The blog will resume on 5 August 2016.
 |
| source: http://www.tinkytyler.org/kel/wallpaper-vintage-travel |
21 July 2016
Independent: Homeopathy effective for 0 out of 68 illnesses, study finds
Professor Paul Glasziou, a leading academic in evidence based medicine at Bond University, was the chair of a working party by the National Health and Medical Research Council which was tasked with reviewing the evidence of 176 trials of homeopathy to establish if the treatment is valid.
A total of 57 systematic reviews, containing the 176 individual studies, focused on 68 different health conditions - and found there to be no evidence homeopathy was more effective than placebo on any. [...]
Writing in a blog for the British Medical Journal, Professor Glasziou states: “As chair of the working party which produced the report I was simply relieved that the arduous journey of sifting and synthesising the evidence was at an end. I had begun the journey with an ‘I don’t know attitude’, curious about whether this unlikely treatment could ever work… but I lost interest after looking at the 57 systematic reviews which contained 176 individual studies and finding no discernible convincing effects beyond placebo.
Salon: What Obama’s Dallas speech missed: Police brutality is rooted in race-based housing segregation and economic inequality
There, Obama summoned facts about how the United States’ legal system discriminates against blacks and Latinos while also being reverential of the good work done by many police officers. He spoke directly about the reality of the color line and persistent racism in the United States. Obama embraced his identity as the United States’ first black president as opposed to a president who just happens to be black. Obama also signaled to how the repeated killings of African-Americans by the country’s police, and the loss of five officers in Dallas, are part of a cycle of violence that must end. [...]
It is problematic because Obama’s logic surrenders to an ethical framework and politics which rests up a basic assumption that people who live in poor and working class black and brown neighborhoods should not receive the same level of respect and fair treatment from the police as those who reside in wealthier white communities. Obama’s observation also plays dangerously close to the belief that poor black and brown people who are abused by the country’s police are somehow responsible for their own victimization.
President Obama’s observation is challenging because it is calls attention to how structural class inequality and systemic racism help to create and legitimate the very circumstances in which African-Americans (and Latinos) are subjected to excessive force, violence, and killing by police as compared to whites.
Slate: Trump’s Wall? Also Terrible for Animals, Conservation, and Scientific Collaboration
Bears and humans have been in conflict in Texas since, well, pretty much as long as we’ve kept track. By the time the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted the first organized survey of Texas mammals in the 1890s, black bears were in decline after having been persecuted for more than half a century. They were trapped, poisoned, hunted, and pushed out of their habitat by development and agriculture. By the mid-20th century, they were nearly extirpated throughout West Texas. [...]
By militarizing the border—building walls and fences, Border Patrol outposts, spotlights and service roads and clearing vegetation—we sever the connections that wildlife relies on. We cut animals off from habitats, resources, and breeding partners and block migration routes, just as climate change and habitat loss makes every bit of land ever more important. We know how bad this kind of fragmentation is ecologically—scientists have seen the consequences of constructed barriers on farms, ranches, and national parks, as well as across international borders in Europe and Central Asia. They also know that once the barriers are built, it becomes even harder for conservationists to work to protect animals just when they need it the most. [...]
In order to get a better sense of the problem, we can look to Europe, where there are roughly 18,000 miles of border fences and walls, many hundreds of which have gone up just since the start of the refugee crisis last year. In Slovenia, for example, new security fences erected late last year cut through range of one of Europe’s largest populations of gray wolves, isolating packs on either side of the Slovenia-Croatia border. The same fence goes through the habitat of a small, threatened population of Eurasian lynx, and a recent study led by ecologist John Linnell argues it may be “last push for the population to spiral down the extinction vortex.”
Reuters: Pakistan to pass law against honor killings in weeks: PM's daughter
Pakistan's ruling party plans to pass long-delayed legislation against "honor killings" within weeks in the wake of the high-profile murder of an outspoken social media star, the daughter of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said on Wednesday. [...]
Some 500 women are killed each year in Pakistan at the hands of family members over perceived damage to "honor" that can involve eloping, fraternizing with men or any other infraction against conservative values that govern women's modesty.
Maryam Nawaz Sharif said the government wanted to pass the law unanimously and had been negotiating with religious parties in parliament. [...]
The upper house of parliament passed the bill in 2014 but it lapsed after the government failed to put it up for a vote in the lower house because it was preoccupied with legislation aimed at tackling security problems and economic reforms.
Business Insider: A campaign to register American Muslims to vote could have a pivotal impact in swing states
US Muslim leaders hope to register a million voters from within their community to help combat what they say is the anti-Muslim stance of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
The United States has only about 3.3 million Muslims, but campaign organizers say Muslim voters could have an outsize impact in swing states that are key to the November general election, such as Virginia and Florida. [...]
CAIR's database showed that 300,000 Muslims had registered since November, he said.
Awad said anti-Muslim sentiment had grown since the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, last year that authorities have said was inspired by Islamist militants, and due to comments by Trump. He has called for a ban on Muslim immigrants. [...]
US Muslim backers of Trump said they were trying to build their own coalitions in swing states.
Baltimore businessman Sajid Tarar said he launched American Muslims for Trump because he favored Trump's stance on combating radical Islam.
Business Insider: Bookmakers are more sure than ever that Article 50 will never be triggered
Bookmakers are more sure than ever that Article 50 — the two-year notice period the UK must give to the EU before leaving — will never be triggered, despite Prime Minister Theresa May's continued insistence that "Brexit means Brexit."
Sky Bet currently gives odds of 2/1 of Article 50 happening in "2018 or later or not at all" — the shortest odds in the market. [...]
Marcus J Ball, the founder of the #BrexitJustice campaign, has already raised almost £100,000 to take Leave campaigners to court for lying to the public about what a Brexit would mean for the UK. If the case is successful, it could have severe implications on a Brexit.
On top of that, there is also the issue of Scotland's place in the EU negotiations. Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon has made it clear that a Brexit could mean another independence referendum, with Scotland leaving the UK but staying in the EU. May has stressed that a Brexit must happen as a union, which some took to mean it might not happen at all given Scotland's firm stance on the matter. [...]
To make matters even worse, the civil service has a severe shortage of trade negotiators, with only 12 to 20 officials “with direct knowledge of trade negotiations," available in Whitehall. Canada, which recently completed its own trade deal with the EU, has 830 by comparison.
20 July 2016
The New Yorker: What Happened to the Ice Bucket Challenge?
All these critiques had the same underlying theme: the faddishness of the challenge undermined its value. This makes intuitive sense, but is it true? Actually, no. Silly though the Ice Bucket Challenge may seem now, it had far-reaching effects. It raised a reported two hundred and twenty million dollars worldwide for A.L.S. organizations; in just eight weeks, the American A.L.S. Association received thirteen times as much in contributions as what it had in the whole of the preceding year. Public awareness rose: the challenge was the fifth most popular Google search for all of 2014. Brian Fredrick, the vice-president for communications and development at the A.L.S. Association, told me, “The challenge suddenly made a lot of people who probably didn’t even know who Lou Gehrig was aware of the disease. It really changed the face of A.L.S. forever.” [...]
If the success of the challenge had come at the expense of other charities, ambivalence might be justified. But there’s almost no evidence that this was the case. According to Giving U.S.A., individual donations in the U.S. rose almost six per cent in 2014, which doesn’t suggest any cannibalization effect. Indeed, it’s likely that the very nature of the challenge, which belongs to a category known to anthropologists as “extreme ritual,” made people more openhanded. Dimitris Xygalatas, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut who has studied the effects of such rituals, ran a fascinating experiment with people who were undergoing kavadi—a Hindu ritual that commonly involves piercing the skin with sharp objects and then making a long procession while carrying heavy objects. Xygalatas found that people who did kavadi, and even people who just joined in the procession, donated more to charity than people in a control group. And those who gave the most painful descriptions of the experience donated the most. As a result, Xygalatas has suggested that the Ice Bucket Challenge, far from stealing from other charities, almost certainly increased the total size of the pie.
The Atlantic: Erdogan’s Final Agenda
But maybe more importantly, the coup failed because Erdogan won the information battle on two fronts. The putschists staged a “1980s-style” coup, Cagaptay told me, proclaiming their takeover on the public broadcaster TRT, which isn’t widely watched in Turkey these days. “Erdogan goes on his smartphone, does a FaceTime interview, puts it on social media, millions saw it,” Cagaptay said. “It was a victory of digital over analog, in terms of communications styles.” (Turkish cellphone-service providers reportedly ramped up call, text, and data packages during the tumult.) [...]
Around the same time, according to Cagaptay, Erdogan urged imams to mobilize people as well, likely through communications channels maintained by the government’s religious-affairs directorate, which runs and funds Turkey’s 80,000 mosques. Mosque loudspeakers began issuing the call to prayer at an ungodly hour. “It would be the equivalent of church bells suddenly starting to toll all over the United States at 1:15 AM, and ringing for hours,” Cagaptay said. Erdogan was asking his political base, which includes many Islamists, to “flood the country.” The Wall Street Journal reports that Mehmet Gormez, the head of the religious directorate, “ordered thousands of imams to recite prayers known as ‘sela,’ ordinarily reserved for funerals and special religious occasions. When issued at other times, the prayers act as a call to arms for the Islamic community.” Within hours, people were clambering on top of tanks. The coup was a husk of its former self. [...]
The more likely scenario is that Erdogan capitalizes on his post-coup support to push constitutional amendments through parliament that change Turkey from a parliamentary system to a presidential one, with Erdogan at the helm. (Erdogan became president in 2014 after serving the limit of three terms as prime minister, though he has remained Turkey’s de facto leader even when occupying the ostensibly ceremonial presidential office.) This approach would be in keeping with Erdogan’s “pragmatic, gradualist” style, Cagaptay said. Erdogan has already amassed a great deal of power, Cagaptay noted, but he’s done so over 13 years, unlike Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist leader and former Egyptian president, who tried to consolidate authority all at once and was overthrown in a military coup as a result. [...]
All this is hard to stomach for Cagaptay, who just two years ago wrote a book titled, The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century’s First Muslim Power. Erdogan, he noted, has improved living standards in Turkey and fashioned Turkey into a middle-income country. But he never healed Turkish society’s most problematic schisms—between religious and secular Turks, between the government and the Kurds. In fact, those schisms have only grown more pronounced. Erdogan, Cagaptay told me, “is going to go down in history as the guy who transformed Turkey economically, and either messed it up politically or almost messed it up politically.”
The Atlantic: The Return of American Hunger
And yet, when it comes to the number of Americans who go hungry, it’s almost like the recovery never happened. The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food security as "access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life,” and in 2006, the year before the housing market stumbled, the USDA estimated that fewer than 10.9 percent of American households were food insecure. By 2009, that figure had spiked to 14.7 percent. And now? As of 2014, the most recent year on record, 14 percent of all American households are not food secure. That’s approximately 17.4 million homes across the United States, populated with more than 48 million hungry people. By the time the USDA reports its 2016 figures in September 2017, new food-stamp restrictions could make that number higher. [...]
As a result, in one of the richest countries that has ever existed, about 15 percent of the population faces down bare cupboards and empty refrigerators on a routine basis. That fact alone meets any reasonable definition of the word “crisis,” but it is rarely treated like one. In a lot of states, benign neglect is the most that hungry Americans can expect from their government. What they get instead is usually worse: new restrictions on food-stamp eligibility, in the form of a reimposition of work requirements, mandatory drug testing, and so on. [...]
The Farm Bill and its fallout epitomize post-recession hunger policy. In the face of widespread hunger and federal budget cuts, some states try to mitigate the crisis with whatever policy levers are available. Meanwhile, others do nothing—or worse. For now, at least, state-level food-stamp policies range from inadequate to disastrous.
My Modern Met: Monumental 1,320-Ton Sculpture of Chinese War God Watches Over the City
An enormous, commanding 1,320-ton sculpture of the Chinese god of war, Guan Yu, was unveiled on July 11th in China’s Hubei province in Jingzhou city. Guan Yu, was a Chinese military general who had tremendous martial prowess during his time, and was deified as a god of war after his death. He is also an epitome of loyalty and righteousness.
Guan Yu lived during a restless period in Chinese history known as the Three Kingdoms, and is often depicted holding his “reclining moon blade” named the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, which he wielded against his enemies and was said to weigh an impressive 40 lbs (18.25 kg).
A sight to behold, the entire sculpture stands at just over 190 feet (58 meters) tall, seeming to watch over the city and its residents. Over 4,000 strips of bronze were glued over the sculpture, and Guan Yu is portrayed as a fearless warrior who is ready for battle, proudly posed atop his pedestal which was modeled after a warship. Curious visitors can enter the pedestal and visit the Guan Yu Museum which is housed inside.
The Guardian: Boris Johnson grilled over past ‘outright lies’ at uneasy press conference
Boris Johnson was embarrassingly forced on to the back foot during his first London press conference as foreign secretary on Tuesday as he was repeatedly pressed to explain his past “outright lies” and insults about world leaders, including describing the US president as part-Kenyan and hypocritical.
Standing alongside John Kerry, the US secretary of state, Johnson claimed his remarks had been misconstrued, that his past journalism had been taken out of context, and world leaders he had met since his appointment fully understood his past remarks. [...]
The event was probably Johnson’s bumpiest ride since his appointment as foreign secretary less than a week ago, although he was booed by a section of the audience after speaking at the French ambassador’s party on Bastille Day.
Pressed by an American reporter on a series of remarks he had made about world leaders, Johnson was asked whether he wanted to apologise or instead take them with him as foreign secretary. He joked that it would take “too long” to issue an apology for all the things he had written.
VICE: How Scotland Could Ruin Theresa May's Career as British Prime Minster
When David Cameron arrived in power in May 2010, one of his first actions was to jump up to the Scottish parliament for a chat with then first minister Alex Salmond. A new "agenda of respect" with Scotland was to be established, Cameron promised, as he committed to making the UK work for all of its different nations and regions.
And so to 2016: David Cameron has just resigned, UK politics are a total mess, and the country is as divided as ever. His three-days-into-the job successor, Theresa May, followed his example and came up to Scotland for talks on Friday with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. Symbolically, it was May's first official visit as prime minister. The concerns of Scotland will be listened to, May promised, as she committed to working for "all parts of the United Kingdom and for all people." Her words sounded vaguely familiar, but the context couldn't be more different from six years ago. [...]
The two manic days after the referendum saw some of the last remaining bastions of Labour Scotland—namely Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling and the Daily Record newspaper—indicate a new acceptance of independence in the changed climate. Given that Rowling donated around $1.33 million to the No campaign last time and the Record is public enemy number one as far cybernats are concerned, this was pretty big news. Independence supporters are hoping this trend will continue, keenly aware that some of the areas that delivered the strongest Remain vote in June, including Edinburgh, voted heavily for No in 2014. Post-Brexit polls are now placing support for independence at more than 50 percent—maybe not quite safe enough ground for another referendum yet, but unprecedented nonetheless.
19 July 2016
AP: Through an author's eyes: 50 years of Israeli occupation
"All of us have been surprised by the amount of architecture and engineering required to make sure one side is locked in and the other side is free to move," said Toibin, who has won several literary awards and whose novel "Brooklyn" about an Irish immigrant was adapted into a movie last year.
The anthology is meant to introduce a wider audience to this reality through the power of story-telling, said those involved in the project.
"I want to get to people who would normally avoid at all costs thinking about this issue because it makes them uncomfortable," said Israeli-American writer Ayelet Waldman, one of the book's editors [...]
Over the past five decades, Israel, citing security needs, established a military bureaucracy that enforces movement restrictions on Palestinians through a complex permit system. Successive governments have moved nearly 600,000 Israelis, or 10 percent of the country's Jewish population, to settlements on occupied land, a multi-billion-dollar enterprise the international community overwhelmingly considers illegitimate. [...]
In writing about his experience, Toibin said he will avoid words like "occupation" and "''settlements" that he believes convey little meaning. "What I want to use are the smaller words to let people actually see what it is like on the (given) day for people who are humans under the same sky," he said.
The Atlantic: Why Are So Many Millennials Having Children Out of Wedlock?
A few years ago, researchers published an eye-opening statistic: 57 percent of parents ages 26 to 31 were having kids outside of marriage. Who were these unwed Millennials and why were they forgoing the traditional structure of American family?
New research from sociologists at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Melbourne has started to answer that question. These aren’t a random assortment of Millennials but disproportionately come from a specific group of young Americans who don’t have college degrees, live in areas with high income inequality, and tend not to have very bright job prospects. The study, published this month in the journal American Sociological Review, found that in areas with the greatest income inequality, young men and women were more likely to have their first child before marriage. The areas with the largest income gaps also tended to have the fewest medium-skilled jobs, which researchers define as jobs that only require a high-school diploma but still enable families to live above the poverty level—jobs such as office clerks and security guards. [...]
The impact on women was the most dramatic. Young women living in areas with the greatest inequality were 15 to 27 percent less likely to marry before having a child than women in areas with lower inequality. They also found that in areas where men outnumber women, a women is more likely to get married before having a child. The reasoning for this has more to do with money than love. “This is consistent with the idea that when women are in short supply, they can bargain more effectively for marriage or a partnership prior to childbirth,” the authors write. [...]
He argues that a college degree seems to be a good indicator of the choices millennials will make about getting married or starting a family. His previous research shows that millennials without college degrees are now more likely to have a child without getting married first. Among parents aged 26 to 31 who didn't graduate from college, 74 percent of the mothers and 70 percent of the fathers had at least one child outside of marriage, Cherlin found.
Salon: How a six-month separation saved our marriage
It wasn’t really that I was unhappy in the initial decades of the marriage, but I wouldn’t have described myself as happy. I really didn’t feel very much of anything; it seemed simply like going through the motions. In many ways there had been an inadvertent trade: identity and career plans for motherhood, the settling for part-time freelance writing instead of the magazine editing career in New York complete with white cat and white shag area rug in a loft studio envisioned by a girl long ago. [...]
My husband and I started talking on the one day a week we saw each other. In the absence of the day-to-day pressures of a marriage, we found common ground. He had begun a relationship with a woman. I was surprised to find myself jealous of her given my own sexual exploits. We spoke with sadness about the failings of our marriage, the desire we both had to have worked harder to make communication successful. We began couples therapy. We kept connecting on Sundays, and in those Sundays we found that the flame of our marriage had not totally burned out, that the spark we had felt all those decades ago as teenagers was still there. Was it possible it could be reignited? [...]
My “marriage sabbatical” could easily be written off as a mid-life crisis, and probably has all the trappings of such. It certainly didn’t seem that simple at the time. I can’t imagine the track my life would have taken if I had just continued going through the motions, doing the things society expects of us, that we expect of ourselves.
Los Angeles Times: One thing the polls agree on: Voters don't like their choices
A new Washington Post/ABC News poll, for example, finds 58% of voters are dissatisfied with the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Among those surveyed, 64% had an unfavorable view of Trump, while 54% felt unfavorably toward Clinton.
A new NBC News/Wall St. Journal survey offered a similar verdict: Trump was viewed favorably by 27% of those surveyed and unfavorably by 60%. That net negative rating of -33 points is the worst in the history of the poll.But Clinton's image is only somewhat better: 34% positive, 56% negative. [...]
Rather than flocking to a third choice, many voters are being driven by negative feelings about the candidate they don't like, more than positive feelings about their own candidate. That's particularly true for Trump, who leads a party still badly divided between his supporters and detractors. [...]
One political figure Americans do like: President Obama. His job approval continues to stay above 50%, at some of the highest levels of his presidency. That has helped buoy Clinton, even as concerns over her handling of classified information in her email while secretary of State have pulled her downward.
FiveThirtyEight: The End Of A Republican Party
According to the American National Election Studies, the white percentage of the national vote overall has dropped fairly steadily from around 95 percent during the period from 1948 to 1960 to the low 80s by 1992 to 73 percent in 2012. The Republican party did not keep pace with this change, nor did it do much to win younger voters. 2008 featured a gaping chasm between the over-65 vote and the 18- to 29-year-old vote: There was a 43-point difference between how the two groups voted, with the older crowd going for John McCain by 10 percentage points, even as he lost the overall election by a 7-point margin to Barack Obama, the country’s first black president. [...]
Despite its demographic inertia, the Republican Party has not been without its moments of change. The tea party movement, which rose up from the grassroots in 2009, has significantly altered the way the GOP conducts its business. But the party’s “revolution” was led not by young men and women storming the barricades but by the gray-haired masses sitting down in their Adirondack Chairs and fighting to keep things as they have been. According to a 2010 New York Times/CBS News poll of tea party supporters, 75 percent were 45 or older. In keeping with Republican Party trends, the group was also overwhelmingly white, at 89 percent, and only 23 percent had a college degree. [...]
In addition to dissatisfaction with the state of immigration and rounding off what might be called the trifecta of cultural grievance, the FiveThirtyEight/SurveyMonkey poll found that among the top indicators of Trump support were feelings of anger at the country’s direction and a sense that things would be worse for the next generation. [...]
“We have before us the task of trying to create a society of lifelong learners because people’s jobs are going to expire every three years forevermore at a pace that’s going to continue to accelerate. And so what’s the Republican’s Party solution to that? What’s the Democratic Party’s solution to that?” Sasse said. “The Democrats have a really crappy product — they’re trying to sell more central planning and more monopolistic rule of experts in the age of Uber — and Republicans, no one knows what we stand for.”
Yuval Levin, whose recent book, “The Fractured Republic,” tackles this idea of where the Republican Party might go in a more decentralized, economically and demographically diversified country, has made a career out of thinking through what path the party might take, editing the quarterly policy review, National Affairs.
Politico: Greenpeace covers up Brexit battlebus ‘lies’
The battlebus used by the Leave campaign during the Brexit referendum has been snapped up by Greenpeace, which plans to use it to ask the British government questions about its environmental policies.
The bus, which drove Boris Johnson and other leading Brexiteers around the country, was highly controversial as it claimed that the U.K. sends £350 million a week to the EU. That figure was always hotly debated and was disowned by prominent Leave campaigners, including Nigel Farage, after the referendum.
Greenpeace on Monday parked the double-decker bus outside parliament, saying it was “covering up the bold-faced lie” with “messages of hope.”
Jacobin Magazine: The Problem With Gun Control
Yet most politicians have shied away from discussing the social and political attitudes shaping homophobia — the actual motivation for the attack. Several members of Congress conducted a theatrical “sit-in” on the House of Representatives floor to push for a bill banning those on the “no-fly” list from purchasing guns, but those same representatives have had little to say on the climate of hate leading up to the massacre. [...]
Nor is violence and discrimination against LGBT people merely a product of individual acts. While the United States proclaims itself to be a bastion of democracy and liberation, over twenty-two states have legalized hate through anti-LGBT laws. More than a hundred anti-LGBT bills have hit legislative houses from local city councils to the United States Senate in recent years, much of it in response to the federal legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015. [...]
The current effort for gun control is also explicitly racialized. The typical mass shooter is a right-wing white man from a Christian background, yet Democrats’ strongest action for gun control has been based on the no-fly list, a racist Bush-era measure that targets Muslims almost exclusively. [...]
Channeling the conversation toward gun control erases, and thus legitimates, violence perpetuated by the police. The rhetoric asking for the banning of assault rifles seems built on the pretense that the police are surrounding our protests with teddy bears and candy, not barricades and the very same assault rifles.
18 July 2016
The Atlantic: Being Powerful Distorts People's Perception of Time
Maria Konnikova, writing in the New York Times, made the point recently that there’s much more to poverty than just a shortage of money. Being poor, she said, brings with it other abstract deficits, most notably a lack of time. She quoted Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist and the author of the book Scarcity: “The biggest mistake we make about scarcity is we view it as a physical phenomenon. It’s not.” [...]
A new study out of the University of California at Berkeley examined how the perception of time can be distorted by being in a position of power. With the help of hundreds of people, the study’s authors found that the more power people have, the more time they feel they have available in their lives. The researchers primed some subjects for feelings of either power or powerlessness by assigning them to the role of either boss or employee in a mock task of solving brain teasers. The bosses were told they’d be making decisions about which puzzles to solve and how to divvy up the highly-sought-after candy prize at the end of the exercise. Once primed, the subjects filled out surveys that revealed their perceptions of time availability. [...]
It’s often advantageous to delay gratification, and, according to the study, that’s what many powerful people do, because they’re more aware of the needs of their future selves. For that reason, the study found, they're also more likely to put money into savings. Perhaps this is because people in power have an easier time seeing that they’ll still be in a powerful, stable position well into the future.
The Atlantic: What Good Is Thinking About Death?
More often though, it’s the hope of symbolic immortality that calms the frightened rabbits of death-fearing hearts—the idea that people are a part of something that will last longer than they do. Their culture, their country, their family, their work. When thinking of death, people cling more intensely to the institutions they're a part of, and the worldviews they hold.
What that actually means in terms of behavior, is trickier. The research shows that what people do when they’re feeling aware of their mortality depends on the person, the situation she’s in, and whether she’s focusing on death or it’s just in the back of her mind. (The TMT literature, which details a wide range of effects, is now fairly substantial. A 2010 metareview found 238 TMT studies, and this page on the University of Missouri website lists nearly 600, though it doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012). [...]
Unfortunately, a lot of what death brings out when it's sitting at the top of the file drawer is not humanity’s most sterling qualities. If people feel motivated to uphold their own cultures and worldviews in the face of death, it stands to reason that they might be less friendly toward other worldviews and the people who hold them. [...]
But perhaps not more bothersome than other threats to meaning. Heine says Meaning Maintenance Model studies have found that thinking about death does not have a noticeably larger effect on people's attitudes and behaviors than, say, watching a surreal movie. A metareview of TMT studies also notes that the effects of thinking about death are less significant when compared with thinking about something else that threatens someone's sense of meaning.
Political Critique: Cameron’s fate should be a warning to Slovak opposition leader Sulík
The political narrow-mindedness of Eurosceptics is not only a British problem. Richard Sulík is the chief face of Slovak Euroscepticism and has been poisoning the public sphere with shallow anti-European claims for years. His party scored 12.10% in the March 2016 elections, and scores at 16% in the latest polls. [...]
Surprisingly enough, a few days later he admitted that the EU has more advantages than disadvantages for Slovakia, namely “Schengen, the Euro and Eurofunds“. Why then is he constantly attacking the EU? Why, in the same way as Cameron, does he not understand that the EU cannot be built as a union from which you only pick the benefits and to which we sometimes pay something back so that there is something to take from again? Does he not realize that his permanent hateful campaign against the EU is only wind in the Slovak neonazis‘ sails? Does he not understand that his party, SaS will do the dirty work and it will be the neonazis who will score the points in a potential Slovak referendum for a Slovak exit from the EU, the same way they have collected political points from the leading social democrats’ Smer-SD anti-refugee rhetoric? [...]
The fear is that in walking a path towards Putin’s loving embrace, we will end up exchanging the “intellectual dictatorship of Brussels” for heiling fascists. At that moment, when Sulík will finally recommend voting “Remain” as “it is more advantageous”, it will be too late – just as it was for David Cameron.
The Guardian: Turkey has defeated a coup – and unleashed a violent mob
Exactly who orchestrated the coup remains unclear. And, as usual in Turkey, conspiracy theories abound. While the government points the finger at the Pennsylvania-based Islamic cleric Fetullah Gülen, whom Erdoğan accused of attempting to oust him with a corruption scandal in December 2013, others believe the president himself stage-managed it all to consolidate his power by quashing the military for good.
According to this theory, Erdoğan now has a cast-iron excuse for future authoritarianism, having established himself as the country’s undisputed guardian of popular rule – after all, the coup failed after his supporters responded to his call to take to the streets. I don’t share this view. A better theory is that Friday was a last-ditch attempt by factions of the army desperate to remove Erdoğan before he pushed forward plans to change the constitution to establish an executive presidency for himself, and – more urgently – to prevent the purge of army personnel that was probably in the works before this weekend.
What is interesting is the complete lack of public support for the attempt. Turkey has a long-established history of coups, which have occurred punctually almost every decade (1960, 1971, 1980 – plus 1997’s “postmodern” coup). Staunchly secular nationalists who like the idea of militarily safeguarding the country from ideological leaders may have been expected to support the coup. And yet there was no evidence of that, despite heartfelt opposition to Erdoğan’s 13-year rule among about 50% of the population, and growing desperation at the lack of mainstream opposition in Turkish politics.
The Guardian: How the UK halved its teenage pregnancy rate
It is a dramatic turnaround: in 1998, England had one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in western Europe. Last week, the Office for National Statistics released data revealing the fall in the conception rate among females aged 15 to 19 as the standout success story in the public health field: just 14.5 per 1,000 births were to women in their teens, with drops in all age groups under 25.
“It’s the result of an unusually long-term and ambitious strategy launched by the Labour government in 1999,” said Alison Hadley, director of the Teenage Pregnancy Knowledge Exchange at the University of Bedfordshire. “The drive to reduce teenage pregnancy was given 10 years to achieve a 50% fall in under-18 conception rates. Unusually for government schemes, efforts really were sustained for the full 10 years and ambitions weren’t lowered, despite difficulties and slow progress at the start.” [...]
“The two things that would make the biggest difference to regional differences in conception rates are making sex and relationship education compulsory in schools, and engaging with parents. Schools are vital but they can’t do it all. Parents have to be engaged for rates to go down.” [...]
“The conclusion of our paper was that there was a fair wind behind the teenage pregnancy strategy because all over the world rates were dropping,” she said. “The strategy made a big difference but the underlying trend towards fewer early pregnancies has been attributed to increased education, later completion of education and increased access to reliable contraception: long-acting, reversible methods which don’t depend on the reliability of the user.”
17 July 2016
Independent: EU immigration has no negative impact on British wages, jobs or public services, research finds
The report, by the London School of Economics, has dispelled a number of ‘myths’ or misconceptions about the impact of immigration on the UK. It has been published as part of a series of research publications to be released between now and the EU referendum on 23 June.
Key findings have included that wage variations for British workers have little correlation to immigration rates and are instead primarily linked to overriding economic factors such as the global economic crisis. The report’s authors also state that rather than being a burden on resources, immigrants pay more in taxes than they use in public services and play a vital role in reducing the budget deficit.
Report author Jonathan Wadsworth said: “The bottom line, which may surprise many people, is that EU immigration has not harmed the pay, jobs or public services enjoyed by Britons. EU immigrants pay more in taxes than they use in public services and therefore they help to reduce the budget deficit.
The New Yorker: Atatürk versus Erdogan: Turkey's Long Struggle
Throughout his tenure as Prime Minister and now as President, Erdoğan has distanced himself from Atatürk. He views himself as the father of a new Turkish identity, one aligned more closely with its Ottoman past, its Islamic heritage. He has taken the country in a more religious direction, similar to a place it was in before the 1997 coup. Just before that coup, a poll conducted by the World Values Survey found that ninety-five per cent of Turks trusted their military. A Pew poll taken last year in the run-up to national elections found that only fifty-two per cent of Turks gave the military a positive rating. With support for the military less dominant now and with Erdoğan’s support still solid among much of the population, the coup has faltered. Citizens have taken to the streets in protest. Opposition parties have also chosen to stand in solidarity with the government. The Peoples’ Democratic Party, or H.D.P., which mainly represents the country’s Kurdish minority, sent out a mailer against the coup: “The only solution is democratic politics!”
Framed portraits of Atatürk still line Cevdet Paşa Caddesi, the main thoroughfare along the Bosphorus, in Istanbul. It seems unlikely that the Statue of the Republic with him at its center will be removed from Taksim Square anytime soon. Atatürk’s legacy and longevity seem to extend without question. He was the one who advised, “He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth, and the teachings of science.”
The Atlantic: Fear of a Black President
the irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity—race. [...]
By the time reporters began asking the White House for comment, the president likely had already given the matter considerable thought. Obama is not simply America’s first black president—he is the first president who could credibly teach a black-studies class. He is fully versed in the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X. Obama’s two autobiographies are deeply concerned with race, and in front of black audiences he is apt to cite important but obscure political figures such as George Henry White, who served from 1897 to 1901 and was the last African American congressman to be elected from the South until 1970. But with just a few notable exceptions, the president had, for the first three years of his presidency, strenuously avoided talk of race. [...]
What we are now witnessing is not some new and complicated expression of white racism—rather, it’s the dying embers of the same old racism that once rendered the best pickings of America the exclusive province of unblackness. Confronted by the thoroughly racialized backlash to Obama’s presidency, a stranger to American politics might conclude that Obama provoked the response by relentlessly pushing an agenda of radical racial reform. Hardly. Daniel Gillion, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies race and politics, examined the Public Papers of the Presidents, a compilation of nearly all public presidential utterances—proclamations, news-conference remarks, executive orders—and found that in his first two years as president, Obama talked less about race than any other Democratic president since 1961. Obama’s racial strategy has been, if anything, the opposite of radical: he declines to use his bully pulpit to address racism, using it instead to engage in the time-honored tradition of black self-hectoring, railing against the perceived failings of black culture.
Independent: Nice is a very different city to Paris or Lyon – and a clever choice for igniting race war
The 13 November attacks in Paris were, in a sense, misleading. They needed considerable logistics and planning. The real war now facing the west – not just France – has been openly boasted of by Isis leaders. It involves random and scarcely planned attacks on Europe as the “soft belly” of the West by individuals inspired, but only loosely guided, by the jihadist gospel of hatred and revenge.
The aim has also been clearly stated: to provoke a white backlash against the Muslim populations of Europe, starting with the 4.7m Muslims in France. This will in turn, Isis believes, recruit many more young Muslims to its cause. [...]
Paris and Brussels are cosmopolitan, leftish-leaning, open-minded cities. Nice is by far the most right-wing of the large towns and cities in France, a bastion of the hardest-edged version of Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre right and also of the far right Front National.
The Jerusalem Post: Analysis: Why the Turkey coup failed and what's likely to come next
The great irony in the coup attempt that failed in Turkey was evident. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has tried for years to stifle the operating freedom of social networks and has accused them of being dark forces attempting to undermine his rule. It was these same social media networks which helped him to put down the coup. [...]
It can be assumed that now, with the defeat of the coup attempt, he will immediately increase his efforts to strengthen his hold on power and oppress his opponents. His supporters are already accusing his arch rival Fethullah Gulen, a powerful cleric who lives in exile in the US, of organizing the rebellion. Gulen has denied involvement, but that will not stop Erdogan from persecuting his supporters. In Turkey, conspiracy theories that Erdogan himself planned the coup in order to make himself stronger are even being voiced. [...]
However, it can be assumed that the Israeli government, the defense establishment and the intelligence community would not have shed a tear if the coup had succeeded, Erdogan was ousted and the army took power.
VICE: What I Learned About Britain From These Rare Documentaries on Youth Subcultures
The first thing I noticed when trawling through the collection was that white people were much whiter in the past. In the 1970s, before you could fly to Malaga on Easyjet for 60 quid, the nearest most British people got to seeing the sun was taking a vandalised British Rail train to Clacton-on-Sea. The lack of vitamin D is almost squint-worthy in two short films about the punk era. [...]
Getting naked was clearly a thing that young alternative people did back then. Imagine 20-year-old lads today standing around at Glasto 2016, ankle-deep in mud with the sound of Foals drifting from the main stage, bottle of Magners in hand, willies out. Inhibition has replaced exhibitionism.
Besides the odd royal wedding, Britain has never really been that good at finding ways for people to come together in the streets. Grove Carnival shows how the Caribbean community gave Britain the annual party it badly needed, Notting Hill Carnival. Made in 1981 (the same year as the Brixton Riots), the film is a beautiful snapshot of everything good about Carnival. Steelpan music resonates through west London streets. A beaming Darcus Howe parades in costume. Kids wave at the camera. Black, white, Asian and mixed-race people sway to calypso beats. Afros and drainpipe jeans are seriously on point. It's life-affirming stuff.
16 July 2016
The Atlantic: Will the Middle East Ever Be Secular?
In this era of ISIS, many debates in the West center on how followers of Islam will eventually, through a series of steps and growing pains, arrive at liberal democracy. Shadi Hamid, the author of the new book Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World, believes that Muslims don’t want that path. In this animated interview by The Atlantic, Hamid explains how not only was the Prophet Mohammed a religious figure, he was a politician. In fact, for much of the Middle East’s existence, there hasn’t been a separation of religion and governance. "Islam has proven to be resistant to secularization," he says. “We don't have to like it or agree with it...but the goal shouldn't be to push [Islam] away or exclude people, it has to be to find ways to accommodate Islam in a legal, peaceful, democratic process.”
AP: France's truck attack marks deadly twist in Europe
"Using vehicles in attacks is a fairly well-established tactic with al-Qaida and the Islamic State group," said Matthew Henman, managing editor at IHS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre. "The deliberate use of a heavy truck targeting a crowd illustrates the demonstrability of the attack and could be the precursor for other attacks." [...]
Terrorist attacks involving vehicles have been more common outside of Europe.
The deadliest recent attack occurred July 3 when a suicide bomber from the Islamic State group killed at least 292 people and wounded another 200 by exploding a minibus in a crowded commercial area of Baghdad. The blast came near the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan when streets were teaming with people — much like Thursday's festivities that drew crowds across France. [...]
The deadliest vehicle attack was in Beirut in 1983. Two trucks packed with explosives plowed into barracks housing U.S. and French military members, killing more than 300 people. In the United States, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in 1995 by driving a truck laden with explosives into a federal building in Oklahoma City.
Los Angeles Times: Hong Kong demands that candidates take pro-China pledge, threatens prison if they won't
In an unprecedented move, Hong Kong electoral officials are asking all candidates running for the legislature in September to pledge under oath that the territory is an inalienable part of China.
The measure, announced Thursday, two days before the period to nominate candidates opened, is believed to be aimed at appeasing Beijing by blocking any candidate who advocates independence from China. Both the long-established pan-Democratic camp of politicians and new political parties founded by young pro-democracy activists have roundly condemned the new requirement. [...]
Before, potential candidates only needed to sign a declaration to uphold the constitution and pledge allegiance to Hong Kong. Although Article One of the Basic Law states that Hong Kong is an inalienable part of China, “there’s no legal basis for the new requirement,” said Albert Ho, a legislator from the Democratic Party who plans to run for reelection. [...]
Independence so far has made little headway among Hong Kong’s electorate. In an election in February, Leung received only 15% of the vote in losing to a candidate from the pan-Democratic camp who did not advocate independence.
Popular Science: Take A Tour Of New York City In The 1800s With Google Street View
History geeks and time-travelers from the 1800s, get ready to have your days made: Old NYC combines Google Maps with photographs from the New York Public Library to create a timewarped version of Street View.
Developer Dan Vanderkam compiled over 80,000 photos from the NYPL's "Photographic views of New York City, 1870s-1970s" collection and plotted them, using geocoding, to their corresponding origins on an interactive map of the five boroughs.
15 July 2016
Salon: Divided we stand: The sad truth about America — we have always been split
Obama’s latter point on polarization is also quite true — especially if one is likening America in 2016 to a decade as chaotic and divided as the 1960s. At the same time, however, it’s hard not to feel like the country has become more divided in recent years. And a majority of Americans seem to agree on this: according to a 2013 survey from The Atlantic and Aspen Institute, six in ten Americans think the United States has become more divided in the past decade. The poll also found that Americans believe we are more divided today than at any other time since the Great Depression — with the notable exception of the Civil Rights era, i.e. the 1960s. [...]
“The American effort to achieve consensus on the appropriate balance between individual and collective freedom,” writes Woodard, “is hampered by the simple fact that America is not a unitary society with a single set of broadly accepted cultural norms, like Japan, Sweden, or Hungary. It’s a contentious federation comprising eleven competing regional cultures, most of them centuries old, each with a different take on the balance between individual liberty and the common good.” [...]
These regions have vastly different histories and cultural backgrounds, and their diverging political outlooks have clashed constantly throughout the country’s existence. Today, America is pretty solidly divided along partisan lines. The Democrats control regions that historically leaned towards the common good, including Yankeedom, the Left Coast, New Netherlands, while the Republicans control regions that historically leaned towards individualism (an enormously unequal and racist individualism, mind you), including the Deep South, Greater Appalachia and the Far West.
The Telegraph: Germany to recognise Herero genocide and apologise to Namibia
Germany is to recognise as genocide the massacre of 110,000 of the Herero and Nama people of Namibia by German troops between 1904 and 1908 in a landmark admission of historical guilt.
A spokesman for Angela Merkel’s government said Germany would formally apologise to Namibia.
The systematic extermination of up to 100,000 Herero and some 10,000 of the Nama people by German colonial troops is widely regarded as the first genocide of the 20th century, and a precursor to the Holocaust. [...]
Foreign ministry guidelines started referring to the killings as a “genocide” a year ago, but only this week has the government confirmed in a written answer to a parliamentary question that this is now official policy.
“The federal government has been pursuing a dialogue with Namibia on this very painful history of the colonial era since 2012,” Sawsan Chebli, a spokesman for the German foreign ministry, said on Wednesday. [...]
In remarks that now seem chillingly to prefigure the Holocasut. General Lotha von Trotha, the commander of German forces, wrote in 1904 of his policy towards the Herero: “I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this is not possible by tactical measures, expelled from the country”.
VICE: What It's Like to Be Gay and Part of a Conservative Christian Sect
Hofer is part of a tiny but increasingly vocal group of Hutterites who are opening up about being gay in a community that hardly recognizes the concept of homosexuality, and certainly doesn't accept it. Those who are gay are left with a choice of remaining closeted for life or being completely cut off from family, friends, and a way of life that's evolved little in hundreds of years. [...]
Hutterites adopt traditional gender roles; men wear suspenders and dress shirts, and women wear dresses and black kerchiefs on their heads—they're not allowed to wear pants. A male minister runs the colony, making both spiritual and financial decisions, while men earn money through labor jobs. Women take on roles like sewing, cooking, gardening, and teaching—some colonies forbid them from having driver's licenses or voting. [...]
"It was one of the worst things I have ever read in my entire life," he told VICE. Hofer won't fully detail the contents of the letter because he hopes to one day reconcile with his mother, but he said she told him that his being gay was "worse than death." Neither one of his parents have spoken to him in a year. His aunt has told him he's not gay but "brainwashed" and said he'll never see his siblings get married or play with their children unless he changes.
The Atlantic: Making the Brain Less Racist
Most people harbor biases against other races and genders, whether they admit to them or not. And as the events of recent weeks (and frankly, centuries) underscore, societal bias against African Americans is perhaps most pervasive and harmful of all.
African-Americans face discrimination in almost every facet of life. People with black-sounding names are less likely to be invited for interviews by prospective employers or even to stay in apartments by AirBnb hosts. [...]
Some interventions appear to be counterproductive, reinforcing prejudice even as they tried to destroy it. Michelle Duguid of Washington University in St. Louis has found that telling people that negative stereotypes about women are very common actually led them to stereotype women more negatively. If everyone is sexist, after all, why shouldn’t you be?
14 July 2016
BBC4 A Point of View: Strategic Shift
eter Hennessy sees the UK's vote to leave the European Union as the biggest strategic shift in British history since the Second World War, rivalled only by the disposal of the British Empire. As a consequence, we need a serious national conversation using a new political vocabulary to tackle "multiple and overlapping anxieties".
"If we do hold that national conversation, rise to the level of events and draw on those wells of civility and tolerance, we may yet surprise ourselves - and the watching world - by the quality, the care and the foresight of what we do and what we say."
The Washington Post: Europe’s citizenship tests are so hard not even citizens can pass
Critics of Europe's citizenship tests have pointed out that they do not follow a common pattern or they are based on little research as to what questions are needed to distinguish migrants who are willing to assimilate from those who are not. And yet, they have the potential to determine the fate of thousands. Particularly amid the recent influx of migrants into Europe, there has been a renewed focus on a contentious question: How should a test that will help determine whether an individual can acquire citizenship look? [...]
Many of the questions in Denmark's new citizenship test have been criticized as unnecessarily tough or out of touch with the reality of everyday life. After the country revamped its questions to make the test harder, nearly 70 percent of all June applicants failed. [...]
There, more than half the country's citizens age 18 to 24 would fail the citizenship test, a YouGov poll suggested two years ago.
Deutsche Welle: Europe's rights court upholds French burqa ban
Judges in the eastern French city of Strasbourg also ruled that the 24-year-old Frenchwoman who bought the case had not been a victim of discrimination. The court ruled that respect for the conditions of "living together" was a legitimate aim of French authorities. [...]
The French government insisted that the ban was necessary to ensure gender equality, human dignity and "respect for the minimum requirement of life in society."
The court dismissed the first two arguments but upheld the third, saying it was "able to understand the view that individuals might not wish to see, in places open to all, practices or attitudes which would fundamentally call into question the possibility of open interpersonal relationships." [...]
The ECHR has already upheld France's 2004 ban on headscarves in state schools, and its regulation requiring the removal of scarves, veils and turbans for security checks.
Foreign Affairs: May's Brexit Mastery
Here, it is worth looking to two other European countries that passed on EU membership: Norway, with a GDP per capita close to $70,000; and Switzerland, with a GDP of $60,000. Not all economies are comparable—Norway lives off oil and fish—but the GDP per capita of the United Kingdom just exceeds $40,000. In other words, there is no absolute link between membership in the EU and national wealth. Furthermore, although they are non-members, Norway and Switzerland are deeply integrated in the regulatory framework of the EU, which facilitates their commerce with the region. [...]
For such a rosy outcome, though, time is of the essence. The new British prime minister should rush to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, which starts the process of secession. Rapid agreement on a framework between London and Brussels will soothe Britons and allow European public opinion to move on to other topics. The sooner the United Kingdom is out of European minds, and the EU is out of British minds, the sooner the noxious politics of Brexit can be laid to rest. By defusing the political question, a rapid framework agreement will leave bureaucrats and lawyers months, maybe years, to finesse behind closed doors the commercial and regulatory details. In the end, when it comes to economic integration, the EU-UK relationship may not look very different pre- and post-Brexit. And no one will care.
After all, whether Brexit costs a quarter or half of a percentage point of GDP—or nets it—it is not consequential to most voters. The vote was more about the apparent end of a treasured way of life, about alien products in the supermarket, and about ethnic food where the fish and chips used to be. The Brexit result was aspirational, a nostalgic appeal to a past that can never be reclaimed, because the United Kingdom is already far more open and cosmopolitan than its voters wish it to be.
Mashable: Britain has its next prime minister to thank for mass surveillance bill
In June, as the campaigns to Remain or Leave the European Union were at the final stage, Parliament overwhelmingly approved a bill that critics believe is the most intrusive piece of legislation on mass surveillance in the West.
Just 69 MPs voted against the Investigatory Powers Bill — dubbed the "Snoopers' Charter" by critics — which is now with the House of Lords for further consideration.
Privacy campaigners pointed the finger at measures that would give the government bulk powers to collect citizens' web records, monitor, intercept and even hack smartphones under warrants authorised by ministers.
A recent report by House of Lords peers warned that the charter could endanger journalists and their sources as computer hacking could allow the state to access a journalist's notes or video footage.
It's worth noting that the legislation is the brainchild of Theresa May, the "steely" and "hard-working" Home Secretary who is poised to become the first woman prime minister since Margaret Thatcher. [...]
Over six years as Home Secretary, she didn't shy away from controversy, taking on police corruption and rolling out billboards telling illegal immigrants to "go home or face arrest."
AP: Seeking peace in Syria, US offering new deal with Russia
Frustrated by months of failure in Syria, the Obama administration is taking what might be its final offer to Moscow: Enhanced intelligence and military cooperation against the Islamic State and other extremist groups if Syria's Russian-backed president Bashar Assad upholds a ceasefire with U.S.-supported rebel groups and starts a political transition. [...]
Kerry will have to thread a needle. He's watched the Syrian military and Russian air force violate truce after truce in recent months. This time, the officials said, Kerry is dangling in front of the Kremlin Russia's long-sought requests for intelligence sharing and targeting assistance in return for Russia using its influence to end the fighting and start ushering Assad out of power. But Kerry will be wary about offering too much. [...]
Much of Washington is wary about working too closely with Russia. The U.S. doesn't want to be seen as entrenching Assad, whom American officials have referred to as a "butcher" and "mass murderer." Russia's bombers also have attacked anti-Assad rebel groups that have received weapons, training and other forms of support from the U.S. and allies such as Saudi Arabia — whose foreign minister Kerry met in Washington on Tuesday before a weeklong Europe trip.
Israel National News: Israeli startup aims to grow meat without the animal
SuperMeat, which launched in December and began an online crowdfunding campaign Monday, is developing a method for bioengineering “cultured meat” from animal cells. Its tagline: “Real meat, without harming animals.”
Imagine a chicken breast without the chicken, developed in a machine from cells taken from a living bird and cultured in a nutrient-rich stock. [...]
SuperMeat's co-founder and co-CEO, Koby Barak, himself a longtime vegan and animal rights activist, said his company's cultured meat will be both kosher and vegan-friendly, and he has the supporters to prove it.
“I have spoken to about 10 rabbis and I don’t see any problem. It will be kosher,” Barak told JTA. “The vast majority of the vegan-vegetarian movement is very supportive, and we thank them for really supporting us.”
13 July 2016
The Atlantic: The End of a Political Revolution
For now, his political revolution has come up short. From the start of his campaign, Sanders called for a fundamental transformation in American political life so that the voices of average Americans would not be drowned out by wealthy elites and the gap between the rich and poor would not be nearly so vast. Yet Democratic primary voters overwhelmingly sided with Clinton’s pragmatic incrementalism over Sanders’s enthusiastic idealism. If the senator’s dream of revolution is ever to be achieved, it won’t happen with Sanders as the next president. [...]
It is remarkable that a self-described democratic socialist managed to get so close to the White House in a country that so ardently proclaims its adoration for free markets. Sanders did not prove that embracing socialism is a winning proposition, but he showed that the label is not politically toxic either. [...]
Sanders has attempted to lay the groundwork for a lasting political movement, but there too the future is uncertain. He endorsed an array of congressional candidates as well as contenders vying for seats in state legislatures, though that effort has already encountered setbacks. His presidential run has given rise to a grassroots army of supporters looking for ways to carry on the fight. The question now is: how much success will Sanders and his followers have in building a movement that outlasts the campaign?
FiveThirtyEight: What Bernie Sanders Meant
Of course, election results are only one way to measure a candidate’s success. I had argued before the primary that Sanders’s biggest impact might be to push Clinton further to the left on the issues. The jury is still out on how much Clinton changed her rhetoric versus her actual positions (see: the $15 minimum wage), as Dave Hopkins of Boston College pointed out. Still, there can be little doubt that Sanders changed how issues were talked about during the campaign. Clinton didn’t try to beat Sanders by tacking toward the center, as Al Gore often did when Bill Bradley challenged him in 2000. Rather, Clinton highlighted issues where she was further left than Sanders, such as gun control.
Sanders’s greatest effect on Clinton’s positioning may have been on trade. Clinton entered the race having once called the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement the “gold standard.” She ended up against it, even though President Obama, whom she hugged closely throughout the campaign, was pushing the agreement. Sanders was resolutely against TPP, and Clinton ultimately flipped to Sanders’s side of the issue. Sanders also got Clinton to back free college tuition at state colleges and universities for all but the top of the income distribution. [...]
Let’s start with the most obvious problem that Sanders ran into: He never caught on with black voters and didn’t improve with them as the primary season went on. Black voters are the base of the Democratic Party. Clinton lost without them in 2008 and won with them in 2016. Clinton won every state where black voters made up at least 10 percent of the population, except for Michigan.1 In the North, Clinton regularly won black voters by 40 to 50 percentage points. In the South, she regularly won them by 70 to 80 percentage points. When you’re losing by this wide of a margin among a voting bloc that makes up somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of your party’s voters, your candidacy is going to have a hard time winning.
Sanders also struggled tremendously with Latinos, who are growing as a percentage of eligible voters. Sanders lost every contest, except for Colorado, where Latinos made up at least 10 percent of the voting eligible population.2 Further, as my colleague Nate Silver calculated, Clinton won 16 of 17 districts3 where Latinos made up a majority, beating Sanders by an average of 32 percentage points.4 Simply put, the two most consequential minority blocs in Democratic politics didn’t feel the Bern.
12 July 2016
Deutsche Welle: With TTIP talks stuttering, free trade is reaching its limits
Arbitration tribunals, for instance, are a hot-button issue in Europe, especially in Germany. Such private tribunals give investors the opportunity to sue a government if they feel that a country's laws restrict their "legitimate expectations." The EU and Canada were able to overcome this hurdle in their CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) negotiations by agreeing to nix arbitration courts in favor of a permanent dispute settlement tribunal. But it remains unclear whether TTIP negotiators can strike a similar compromise.
The same goes for rules concerning government bids. There is a lot of money at stake, said Laura von Daniels of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. "Inside the EU, public bids amount to 16 percent of GDP," she said. "In the US, it is up to 12 percent." [...]
At the moment, too much seems up in the air to foresee an end to negotiations. On a visit to Germany in April, US President Barack Obama said he expected the agreement to be hammered out by the end of the year. But since then, the prospect of free trade has grown more and more unlikely.
It is even uncertain whether the already finalized agreement between the EU and Canada will enter into force, after it was decided that it will have to be independently ratified by all national EU parliaments.
Vox: How Vladimir Putin is being outfoxed by a Chechen warlord
This year has seen a sometimes bizarre battle of wills between Kadyrov and the Kremlin, though. Kadyrov has been Putin’s man in rebellious Chechnya since 2007. He has made Chechnya a haven of relative stability in the turbulent North Caucasus.
This is, however, a stability bought with Russian money and Chechen human rights. More than 80 percent of the Chechen Republic’s budget is provided by subsidies from Moscow, which have turned downtown Chechnya into a shining, high-rise (and virtually empty) architectural testament to Kadyrov’s vanity and enriched him and his cronies no end. [...]
By daring the regime to try to find a new Chechen leader, he was in effect forcing them to acknowledge that they could not. At the time, a Russian security official told me that "if anyone there even hints that he’d be willing to take Ramzan’s place, the Kadyrovtsy would throw his body in the Sunzha [River] next morning."
Politico: Polish media goes back to pre-1989
The larger fear among political opponents is that the government will next look to bring private broadcasters and publishers to heel, and is already eyeing foreign-owned media in Poland.
The changes at TVP came quickly. Journalists out of step with the new authorities were pushed out. Newscasts are now unapologetically pro-government. On Saturday, TVP responded to criticism of its news agenda by condemning those who had pointed out Poland’s constitutional problems during the NATO summit, with commentators calling it “foul” and “shocking.” Poland has been embroiled for months in a crisis over which rules the country’s top constitutional court should follow.
The new-look state television is bleeding viewers, but those who’ve tuned out aren’t the people PiS is trying to influence. Its main evening news program has shed 750,000 viewers since the beginning of the year, falling to 2.7 million people. Overall, TVP saw a 19.8 percent fall in viewers since Jacek Kurski took over as TVP boss in January, putting it behind two private rivals.
“I don’t deny that some of the viewers, especially those with liberal views, have stopped watching us,” Kurski, a former MEP and PiS politician, said in a recent interview. “At the same time, many conservative viewers from right-wing areas of Poland have returned to TVP.” [...]
What PiS is doing is not unusual. Even after the end of communist rule in 1989, democratic governments of both the Left and Right sought to influence radio and television. But the scale of PiS’s overhaul is deeper than anything that has come before.
Fusion: How Bernie Sanders lost black voters
Demoralized by police killings, left even further behind by economic inequality, held back for generations by structural racism, black people were primed for a political revolution.
Sanders was ready to lead one. From the time he announced his campaign, in April 2015, his crusade against economic inequality galvanized a sleeping sector of the populace that felt left out of the political process.
But Sanders seldom trained that same impassioned rhetoric on the problems that so many black voters wanted addressed: police brutality, white supremacy, and the ways in which economic inequality is inextricable from race.
It may have been white privilege, or simple cultural ignorance of black people and our plights. The Vermont senator, who built a movement on lofty promises like universal health care and free college, dismissed reparations for black people as “very divisive.” [...]
What makes the accounts of the former Sanders staffers particularly troubling is that the senator, according to his liberal and mostly white supporters, was supposed to be the ideal candidate for black people. [...]
Sanders’ response reminded some people of the language of “All lives matter”: “It’s not just black,” he said in part. “It’s Latino. In some rural areas, it is white.”
Sanders was in a staunchly activist, anti-establishment environment full of people who were very much open to a candidate who wasn’t afraid of speaking truth to power. Yet he didn’t seem able, or willing, to speak about race beyond citing statistics on discrimination against black people.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)