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Macron says he expects Trump to scrap Iran nuclear deal - 0 views

beta.nbcnews.com/...crap-iran-nuclear-deal-n869191 US politics history trump
shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump is likely to scrap the Iran nuclear deal, French President Emanuel Macron said, adding that he is working on containing the damage with an ambitious new diplomatic framework.Macron made the comments during a roundtable with reporters Wednesday night on the eve of his trip home following three days of high-stakes meetings with Trump about the thorniest foreign policy issues facing the two leaders.
  • acron said he told Trump during their private talks that killing the deal “would open Pandora’s box,” adding: “I don’t think your president wants to make war with Iran.
  • Macron acknowledged that, while he has had talks with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, he does not know how Iran would respond given deep divisions in the regim
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  • Filling in more details of an ambitious multi-part strategy Macron floated at Tuesday’s White House news conference, the French president said he is trying to create a new, smaller coalition to build on the JCPOA and make the nuclear ban permanent, ban Iran’s ballistic missile program, and contain Iran’s aggression in Syria, ultimately leading to political negotiations to end the civil war.
  • And on Friday, Germany’s Angela Merkel will meet with Trump for a few hours to add support for Macron's arguments to Trump on Iran, steel and aluminum tariffs and Syria policy.
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Trump Voters Driven by Fear of Losing Status, Not Economic Anxiety, Study Finds - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-economic-anxiety.html trump voters status anxiety economic dss
shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Ever since Donald J. Trump began his improbable political rise, many pundits have credited his appeal among white, Christian and male voters to “economic anxiety.”
  • A study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences questions that explanation, the latest to suggest that Trump voters weren’t driven by anger over the past, but rather fear of what may come.
  • White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.
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  • “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”
  • Last year, a Public Religion Research Institute survey of more than 3,000 people also found that Mr. Trump’s appeal could better be explained by a fear of cultural displacement.
  • she analyzed survey data from a nationally representative group of about 1,200 voters polled in 2012 and 2016.
  • Dr. Mutz’s statistical analysis focused on those who bucked the trend, switching their support to the Republican candidate, Mr. Trump, in 2016.
  • Dr. Mutz also analyzed a separate survey, conducted in 2016 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. It showed that anxieties about retirement, education and medical bills also had little impact on whether a person supported Mr. Trump.
  • Losing a job or income between 2012 and 2016 did not make a person any more likely to support Mr. Trump
  • A person’s opinion on how trade affected personal finances had little bearing on political preferences
  • uation had worsened
  • Even before conducting her analysis, Dr. Mutz noted two reasons for skepticism of the economic anxiety, or “left behind,” theory. First, the economy was improving before the 2016 presidential campaign. Second, while research has suggested that voters are swayed by the economy, there is little evidence that their own financial situation similarly influences their choices at the ballot box.
  • “It wasn’t people in those areas that were switching, those folks were already voting Republican,” Dr. Mutz said.
  • Neither did unemployment or the density of manufacturing jobs in one’s area.
  • Last year’s Public Religion Research Institute report went even further, finding a link, albeit a weak one, between poor white, working-class Americans and support for Hillary Clinton.
  • While economic anxiety did not explain Mr. Trump’s appeal, Dr. Mutz found reason instead to credit those whose thinking changed in ways that reflected a growing sense of racial or global threat.
  • the findings revealed a fear that American global dominance was in danger, a belief that benefited Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.
  • “The shift toward an antitrade stance was a particularly effective strategy for capitalizing on a public experiencing status threat due to race as well as globalization,” Dr. Mutz wrote in the study.
  • “It used to be a pretty good deal to be a white, Christian male in America, but things have changed and I think they do feel threatened,
  • The other surveys supported the cultural anxiety explanation, too.
  • For example, Trump support was linked to a belief that high-status groups, such as whites, Christians or men, faced more discrimination than low-status groups, like minorities, Muslims or women
  • If wrong, the prevailing economic theory lends unfounded virtue to his victory, crediting it to the disaffected masses
  • More important, she said, it would teach the wrong lesson to elected officials, who often look to voting patterns in enacting new policy.
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Trump Isn't Merely Tolerating Torture - He's Celebrating It - 0 views

nymag.com/...orture-hes-celebrating-it.html
shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • When you consider the plain meaning of the law, and the actions Haspel engaged in, it is impossible to conclude anything but that Haspel committed war crimes of the gravest kind and then helped destroy the evidence of them. There is no defense under the law in which a war criminal can claim that he or she was merely following orders.
  • There are equally no extenuating circumstances that can ever justify torture, according to the U.N. Convention signed by Ronald Reagan no less, in 1984: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
  • Nor is it possible for any human being to read what was done to these prisoners without concluding that this was torture. If an American were captured by ISIS, was waterboarded 83 times, hung from the ceiling by his wrists, locked into a tiny box for days, and turned into a shell of a human being, would any American deny that he was tortured? The question answers itself.
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  • to actually reward someone who has committed war crimes with promotion, and then to elevate her to the highest position in Western intelligence, is a whole new level of depravity. It sends a very clear message: that anyone committing war crimes in the future will be celebrated, not disciplined, rewarded, not punished, that torture is justifiable, even worth reviving, as our future secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, opined only last year.
  • It would amount to a full-on endorsement of torture by the United States, and a signal to the entire world that it can be justified.
  • This is a profound threat to human rights globally and to the long tradition of American warfare, initiated by George Washington no less, in which the use of torture has always been regarded as exactly the kind of barbarism America was founded to overcome. It would be the final nail in the coffin that used to be the West.
  • If this line of defense falls, we are truly lost in a vortex of self-perpetuating evil. We will have abolished something deep and essential in the soul of America.
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Republicans deserve their sad fate - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-9c52-0b10449e33c4_story.html gop trump evangelical morality politics 2016
shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • A man comes out of a church after a fire-and-brimstone sermon on the Ten Commandments, pauses a moment, and then tells his wife, “At least I haven’t made any graven images!”
  • This is the type of praise Republicans could muster for Donald Trump’s second debate performance. He did not have a mental breakdown on stage or try to kiss anyone against their will
  • What Trump actually did was ensure that hardcore conservatives stay with him until the end of his political journey, when Republicans begin the search for survivors and examine the charred black box.
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  • This sad Republican fate is deserved. It is the culmination, the fruition, of an absurdly simplistic anti-establishment attitude. The Trump campaign is what happens when you choose a presidential candidate without the taint of electoral experience — and all the past vetting that comes with it
  • Whatever the explanation, Trump achieved the worst possible outcome for the GOP. He was good enough with his base to avoid a generalized revolt, and bad enough with the rest of the country to continue his slide toward major defeat.
  • This kind of thing has been normalized in far-right discourse for decades. To the most partisan and polarized portion of the right, these excuses and accusations were familiar and appropriate.
  • It is what happens when you pick a candidate who has not engaged in serious public argument over a period in which his or her views and consistency can be tested. It is what happens when you embrace a candidate only on the basis of an outsider persona, who lacks actual political skills — like making a policy argument, empathizing with a voter or avoiding a constant stream of distracting gaffes.
  • This is what Republicans get for devaluing the calling of public service. When you have contempt for politics, you often get a politics worthy of contempt.
  • Until recently, it was presumed, by both critics and supporters, that the GOP was the party of traditional moral order. Under Trump, it seems much more like British conservatism at its worst — hate and mock the liberals, fear the outsiders, and put a topless woman on Page 3
  • The deep partisanship of Trump evangelicals — fighting for a team rather than standing for principles — is actually aiding the secularization of American politics. And so, it turns out, some are making a graven image — of a figure who deserves contempt.
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Donald Trump's Pathetic Fraternity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rumps-pathetic-fraternity.html election politics US opinion
shared by rachelramirez on 03 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump’s Pathetic Fraternity
  • Christie made that deal with shocking alacrity, apparently on the theory that by getting to the table first, he could snag the best seat. It was flawed thinking. Mike Pence was given the marquee assignment; Christie was subjected to repeated public humiliations, including an admonition by Trump to stay away from Oreos.
  • Over recent days, in a spectacularly ill-advised war of words with the former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, he and his minions sought to discredit her by essentially calling her a tramp. Isn’t that precisely what they’re complaining that the Clintons and their minions did to Monica Lewinsky?
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  • It’s all wild hallucination, but he bellows nonetheless, because the television cameras eat it up
  • It’s not exclusive to Republicans. Howard Dean had a Giuliani moment all his own, suggesting that Trump, who doesn’t even drink alcohol, might have a nasty cocaine habit.
  • And it’s amazing how far they’ve fallen. For a significant stretch of the 2008 election cycle, Giuliani was the favorite for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, and not just any favorite.
  • If Trump fails, where does that leave Christie? He was once intent on proving the bipartisan breadth of his outlook and appeal, as his brief bromance with President Obama demonstrated.
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Burning oil tanker sinks off China after one week - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-42680945
shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • An oil tanker burning in the East China Sea for more than a week has finally sunk, Chinese media say.The Sanchi and a cargo ship collided 260km (160 miles) off Shanghai on 6 January, with the tanker then drifting south-east towards Japan
  • China Central Television said that the Sanchi had gone down after "suddenly igniting" around noon (04:00 GMT).
  • Some 13 vessels and an Iranian commando unit had been taking part in the salvage operation, amid bad weather.A spokesman for the Iranian team, Mohammad Rastad, said there was no hope of finding any survivors.
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  • The rescue workers retrieved the ship's black box but had to leave quickly because of the toxic smoke and high temperatures.
  • The Panama-flagged Sanchi was bringing the condensate from Iran to South Korea when the collision with the Hong Kong-registered freighter CF Crystal, carrying grain from the US, happened in the East China Sea. The crewmen of the Crystal were all rescued.
  • Condensate is very different from the black crude that is often seen in oil spills.It is toxic, low in density and considerably more explosive than regular crude.Condensate creates products such as jet fuel, petrol, diesel and heating fuel.
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With AR-15s, Mass Shooters Attack With the Rifle Firepower Typically Used by Infantry T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-15-rifle-mass-shootings.html industrialization weapons attack america politics US history crisis culture policy
shared by anonymous on 28 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • When a gunman walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, he was carrying an AR-15-style rifle that allowed him to fire upon people in much the same way that many American soldiers and Marines would fire their M16 and M4 rifles in combat.
  • Since 2007, at least 173 people have been killed in mass shootings in the United States involving AR-15s, according to a New York Times analysis.
  • What all of this means is that the Parkland gunman, in practical terms, had the same rifle firepower as an American grunt using a standard infantry rifle in the standard way.
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  • For decades the American military has trained its conventional troops to fire their M4s and M16s in the semiautomatic mode — one bullet per trigger pull — instead of on “burst” or automatic in almost all shooting situations.
  • “They are the Formula One cars of guns, designed to kill as many people as quickly and efficiently as possible,” Mr. Plenzler said, referring to AR-15-style rifles. “We are seeing battlefield-level casualties because we are allowing those weapons on our street,” he said.Like the military’s M4s and M16s, civilian AR-15s are fed with box magazines — the standard magazine holds 30 rounds, or cartridges — that can be swapped out quickly, allowing a gunman to fire more than a hundred rounds in minutes. That is what the police described the Parkland gunman as having done. In many states, civilians can buy magazines that hold many more rounds, including 60- and 100-round versions.
  • A federal ban on the manufacture of certain rifles deemed to be “assault weapons” took effect in 1994, and the list of covered rifles included the AR-15.
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Your Location Data Is Being Sold-Often Without Your Knowledge - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...hout-your-knowledge-1520168400 dataleak location
shared by runlai_jiang on 04 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • like that Jack in the Box ad that appears whenever you get near one, in whichever app you have open at the time—and as popular apps harvest your lucrative location data, the potential for leaking or exploiting this data has never been higher.
  • Every time you say “yes” to an app that asks to know your location, you are also potentially authorizing that app to sell your data.
  • They aim to compile a complete record of where everyone in America spends their time, in order to chop those histories into market segments to sell to corporate advertisers.
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  • The data required to serve you any single ad may pass through many companies’ systems in milliseconds—from data broker to ad marketplace to an agency’s custom system.
  • Another way you can be tracked without your knowing it is through any open Wi-Fi hot spot you might pass. If your phone’s Wi-Fi is on, you’re constantly broadcasting a unique MAC address and a history of past Wi-Fi connections.
  • is that with most individual data vendors holding only parts of your data, your complete, identifiable profile is never all in one place. Giants like Google and Facebook , who do have all your data in one place, say they are diligent about throwing away or not gathering what they don’t need, and eliminating personally identifying information from the remainder.
  • There are plenty of ways to track you without getting your permission. Some of the most intrusive are the easiest to implement. Your telco knows where you are at all times, because it knows which cell towers your phone is near. In the U.S., how much data service-providers sell is up to them.
  • A map of the U.S., showing areas of unusually high visits to sites where location-based advertising firm Groundtruth pushes ads to mobile devices.
  • Retailers sometimes use these addresses to identify repeat customers, and they can also use them to track you as you go from one of their stores to another.
  • WeatherBug, one of the most popular weather apps for Android and iPhone, is owned by the location advertising company GroundTruth. It’s a natural fit: Weather apps need to know where you are and provide value in exchange for that information.
  • Every month GroundTruth tracks 70 million people in the U.S. as they go to work in the morning, come home at night, surge in and out of public events, take vacations, you name it.
  • Companies like Acxiom could be prime targets for hackers, said Chandler Givens, chief executive of TrackOff, which develops software to protect user identity and personal information
  • Nearly every year, a bill comes up in the Senate or House that would regulate our data privacy—the most recent was in the wake of the Equifax breach—but none has passed. In some respects, the U.S. appears to be moving backward on privacy protections.
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Grieving for Aleppo, One Year After Its Fall - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549437 aleppo crisis destruction
shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Last autumn, we watched as Bashar al-Assad pummeled the life out of east Aleppo. His barrel bombs collapsed stone apartment buildings into concrete slabs, crushing their inhabitants between the layers. Those who survived were left with hunger, disease, and despair. Death surrounded them. With devastating detail, the siege taught us the full meaning of “kneel or starve,” the Syrian president’s strategy for defeating “the terrorists”—basically, anyone who opposed him. In mid-December, the Assad regime’s menacing green busses forcefully evacuated tens of thousands of civilians to Idlib, where local humanitarians scrambled to erect enough plastic tents for the families as snow began to fall.
  • By choosing to grieve in Arabic, we carved a semi-private space to mourn our homeland.
  • Back at home in my childhood bedroom, I finally cleared my desk of hundreds of plastic cassette boxes and swept them into trash bags. It was time to move on from the past. I thought of the tapes as an end of my youth and of outdated technology. I didn’t know it was just the beginning of the end of everything.
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Trump's vulgarity: Overt racism or a president who says what many think? - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-b34a-b85626af34ef_story.html
shared by ecfruchtman on 13 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • President Trump had once again propelled himself to center stage — boxing out discussion of any number of world crises and, more immediately, freezing progress toward a bipartisan deal on immigration policy.
  • Trump’s slur Thursday against the “shithole countries” from which he would rather the United States take fewer immigrants sparked a louder-than-usual tempest Friday
  • President Trump referred to African nations and Haiti as "shithole" countries on Jan. 11
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  • “This is par for the course,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a supporter of the president who is writing a book about Trump’s America.
  • Gingrich said the normal concerns that presidents and other politicians have about their legacies and reputations don’t seem to apply to Trump
  • Former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana legislator David Duke said on Twitter that the president “restores a lot of love in us by saying blunt but truthful things that no other President in our lifetime would dare say!”
  • Last March, at a meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Trump asked his guests if they knew Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, the only African American in his Cabinet, NBC News reported Friday, citing sources who were in the room.
  • Steele called it “disappointing as hell” that Republicans in Congress have not had “a more forceful rhetorical response to the president
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Can France's Far-Right Reinvent Itself? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550484 france
shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Through much of the last two years, the populist far-right seemed poised to conquer France. In the surreal aftermath of Trump and Brexit, the prospect of a victory by Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front (FN), felt alarmingly possible. After decades of mounting racism and economic insecurity, Western democracies were lashing out at the ballot box.
  • But today, eight months after the French presidential election, the FN seems flummoxed by Emmanuel Macron, the country’s centrist president, who, with his hefty budget cuts and far-reaching welfare reforms, would seem to be the party’s ideal adversary.
  • The National Front’s inability to seize the moment stems, in large part, from a raft of internal contradictions.
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  • Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the FN’s identity crisis than the departure of Florian Philippot, the party’s former vice president and national spokesperson. He had embodied the FN’s “de-demonization” strategy—less racism and xenophobia, more education, healthcare and progressive economics.
  • “They’re returning [to] an identity-based rhetoric. It’s really a step backwards,” he said. Since Philippot’s break with the FN (he insisted he was pushed out), he has co-founded a political party called “the Patriots.”
  • This logic animates the push for the party to pick a new name, which is expected to be announced at the FN’s “re-foundation congress” in March.
  • The Front’s leaders, however, insist that they don’t want to revive the FN of the 1970s and 1980s, the days of the party’s Holocaust-denying president Jean-Marie Le Pen and his obsession with immigration.
  • It’s difficult to see anything changing until another FN politician rises to challenge Le Pen.
  • To some degree, the party still operates as something of a personality cult.
  • “If people from the National Front are really asking themselves questions about the basics and about strategy, and they want to bring them forward, they need to run against Marine Le Pen for the presidency of the National Front,”
  • Perhaps the most sensitive question for the FN is that of a potential electoral alliance with the Republicans, France’s mainstream conservative party, which has struggled to differentiate itself from Macron’s La République En Marche
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Antony Beevor: the greatest war movie ever - and the ones I can't bear | Film... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-ever-and-the-ones-i-cant-bear war movie History
shared by Javier E on 30 May 18 - No Cached
  • recent imitators lack all intellectual honesty. They throw dates and place names on to the screen as if what you are about to see is a faithful reproduction of events, when they are simply trying to pass off their fiction as authentic. This is basically a marketing ploy that has developed over the last 20 years or so.
  • Unfortunately, fake authenticity sells. People are more likely to want to see something they think is very close to the truth, so they can feel they are learning as well as being entertained.
  • In a post-literate society, the moving image is king, and most people’s knowledge of history is regrettably based more on cinematic fiction than archival fact.
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  • His great line was: “But Antony, who can tell where myth begins and truth ends?
  • The real problem is that the needs of history and the needs of the movie industry are fundamentally incompatible.
  • Hollywood has to simplify everything according to set formulae. Its films have to have heroes and, of course, baddies – moral equivocation is too complex. Feature films also have to have a whole range of staple ingredients if they are to make it through the financing, production and studio system to the box office.
  • One element is the “arc of character”, in which the leading actors have to go through a form of moral metamorphosis as a result of the experiences they undergo. Endings have to be upbeat, even for the Holocaust. Look at Schindler’s List and the sentimentality of its finale, revealing that in movies only the survivors count.
  • I still shake my head in disbelief when it is regularly voted the best war movie ever. It is nevertheless a work of intriguing paradoxes – some intended, others not. Steven Spielberg’s storyline rightly dramatises the clash between patriotic and therefore collective loyalty, and the struggle of the individual for survival. Those mutually contradictory values are, in many ways, the essence of war.
  • After a truly extraordinary opening – probably the most realistic battle sequence ever filmed – everything changes and becomes formulaic
  • Amid the horror of war, Spielberg seems to be trying to rediscover American innocence, that Holy Grail that existed only in the Rousseau-esque imagination yet was virtually incorporated into the constitution
  • Spielberg, like other Hollywood directors of the time, came from a generation scarred by the moral quagmire of Vietnam. He understood the national need, in the post-cold war chaos, to reach back to more certain times, seeking reassurance from that moment in history – the second world war – when the fight seemed unequivocally right.
  • This representative of American motherhood appears to be reassuring the US as a whole. She seems to be speaking to a nation unable at that time to come to terms with its role in a disordered world, to a nation that, for all its power, can be bewilderingly naive abroad because it so badly needs to feel good about itself at home.
  • Andrew Marr rightly called The Patriot, set in the American war of independence, “a stinker”. As he pointed out: “Black Americans, in fact destined to stay slaves thanks to the war, very many of whom enlisted with the British, are shown fighting shoulder to shoulder with their white rebel ‘brothers’. The British are portrayed as effete sadists and serial war criminals, just as in other American films. The huge support of the Bourbon French, who helped win the war, is airbrushed out. And the fact that most colonists actually sided with King George is airily forgotten.”
  • a national self-image certainly existed during the war and for some time afterwards. Perhaps that is partly why I do not react so angrily when watching films of that era. Also, they never used that weasel claim “based on a true story”
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Sohrab Ahmari and the Rise of America's Orbánists - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...591697 liberal democracy right-wing authoritarian culture history
shared by Javier E on 15 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • The past few weeks have witnessed a nasty internecine fight among religious conservatives about whether liberal democracy’s time has passed
  • French and Ahmari. They are yelling at each other in a walled garden; conservative pundits in ideological magazines have little influence over a base whose opinions are guided by the commercial incentives of Fox News and right-wing talk radio, and the partisan imperatives of the Republican Party
  • French’s adherence to liberal democracy is a commitment to a set of rules under which these goals can be pursued in a pluralistic society: through public discourse, the courts, and the ballot box. For Ahmari and his ilk, this is insufficient. He seems to believe not only that the state should always settle such disputes in his favor, but that it should prevent cultural and political expressions he finds distasteful.
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  • In a since-deleted tweet, Ahmari praised Alabama Public Television for refusing to air an episode of the cartoon Arthur in which the titular character’s male teacher marries another man; his attack on French was preceded by another since-deleted eruption, over Drag Queen Story Hour at a public library, in which he cried, “To hell with liberal order”; and he has since suggested the humanities should be defunded because “they may be lost to us for good.
  • the United States that illiberals would like to see: one that resembles Orbán’s Hungary, where rigged electoral systems ensure that political competition is minimal, the press is tightly controlled by an alliance between corporations and the state on behalf of the ruling party, national identity is defined in religious and ethnic terms, and cultural expressions are closely policed by the state to ensure compliance with that identity
  • Although the intraconservative critiques leveled by Ahmari and his allies sometimes take on the language of opposition to market fundamentalism, they are not truly opposed to the concentration of power and capital.
  • These critics observe the decline in wages and community that has resulted from this concentration, and propose to do nothing at all about it other than seize that power for themselves
  • The same sort of protests that the right decries as illiberal when deployed against right-wing speakers on college campuses are suddenly a legitimate tactic when used against Drag Queen Story Hour. The objective here, in Ahmari’s words, is to defeat “the enemy,” not adhere to principle
  • Indeed, the illiberal faction in this debate retains Trump as its champion precisely because the president is willing to use the power of the state for sectarian ends, despite being an exemplar of the libertinism to which it is supposedly implacably opposed
  • Sohrab Ahmari, writing at First Things, attacked National Review’s David French for adhering to a traditional commitment to liberal democracy while “the overall balance of forces has tilted inexorably away from us.”
  • the support Ahmari has drawn suggests that the conservative intelligentsia will offer less resistance to authoritarianism than it did in 2015 and 2016.
  • even before Trump ran for president, some Republican elites were plotting to diminish the political power of minorities and enhance those of white voters. Whatever their disagreements, the leaders of both the populist and establishment wings of the Republican Party have concluded that they cannot be allowed to lose power simply because a majority of American voters do not wish them to wield it.
  • Black Americans did not abandon liberal democracy because of slavery, Jim Crow, and the systematic destruction of whatever wealth they managed to accumulate
  • Latinos did not abandon liberal democracy because of “Operation Wetback,” or Proposition 187,
  • Gay, lesbian, and trans Americans did not abandon liberal democracy over decades of discrimination and abandonment in the face of an epidemic.
  • This is, in part, because doing so would be tantamount to giving the state permission to destroy them, a thought so foreign to these defenders of the supposedly endangered religious right that the possibility has not even occurred to them
  • a peculiar irony of American history: The American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises, and no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken them for granted.
  • Undetectable in the dispute on the right is any acknowledgment of the criticisms of liberal democracy by those who have been fighting for their fundamental rights in battles that are measured in decades and even centuries; that the social contract implicitly excluded them from the very rights white Christian men have been able to assert from the beginning
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Earth's Food Supply Is Under Threat. These Fixes Would Go a Long Way. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-change-food.html food supply threat diet agriculture hunger climate change
shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • the planet’s land and water resources are so poorly used, according to a new United Nations report, that, as climate change puts ever-greater pressure on agriculture, the ability of humanity to feed itself is in peril.
  • The report, published in summary form Thursday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, magnifies a dual challenge: how to nourish a growing global population, but do so in a way that minimizes agriculture’s carbon footprint.
  • Answering that challenge requires a huge overhaul of how we use land and water for food production
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  • it is entirely possible to grow food that’s better for us and grow it in ways that are better for the land. Better land management techniques include limiting the use of fertilizers that contribute to emissions and planting crops that add carbon to the soil.
  • The way forward, they point out, requires reducing planet-warming emissions, removing carbon from the atmosphere by storing it in trees or soil, and changing diets, especially among the world’s wealthy.
  • it also requires a hard look at who gets to eat what
  • Scientists often refer to these as “natural climate solutions,” and they point out that sequestering carbon in the soil not only helps slow down climate change, it can also make the soil hardier to deal with extreme weather events and ultimately increase crop yields.
  • “Farming must work with nature, not against it,
  • “The I.P.C.C.’s land report puts a big question mark on the future of industrial agriculture.”
  • when it comes to land use, better forest management has the “largest potential for reducing emissions.”
  • The world’s forests are under intense threat, though, especially in the tropics. They are cleared for things we consume, including soy, palm oil and beef cattle
  • Nowhere is that more stark than in the world’s largest rain forest, the Amazon. Its destruction has increased drastically since Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, took power with a promise to further open the forest to commercial exploitation.
  • Livestock can be raised on lands that are too arid to grow crops, they can be fed differently so they produce lower methane emissions and they produce manure that can fertilize soil.
  • animal protein is vital nourishment for a hungry child and raising animals has been part of the culture and livelihood for millions of people around the world.
  • But if the heaviest meat eaters in places like the United States and Australia cut back on meat, especially red meat, it would make a big difference.
  • It is entirely possible to eat well without depriving ourselves. There are tips we can borrow from many traditional cuisines.
  • Taken together, the amount of food that is wasted and unused accounts for close to a 10th of global emissions.
  • Curbing food waste is arguably the single most effective thing that can be done at an individual or household level to slow down climate change.
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April Bills Loom. The Economy Hangs on How Many Are Left Unpaid. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...virus-bills-rent-payments.html
shared by nrashkind on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • On Wednesday, as on the first day of any month, many companies and households will have bills to pay. This time, a lot will simply pile up.
  • The trajectory of the U.S. economy will largely rest on how many payments go unmade, which bills are put ahead of others and the terms on which they are settled.
  • The $2 trillion relief package passed by Congress amounts to a grand attempt to flush the economy with cash so that the obligations of corporations and minimum-wage-earning tenants alike can be met as usual.
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  • But much of the money will take weeks to arrive
  • Should a significant portion be curtailed through negotiation or absorbed by the government altogether
  • a coronavirus recession could be followed by a robust recovery in which commercial life looks something like normal.
  • Consider the metal lockboxes in the 110 apartment buildings owned by Bridge Housing,
  • a nonprofit affordable-housing developer that manages about 12,000 subsidized units in California, Oregon and Washington.
  • On Wednesday, Bridge’s 30,000 tenants, most of them hourly workers with little or no financial cushion, will start dropping their April rent checks in the boxes.
  • Usually, no more than 3 percent of Bridge’s tenants fail to pay.
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Coronavirus: Trump knows economic meltdown brings political pain - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/52053676
shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The latest US unemployment numbers were predicted to be catastrophic. The actual total, 3.3 million, turned out to be even worse than expected.
  • The record-breaking amount reflects a US economy put into deep-freeze almost overnight. The government-ordered shutdown hasn't just shuttered businesses temporarily, it has vaporised the jobs of millions of Americans - many of whom are the particularly vulnerable hourly service workers who live paycheque to paycheque.
  • The stock market free-fall and early reports of layoffs foreshadowed Thursday's grim news
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  • What's clear at this point, however, is the physical disease that is afflicting tens of thousands of Americans and growing will be accompanied by an economic ailment that adversely affects the lives of millions.
  • Like Congress, the White House has also seen the coming economic tsunami - and what it could portend.
  • Earlier this week, Donald Trump said he was anxious to reopen businesses and get Americans back to work
  • While this is uncharted territory, a nation in economic turmoil early in an election year is a serious threat to a president's political hopes.
  • There are few more reliable indicators of ballot-box success or failure than the state of the economy.
  • When times are bad, financial hardship becomes a roar that drowns out all other concerns.
  • For the moment, the president has seen a modest rise in his public approval ratings, suggesting the possibility of a rally-around-the-leader effect, as Americans accept hardship in order to overcome an external threat.
  • Trump's call for the nation to get back to work has been echoed by other conservatives who are more bluntly suggesting that aggressive measures to save American lives may not be worth the extended economic distress they require.
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California Coronavirus: Tips for Going to the Grocery Store - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...onavirus-grocery-shopping.html grocery shopping pandemic
shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • what to know to make your trip to the supermarket as safe as possible:
  • If you have to go to the store, touch as little as possible and sanitize all the stuff you buy when you get home.
  • most produce is placed on displays by hand — sometimes they’re gloved. But it’s safe to assume that if a piece of produce has been out, it’s been handled by at least 10 people.
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  • He recommended misting produce with a very diluted bleach solution (a teaspoon of bleach per gallon of water) and letting it air dry. Or, if you’re nervous about using bleach on something you’ll eat, he said you could use a disinfecting wipe.
  • Other goods are less risky, but it’s still worth wiping down cardboard boxes of crackers or other packaged items.
  • the best thing to do is stay away from other people, particularly if you’re part of a vulnerable population.
  • Hand soap really will protect you.“One thing about this coronavirus,” he said, is that “it’s very susceptible to disinfectants and soap and water.”
  • if you go to a store, touch a contaminated surface, then touch your hair and then your face, even once between hand-washing, you could become infected.
  • if you’re really concerned, it might be worth throwing your clothes in the wash and showering after you get back from the store. (Your shoes, he said, are probably fine to bring into the house.)
  • one thing to watch out for is your reusable grocery bags: “When was the last time you sanitized your favorite bag?
  • Although state health officials released guidelines for grocery stores saying they should limit how many customers are in a given store and should keep people at least six feet apart even when they’re in line, this is proving to be easier said than done.
  • he suggested calling the store you’d like to visit before you leave, both to inquire about the wait and what’s in stock.
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How A Press Photo From The Mormon Church Got Co-Opted By Mask-Selling Middlemen | Talki... - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...-mormon-donation-brian-kolfage equipment pandemic supplies crisis
shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • On March 3, Brian Kolfage tried to reach the U.S. government — through Instagram. The Air Force veteran, who’s best known for running the crowd-funded border wall project “We Build The Wall,” had stumbled into a new line of work: Medical supply middleman.
  • He’d posted a picture of a massive warehouse, filled with hundreds of boxes marked “3M.” They held 300 million N95 surgical masks, he wrote, just waiting to reach health professionals in need around the country.
  • In fact, the masks in the photo didn’t belong to Kolfage, and they weren’t for sale. Rather, they were sitting in a storehouse of supplies in Salt Lake City, part of a humanitarian shipment that, when photographed in January, was destined for a hospital in Shanghai
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  • Kolfage himself is new to the medical supply industry. His company has only been around for a few weeks; before that, he’d spent tens of millions of dollars crowdfunded from Trump supporters to plan and build two segments of steel bollard fencing on private land at the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas. The project is billed as an effort to help the President complete his promised wall.
  • But upon hearing the truth about his Instagram post on a phone call Wednesday, Kolfage shrugged it off. “That’s the nature of this market, there’s so much uncertainty,” he said. “Ninety or 95% of all deals are scams.”
  • The market has been been upended by a bottomless pit of coronavirus-related demand, and entrepreneurs like Kolfage have jumped to fill the void, even if they’re not totally sure of what’s real, and what’s not.
  • “You’re doing these contracts that involve a lot of money,” Kolfage told TPM. “That could have been a billion dollars worth of money on the table — setting up an escrow for a billion dollars and still you don’t know that it’s real or fake.”
  • If he’d found a buyer, Kolfage said he would have used a third-party vendor to confirm that the Japanese salesmen he was in touch with were serious. But he never did.
  • What ultimately happened to the supposed stash of masks is another complicated story: Kolfage claimed on Instagram at the time that the U.S. government had acted too slowly and that “someone else bought” the supply. But he eventually relayed to TPM that the Japanese government had seized the shipment from his supplier.
  • Indeed, these are flush times in the mask industry. Prices for coveted N95 masks like the ones Kolfage was trying to sell are 10 times what they were before the pandemic.
  • Kolfage told TPM that’s he’s supplying retailers with 4–5 million surgical style masks every single week, and that he has “full contract deals with foreign countries to supply them masks.” He told Reuters, which first reported his new hustle, that he was selling the masks for about $4 each. And he said Wednesday that his company typically takes a 1–3% commission.
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Safety Advice If You Must Visit the Grocery Store - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-the-grocery-store-11585336520 grocery shopping pandemic safety personal response
shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • if you must go to the store, what’s the best way to navigate the aisles and crowds? Information and guidance about the virus is changing quickly, so we asked the experts.
  • Try to minimize visits to the store. “The biggest risk factor is really being around other people,”
  • If you must go, maintain a buffer around yourself and try to go at off-hours. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends a 6-foot buffer
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  • Try to avoid exchanging money or credit cards with the cashier. Use a credit-card reader when possible.
  • all Americans to wear cloth face masks when out in public, which includes when in the grocery store.
  • wash your hands with soap and water before going out and when coming home, and use hand sanitizer when out.
  • If you use gloves, choose disposable ones and throw them before getting into your car or as soon as you get home
  • Try not to use your phone when in the store. If you do, clean it when you get home.
  • it’s a good idea to bring your own, mainly to wipe the grocery cart
  • Wipes can also be used for other high-touch areas in the store like freezer handles or tongs used in self-serve bins.
  • To be extra cautious, you could heat food in the oven or microwave, though this hasn’t been specifically studied so it’s unclear if there’s a particular length of time needed.
  • People over 65 and those who have medical conditions that put them at greater risk of hospitalization and serious illness should avoid going to the grocery store, if possible. Try to order groceries online or have a family member or friend deliver them while taking precautions.
  • Though there have been no documented cases of transmission of the novel coronavirus through food packaging, a recent NEJM study found that the virus can live on cardboard for up to 24 hours and on hard surfaces such as plastic and stainless steel for two to three days.
  • use self-checkout when possible and use hand sanitizer when you’re done.
  • experts say wiping down cereal boxes and other packages isn’t necessary. “Use the wipes when you need them,” says Dr. Chapman. If you’re home you can easily wash your hands. “That’s going to reduce your risk as much if not more than trying to wipe everything down,” he says.
  • instead of being preoccupied with wiping down packaging and containers, focus on washing your hands. “It’s much better to treat your hands, wash your hands, rather than dealing with all the surfaces,”
  • Your mouth is a gateway to both your respiratory system (your lungs) and your digestive system (stomach). Respiratory viruses like the novel coronavirus are believed to enter the body and reproduce through the respiratory tract, not the digestive tract.
  • Experts say it is possible that if the virus rubs off from any object to the inside of your mouth, it could infect you if it goes into your respiratory system. But there doesn’t appear to be any risk of infection via your digestive trac
  • doctors say getting the virus through ingestion of contaminated food seems unlikely. Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group in Rochester, Minn., speculates that the gastric acid in the stomach would kill it. “My own speculation is that the GI route would be very low likelihood compared to known and efficient methods of infection,”
  • the studies were done in a laboratory with high doses of the virus, so it’s unknown if in real life the virus can be transmitted that way. Most likely if someone were to sneeze or cough on a cardboard container, the virus would degrade more quickly due to environmental factors, such as sunlight.
  • If you touch virus particles on raw food and then touch your nose, eyes or mouth, that is a potential source of transmission. But experts note that is very unlikely. To be vigilant, thoroughly wash your hands with soap and water, and don’t eat your food with your hands.
  • Experts urge people not to wash fruits and vegetables with anything but water. The chemicals on wipes and chlorine solutions especially can be dangerous—don’t ingest those.
  • There’s no evidence that the virus can be transmitted through clothing, but it hasn’t been specifically studied
  • The good news is it can be killed by doing laundry. So if you were in a grocery store where people near you were coughing, it’s a good idea to remove your clothes when you get home. Don’t shake clothing. Place it in your laundry hamper.
  • The CDC recommends laundering contaminated clothes in the warmest appropriate water setting and drying them thoroughly.
  • The CDC says there are no known cases of the novel coronavirus being spread through the fecal-oral route, which is a common route of transmission for stomach viruses like the norovirus.
  • But a recent study that hasn’t been peer reviewed yet found the virus in the stool of some patients. This route of transmission remains unknown, and experts say it’s unlikely to be contributing significantly to the pandemic.
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We are witnessing a critical time in history. You should keep a diary | Paul Daley | Op... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...istory-you-should-keep-a-diary diary crisis culture history
shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • it will pass. Many won’t live through it. Those who do will carry it as scar tissue of personal experience the rest of their lives. That’s why many will be recording their impressions of their altered worlds. The future will thank them.
  • It’s therapeutic. But I’m also hoping that I’ll reread it after this season ends and once my horizons have once again broadened, to remind myself of what was lost and gained in these times. I love an archive, as I’ve mentioned, and what I write now will be there in hard– (and virtual) – copy in my own few cardboard boxes wherever they will be when I will not.
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