenecks that lasted late into the night.
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“AT THIS MOMENT, HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE ARRIVING FROM NUMEROUS COUNTRIES ARE JAMMED TOGETHER IN A SINGLE SERPENTINE LINE VAGUELY SAID TO BE ‘FOR SCREENING,’” read a tweet from Tracy Sefl, who wrote that she waited for several hours to be screened at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport
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“Authorities are going to have to deal with the ramifications of the breakdown of whatever this system is supposed to be,” she wrote. “Not to mention needless exposure risks from containing thousands of passengers like this.”
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I'm an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain's 'herd immunity' coronavirus plan, I... - 0 views
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My colleagues here in the US, even as they are reeling from the stumbling response of the Donald Trump administration to the crisis, assumed that reports of the UK policy were satire – an example of the wry humour for which the country is famed. But they are all too real.
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The stated aim has been to achieve “herd immunity” in order to manage the outbreak and prevent a catastrophic “second wave” next winter
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the reasoning goes that even though in a perfect world we’d not want anyone to take the risk of infection, generating immunity in younger people is a way of protecting the population as a whole.
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We talk about vaccines generating herd immunity, so why is this different? Because this is not a vaccine. This is an actual pandemic that will make a very large number of people sick, and some of them will die
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Even though the mortality rate is likely quite low, a small fraction of a very large number is still a large number.
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There might well be a second wave, I honestly don’t know. But vulnerable people should not be exposed to a virus right now in the service of a hypothetical future
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This virus is capable of shutting down countries. You should not want to be the next after Wuhan, Iran, Italy or Spain. In those places, the healthcare systems have broken down. In Italy, the choices of whom to save and whom to allow to die are real
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You should instead look to the example of South Korea, which, through a combination of intense surveillance and social distancing, appears to have gained some semblance of control over the virus. We can learn from South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, all of which have so far done a good job mitigating the worst outcomes despite having reported cases early in the pandemic, and in the case of South Korea, suffering a substantial outbreak.
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The UK should not be trying to create herd immunity, that will take care of itself. Policy should be directed at slowing the outbreak to a (more) manageable rate. What this looks like is strong social distancing.
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If you hear any talking head on TV explain that kids don’t get sick, remember that doesn’t mean kids cannot be infected and transmit. It’s probably a good idea to hold off on visits to Nana and Grandpa.
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The most fundamental function of a government is to keep its people safe. It is from this that it derives its authority, the confidence of the people and its legitimacy
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Nobody should be under the illusion that this is something that can be dodged through somehow manipulating a virus that we are only beginning to understand. This will not pass you by; this is not a tornado, it is a hurricane.
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New York City during the coronavirus outbreak - CNN - 0 views
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With 532 new cases on Wednesday, there are now at least 1,871 cases of coronavirus in New York City and 11 deaths, Mayor Bill de Blasio's office confirmed to CNN.Health officials and government leaders have encouraged Americans to avoid populous places and large group gatherings to mitigate the spread of the virus. In one of the more drastic measures, San Francisco is demanding that residents shelter in place during the pandemic.
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Ridership on the city's subway system was down 3.7 million on Tuesday, compared with the same day last year when more than 5.5 million people rode the subway, the MTA New York City Transit said in a tweet.
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Times Square, normally teeming with vehicle and foot traffic, was lit up as ever but nearly uninhabited Monday as bars and restaurants became take-out only and public spaces like theaters and gyms shuttered.
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Rockefeller Center, like other entertainment spots, was captured in an unfamiliar light Wednesday as it was closed, with no skaters and no onlookers to fill it.
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The city's hotels were less than 49% full last week, according to data released Wednesday, and Gov. Cuomo announced a mandatory ban on businesses that would allow no more than 50% of the workforce to report for work outside their home. As a result, coming and going in the city has dwindled.
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Germany's coronavirus death rate is lower than Italy, China, Spain, France - The Washin... - 0 views
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In Italy, 9.5 percent of the people who have tested positive for the virus have succumbed to covid-19, according to data compiled at Johns Hopkins University. In France, the rate is 4.3 percent. But in Germany, it’s 0.4 percent.
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The biggest reason for the difference, infectious disease experts say, is Germany’s work in the early days of its outbreak to track, test and contain infection clusters. That means Germany has a truer picture of the size of its outbreak than places that test only the obviously symptomatic, most seriously ill or highest-risk patients.
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Germany, with 31,150 cases at midday Tuesday, appeared to have a larger outbreak than France, with 20,149. But the higher death rate in France implies there were more undiagnosed cases there. France’s outbreak could be larger than Germany’s.
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“At the beginning, when we had relatively few cases, when it came to finding them and isolating them, we did quite well in Germany,”
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Initially, at least, the country’s health authorities tracked infection clusters meticulously. When an individual tested positive, they used contact tracing to find other people with whom they had been in touch and then tested and quarantined them, which broke infection chains
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Germany’s high diagnostic capacity had “secured us an extreme lead . . . in the detection of the epidemic.”
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But he cautioned against complacency, and said the death rate would increase: “We are no exception.”
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As community spread became prevalent, infection chains in some cases became impossible to trace. Some doctors said they had no choice but to send people seeking tests back home to call jammed coronavirus hotlines because they lacked protective equipment to conduct them safely.
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With cases growing exponentially, health authorities have moved on to ordering social distancing and banning mass events. Federal states have restricted gatherings outside the home to a maximum of two people.
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outh Korea, which has been praised as a model for responding to the outbreak, has a death rate of 1.2 percent.
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“In South Korea, there’s been a longer duration of infections, so we can’t really compare,” he said. “We have lots of newly positive cases. They didn’t have the chance to die yet.”
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Busse said Germany is more comparable to Norway. The Scandinavian country is at a similar point in its outbreak, it’s also worked to test and contain cases, and it also has a death rate of 0.4 percent.
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a period of exponential growth might be slowing, but cautioned that it was too early to say, given fluctuations in data. He said the picture should be clearer by Wednesday.
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the German outbreak started with large numbers of young people — “people who came back from holidays.”
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Lauterbach said he expected Germany’s death rate to rise as more vulnerable segments of society are infected.
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Because testing is not universal, and many people with the coronavirus might never be diagnosed, a true death rate is impossible to ascertain. But experts say the rate is likely to be significantly higher in countries such as Spain and Italy, where care is collapsing.
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With more intensive care beds and ventilators than most other European nations and early measures to prevent the spread of the virus, Lauterbach said, he didn’t see Germany turning into Italy or Spain. Still, he has been advocating for wider restrictions.
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“I think with all things considered, Germany will do reasonably well in this first round of a long fight,”
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Coronavirus in San Francisco: How City Flattened the Curve - The Atlantic - 0 views
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San Francisco had yet to confirm a single case of the coronavirus when Breed, the city’s 45-year-old first-term mayor, declared a state of emergency in late February
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Nearly a month after those initial orders to enforce social distancing, San Francisco and the broader Bay Area have emerged as a national model for how early and aggressive action can prevent the explosive rise in cases that has overwhelmed hospitals in New York, where leaders were slower to respond
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San Francisco’s case count of 857 as of April 10—with just 13 recorded deaths due to the coronavirus—is much lower than that in metropolises of comparable size such as New Orleans, Detroit, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The city’s curve is low and flattening, and patients are not flooding into its emergency rooms.
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“All evidence suggests that they are doing much better, and the simplest explanation for that is that they did take social-distancing measures very seriously and they did it early,
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while positive cases are surely being undercounted—as they are across the country—San Francisco’s stable public-health system and low death count offer validation of its success so far.
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Breed ordered businesses closed and issued a citywide shelter-in-place policy effective on March 17, at a point when San Francisco had fewer than 50 confirmed coronavirus cases.
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By the time New York City fully shut down on March 22, more than 10,000 cases were reported across its five boroughs.
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“She took incredible political heat and criticism,” Harris said, “and she had the courage to make a decision that she in her gut, based on science and the research she did, told her this was the right thing to do for her people, even when other people couldn’t see it yet.”
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“Hindsight these days is not years later; it’s weeks later,” the senator said. “So hindsight tells us London Breed was really smart. She did the right thing at the right time, even though it’s not what people wanted to hear.”
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Epidemiologists told me that San Francisco and other West Coast cities likely benefited from the Trump administration’s late-January restrictions on travel from China, while the president’s delay in banning flights from Europe, which he didn’t do until mid-March, hit New York hard.
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“New York was like Italy, and San Francisco and Washington State are more like, not necessarily the South Koreans, but some of the Asian countries that have had slower growth rates,
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“Really, it’s about early identification of a problem, saying, ‘We’re going to be more proactive than reactive.’”
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It’s that difference in decision making—proactive versus reactive—that has separated leaders at all levels of government during this crisis.
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Mary Ellen Carroll, who runs the city’s Department of Emergency Management, told me. By late January, Breed had activated San Francisco’s emergency-operations center in preparation for an outbreak—the first such move in any major city in the country. The mayor has since relocated the command post to the Moscone Center, a sprawling complex where top city officials can work in-person while social distancing. Everyone, including Breed, wears a mask when they meet, Carroll said.Breed told me that what got her a
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“A picture’s worth a thousand words—seeing the images of what could potentially happen and then hearing your doctors tell you that we may not have the capacity to handle this situation,” the mayor said, recalling a briefing during which her advisers laid out the possibilities for a similar scenario in stark detail. “We have tons of hospitals in San Francisco. What do you mean we don’t have the capacity to handle an outbreak of this capacity?” Breed recalled thinking. “That’s when I was just like, Oh my goodness, this is serious
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In D.C., Trump was reportedly incensed that Messonnier was raising such alarm. In San Francisco, Breed declared a state of emergency that very day.
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“I think they remember how hard it was when we didn’t close down the bathhouses and saw what happened to the epidemic at that point,” said Maldonado, the Stanford epidemiologist.
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Trump is handling the coronavirus like a toddler - The Washington Post - 0 views
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True, his brand of immature leadership is not the only reason the United States lags behind South Korea in its pandemic response, including testing and containment. Organizational inertia and garden-variety bureaucratic politics matter as well.
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the Trump White House’s inadequate handling of the outbreak highlights his every toddler-like instinct
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Some advisers describe an angry Trump as a whistling teapot that needs to either let off steam or explode. Politico has reported on the myriad triggers for his tantrums: “if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him.”
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Like a toddler’s, Trump’s temper has flared repeatedly as the pandemic has worsened and the stock market has tanked.
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For Trump’s staff, crisis management revolves around managing the president’s temper, not managing the actual problem.
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Anthony Fauci, who’s been running the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for decades, responded: “I know, but what do you want me to do? I mean, seriously . . . let’s get real, what do you want me to do?”
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During the transition, the Obama administration prepared a tabletop exercise to brief the incoming Trump team about how to handle an influenza pandemic. The president-elect did not participate, and a former senior official acknowledged that “to get the president to be focused on something like this would be quite hard.”
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Toddlers are natural contrarians, who love to test boundaries by pushing back on whatever they’re told. So is Trump. In the first two months of the outbreak, he insisted that the coronavirus would never spread within the United States, despite expert assessments to the contrary. In late February, he said: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.
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Much like frazzled preschool teachers, the remaining competent people staffing Trump are clearly past the point of exasperation.
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Trump, like most toddlers, also has poor impulse control. Some White House advisers reportedly refer to it as the “shiny-object phenomenon” — his tendency to react to breaking news rather than focusing on more important issues.
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Health experts have reportedly tried to get him to focus beyond the immediate bad news cycles of rising infections and look at the larger picture of “flattening the curve” and preventing a much bigger health disaster, to little avail.
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One former high-ranking government official told me that a 45-minute meeting with the president was really 45 different one-minute meetings, in which Trump would ask disconnected, rapid-fire questions such as “What do you think of NATO?” and “How big is an aircraft carrier?”
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Multiple reports confirm that he has grown restless while confined on the White House grounds. He has crashed staff meetings because he does not know what else to do.
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His aides have questioned whether he has the capacity to focus on what will be a months-long emergency.
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Each time, Trump’s advisers have had to expend precious time and energy to change his mind and soothe his ego rather than focus on the crisis at hand.
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The final and most disturbing parallel between Trump and a toddler is that, like at a day-care center that doesn’t pay caregivers enough, the staff turnover in this administration has hampered the government’s response