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anonymous

Hiding in Plain Sight - The Problem with Pakistani Intelligence - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...roblems-pakistani-intelligence

shared by anonymous on 04 May 11 - Cached
  • Clearly, Pakistan is coming under a great deal of pressure to explain how authorities in the country were not aware that the world’s most wanted man was enjoying safe haven for years in a large facility in the heart of the country.
  • It is no secret that Pakistan’s army and foreign intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, actively cultivated a vast array of Islamist militants – both local and foreign, from the early 1980s until at least the events of Sept. 11, 2001 – as instruments of foreign policy.
  • the policy of backing Islamist militants for power projection vis-a-vis India and Afghanistan had been in place for more than 20 years, and was instrumental in creating a large murky spatial nexus of local and foreign militants (specifically al Qaeda) that had complex relations with elements within and close to state security organs.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • One of the key reasons for this situation is that while the stakeholders of the country (civil as well as military) are engaged in a fierce struggle against local and foreign Islamist insurgents, significant societal forces and sympathetic individuals from within the state are providing support to jihadists. But it’s more problematic that there are no quick fixes for this state of affairs. Further complicating this situation is that the U.S. objectives for the region require Islamabad to address these issues on a fast-track basis.
  • anonymous on 04 May 11
     
    "The fallout continued Tuesday from the revelation that until his death at the hands of U.S. forces on May 2, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden been living in a large compound not far from the Pakistani capital. A number of senior U.S. officials issued tough statements against Pakistan. President Barack Obama's counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said that while there was no evidence to suggest that Pakistani officials knew that bin Laden was living at the facility, the possibility could not be ruled out. The chairwoman of the U.S. Senate's Select Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein, sought more details from the CIA about the Pakistani role and warned that Congress could dock financial assistance to Islamabad if it was found that the al Qaeda leader had been harbored by state officials. CIA chief Leon Panetta disclosed that American officials feared that Pakistan could have undermined the operation by leaking word to its targets."
anonymous

The Insidious Evils of 'Like' Culture - 2 views

online.wsj.com/...4584004576415940086842866.html

social like

shared by anonymous on 05 Jul 11 - Cached
  • Once, there was something called a point of view. And, after much strife and conflict, it eventually became a commonly held idea in some parts of the world that people were entitled to their own points of view.
  • Unfortunately, this idea is becoming an anachronism.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Jul 11
       
      No, it's not.
  • A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn't retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Jul 11
       
      Maybe if you're an SEO-obsessed nutball, but for the rest of us, it's simply another kind of bookmark. Moreover, "liking" something (via button) is not the same as "liking" something (conventionally). It is often accompanied by quite a back and forth that would seem to defy this author's notion of "Like".
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Conversely, when we're looking at someone else's content—whether a video or a news story—we are able to see first how many people liked it and, often, whether our friends liked it. And so we are encouraged not to form our own opinion but to look to others for cues on how to feel.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Jul 11
       
      This is certainly true, but seems to pertain only to the naive or those with the intelligence of a harp-seal.
  • "Like" culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem, which a healthy individual should be developing from the inside out rather than from the outside in.
  • Yet, despite all the time and effort spent amassing and catering to followers, as soon as a social network falls out of use, like MySpace, all that work collapses like a castle built of sand.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Jul 11
       
      If your work boils down to a particular network (rather than, you know, your *work*), then this is surely true.
  • Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same. Write about what's important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear. Form your own opinions of something you're reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think. And, unless you truly believe that microblogging is your art form, don't waste your time in pursuit of a quick fix of self-esteem and start focusing on your true passions.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Jul 11
       
      People are doing this all the time - with and without the Like button. Dumbass.
  • anonymous on 05 Jul 11
     
    Conformity is a new problem? Sounds like someone at the WSJ has been thinking too hard and has lost perspective. If anything, online life has made it very hard to blindly conform; the culture of debate (however debased) has forced me to be sharper and more succinct with ideas. It's not just about clicking +1. I'm not even sure what the point of the piece is, but I can't shake the picture of an old man folding his arms and harrumphing. Another bang-up article by one C. Montgomery Burns (or other appropriate analogue) at the Wall Street Journal.
  • Erik Hanson on 06 Jul 11
     
    I believe you were looking for Andy Rooney. I send his picture as a response to some of the crankier "kids these days" copy I get from people like Sands.
anonymous

Agenda: With George Friedman on Russia - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-agenda-george-friedman-russia

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 18 Jul 11 - Cached
  • Let’s begin by trying to explain what it was that Putin in particular created. What he recognized was the problem of the Soviet empire, the problem with the czarist empire, was that they totally controlled surrounding territories. As such, they benefited from them, but they were responsible for them as well, and so that wealth was transferred into them to maintain them, to sustain the regimes, and so on and so forth. Putin came up with a new structure in which he had limited desires from countries like Ukraine. These were irreducible, that is to say, they could not be part of NATO, could not have hostile forces there, they had to cooperate on a bunch of issues. But Russia was not responsible for their future, and it was really a brilliant maneuver because it gave them the benefit of the Russian empire, of the Soviet Union, without the responsibilities, without the drain on the Russian treasury.
  • And what he has created in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, in Belarus, is sovereignty for these nations and yet alignment with Russia. And this has made Russia a very powerful player because its house is in order at the same time that, for example, as the European house is in massive disorder.
  • So, STRATFOR was perhaps a little unkind in its forecast for 2011 when it said that Russia would play a double game, ensuring it can reap benefits from having warm relations with countries, such as investment and economic ties, while keeping the pressure up on them. It’s been a clever game, hasn’t it?
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Well, a double game is a clever game, particularly when no one realizes you’re playing a double game. I have to say that I don’t regard duplicity among nations as a critique of nations, it’s the lifeblood of international affairs.
  • They’ve become much more accommodating because they’ve achieved, within the former Soviet Union, the goals they wanted to achieve by and large.
  • Now they’re operating from a position of strength and therefore they don’t have to assert their strength.
  • Now they’re being courted by the Americans, they’re being courted by the Germans and this is the position that Putin wanted to get them into, and he did.
  • This Russian empire, the Soviet Union, were not accidents of history. They didn’t just happen. They were structures that grew naturally from the underlying economic and political relationships.
  • Russia is far too vast to simply be the whim of a given personality. In my view even Stalin represented the vast czarist and Leninist tradition, to an extreme perhaps, but still the idea of the personalization of rule.
  • The media tends to think of better and worse relations — I don’t think of that. Russia has its interests; the United States has its interests. There are times when these interests coincide; there are times when these interests diverge. There are times when one country or the other is too preoccupied with other things to be worried about the other.
  • anonymous on 18 Jul 11
     
    "A re-emerging Russia is restoring its global influence without taking on the burden of an empire. In the second of his series on global pressure points, STRATFOR CEO Dr. George Friedman applauds Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's achievements and examines the Russian-U.S. relationship."
anonymous

Russia's Evolving Leadership - 4 views

www.stratfor.com/...04-russias-evolving-leadership

russia leadership geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 05 Jul 11 - Cached
  • In the past decade, one person has consolidated and run Russia’s political system: former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
  • Under Putin’s presidential predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s strategic economic assets were pillaged, the core strength of the country — the KGB, now known as the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the military — fell into decay, and the political system was in disarray. Though Russia was considered a democracy and a new friend to the West, this was only because Russia had no other option — it was a broken country.
  • While an autocrat and KGB agent (we use the present tense, as Putin has said that no one is a former KGB or FSB agent), he hails from St. Petersburg, Russia’s most pro-Western city, and during his Soviet-era KGB service he was tasked with stealing Western technology. Putin fully understands the strength of the West and what Western expertise is needed to keep Russia relatively modern and strong. At the same time, his time with the KGB convinced him that Russia can never truly be integrated into the West and that it can be strong only with a consolidated government, economy and security service and a single, autocratic leader.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Putin’s understanding of Russia’s two great weaknesses informs this worldview.
  • The first weakness is that Russia was dealt a poor geographic hand.
  • The second is that its population is comprised of numerous ethnic groups, not all of which are happy with centralized Kremlin rule.
  • Russia essentially lacks an economic base aside from energy.
  • These geographic, demographic and economic challenges have led Russia to shift between being aggressive to keep the country secure and being accommodating toward foreign powers in a bid to modernize Russia.
  • However, Russia cannot go down the two paths of accommodating and connecting with the West and a consolidated authoritarian Russia at the same time unless Russia is first strong and secure as a country, something that has only happened recently.
  • Which face they show does not depend upon personalities but rather upon the status of Russia’s strength.
  • Putin, who had no choice but to appeal to the West to help keep the country afloat when he took office in 2000, initially was hailed as a trusted partner by the West. But even while former U.S. President George W. Bush was praising Putin’s soul, behind the scenes, Putin already was reorganizing one of his greatest tools — the FSB — in order to start implementing a full state consolidation in the coming years.
  • After 9/11, Putin was the first foreign leader to phone Bush and offer any assistance from Russia. The date marked an opportunity for both Putin and Russia. The attacks on the United States shifted Washington’s focus, tying it down in the Islamic world for the next decade. This gave Russia a window of opportunity with which to accelerate its crackdown inside (and later outside) Russia without fear of a Western response.
  • During this time, the Kremlin ejected foreign firms, nationalized strategic economic assets, shut down nongovernmental organizations, purged anti-Kremlin journalists, banned many anti-Kremlin political parties and launched a second intense war in Chechnya.
  • Western perceptions of Putin’s friendship and standing as a democratic leader simultaneously evaporated.
  • When Medvedev entered office, his current reputation for compliance and pragmatism did not exist. Instead, he continued on Russia’s roll forward with one of the boldest moves to date — the Russia-Georgia war.
  • By 2009, Russia had proven its power in its direct sphere and so began to ease into a new foreign and domestic policy of duality.
  • Only when Russia is strong and consolidated can it drop being wholly aggressive and adopt such a stance of hostility and friendliness.
  • With elections approaching, the ruling tandem seems even more at odds as Medvedev overturns many policies Putin put into place in the early 2000s, such as the ban on certain political parties, the ability of foreign firms to work in strategic sectors and the role of the FSB elite within the economy. Despite the apparent conflict, the changes are part of an overall strategy shared by Putin and Medvedev to finish consolidating Russian power.
  • These policy changes show that Putin and Medvedev feel confident enough that they have attained their first imperative that they can look to confront the second inherent problem for the country: Russia’s lack of modern technology and lack of an economic base
  • Russia thus has launched a multiyear modernization and privatization plan to bring in tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to leapfrog the country into current technology and diversify the economy. Moscow has also struck deals with select countries — Germany, France, Finland, Norway, South Korea and even the United States — for each sector to use the economic deals for political means.
  • two large problems
  • First, foreign governments and firms are hesitant to do business in an authoritarian country with a record of kicking foreign firms out.
  • At the same time, the Kremlin knows that it cannot lessen its hold inside of Russia without risking losing control over its first imperative of securing Russia.
  • The first move is to strengthen the ruling party — United Russia — while allowing more independent political parties.
  • While these new political parties appear to operate outside the Kremlin’s clutches, this is just for show. The most important new party is Russia’s Right Cause launched by Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov.
  • Right Cause is intended to support foreign business and the modernization efforts.
  • The Popular Front is not exactly a political party but an umbrella organization meant to unite the country. Popular Front members include Russia’s labor unions, prominent social organizations, economic lobbying sectors, big business, individuals and political parties. In short, anything or anyone that wants to be seen as pro-Russian is a part of the Popular Front.
  • It creates a system in which power in the country does not lie in a political office — such as the presidency or premiership — but with the person overseeing the Popular Front: Putin.
  • The new system is designed to have a dual foreign policy, to attract non-Russian groups back into the country and to look more democratic overall while all the while being carefully managed behind the scenes.
  • In theory, the new system is meant to allow the Kremlin to maintain control of both its grand strategies of needing to reach out abroad to keep Russia modern and strong and trying to ensure that the country is also under firm control and secure for years to come.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Jul 11
       
      I would imagine that it seems that way to most Americans, but then we're tech-focused. We have a very hard time understanding that the only time Russia has ever felt geographically secure is *when* they're aggressive. This means upgrading tech, infrastructure, and social-glue all at the same time. Add: There are all those quotes from past leaders about feeling as though they had to expand their borders or influence just to feel secure at home. We Americans may as well be from Mars: We have two giant oceans and we culturally dominate our few neighbors with trade. This is why I agree with StratFor (read as: resignedly fear) that a confrontation with Russia is in the offing two decades hence. If they dominate central Asia and hold levers in Europe, as they are quite obviously trying to do, they will be perceived as a threat, and the U.S. is all too willing to help those who are afraid of Russia. All this strikes me as a prelude that we'll gloss over in future readings of the 'past'. But then, it's another case where I'm *begging* to be wrong.
  • anonymous on 05 Jul 11
     
    "Russia has entered election season, with parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections in March 2012. Typically, this is not an issue of concern, as most Russian elections have been designed to usher a chosen candidate and political party into office since 2000. Interesting shifts are under way this election season, however. While on the surface they may resemble political squabbles and instability, they actually represent the next step in the Russian leadership's consolidation of the state."
  • Erik Hanson on 06 Jul 11
     
    I get the security concern, but Putin has always seemed to overemphasize and overextend the issue into something bigger and more offensive. It seems to me that the infrastructure and tech needs are much more pressing and would yield more results.
  • Erik Hanson on 06 Jul 11
     
    There are still plenty of places where we're not willing to push back (the Polish Belorussian genocides being a prominent example in my mind), but you're right at how foreign that mindset is. Foreign or bizarrely 19th century.
anonymous

How to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...8521

politics partisan republican democrat america

shared by anonymous on 24 Jun 11 - Cached
  • When Democrat Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the House, the leader of the lawmaking branch of government, she said her priority was to … elect more Democrats. After Republican victories in 2010, the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said his goal was to … prevent the Democratic president’s reelection. With the country at war and the economy in recession, our government leaders’ first thoughts have been of party advantage.
  • Ours is a system focused not on collective problem-solving but on a struggle for power between two private organizations.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Jun 11
       
      That modern parties vote in party-first ways is not an accident, yes. But, I'm not convinced that the unintended consequences of our political parties was something other than an accident. That point isn't well made enough.
  • What we have today is not a legacy of 1789 but an outdated relic of the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Progressives pushed for the adoption of primary elections.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • the primaries, and the nominating conventions, were open only to party members. This reform was supposed to give citizens a bigger role in the election process. Instead, the influence of party leaders has been supplanted by that of a subset of party activists who are often highly ideological and largely uninterested in finding common ground.
  • Americans demand a multiplicity of options in almost every other aspect of our lives. And yet we allow small bands of activists to limit our choices of people to represent us in making the nation’s laws.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Jun 11
       
      However, *too* many options paralyzes us. This is standard choice/marketing stuff, but I see how, if you tilt your head, something like this would seem inevitable.
  • I am not calling for a magical political “center”
  • Nor am I pleading for consensus
  • And I’m not pushing for harmony
  • The problem is not division but partisanship—advantage-seeking by private clubs whose central goal is to win political power. There are different ways to conduct elections and manage our government—and strengthen the democratic process. Here are some suggestions designed to turn our political system on its head, so that people, not parties, control our government.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Jun 11
       
      I wonder if, with the best of intentions, partisans slowly conflate the party with the nation until it wouldn't dawn on them to consider themselves seeking party favor first, and nation second.
  • Break the power of partisans to keep candidates off the general-election ballot.
  • Because activists who demand loyalty and see compromising as selling out dominate party primaries and conventions, candidates who seek their permission to be on the November ballot find themselves under great pressure to take hard-line positions. This tendency toward rigidity—and the party system that enables it—is at the root of today’s political dysfunction.
  • As a result, members of Congress would have greater freedom to base their legislative decisions on their constituents’ concerns and on their own independent evaluations of a proposal’s merits. They would be our representatives, not representatives of their political clubs.
  • Turn over the process of redrawing congressional districts to independent, nonpartisan commissions.
  • Although legislative majorities continue to draw district lines in most states, 13 states (most recently, California) have established nonpartisan or bipartisan redistricting commissions, and two additional states have created merely “advisory” commissions. The systems vary—some use commissions to propose plans that legislatures must approve; others strip the legislature of all redistricting authority—but each of the 13 recognizes that the partisan drawing of congressional-district boundaries has hurt the democratic process, leaving elected officials dependent on, and beholden to, the party bosses who draw their districts.
  • Allow members of any party to offer amendments to any House bill and—with rare exceptions—put those amendments to a vote.
  • “closed” rules, preventing members from offering amendments, simply tell citizens their preferences don’t matter.
  • Speaker John Boehner deserves credit for promising greater opportunities for the minority party to have its amendments considered. Under his speakership, the Republican-dominated House has actually accepted some Democratic amendments.
  • The House should adopt rules guaranteeing that any proposal receiving a significant level of support—say, 100 co-sponsors—would automatically be allowed a committee hearing, an up-or-down vote in committee, and then, even if it fails in committee, a vote on the House floor.
  • Change the leadership structure of congressional committees.
  • We should change congressional rules to provide for a chairman from the majority party and a vice chairman from the minority (no such position exists in today’s Congress, except on certain special non-legislating committees); the vice chairman need not ascend to the chairmanship in the chairman’s absence, but each would have the authority to bring a bill forward and to invite expert witnesses to offer testimony. The process might be slower, but consideration of alternatives would be more thorough.
  • The current committee process is transactional, not deliberative.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Jun 11
       
      Translation: "What can *we* get?"
  • Fill committee vacancies by lot.
  • The derivation of leadership in Congress from an internal version of the party primary or convention is an artificial construct. In every informal congressional subgroup—the Human Rights Caucus, the Rust Belt Caucus, the Flat Tax Caucus—leaders are chosen without regard to party affiliation.
  • Imagine how different the congressional dynamic would be if that practice prevailed in committee assignments.
  • They would be freer to vote as they saw fit.
  • Choose committee staff solely on the basis of professional qualifications.
  • But if the goal is to legislate for the country, not for a party, then committee staff members should be selected by a nonpartisan House or Senate administrator and obligated to serve all members equally without regard to party agenda.
  • The Constitution grants Congress most of the federal government’s real powers—to spend, tax, create federal programs, declare war, approve treaties, confirm federal court appointments.
  • By thinking of the House and Senate in constitutional rather than partisan terms, we would eliminate party-driven links between Congress and the president and avoid the spectacle of legislative leaders acting as though they were either members of the president’s staff or his sworn enemies.
  • Our current political dysfunction is not inevitable; it results from deliberate decisions that have backfired and left us mired in the trenches of hyper-partisan warfare.
  • The goal is not to destroy parties but to transcend them; to welcome their contributions but end their dominance; and to take back from these private clubs control of our own elections and our own Congress.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Jun 11
       
      This is a really good read. Quite layman-friendly and concise. Without knowing more about the deeper mechanics of the government's procedure, it all (at least) seems quite plausible. When I started reading this, I thought I'd be buried under polemic, but this has almost an engineer's eye. An insider looks at the structure he's been within and thinks, "hmmm, we can fix it. Adjust here, here, and here." Which is not to say that these bullet-point items would be a hard solution, but they could be tweaks that move us in an *improved* direction.
  • anonymous on 24 Jun 11
     
    Thanks to Erik Hanson for the pointer. With a reminder from Ian Dorsch. Wishful thinking? Maybe. But I'd like to try any approach that hastens the departure of the uglier elements of American political shouting. From the Atlantic. "ANGRY AND FRUSTRATED, American voters went to the polls in November 2010 to "take back" their country. Just as they had done in 2008. And 2006. And repeatedly for decades, whether it was Republicans or Democrats from whom they were taking the country back. No matter who was put in charge, things didn't get better. They won't this time, either; spending levels may go down, taxes may go up, budgets will change, but American government will go on the way it has, not as a collective enterprise but as a battle between warring tribes."
anonymous

The Virtue of Subtlety: A U.S. Strategy Against the Islamic State - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...strategy-against-islamic-state

shared by anonymous on 09 Sep 14 - Cached
  • It is important for a president to know when he has no strategy. It is not necessarily wise to announce it, as friends will be frightened and enemies delighted.
  • A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it.
  • Strategy is something that emerges from reality, while tactics might be chosen.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Given the situation, the United States has an unavoidable strategy.
  • The United States has been concerned about the status of Russia ever since U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. The United States has been concerned about the Middle East since U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced the British to retreat from Suez in 1956. As a result, the United States inherited -- or seized -- the British position.
  • A national strategy emerges over the decades and centuries. It becomes a set of national interests into which a great deal has been invested, upon which a great deal depends and upon which many are counting. Presidents inherit national strategies, and they can modify them to some extent. But the idea that a president has the power to craft a new national strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of realities crafted by all those who came before him.
  • The American strategy is fixed: Allow powers in the region to compete and balance against each other. When that fails, intervene with as little force and risk as possible.
  • For example, the conflict between Iran and Iraq canceled out two rising powers until the war ended. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened to overturn the balance of power in the region. The result was Desert Storm.
  • This strategy provides a model. In the Syria-Iraq region, the initial strategy is to allow the regional powers to balance each other, while providing as little support as possible to maintain the balance of power.
  • For the United States, there is no threat to sovereignty, but that makes the process harder: Great powers can tend to be casual because the situation is not existential. This increases the cost of doing what is necessary.
  • The American experience in Iraq highlighted the problems with counterinsurgency or being caught in a local civil war. The idea of major intervention assumes that this time it will be different. This fits one famous definition of insanity.
  • There is then the special case of the Islamic State. It is special because its emergence triggered the current crisis. It is special because the brutal murder of two prisoners on video showed a particular cruelty. And it is different because its ideology is similar to that of al Qaeda, which attacked the United States. It has excited particular American passions.
  • the fragmentation of Iraq into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions was well underway before the Islamic State, and jihadism was deeply embedded in the Sunni community a long time ago.
  • Finally, the Islamic State -- engaged in war with everyone around it -- is much less dangerous to the United States than a small group with time on its hands, planning an attack.
  • In any event, if the Islamic State did not exist, the threat to the United States from jihadist groups in Yemen or Libya or somewhere inside the United States would remain.
  • Because the Islamic State operates to some extent as a conventional military force, it is vulnerable to U.S. air power.
  • There is no reason not to bomb the Islamic State's forces and leaders. They certainly deserve it. But there should be no illusion that bombing them will force them to capitulate or mend their ways.
  • In the first place, is it really a problem for the United States? The American interest is not stability but the existence of a dynamic balance of power in which all players are effectively paralyzed so that no one who would threaten the United States emerges.
  • The United States does not have the force needed to occupy Iraq and Syria at the same time. The demographic imbalance between available forces and the local population makes that impossible.
  • The Turks are emerging as a regional power. Their economy has grown dramatically in the past decade, their military is the largest in the region, and they are part of the Islamic world. Their government is Islamist but in no way similar to the Islamic State, which concerns Ankara.
  • The United States must turn this from a balance of power between Syria and Iraq to a balance of power among this trio of regional powers. They have far more at stake and, absent the United States, they have no choice but to involve themselves. They cannot stand by and watch a chaos that could spread to them.
  • It is impossible to forecast how the game is played out. What is important is that the game begins.
  • The Turks do not trust the Iranians, and neither is comfortable with the Saudis. They will cooperate, compete, manipulate and betray, just as the United States or any country might do in such a circumstance.
  • The point is that there is a tactic that will fail: American re-involvement. There is a tactic that will succeed: the United States making it clear that while it might aid the pacification in some way, the responsibility is on regional powers. The inevitable outcome will be a regional competition that the United States can manage far better than the current chaos.
  • It is not clear why he thinks those NATO countries -- with the exception of Turkey -- will spend their national treasures and lives to contain the Islamic State, or why the Islamic State alone is the issue.
  • U.S. strategy is sound. It is to allow the balance of power to play out, to come in only when it absolutely must -- with overwhelming force, as in Kuwait -- and to avoid intervention where it cannot succeed.
  • In this case the tactic is not direct intervention by the United States, save as a satisfying gesture to avenge murdered Americans. But the solution rests in doing as little as possible and forcing regional powers into the fray, then in maintaining the balance of power in this coalition.
  • anonymous on 09 Sep 14
     
    "U.S. President Barack Obama said recently that he had no strategy as yet toward the Islamic State but that he would present a plan on Wednesday. It is important for a president to know when he has no strategy. It is not necessarily wise to announce it, as friends will be frightened and enemies delighted. A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it."
anonymous

Russia and the United States Negotiate the Future of Ukraine - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...tates-negotiate-future-ukraine

shared by anonymous on 06 Jul 14 - Cached
  • During the talks, U.S. President Barack Obama made it clear that Washington has no intention of expanding NATO into either Ukraine or Georgia. The Russians have stated that they have no intention of any further military operations in Ukraine.
  • For different reasons, neither side wants the crisis to continue, and each has a different read on the situation.
  • The Russians are convinced that the uprising in Kiev was fomented by Western intelligence services supporting nongovernmental organizations and that without this, the demonstrations would have died out and the government would have survived.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • What is important is that the Russians believe this. That means that they believe that Western intelligence has the ability to destabilize Ukraine and potentially other countries in the Russian sphere of influence, or even Russia itself.
  • The Russians have raised the price of natural gas by 80 percent for Ukraine, and the International Monetary Fund's bailout of Ukrainian sovereign debt carries with it substantial social and economic pain.
  • There has been talk of action in Moldova from Transdniestria.
  • Action in the Baltics is possible; the Kremlin could encourage Russian minorities to go into the streets. But the Baltics are in NATO, and the response would be unpredictable
  • Negotiations to relieve the crisis make sense for the Russians because of the risks involved in potential actions and because they think they can recover their influence in Ukraine after the economic crunch hits and they begin doling out cash to ease the pain.
  • The United States sees the Russians as having two levers.
  • Militarily, the Russians are stronger than the Americans in their region.
  • The Americans do not want the Russians to exercise military options, because it would reveal the U.S. inability to mount a timely response. It would also reveal weaknesses in NATO.
  • The Germans do not want a little Cold War to break out.
  • The United States might create bilateral relations in the region, as I suggested would happen in due course, but for the moment, the Americans are not ready to act at all, let alone in a region where two powers -- Russia and Germany -- might oppose American action. 
  • Even assuming the Russian claim about U.S. influence via nongovernmental organizations is true, they have played that card and it will be difficult to play again as austerity takes hold.
  • This tells us something important on how the world works. I have laid out the weakness of both countries, but even in the face of this weakness, the Russians know that they cannot extract themselves from the crisis without American cooperation, and the United States understands that it will need to deal with the Russians and cannot simply impose an outcome as it sometimes did in the region in the 1990s.
  • Part of this might be habits learned in the Cold War. But it is more than that. If the Russians want to reach a solution to the Ukrainian problem that protects their national interests without forcing them beyond a level of risk they consider acceptable, the only country they can talk to is the United States.
  • Europe is an abstraction when it comes to power politics. 
  • On a matter of such significance to the Russians, failing to deal with the United States would be dangerous, and dealing with them first would be the best path to solving the problem.
  • Finally, the United States has global interests that the Russians can affect. Iran is the most obvious one. Thus, the Russians can link issues in Ukraine to issues in Iran to extract a better deal with the United States.
  • Most important, the United States is not clear on what it wants from the Russians. In part it wants to create a constitutional democracy in Ukraine.
  • As sometimes happens in the United States, there is complex ideological and institutional diversity. The State Department and Defense Department rarely see anything the same way, and different offices of each have competing views, and then there is Congress. That makes the United States in some ways as difficult to deal with as the Europeans. But it also opens opportunities for manipulation in the course of the negotiation.
  • Russia suffered a massive reversal after former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich fell. It acted not so much to reverse the defeat as to shape perceptions of its power.
  • anonymous on 06 Jul 14
     
    "During the Cold War, U.S. secretaries of state and Soviet foreign ministers routinely negotiated the outcome of crises and the fate of countries. It has been a long time since such talks have occurred, but last week a feeling of deja vu overcame me. Americans and Russians negotiated over everyone's head to find a way to defuse the crisis in Ukraine and, in the course of that, shape its fate."
anonymous

Russia Nervously Eyes the U.S.-Iran Deal - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ia-nervously-eyes-us-iran-deal

shared by anonymous on 07 Apr 15 - Cached
  • anonymous on 07 Apr 15
     
    "When a group of weary diplomats announced a framework for an Iranian nuclear accord last week in Lausanne, there was one diplomat in the mix whose feigned enthusiasm was hard to miss. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov left the talks at their most critical point March 30, much to the annoyance of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who apparently had to call him personally to persuade him to return. Even as Lavrov spoke positively to journalists about the negotiations throughout the week, he still seemed to have better things to do than pull all-nighters for a deal that effectively gives the United States one less problem to worry about in the Middle East and a greater capacity to focus on the Russian periphery."
anonymous

Taking Responsibility on Welfare - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...responsibility-on-welfare.html

shared by anonymous on 25 Sep 12 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • By the end of the first semester, I knew that my savings and work-study earnings wouldn’t be enough. My parents could help a little, but at that point they had big life problems of their own. If I dropped to a part-time schedule, I’d lose my work-study job and grants; if I dropped out, I’d be back to zero, with student-loan debt. That’s when a friend suggested food stamps and A.F.D.C. — Aid to Families With Dependent Children.
  • Me, a welfare mother? I’d been earning paychecks since the seventh grade. My parents were Great Depression children, both ex-Marines. They’d always taught self-reliance. And I had grown up hearing that anyone “on the dole” was scum. But my friend pointed out I was below the poverty line and sliding. I had a small child. Tuition was due.
  • We always ran out of food and supplies before we ran out of month. There were nights I was so blind from books and deadlines and worry that I put my head on my desk and wept while my boy slept his boy dreams. I hoped he didn’t hear me, but of course he did.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In the years since, the programs that helped me have changed. In the ’80s, the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant became the Pell Grant (which Paul D. Ryan’s budget would cut). In the ’90s, A.F.D.C. was replaced by block grants to the states, a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. States can and do divert that money for other programs, and to plug holes in the state budget. And a single mother applying for aid today would face time limits and eligibility requirements that I did not. Thanks to budget cuts, she would also have a smaller base of the invaluable human resources — social workers, faculty members, university facilities — that were so important to me.
  • I was not an exception in that little Section 8 neighborhood. Among those welfare moms were future teachers, nurses, scientists, business owners, health and safety advocates. We never believed we were “victims” or felt “entitled”; if anything, we felt determined. Wouldn’t any decent person throw a rope to a drowning person? Wouldn’t any drowning person take it? Judge-and-punish-the-poor is not a demonstration of American values. It is, simply, mean. My parents saved me and then — on the dole, in the classroom or crying deep in the night, in love with a little boy who needed everything I could give him — I learned to save myself. I do not apologize. I was not ashamed then; I am not ashamed now. I was, and will always be, profoundly grateful.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 Sep 12
       
      I would like to print this, wad it up into a ball, and shove it down Paul Ryan's throat.
  • anonymous on 25 Sep 12
     
    "I WAS a welfare mother, "dependent upon government," as Mitt Romney so bluntly put it in a video that has gone viral. "My job is not to worry about those people," he said. "I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." But for me, applying for government benefits was exactly that - a way of taking responsibility for myself and my son during a difficult time in our lives. Those resources kept us going for four years. Anyone waiting for me to apologize shouldn't hold his breath."
anonymous

Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World - 0 views

www.psmag.com/...-up-psychology-economics-53135

shared by anonymous on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • For instance, the different ways people perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion likely reflects lifetimes spent in different physical environments. American children, for the most part, grow up in box-shaped rooms of varying dimensions. Surrounded by carpentered corners, visual perception adapts to this strange new environment (strange and new in terms of human history, that is) by learning to perceive converging lines in three dimensions.
  • As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.
  • In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • The trio of researchers are young—as professors go—good-humored family men. They recalled that they were nervous as the publication time approached. The paper basically suggested that much of what social scientists thought they knew about fundamental aspects of human cognition was likely only true of one small slice of humanity. They were making such a broadside challenge to whole libraries of research that they steeled themselves to the possibility of becoming outcasts in their own fields.
  • “We were scared,” admitted Henrich. “We were warned that a lot of people were going to be upset.” “We were told we were going to get spit on,” interjected Norenzayan. “Yes,” Henrich said. “That we’d go to conferences and no one was going to sit next to us at lunchtime.”
  • Still, I had to wonder whether describing the Western mind, and the American mind in particular, as weird suggested that our cognition is not just different but somehow malformed or twisted. In their paper the trio pointed out cross-cultural studies that suggest that the “weird” Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus advancing as a group. WEIRD minds are also more analytic, possessing the tendency to telescope in on an object of interest rather than understanding that object in the context of what is around it.
  • The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world.
  • Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      I did a shit ton of this. I was very internal, didn't have many friends, and came to identify with 'things' as though they were people.
  • Given that people living in WEIRD societies don’t routinely encounter or interact with animals other than humans or pets, it’s not surprising that they end up with a rather cartoonish understanding of the natural world. “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”
  • The three insisted that their goal was not to say that one culturally shaped psychology was better or worse than another—only that we’ll never truly understand human behavior and cognition until we expand the sample pool beyond its current small slice of humanity.
  • Despite these assurances, however, I found it hard not to read a message between the lines of their research. When they write, for example, that weird children develop their understanding of the natural world in a “culturally and experientially impoverished environment” and that they are in this way the equivalent of “malnourished children,” it’s difficult to see this as a good thing.
  • THE TURN THAT HENRICH, Heine, and Norenzayan are asking social scientists to make is not an easy one: accounting for the influence of culture on cognition will be a herculean task. Cultures are not monolithic; they can be endlessly parsed. Ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, economic status, parenting styles, rural upbringing versus urban or suburban—there are hundreds of cultural differences that individually and in endless combinations influence our conceptions of fairness, how we categorize things, our method of judging and decision making, and our deeply held beliefs about the nature of the self, among other aspects of our psychological makeup.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      This is another place where my love of long-term thinking rears its head. So modern as we imagine ourselves, with all our fancy machines, we are still bareinfants when it comes to reckoning about ourselves.
  • Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places.
  • Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults than do Northerners.
  • As Norenzayan sees it, the last few generations of psychologists have suffered from “physics envy,” and they need to get over it.
  • The job, experimental psychologists often assumed, was to push past the content of people’s thoughts and see the underlying universal hardware at work. “This is a deeply flawed way of studying human nature,” Norenzayan told me, “because the content of our thoughts and their process are intertwined.” In other words, if human cognition is shaped by cultural ideas and behavior, it can’t be studied without taking into account what those ideas and behaviors are and how they are different from place to place.
  • This new approach suggests the possibility of reverse-engineering psychological research: look at cultural content first; cognition and behavior second. Norenzayan’s recent work on religious belief is perhaps the best example of the intellectual landscape that is now open for study.
  • “I remember opening textbook after textbook and turning to the index and looking for the word ‘religion,’ ” he told me, “Again and again the very word wouldn’t be listed. This was shocking. How could psychology be the science of human behavior and have nothing to say about religion? Where I grew up you’d have to be in a coma not to notice the importance of religion on how people perceive themselves and the world around them.”
  • He has suggested that there may be a connection between the growth of religions that believe in “morally concerned deities”—that is, a god or gods who care if people are good or bad—and the evolution of large cities and nations.
  • If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine. They may have climbed the ladder of religion and effectively kicked it away. Or perhaps, after a thousand years of religious belief, the idea of an unseen entity always watching your behavior remains in our culturally shaped thinking even after the belief in God dissipates or disappears.
  • almost every major theorist on human behavior in the last 100 years predicted that it was just a matter of time before religion was a vestige of the past. But the world persists in being a very religious place.
  • HENRICH, HEINE, AND NORENZAYAN’S FEAR of being ostracized after the publication of the WEIRD paper turned out to be misplaced. Response to the paper, both published and otherwise, has been nearly universally positive, with more than a few of their colleagues suggesting that the work will spark fundamental changes. “I have no doubt that this paper is going to change the social sciences,” said Richard Nisbett, an eminent psychologist at the University of Michigan. “It just puts it all in one place and makes such a bold statement.”
  • At its heart, the challenge of the WEIRD paper is not simply to the field of experimental human research (do more cross-cultural studies!); it is a challenge to our Western conception of human nature. For some time now, the most widely accepted answer to the question of why humans, among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across the globe is that we have big brains with the ability to learn, improvise, and problem-solve.
  • Henrich has challenged this “cognitive niche” hypothesis with the “cultural niche” hypothesis. He notes that the amount of knowledge in any culture is far greater than the capacity of individuals to learn or figure it all out on their own.
  • He suggests that individuals tap that cultural storehouse of knowledge simply by mimicking (often unconsciously) the behavior and ways of thinking of those around them. We shape a tool in a certain manner, adhere to a food taboo, or think about fairness in a particular way, not because we individually have figured out that behavior’s adaptive value, but because we instinctively trust our culture to show us the way.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      Goodness, though! I'm in TOTAL control of everything! :P
  • The unique trick of human psychology, these researchers suggest, might be this: our big brains are evolved to let local culture lead us in life’s dance.
  • People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home.
  • Because of our peculiarly Western way of thinking of ourselves as independent of others, this idea of the culturally shaped mind doesn’t go down very easily.
  • That we in the West develop brains that are wired to see ourselves as separate from others may also be connected to differences in how we reason, Heine argues. Unlike the vast majority of the world, Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason analytically as opposed to holistically.
  • That is, the American mind strives to figure out the world by taking it apart and examining its pieces.
  • Shown another way, in a different test analytic Americans will do better on something called the “rod and frame” task, where one has to judge whether a line is vertical even though the frame around it is skewed. Americans see the line as apart from the frame, just as they see themselves as apart from the group.
  • Heine and others suggest that such differences may be the echoes of cultural activities and trends going back thousands of years. Whether you think of yourself as interdependent or independent may depend on whether your distant ancestors farmed rice (which required a great deal of shared labor and group cooperation) or herded animals (which rewarded individualism and aggression).
  • These psychological trends and tendencies may echo down generations, hundreds of years after the activity or situation that brought them into existence has disappeared or fundamentally changed.
  • And here is the rub: the culturally shaped analytic/individualistic mind-sets may partly explain why Western researchers have so dramatically failed to take into account the interplay between culture and cognition. In the end, the goal of boiling down human psychology to hardwiring is not surprising given the type of mind that has been designing the studies. Taking an object (in this case the human mind) out of its context is, after all, what distinguishes the analytic reasoning style prevalent in the West. Similarly, we may have underestimated the impact of culture because the very ideas of being subject to the will of larger historical currents and of unconsciously mimicking the cognition of those around us challenges our Western conception of the self as independent and self-determined. The historical missteps of Western researchers, in other words, have been the predictable consequences of the WEIRD mind doing the thinking.
  • anonymous on 02 Mar 13
     
    "The growing body of cross-cultural research that the three researchers were compiling suggested that the mind's capacity to mold itself to cultural and environmental settings was far greater than had been assumed. The most interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things they do-the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the like-but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and unconscious thinking and perception."
anonymous

Vortex motion: Viral video showing Sun's motion through galaxy is wrong. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...n_through_galaxy_is_wrong.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Mar 13 - Cached
  • However, there’s a problem with it: It’s wrong. And not just superficially; it’s deeply wrong, based on a very wrong premise. While there are some useful visualizations in it, I caution people to take it with a galaxy-sized grain of salt.
  • Normally I wouldn’t bother debunking stuff like this; wacky claims are made all the time and usually disappear on their own. But in this case I’m getting a lot of people telling me about it, so clearly it's popular—probably because it seems superficially right, and it has very nice graphics. I’m also seeing it spread around by people who do understand science, but missed the parts of it that are way off. With stuff like this, it always pays to dig a little deeper.
  • Heliocentrism is the idea that the Sun is the center of the solar system, and the planets orbit around it (there are also important details, like the planets orbit on ellipses, and these orbits are tilted with respect to one another).
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Sadhu is claiming that heliocentrism is wrong, and that the motion of the planets around the Sun actually makes a vortex. What he actually means is a helix, not a vortex. They’re different in more than just name; they’re actually very different physical motions with different properties—you can get helical motion without the particles in it interacting, like in the solar system, but in a vortex the particles interact through drag and friction.
  • But let's not argue over semantics. Look at the video again: Sadhu shows the Sun leading the planets, ahead of them as it goes around the galaxy (he makes this even more obvious in a second video; see below). This is not just misleading, it’s completely wrong.
  • I’m not arguing some small detail here. The idea that the planets trail behind the Sun as it moves through the galaxy is fundamental to what Sadhu is saying about the helix—as I’ll explain below (in the section “Where Do All These Ideas Come From?”). But first, there’s a bit more to see.
  • Look carefully at his animation of heliocentric motion. He shows the direction of the Sun's motion around the galaxy as the same as the plane of the planets' orbits. But this is not the case. The solar system's plane is tipped with respect to the galaxy by about a 60° angle, like the way a car's windshield makes an angle with respect to the car's forward motion.
  • This is actually critical: In the helical model, he shows the planets as orbiting around the Sun perpendicular to the motion of the Sun around the galaxy; "face-on", if you like. This is wrong. Because the orbits of the planets are tipped by 60°, not 90°, they can sometimes be ahead and sometimes behind the Sun. That right there, and all by itself, shows this helical depiction is incorrect. In the real model, heliocentrism, you do get that sort of ahead-and-behind motion, exactly as we observe in the real sky.
  • If you are slightly above the disk you feel an overall pull down, toward the disk. Imagine the disk is just a huge slab of matter, and the Sun is above it. The gravity of the disk would make the Sun plunge down into it. Since stars are so far apart, the Sun would go right through the disk and out the bottom. But then the disk would be pulling it up, once again toward the disk. The Sun would slow, stop, and reverse course, plummeting into the disk once again. It gets about 200 or so light years from the midplane of the galactic disk every time its bobs; the disk is 1000 light years thick, though, so we always stay well inside it. But these oscillations would go on forever, the Sun moving up and down like a cork in the ocean.
  • Since the Sun is also orbiting the galaxy, the combined motion makes that lovely waving pattern, up-and-down as it goes around, like a horse on a carousel. So Sadhu has that part (more or less) right.
  • Mostly. But he then adds a third component, a twisting spiral around the Sun’s path he attributes to precession. That part is wrong, very wrong.
  • His video shows the Sun corkscrewing around the galaxy, sometimes closer to the galactic center and sometimes farther away over and over again. To go back to the carousel analogy, its like the horse is circling the center, moving up and down, and also left-to right. But that's not what the Sun really does. There is no left to right motion (toward and away from the galactic center multiple times per orbit). That corkscrew pattern Sadhu shows is wrong.
  • In that video and its notes Sadhu confuses coordinate systems, forces, and motions pretty often.
  • In his videos and on his page, Sadhu says that he learned all this from a man named Pallathadka Keshava Bhat.
  • Seriously, none of it makes any sense. Bhat claims heliocentrism is wrong, but then uses one fallacious idea after another to back this up. I could write pages debunking his claims, but I'll try to keep this short.
  • Also, we have multiple space probes that have visited other planets, many of them still in orbit. If heliocentrism were wrong in the way Bhat describes, then those probes never would have made it to those planets. The calculations used to send them there would've been wrong. We don't have to account for the Sun's motion around the galaxy at all when calculating these spacecraft paths, so Bhat cannot be correct.
  • The claim that the Sun is at the tip of the solar system with the planets trailing behind is also demonstrably wrong. The Sun does not really lead the solar system through the galaxy like the tip of a bullet as Bhat apparently claims (and as Sadhu’s videos show). The planets go around the Sun, and the whole shebang moves around the galaxy as a unit, tipped by that 60° angle. That means sometimes the planets are ahead of the Sun, and sometimes behind it along that galactic orbit.
  • given Sadhu's misapplication of the Earth's precession, I tried to read what Bhat had to say about it. But it's so garbled (and plain wrong; he claims the precession cycle is 225,000 years long, when it's actually 26,000 years) it's like trying to untie the Gordian knot. And there's much more.
  • And that's what Sadhu was basing his (lovely, if incorrect) videos on, mind you. I'll note that if you poke around Sadhu’s site, you’ll find links to all sorts of, um, odd conspiracy theories, from 9/11 Truthers to chemtrails to the ravings of David Icke (who claims—seriously— that reptilian aliens live under Denver airport and control the world), just to name a few. To me, that puts his other ideas into perspective.
  • It seems right, or looks cool, or appeals to some sense of how things should be. But how things should be and how they are don’t always overlap. The Universe is a pretty cool place, and works using a fairly well-regulated set of rules. We call those rules physics, they’re written in the language of math, and trying to understand all that is science.
  • anonymous on 04 Mar 13
     
    "I've been getting lots of tweets and email from folks linking to a slick-looking video, a computer animation showing the motion of the planets around the Sun as the Sun orbits around the Milky Way Galaxy. It's a very pretty video with compelling music and well-done graphics."
anonymous

What Your Culture Really Says - 0 views

blog.prettylittlestatemachine.com/...what-your-culture-really-says

culture politics

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 13 - Cached
  • The monied, celebrated, nuevo-social, 1% poster children of startup life spread the mythology of their cushy jobs, 20% time, and self-empowerment as a thinly-veiled recruiting tactic in the war for talent against internet giants. The materialistic, viral nature of these campaigns have redefined how we think about culture, replacing meaningful critique with symbols of privilege. The word “culture” has become a signifier of superficial company assets rather than an ongoing practice of examination and self-reflection.
  • Culture is not about the furniture in your office. It is not about how much time you have to spend on feel-good projects. It is not about catered food, expensive social outings, internal chat tools, your ability to travel all over the world, or your never-ending self-congratulation.
  • Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken priorities and beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social norms, creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and control inside companies. Culture is usually ugly.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… We have implemented a loosely coordinated social policy to ensure homogeneity in our workforce. We are able to reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that they “aren’t a culture fit” while not having to examine what that means - and it might mean that we’re all white, mostly male, mostly college-educated, mostly young/unmarried, mostly binge drinkers, mostly from a similar work background. We tend to hire within our employees’ friend and social groups. Because everyone we work with is a great culture fit, which is code for “able to fit in without friction,” we are all friends and have an unhealthy blur between social and work life. Because everyone is a “great culture fit,” we don’t have to acknowledge employee alienation and friction between individuals or groups. The desire to continue being a “culture fit” means it is harder for employees to raise meaningful critique and criticism of the culture itself.
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… We have a collective post-traumatic stress reaction to previous workplaces that had hostile, unnecessary, unproductive and authoritarian meetings. We tend to avoid projects and initiatives that require strict coordination across the company. We might have difficulty meeting the expectations of enterprise companies and do better selling to startups organized like us. We are heavily invested in being rebels against traditional corporate culture. Because we communicate largely asynchronously and through chat, it is easy to mentally dehumanize teammates and form silos around functional groups with different communications practices or business functions.
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… Our employees must be treated as spoiled, coddled children that cannot perform their own administrative functions. We have a team of primarily women supporting the eating, drinking, management and social functions of a primarily male workforce whose output is considered more valuable. We struggle to hire women in non-administrative positions and most gender diversity in our company is centralized in social and admin work. Because our office has more amenities than home life, our employees work much longer hours and we are able to extract more value from them for the same paycheck. The environment reinforces the cultural belief that work is a pleasant dream and can help us distract or bribe from deeper issues in the organization.
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… We have enough venture funding to pay people to work on non-core parts of the business. We are not under that much pressure to make money. The normal work of the business is not sufficiently rewarding so we bribe employees with pet projects. We’re not entirely sure what our business objectives and vision are, so we are trying to discover it by letting employee passions take root. We have a really hard time developing work that takes more than a few people to release. We have lots of unfinished but valuable projects that get left behind due to shifts in focus, lack of concentrated effort, and inability to organize sufficient resources to bring projects to completion.
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… Management decisions are siloed at the very top layers of management, kept so close to the chest they appear not to exist at all. The lack of visibility into investor demands, financial affairs, HR issues, etc. provides an abstraction layer between employees and real management, which we pretend doesn’t exist. We don’t have an explicit power structure, which makes it easier for the unspoken power dynamics in the company to play out without investigation or criticism.
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… We fool ourselves into thinking we have a better work/life balance when really people take even less vacation than they would when they had a vacation policy. Social pressure and addiction to work has replaced policy as a regulator of vacation time.
  • What your culture might actually be saying is… Features are the most important function of our business. We lack processes for surfacing and addressing technical debt. We have systemic infrastructure problems but they are not relevant because we are more focused on short-term adoption than long-term reliability. We prioritize fast visible progress, even if it is trivial, over longer and more meaningful projects. Productivity is measured more by lines of code than the value of that code. Pretty things are more important than useful things.
  • Talk to your company about culture. Talk to other companies about culture. Stop mistaking symbology and VC spoils for culture. Be honest with yourself, and with each other. Otherwise, your culture will kill you softly with its song, and you won’t even notice. But hey, you have a beer keg in the office.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 13
     
    "Toxic lies about culture are afoot in Silicon Valley. They spread too fast as we take our bubble money and designer Powerpoints to drinkups, conferences and meetups all over the world, flying premium economy, ad nauseam. Well-intentioned darlings south of Market wax poetic on distributed teams, office perks, work/life balance, passion, "shipping", "iteration," "freedom". A world of startup privilege hides blithely unexamined underneath an insipid, self-reinforcing banner of meritocracy and funding. An economic and class-based revolt of programmers against traditional power structures within organizations manifests itself as an (ostensively) radical re-imagining of work life. But really, you should meet the new boss. Hint: he's the same as the old boss."
anonymous

How the internet is making us poor - Quartz - 2 views

qz.com/...how-the-internet-made-us-poor

technology unemployment computing

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Sixty percent of the jobs in the US are information-processing jobs, notes Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author of a recent book about this disruption, Race Against the Machine. It’s safe to assume that almost all of these jobs are aided by machines that perform routine tasks. These machines make some workers more productive. They make others less essential.
  • The turn of the new millennium is when the automation of middle-class information processing tasks really got under way, according to an analysis by the Associated Press based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2000 and 2010, the jobs of 1.1 million secretaries were eliminated, replaced by internet services that made everything from maintaining a calendar to planning trips easier than ever.
  • Economist Andrew McAfee, Brynjolfsson’s co-author, has called these displaced people “routine cognitive workers.” Technology, he says, is now smart enough to automate their often repetitive, programmatic tasks. ”We are in a desperate, serious competition with these machines,” concurs Larry Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. “It seems like the machines are taking over all possible jobs.”
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • In the early 1800′s, nine out of ten Americans worked in agriculture—now it’s around 2%. At its peak, about a third of the US population was employed in manufacturing—now it’s less than 10%. How many decades until the figures are similar for the information-processing tasks that typify rich countries’ post-industrial economies?
  • To see how the internet has disproportionately affected the jobs of people who process information, check out the gray bars dipping below the 0% line on the chart, below. (I’ve adapted this chart to show just the types of employment that lost jobs in the US during the great recession. Every other category continued to add jobs or was nearly flat.)
  • Here’s another clue about what’s been going on in the past ten years. “Return on capital” measures the return firms get when they spend money on capital goods like robots, factories, software—anything aside from people. (If this were a graph of return on people hired, it would be called “Return on labor”.)
  • Notice: the only industry where the return on capital is as great as manufacturing is “other industries”—a grab bag which includes all the service and information industries, as well as entertainment, health care and education. In short, you don’t have to be a tech company for investing in technology to be worthwhile.
  • For many years, the question of whether or not spending on information technology (IT) made companies more productive was highly controversial. Many studies found that IT spending either had no effect on productivity or was even counter-productive. But now a clear trend is emerging. More recent studies show that IT—and the organizational changes that go with it—are doing firms, especially multinationals (pdf), a great deal of good.
  • Winner-take-all and the power of capital to exacerbate inequality
  • One thing all our machines have accomplished, and especially the internet, is the ability to reproduce and distribute good work in record time. Barring market distortions like monopolies, the best software, media, business processes and, increasingly, hardware, can be copied and sold seemingly everywhere at once. This benefits “superstars”—the most skilled engineers or content creators. And it benefits the consumer, who can expect a higher average quality of goods.
  • But it can also exacerbate income inequality, says Brynjolfsson. This contributes to a phenomenon called “skill-biased technological [or technical] change.” “The idea is that technology in the past 30 years has tended to favor more skilled and educated workers versus less educated workers,” says Brynjolfsson. “It has been a complement for more skilled workers. It makes their labor more valuable. But for less skilled workers, it makes them less necessary—especially those who do routine, repetitive tasks.”
  • “Certainly the labor market has never been better for very highly-educated workers in the United States, and when I say never, I mean never,” MIT labor economist David Autor told American Public Media’s Marketplace.
  • The other winners in this scenario are anyone who owns capital.
  • As Paul Krugman wrote, “This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.”
  • Computers are more disruptive than, say, the looms smashed by the Luddites, because they are “general-purpose technologies” noted Peter Linert, an economist at University of Californa-Davis.
  • “The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories,” said Andreessen. “People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” It’s a glib remark—but increasingly true.
  • In March 2009, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, a warehouse robotics and automation company. In partnership with a company called Quiet Logistics, Kiva’s combination of mobile shelving and robots has already automated a warehouse in Andover, Massachusetts.
  • This time it’s fasterHistory is littered with technological transitions. Many of them seemed at the time to threaten mass unemployment of one type of worker or another, whether it was buggy whip makers or, more recently, travel agents. But here’s what’s different about information-processing jobs: The takeover by technology is happening much faster.
  • From 2000 to 2007, in the years leading up to the great recession, GDP and productivity in the US grew faster than at any point since the 1960s, but job creation did not keep pace.
  • Brynjolfsson thinks he knows why: More and more people were doing work aided by software. And during the great recession, employment growth didn’t just slow. As we saw above, in both manufacturing and information processing, the economy shed jobs, even as employment in the service sector and professional fields remained flat.
  • Especially in the past ten years, economists have seen a reversal of what they call “the great compression“—that period from the second world war through the 1970s when, in the US at least, more people were crowded into the ranks of the middle class than ever before.
  • There are many reasons why the economy has reversed this “compression,” transforming into an “hourglass economy” with many fewer workers in the middle class and more at either the high or the low end of the income spectrum.
  • The hourglass represents an income distribution that has been more nearly the norm for most of the history of the US. That it’s coming back should worry anyone who believes that a healthy middle class is an inevitable outcome of economic progress, a mainstay of democracy and a healthy society, or a driver of further economic development.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 27 Mar 13
       
      This is the meaty center. It's what I worry about. The "Middle Class" may just be an anomaly.
  • Indeed, some have argued that as technology aids the gutting of the middle class, it destroys the very market required to sustain it—that we’ll see “less of the type of innovation we associate with Steve Jobs, and more of the type you would find at Goldman Sachs.”
  • So how do we deal with this trend? The possible solutions to the problems of disruption by thinking machines are beyond the scope of this piece. As I’ve mentioned in other pieces published at Quartz, there are plenty of optimists ready to declare that the rise of the machines will ultimately enable higher standards of living, or at least forms of unemployment as foreign to us as “big data scientist” would be to a scribe of the 17th century.
  • But that’s only as long as you’re one of the ones telling machines what to do, not being told by them. And that will require self-teaching, creativity, entrepreneurialism and other traits that may or may not be latent in children, as well as retraining adults who aspire to middle class living. For now, sadly, your safest bet is to be a technologist and/or own capital, and use all this automation to grab a bigger-than-ever share of a pie that continues to expand.
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 13
     
    "Everyone knows the story of how robots replaced humans on the factory floor. But in the broader sweep of automation versus labor, a trend with far greater significance for the middle class-in rich countries, at any rate-has been relatively overlooked: the replacement of knowledge workers with software. One reason for the neglect is that this trend is at most thirty years old, and has become apparent in economic data only in perhaps the past ten years. The first all-in-one commercial microprocessor went on sale in 1971, and like all inventions, it took decades for it to become an ecosystem of technologies pervasive and powerful enough to have a measurable impact on the way we work."
anonymous

Can Eric Cantor Redeem the Republican Party and Himself? - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...130304fa_fact_lizza

shared by anonymous on 27 Feb 13 - Cached
  • On the second day, after a 7 A.M. choice of Catholic Mass or Bible study, the political analyst Charlie Cook gave a sober presentation about current demographic trends, demonstrating that the Party was doomed unless it started winning over Asian-Americans, Hispanics, and younger voters. He also noted that forty per cent of the electorate is moderate—and Republicans lost that constituency by fifteen points in 2012. Thanks to congressional redistricting, Republicans were able to hold on to the House of Representatives, and Cook said that the Party could probably keep it for the foreseeable future, but he warned that the prospects of winning back the Senate, and the White House, would require dramatic change. There are only twenty Republican women in the House, and Kellyanne Conway, a G.O.P. pollster, gave the overwhelmingly white male audience some advice: stop talking about rape.
  • Cantor is the House Majority Leader, which means that he is responsible for the mundane business of managing the schedule, the House floor, and committees, where legislation is generally written. He has used his position to transform himself into the Party’s chief political strategist.
  • “What Eric is really focussed on is that we need to do a better job of broadening our appeal and showing that we have real ideas and solutions that make people’s lives better,” Ryan said. “Eric is the guy who studies the big vision and is doing the step-by-step, daily management of the process to get us there. That is a huge job.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Cantor was one of the most influential political forces in Obama’s first term. In June of 2011, the President and the Speaker began working toward a Grand Bargain of major tax increases and spending cuts to address the government’s long-term budget deficits. Until late June, Boehner had managed to keep these talks secret from Cantor. On July 21st, Boehner paused in his discussions with Obama to talk to Cantor and outline the proposed deal. As Obama waited by the phone for a response from the Speaker, Cantor struck. Cantor told me that it was a “fair assessment” that he talked Boehner out of accepting Obama’s deal. He said he told Boehner that it would be better, instead, to take the issues of taxes and spending to the voters and “have it out” with the Democrats in the election.
  • Why give Obama an enormous political victory, and potentially help him win reëlection, when they might be able to negotiate a more favorable deal with a new Republican President? Boehner told Obama there was no deal. Instead of a Grand Bargain, Cantor and the House Republicans made a grand bet.
  • The bet failed spectacularly. Just as Cantor had urged, Obama and Romney spent much of the campaign debating tax and spending policies that the House Republicans had foisted on the Romney-Ryan ticket. What’s more, by scuttling the 2011 Grand Bargain negotiations, Cantor, more than any other politician, helped create the series of fiscal crises that have gripped Washington since Election Day. The failure of the Grand Bargain led to a byzantine deal: if the two parties could not agree on a new deficit plan, then a combination of tax increases and spending cuts—cuts known, in budget jargon, as a “sequester”—would automatically kick in on New Year’s Day.
  • Since the 2012 elections, the Republicans have been divided between those who believe their policies are the problem and those who believe they just need better marketing—between those who believe they need to make better pizza and those who think they just need a more attractive box. Cantor, who is known among his colleagues as someone with strategic intelligence and a knack for political positioning, argues that it’s the box.
  • As he gamed out G.O.P. strategy for the budgetary showdowns with Obama in January and February—including this week’s clash over the sequester—Cantor was happy to make himself available for several long interviews. He persistently struck a diplomatic note and mentioned again and again how much he looked forward to working with Obama, a position that he said he’s been articulating for a long time.
  • There are several ways to think of the divide in the Republican conference.
  • One is regional. The House has two hundred and thirty-two Republican members; nearly half of them—a hundred and ten—are from the South.
  • The rest are scattered across the Midwest (fifty-eight), the mid-Atlantic (twenty-five), the mountain West (eighteen), and the Pacific (twenty-one). There are no House Republicans from New England.
  • Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia, who holds Newt Gingrich’s old congressional seat and is seen as a leader of the most conservative House Republicans, said that, during a recent debate over taxes, “we talked past each other oftentimes as much as Republicans and Democrats talk past each other.” He explained how surprised he was when one of his colleagues from a Northern state told him that he favored a tax increase on millionaires. “It hit me that what he was hearing when he’s going home to a Republican district in a blue state is completely different than what I’m hearing when I go home to a Republican district in a red state,” he said. “My folks are livid about this stuff. His folks clearly weren’t. And so we weren’t even starting from the same premise.”
  • The other divide in the House is generational.
  • If Democrats vote as a bloc, which they often do, it takes only sixteen dissenting Republicans for the leadership to lose a vote. There is a rump group of some forty or fifty restless Republicans. At its core are two dozen younger members, most of whom have been elected since 2010 and have what generously might be called a dismissive attitude toward their leaders, whom they see as holdovers from the big-spending era of George W. Bush.
  • Tom Cole, of Oklahoma, who is sixty-three and has served for a decade in the House, recently emerged as the leader of a large faction of House Republicans who believe that the Tea Party-inspired congressmen are dooming the Party.
  • Cole is no fan of Obama. “The President is so self-righteous and so smug,” he told me. But Cole is one of the few House Republicans who have worked closely with the White House. On one of his walls, which is decorated with Native American artifacts, were framed copies of two laws that Obama signed regarding tribal issues. “He’s the best President in modern American history on Native American issues,” Cole said.
  • anonymous on 27 Feb 13
     
    "Two months earlier, Republicans had lost the Presidential election and eight seats in the House. They were immediately plunged into a messy budget fight with a newly emboldened President, which ended with an income-tax increase, the first in more than twenty years. A poll in January deemed Congress less popular than cockroaches, head lice, and colonoscopies (although it did beat out the Kardashians, North Korea, and the Ebola virus). It was time to regroup."
anonymous

Libyan Report Card - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...libyan-report-card

geopolitics libya

shared by anonymous on 03 Apr 13 - Cached
  • The authorities in the capital of Tripoli openly acknowledge the fact that they do not monopolize the use of force and have wisely opted for compromise and arbitration in eastern Libya (the Benghazi region) and in the far-flung Sahara to the south.
  • Libya's fundamental problem is that rather than comprising a compact cluster of demography like the Nile Valley, it is but a vague geographical expression -- a monumentally vast desert and coastal region between historic Egypt and Greater Carthage (Tunisia).
  • Because Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt are geographically associated with specific knots of civilization going back to antiquity, they did not require suffocating forms of tyranny to hold them together like Libya, and to a lesser extent like Algeria, which for decades during the height of the Cold War had a radical socialist regime. For Libya, Moammar Gadhafi's regime was, in fact, anarchy masquerading as tyranny.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Therefore, it should surprise no one that the toppling of Gadhafi brought about the veritable collapse of the state. Libyan authorities do not govern so much as negotiate the terms of geographic control.
  • Modern states have borders; weak and failed states have frontiers.
  • The stability of regimes in places like Mauritania and Niger are somewhat more in doubt than before Gadhafi's collapse. Libya, for that matter, is now an ungovernable space in significant parts of the country where al Qaeda can very possibly find refuge. The killing of the American ambassador in Benghazi was indicative of the terrors that a chaotic, post-Gadhafi Libya can offer up.
  • It would seem from this accounting that the Obama administration's decision to militarily intervene in Libya (along with its NATO allies) was a blunder of the first magnitude.
  • A post-Gadhafi world now clearly presents the CIA with greater security challenges than it had before.
  • But the political reckoning for the Obama administration is not that simple.
  • Those reportedly in the forefront of arguing for intervention on such grounds were then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and National Security official Samantha Power.
  • The three women had good arguments: Were Gadhafi to have massacred large numbers of civilians with U. S. warships hovering just offshore, it would have been a demonstration of American fecklessness comparable to that of European (and particularly Dutch) fecklessness when Serb troops massacred large numbers of civilians in 1995 in Srebrenica under the thumb of U.N. peacekeepers.
  • The loss of prestige the United States might have suffered throughout the Arab world as a result could have been substantial.
  • More to the point, because we still do not know all the intelligence the administration had available at the time regarding Gadhafi's intentions in Benghazi, to condemn administration officials outright is too easy a judgment at this date.
  • But there is a conundrum here that those who favored intervention -- in Libya as well as elsewhere -- do not own up to. That is, short of deploying large numbers of ground troops, the ability of the U.S. government to rebuild weakened or collapsed states is severely limited.
  • Even the presence of more than 100,000 American ground troops was insufficient to make Iraq an adequately effective democracy, so how can one argue that a band of civilian experts, plus small numbers of special operations forces, could have accomplished more in Libya?
  • Gadhafi's regime had virtually eliminated civil society in a country that was barely a country -- and you say that the United States had it in its power to make it all whole, or partly whole, again?
  • Toppling an evil regime or stopping a war is a profoundly moral act.
  • But taking moral responsibility for what happens next in a country is the hard part.
  • because Washington tends to overestimate its own significance in terms of its ability to alter distant societies, the following pattern will continue to emerge: a terrible war resulting in calls for humanitarian intervention, an intervention in some cases, always followed by a blame game inside the Washington Beltway after the country has slipped back into tyranny or anarchy.
  • Meanwhile, here is a probability: Libya's relatively short history as a strong state is over. It will go on and on as a dangerous and weakly governed area between Tunisia and Egypt. Its considerable oil resources can internally generate revenue for armed groups and politicians both. Thus, Libya will become a metaphor for much of North Africa and the Sahara, places where frontiers are more common than borders. 
  • anonymous on 03 Apr 13
     
    "In the starkest terms, a state is defined by a bureaucratic hierarchy that monopolizes the use of force over a specific geography. Ideally, nobody need fear the authorities except those who break the law. And because the authorities monopolize violence, nobody need fear his fellow man. Of course, tyrannical states induce general fear among much of the population. And weak states have a difficult time monopolizing the use of force -- the reason they are weak in the first place. By these standards, many states in the world are weak. And Libya has gone from being a tyrannical state to being barely a state at all."
anonymous

Escalating Tensions on the Korean Peninsula (Agenda) - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...nsions-korean-peninsula-agenda

shared by anonymous on 05 Apr 13 - Cached
  • It has now got to the point where you have a former CIA director, Michael Hayden, saying the possibility of North Korea funding a nuclear attack is somewhere between extremely remote and zero.
  • Well I think one in looking at his statements you have to look at the difference between nuclear and conventional warfare. The North Koreans have developed a nuclear device that they are able test underground. It's highly unlikely that the North Koreans have developed a deliverable nuclear weapon. And therefore, North Korea striking with a nuclear weapon at South Korea and particularly the ability of the North Koreans to strike at Japan or the United States is extremely remote.
  • At the same time, North Korea does have a very large conventional force. That conventional force is forward deployed, and the North Koreans and the South Koreans are exchanging certain types of rhetoric; they're both adjusting their rules of engagement or are at least claiming to be adjusting those.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Well the United States and the Chinese are going to have some meetings coming up in the not too distant future. Certainly, North Korea's going to be in discussion during those. The United States, however, has really tried to stick to its policy of ignoring the North Koreans to death.
  • in some sense the impression and the face that the U.S. is putting on this is that they're not willing to enter any form of negotiation at this time with the North Koreans until after the North Koreans reduce tension -- so not enter talks to bring tensions down but to wait until tensions come down to enter talks.
  • right now, the U.S. and the Chinese are on a very different page about what to do about this crisis.
  • In fact, it has taken most of the world attention off of what had been focused on what was perceived as Chinese maritime aggression in the region and it shifted it all to North Korea.
  • There really is no pre-emptive military action the South Koreans could take that doesn't risk triggering off a complete war.
  • The problem is that what the North Koreans have that threatens South Korea is not necessarily the nuclear program. It's not even really even the missile program. It's the frontline artillery. And there's no way to take out, to attack, to destroy that frontline artillery without basically triggering the response from North Korea to start shelling the greater Seoul-Incheon area.
  • The North Koreans right now, everybody's interpretation -- at least from the government level in looking at the North Koreans -- is that the North Koreans are not intent on actually triggering a war, that North Korea is just as concerned as everybody else about a war and perhaps even more because although the South Korean economy may be devastated in the short term, the likelihood of the North Korean regime being able to continue in the long term is very, very low.
  • So they will lose a war, effectively.
  • Rodger a few days ago I happened to be talking to Alexander Zhebin, a North Korean expert from the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He was once the Tass correspondent in Pyongyang, and he argued that the issue for Kim Yong Un was getting a guarantee that his regime would survive, and that once he got that, progress could be made. Do you see any truth in this?
  • I think there is actually some truth in that. The North Koreans…their entire policy that they've been pursuing is a policy of securing and strengthening the Kim regime and securing the elite; it's maintaining control within North Korea.
  • And their pattern of raising tensions and backing down and then they have to raise tensions higher the next time before they back down, has really been going on for about 20 years.
  • They have lived since the end of the Korean War under how they perceive under the guns of the Untied States -- that they are under constant threat from the much larger United States. And whether the U.S. really has an interest in going after North Korea or not doesn't matter to the North Koreans.
  • From the North Korean point of view, Kaesong is probably economically more important for them than it is for South Korea, although there are a lot of small South Korean companies operating there that could be seriously damaged if the facilities close. But for the South Koreans, it is much more psychologically important because it really is the centerpiece of South Korean policy toward North Korea and it's that tiny piece that keeps a connection between the two. And from the South Korean perspective, as long as Kaesong is open, they see it as a signal from the North that they're really not going back to confrontation.
  • anonymous on 05 Apr 13
     
    "While President Xi Jinping gives the keynote speech at this weekend's Boao Forum on the Chinese island of Hainan, attended also by business icons like Bill Gates and George Soros, one friend of China will not be there -- North Korea's Kim Jong Un, now pondering his next move in the escalating threats uttered from Pyongyang."
anonymous

Penalties for politicians - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...2363901

shared by anonymous on 28 May 13 - Cached
  • This reminds me of something writer Robert Heinlein once said: "Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not ensure 'good' government, it simply ensures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things, but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the 'backseat driver' syndrome."
  • Government officials are happy making and executing plans that affect the lives of millions, but when things go wrong, well ... they're willing to accept the responsibility, but they're not willing to take the blame. What's the difference? People who are to blame lose their jobs. People who are "responsible," do not. The blame, such as it is, winds up deflected on to The System, or something else suitably abstract.
  • The problem is that they don't have, in President Obama's words, "skin in the game." When it comes to actual wrongdoing, they're shielded by doctrines of "absolute immunity" (for the president) and "qualified immunity" (for lesser officials). This means that the president can't be sued for anything he does as president, while lower-ranking officials can't be sued so long as they can show that they were acting in a "good faith" belief that they were following the law.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Then, of course, there's the unfortunate fact that the worse the economy does, the more important the government becomes. As Tim Noah pointed out back when the financial crisis was new, "On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details."
  • I'd favor some changes that put accountability back in. First, I'd get rid of judicially created immunities. The Constitution itself creates only one kind of immunity, for members of Congress in speech and debate. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, courts have interpreted this grant of immunity, explicitly in the Constitution, more narrowly than the judicially created ones). I'd also cut all payments to members of Congress whenever they haven't passed a budget. If they can't take care of that basic responsibility, why should they get paid? Likewise, I'd ban presidential travel when there's not a budget. He can do his job from the White House.
  • I'm willing to consider other changes: Term limits that kick in whenever there's a deficit for more than two years in a row. Limitations on civil-service protections to allow wronged citizens to get offending bureaucrats fired. Pay cuts for elected officials whenever inflation or unemployment are above a threshold.
  • But the real lesson is this: We entrust an inordinate amount of power to people who don't feel any pain when we fall down. The best solution of all is to take a lot of that power back. When the power is in your hands, it's in the hands of someone who feels it when you fall down. When it's in their hands, it's your pain, their gain. That's no way to run a country.
  • anonymous on 28 May 13
     
    "We entrust an inordinate amount of power to people who don't feel any pain when we fall down."
anonymous

Things We Don't Know: The beast with a billion backs: Part 1 - 0 views

blog.thingswedontknow.com/...with-billion-backs-part-1.html

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • We like to think of ourselves in the singular, but the reality is we are a swirling composite of thousands of species, more accurately thought of as an ecosystem than as an individual.
  • There is the core ‘us’, the cells that contain our DNA. But we are also like the land on which a rich forest might grow
  • Together they are our ‘microbiome’.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • in return for shelter and a share of the spoils from our meals, some make vitamins, liberate nutrients and energy from food, and protect us from their pathogenic cousins. Millions of years of co-evolution with our microbial horde have forged this relationship, shaping us both in ways whose significance we’re still trying to understand.
  • One of the biggest problems in unpicking the microbiome’s relationship with health is working out if the changes and differences are a cause, an intermediate step, or a consequence of developing a disease.
  • separating our environment from disease is proving hard.
  • Crohns disease is a good example
  • we know a disrupted microbiota is one of its features.
  • But we can’t yet say for sure if this is the cause or the effect.
  • If it starts with our own physiology, then we need to investigate treatments targeted at those changes, but if it starts with the microbiome our treatments will be different.
  • With so many branches it’s perhaps no surprise that so many other organisms can call us ‘home’.
  • In the past we’ve been well served by the one-pathogen-one-disease model for tracking, monitoring and avoiding infectious diseases. But do beneficial, or harmless, bugs in the microbiome spread like pathogens? If not, how?
  • It is important to understand this because of the number of links between the microbiome and a number of diseases like diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, food allergies, and even obesity.
  • An improved picture of how our communities of microbes – good and bad – come together and move through populations could help us to develop interventions to significantly reduce, or prevent, the numbers of people with these conditions. Or, at the least, find ways to hobble this trend.
  • Understanding both the flow of microbes and the factors which influence it may also be important for any treatments we produce.
  • We’ve been manipulating our microbial ecosystems for years, both naturally through our immune systems and, perhaps more worryingly, through a weapon of microbial mass destruction: antibiotics.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "This post is by freelance science writer Gavin Hubbard. Gavin originally trained as a Medical Biochemist at the University of Surrey and spent over 10 years working in biotechnology, immunology and clincal trials. He writes both for industry and for a general audience, with a focus on health, immunology and pathology. He blogs at Sciencehubb.co.uk and can be found on twitter as @GavinHub"
anonymous

BioShock Infinite: an intelligent, violent videogame? - Read - ABC Arts | Australian co... - 1 views

www.abc.net.au/...s3733057.htm

shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Infinite has the difficulty of an inherited legacy: people like to point to the first BioShock (2007) as an example of how videogames made in studios by hundreds of people and financed by corporations can be artistic. It was, in a way, a beacon of hope for those who dreamed that the sheer industrial scale at the peak of the videogames business could translate into something worth taking seriously.
  • BioShock Infinite is a videogame with ideas. Set in 1912, it’s in part inspired by The Devil In The White City, Erik Larson’s 2003 novelistic account of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
  • The city is beautiful, and possibly unparalleled in terms of visual design in a videogame: along with the expected white American neo-classical architecture, we get an astounding array of poster art and fashion, taking in both the decline of the strong silhouettes and Gibson Girl aesthetics of the 1910s, and the Art Nouveau movement, as well as Kinetoscopes similar to the illusionistic films of Georges Melies.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Columbia, according to Infinite, is to have set sail at the 1893 Fair, thus opening up a ripe array of potential themes stemming from real world history and politics, all of which get at least lip service in the game: Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, racism, and religious conflict.
  • This all occurs, as with the first BioShock, within the framework of a first person shooter.
  • The first major choice that players of BioShock Infinite are presented with is whether they would like to publicly punish an interracial couple or not. You may choose to throw a ball at the couple, who are tied up in front of a crowd at a fair, or you may choose to throw the ball at the man who is asking you to do so. The outcome of your choice is mostly the same.
  • Let’s think about that for a moment. BioShock Infinite, the game that many would hope to point to as an example of how art and subtlety might be found in expensive, mainstream videogames, sets up its moral stakes by asking the player if they would like to be a violent bigot.
  • Would you like to be for or against?
  • This is thunderously stupid, and an insipid example of how terrifyingly low the bar is set for ‘intelligence’ in mainstream videogames
  • In taking the game seriously, I want to be as clear as possible: BioShock Infinite uses racism for no other reason than to make itself seem clever. Worse, it uses racism and real events in an incredibly superficial way—BioShock Infinite seeks not to make any meaningful statement about history or racism or America, but instead seeks to use an aesthetics of ‘racism’ and ‘history’ as a barrier to point to and claim importance.
  • puts the lie to the claim that by engaging with these themes, BioShock Infinite is the place to find substance in mainstream videogames.
  • At the real Wounded Knee, over three hundred Native Americans—the Lakota Sioux—were massacred. Many of them were unarmed. Some of them were children. These were real people, with real lives and real families. The victims were buried in a mass grave, and many of the US Cavalry who led the massacre were later awarded the Medal of Honor, a decision that remains shameful today.
  • I am certainly not saying that a videogame has no right to engage with such events. What I am saying is that when you use such a horrific historic event in art—in any media—you have a responsibility to get it right, to use it to say something worthwhile, to make the invocation count.
  • Wounded Knee, I believe, is not something you get to invoke in 2013 without also making a statement of sorts. The idea of publicly punishing interracial relationships, something that of course has happened in reality, is also not something you get to invoke in 2013 without making a statement.
  • “[Letting] the player decide how they feel,” is not respecting your audience’s intelligence in these situations; it is a cop-out of the highest order.
  • For a game that so explicitly aimed to take on racism through its 1912 setting, the politics of BioShock Infinite are defined by evasion.
  • Such nihilistic disapproval is the absence of a political position masquerading as shrewd criticism. It may seem worldly, but it allows BioShock Infinite to be controversial to no-one by treating everyone with equal contempt.
  • Let us get one thing straight, then: despite its desperation to be taken seriously, BioShock Infinite is not an intelligent work of art. It is a history-themed first person shooter, and it deserves no more or less respect than any other first person shooter.
  • You can argue that the faults of BioShock Infinite are the latest and most unfortunate result of the first-person genre that found bedrock in both Doom (reflexes and gore) and Myst (architecture and mystery) in the mid-1990s, two sharply different trajectories that have been bound into problematic convergence ever since. While the two genres remain fruitfully exploited in separation, all attempts at marrying the two—and thus discovering the elusive union of the shooter’s popularity and the exploration game’s more literary aspirations—have remained ill considered. In a way, mainstream videogames are still completely dumbfounded by Edge magazine’s famous 1994 criticism of Doom: “If only you could talk to these creatures.”
  • Maybe this is really the central problem of the game—how do you merge any kind of intelligent thematic exploration while taking unrestrained pleasure in shooting people in the face?
  • Where do those two circles converge in a Venn diagram?
  • By its conclusion, BioShock Infinite quickly forgets that it ever engaged with ideas of racism and American Exceptionalism in favour of a tangled Christopher Nolan puzzle plot about time travel. This is the sound of a thousand popguns going off, taking up the silent report of a giant cannon that failed to fire.
  • it remains difficult to point to a single videogame that is both artful, subtle and a successful mainstream videogame, and BioShock Infinite only muddies the waters further.
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 13
     
    "Can mainstream videogame makers present an artful, intelligent thematic exploration about real world history within a game dominated by scenes of unrestrained violence, asks Daniel Golding."
anonymous

The Crisis of the European Common Market | Stratfor - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...crisis-european-common-market

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - Cached
  • The creation of a common market where people, goods, services and capital could move freely was one of the main goals of the Treaty of Rome
  • The free movement of people is the principle that allows EU citizens to travel to or live and work in any member country.
  • The creation of the eurozone put 17 countries with varying levels of economic development and competitiveness in a currency union. This has created significant trade imbalances between the less developed economies in the eurozone periphery and Germany, Europe's main exporter.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The European Union is trying to address the problems of its banking sector through the creation of a banking union -- a mechanism that would put all the eurozone banks under the supervision of a single entity, provide joint funds to rescue banks in distress and provide all banks with the common deposit guarantee.
  • This idea has been controversial since the beginning.
  • First, there was a debate regarding which banks should be supervised. In December 2012, the European Union agreed that only the largest banks in the eurozone would be put under supervision.
  • Second, the idea of a joint insurance mechanism and bank resolution fund was highly controversial because countries with strong banking sectors refuse to take responsibility for failing banks.
  • As a result, EU leaders decided to postpone the insurance mechanism's implementation.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "The European Union was founded on the free movement of people, goods, services and capital. All of these basic freedoms are inextricably intertwined with the European crisis. The free movement of people is being questioned in numerous countries, while the free movement of goods and services is in part responsible for the current crisis. The free movement of capital has forced EU leaders to face the consequences of different national banking regulations that allow capital flight and tax evasion. While better oversight and collaboration make tax collection across borders easier, they do little to stem capital flight, which weakens banking sectors in already struggling economies."
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