Vegan. 19. Canada.
Riot police confront students during a protest April 26, 2012 in Montreal, Canada, over Quebec’s plans to raise tuition 75 percent over the next five years. About 85 protesters were arrested after police fired at the crowd with tear gas.
![theatlantic:
America’s Secret Growth Weapon: Why Immigration Really, Really Matters
Immigration is a big part of what distinguishes the U.S. from, say, the EU. Immigration makes us younger. That’s what you see from the graph above. Immigration makes us smarter. Half of all Silicon Valley start ups have a co-founder no more than one generation separated from an immigrant. Immigration makes us work. The U.S. fertility rate is below 2.1, so it’s immigration that pushes us above replacement level growth.
But don’t gloat. There are cracks our armor.
One in three U.S. immigrants today was born in Mexico, making it the “biggest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States,” according to the Pew Hispanic Center. But that wave hit a wall. Thanks to a weak U.S. economy, a growing Mexican economy, and a handful of other policies, net flow of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. has possibly reversed for the first time in several decades.
At the same time, “highly educated children of immigrants to the United States are uprooting themselves and moving to their ancestral countries,” the New York Times reported just two weeks ago. The factors aren’t all the same, but they rhyme. India is getting stronger relative to the United States, and, once again, public policy is getting in the way of immigration. We don’t block foreign-born students at the Texas border. We kick them out if they can’t marry, find a job, or snag one of a limited number of visas. In the race for human capital, this is a deliberate losing strategy.
There are reasonable arguments for using government laws and resources to limit immigration and protect jobs for American-born workers. But the broader picture is that the U.S. is failing to recognize a free and automatic virtue of being America: People want to move here and work in exchange for money.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2zzwlcySc1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
America’s Secret Growth Weapon: Why Immigration Really, Really Matters
Immigration is a big part of what distinguishes the U.S. from, say, the EU. Immigration makes us younger. That’s what you see from the graph above. Immigration makes us smarter. Half of all Silicon Valley start ups have a co-founder no more than one generation separated from an immigrant. Immigration makes us work. The U.S. fertility rate is below 2.1, so it’s immigration that pushes us above replacement level growth.
But don’t gloat. There are cracks our armor.
One in three U.S. immigrants today was born in Mexico, making it the “biggest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States,” according to the Pew Hispanic Center. But that wave hit a wall. Thanks to a weak U.S. economy, a growing Mexican economy, and a handful of other policies, net flow of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. has possibly reversed for the first time in several decades.
At the same time, “highly educated children of immigrants to the United States are uprooting themselves and moving to their ancestral countries,” the New York Times reported just two weeks ago. The factors aren’t all the same, but they rhyme. India is getting stronger relative to the United States, and, once again, public policy is getting in the way of immigration. We don’t block foreign-born students at the Texas border. We kick them out if they can’t marry, find a job, or snag one of a limited number of visas. In the race for human capital, this is a deliberate losing strategy.
There are reasonable arguments for using government laws and resources to limit immigration and protect jobs for American-born workers. But the broader picture is that the U.S. is failing to recognize a free and automatic virtue of being America: People want to move here and work in exchange for money.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
Thousands protest health, education cuts in Spain
Tens of thousands of people across Spain protested Sunday against education and health care spending cuts as the country slid into its second recession in three years.
Unemployment is at a eurozone high of 24.4 percent, more than half of Spaniards under 25 years old are jobless, and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government has introduced stinging austerity measures in its first five months in office.
Speaking at a party rally, Rajoy, who on Friday announced a new set of tax hikes to come into effect next year, said he had “no alternative.” He added, “Spain needs deep structural change, not makeup.”
Protesters in northeastern Barcelona, northern Bilbao, eastern Valencia and many other regional capitals carried banners urging Rajoy to not “mess around with health and education.”
Read More: Europe Seeks to Restore Calm After Spain Downgrade, Growth Spat
I believe veganism extends beyond a life free of animal products. Most of us don’t think about where our products come from or where they go after we’re done with them. A lot vegan products are more eco-friendly than most, but not all are. The lovely @ianjsomerhalder posted this a while back, and it really speaks volumes to the plastic epidemic we have on our hands. As Anna Lappe said, “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.” When I was living outside the US, I became more aware of just how wasteful a society we are, and what kind of carbon footprint we each leave behind. Fast food may be “fast” but it’s also responsible for contributing to deforestation and pollution at an alarming rate. One of my favorite eco-friendly shops is “The Green Life” Have a look through their site and see if there’s any green, reusable products that you can begin to use in your daily life. Also, check out Alicia Silverstone’s blog “The Kind Life” for some great vegan, eco-friendly tips and products. #vegansofig
In a bare concrete room in a far-flung corner of Central African Republic, U.S. special forces and Ugandan soldiers map out the hunt for one of Africa’s most wanted rebel leaders hiding in an area the size of California.
The building belonged to the town of Obo’s doctor until he was murdered last year by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) while transporting medicines by road. Now it serves as an operational centre in one of America’s latest military ventures in Africa.
The mission’s goal is clear.
“(The) focus is the removal of Joseph Kony and senior Lord’s Resistance Army leadership from the battlefield,” said Captain Ken Wright, a navy SEAL in command of the roughly 100-strong force which deployed in October.
Kony has evaded the region’s militaries for nearly three decades, kidnapping tens of thousands of children to fill his militia’s ranks and serve as sex slaves as he moves through the bush. Thousands more have died in the wake of his brutal army.
The deployment of elite American forces to help track Kony and his senior commanders in the dense equatorial jungle across a region that spans several countries has raised hopes the sadistic warlord’s days are numbered.
The troops are armed but do not patrol the surrounding forests and are allowed to engage the LRA only in self-defense.
Instead, their focus is on improving intelligence on LRA positions gathered both electronically and from tip-offs.
By meshing stories from hunters and nomadic cattle herders of encounters with the rebels together with sophisticated surveillance imagery, allied forces chart suspected rebel activity and coordinate the regional armies’ pursuit of Kony.
“You look at patterns to see where LRA might be moving, historic areas where they might operate, so we can predict where they’re going and try and head them off and most effectively use the forces on the ground,” Captain Gregory, a 29-year-old Texan hidden behind sunglasses and a wide brimmed hat told Reuters.
For many of the U.S. troops who have recently served in Afghanistan and Iraq, the humid jungles of central Africa are unfamiliar territory.
Their deployment raised expectations locally that U.S. drones would be unearthing Kony. They are not, and this hostile environment is throwing up unforeseen challenges.
“Some of the gear we have here is affected by the vegetation … and acts differently from in the desert. “Vegetation absorbs signals and sounds,” said Gregory.
INTERNATIONAL BAD GUY
Kony, a self-styled mystic leader who at one time was bent on ruling Uganda by the ten commandments, fled his native northern Uganda in 2005, roaming first the lawless expanses of South Sudan and then the isolated northeastern tip of Congo.
In December 2008, after last-ditch peace talks failed, Ugandan paratroopers and fighter jets struck the LRA’s Congo hideouts. Kony slipped through the net, raising suspicions he had been tipped off. He and many of his combatants moved north into CAR.
Kony was thrust back into the spotlight earlier this year when a video, “Kony 2012”, highlighting the chilling mutilations, rapes and murders carried out by his spell-bound fighters went viral on the Internet.
Bruce Wharton, deputy assistant secretary in the Department of State’s Africa bureau said the deployment of special forces was in part a response to legislation in 2010 calling on the Obama administration to do more to tackle Kony.
“I think Kony, for lack of an ideology, for lack of a political agenda, for lack of an intellectually identifiable cause, and for the brutality with which he operates, is at the top of the list of international bad guys,” Wharton said.
Asked whether hunting Kony offered a convenient way of expanding the U.S. military footprint in Africa, Wharton told Reuters: “I absolutely think that as soon as this mission is accomplished the roughly 100 troops will go away.”
Facing war crimes charges, Kony has transformed himself from a one-time altar boy to a master of jungle survival and evasion. His fighters have become increasingly savvy in concealing their movements, wading through crocodile-infested rivers and walking backwards and in loops to disguise their tracks.
The vicious and often drugged rebels first struck Obo in the early hours of March 6, 2009. They targeted the town’s Catholic mission, abducting 76 people.
“We were told they were coming but we didn’t believe they would attack the town,” said Obo resident Ricardo Dimanche who runs a community radio project urging LRA fighters to give up their weapons.
“The next year they started attacking the small villages around us. Displaced people started flooding in,” said Dimanche.
Underscoring the challenge facing the American and regional troops, the LRA launched almost as many attacks in the first three months of this year in CAR as in all of last year, according to U.N. data.
“Nobody has peace of mind now,” said Dimanche.
U.S. military officials are reluctant to bet on if and when they might snare Kony.
“The global effort to try to find Osama bin Laden took 10 years with an extraordinary level of effort … the highest priority for the international intelligence community, and it still took 10 years to find him,” General Carter Ham, commander of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) told a media briefing in Germany ahead of the tightly controlled trip.
“So this is a tough mission.”
I see the propaganda campaign has worked. Most people won’t be against this because of Kony 2012 when it’s been made clear that Kony 2012 SPIED for the U.S. government and worked alongside with it. It’s clear that the Kony 2012 campaign was a propaganda tool to get us into Uganda militarily to probably get a hold of their recently discovered oil supply under the guise of hunting down a warlord that has been irrelevant for almost a decade.
And there it is.
Use media to emotionally manipulate the masses -> spread word -> general consensus that war “against Kony” is okay -> U.S. gov rapes another African country for resources, and not for the purposes the masses consented to.
Remember Iraq and Hussein? Yeah? Nothing to do with 9/11, used pretext that he had committed crimes against humanity. Where were the asshats when the Kurdish massacre happened? Asshat numero 1 (Ronald Reagan) refused to back sanctions against Iraq for the sake of their relationship with Amerikkka.
History, doomed to repeat itself tenfold by the Americans.
cool. gg, guys. /rant
The amount of money being poured into this jet is absolutely absurd. Yet another example of how the military industrial complex dictates our policy.
Students at six Cal State universities have announced they are going on a hunger strike until universities agree to a tuition freeze, free speech rights on campus & administrative pay cuts.
