Skip to main content

Home/ Long Game/ Group items tagged problems

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
anonymous

The Next Stage of Russia's Resurgence: Introduction - 3 views

stratfor.com/...ussias-resurgence-introduction

shared by anonymous on 07 Feb 12 - Cached
  • In many ways, Russia's geopolitical strength is derived from its inherent geographic weaknesses. There are few natural barriers protecting Russia's core, and this has required Russia to expand into and consolidate territories around its core to acquire buffers from external powers.
  • this expansion created two fundamental problems for any Russian state:
  • It brought Moscow into conflict with numerous external powers and gave it the difficult task of ruling over conquered peoples (who were not necessarily happy to be ruled by Russia).
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 at the end of the Cold War and Moscow lost control of its constituent republics and fell into internal chaos, those circumstances did not guarantee that Russia was permanently removed from the international scene and that a unipolar world dominated by the United States would last forever
  • Russia has returned to its traditional status of legitimate regional power, and its influence is increasing in its historic geographic buffer zones, which are currently made up of more than a dozen independent states.
  • In the context of its resurgence, Russia's broad imperative has been to prevent foreign influence while building and ingraining its own.
  • anonymous on 07 Feb 12
     
    Stratfor has long followed and chronicled Russia's resurgence, which has included bolder foreign policy moves and resuming the role of regional power. In particular, Moscow has focused its energy in its former Soviet periphery: the Eastern European states of Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova; the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; the Caucasus states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan; and the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In recent years, Russia has increased its influence in many of these states politically, economically, militarily and in the area of security, with the most obvious sign of its return to power coming in the August 2008 war with Georgia. Now, Moscow is preparing for the next stage of its resurgence. This new phase will include the institutionalization of Russia's position as the regional hub, but will also include the use of more subtle levers and influence in areas Moscow wants to bring into its fold -- though not all of these efforts will go unchallenged.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Erik Hanson on 08 Feb 12
     
    Again with the "geographic weakness." I maintain that the biggest geographic strength that still counts is simply space, which Russia has plenty of. They could build a massive Maginot Line across the entire border and be no more secure for it. If Russia is being characterized as geographically vulnerable, it's by someone who's trying to leverage that notion or who hasn't realized that war has changed since WWI.
  • anonymous on 08 Feb 12
     
    I have to disagree with you, there. While the term "geographic weakness" can be flexible, I think that it applies to a lot more than just missile ranges. It also applies to things like how almost all the arable land in Russia is as far to the west as possible, or how the Russian interior is mostly inaccessible. Or think how the southmost end of its reach is so cut-up that we actually use the term "Balkanization." If you plopped that kind of geography in the center of north America, we likely wouldn't have extended from sea to shining sea. Russia proper doesn't have many geographic buffers. They surely don't have two oceans, like we do. This matters. We don't have a host of uneasy neighbors, either. You're right that a line wouldn't help. That's kind of the point, actually. By putting more miles between itself and any possibly hostile state - by charm or by threat - the entity increases its security.
  • Erik Hanson on 08 Feb 12
     
    I think that the way "geographic weakness" usually is used, it's not in reference to what I might call "infrastructural weakness." Even there, I think that there is a very real geographic similarity you're overlooking in your "sea to shining sea" comparison: The Great Plains of North America are a steppe, followed by one of the more troublesome mountain ranges in the world. How the two nations crossed and filled their steppes is I think part of what makes the two so different. I might also argue that Russia's interior is naturally richer in resources--we put a lot (financially and chemically) into the "Great Desert" to make it viable for farming, and now we still daydream about swapping that into a source of energy. Russia's backyard is built for industrial exploitation, not agricultural, and I think that's probably worth more. As for actual physical buffers, It's been a while, but the US certainly has had to mess around militarily along and within its land borders over the years. Russia does have ocean on the north and east ends, and that ain't nothing. I'd like to know what percent of both our borders are sea borders. I'd guess we're within 10% of each other.
anonymous

Why Mass Effect is the Most Important Science Fiction Universe of Our Generation - 3 views

io9.com/...ion-universe-of-our-generation

shared by anonymous on 21 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Think of the Big Issues in your favorite series. Whether it is realistic science explaining humanoid life throughout the galaxy, or dealing with FTL travel, or the ethical ambiguity of progress, or even the very purpose of the human race in our universe, Mass Effect has got it. By virtue of three simple traits – its medium, its message, and its philosophy – Mass Effect eclipses and engulfs all of science fiction's greatest universes. Let me show you how.
  • As a vessel for an epic science fiction narrative, the medium of action-adventure game affords three immediate advantages – setting, casting, and emotional involvement.
  • The first advantage, setting, involves the portrayal of alien species and alien worlds with ease.
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • Because they are filmed with human actors, series like Star Trek and Star Wars leverage mostly human and very humanoid (vulcan, bajoran, betazoid) characters. Even though we are told humans are only one race among many, we somehow always end up running the galaxy and living everywhere. All the important characters who get the most screen time are human beings.
  • Run around the Citadel and you'll be damned if you find more than two or three humans out of hundreds of citizens milling about, shopkeepers hocking their wares, and government officials eyeing you suspiciously. The entire government of the galaxy, known as the Council, is run by non-humans. The majority of characters on screen at any given time are alien.  Being able to render any race with equal ease means that as a human, you truly feel like the minority species we are.
  • Second, the ability to customize the cast of Mass Effect is only possible with a video game.
  • I can't very well rewatch all of Star Trek: The Next Generation with a female Picard of Middle Eastern descent who grew up on a space station. Mass Effect gives me that option with Shepard.
  • Third, and for the sake of narrative, perhaps the most intriguing, is the player involvement in ethical decision making.
  • The critical difference is the duration and scale of the consequences of the decisions made in Mass Effect.
  • First, decisions are not a function of gameplay but of narrative.
  • Second, decisions are persistent through each installment in the series.
  • Further, each decision is clouded by an insufficient amount of information. Players often act in the dark, evaluating and analyzing the he-said-she-said of characters whose motivations are rarely selfless or noble.
  • A prime example is that even during rousing speeches, the player is able to make on-the-fly decisions that alter the pathos of Shepard's rhetoric.
  • During an interview I had with Daniel Erickson, lead writer for Star Wars: The Old Republic, he revealed two key elements of BioWare's process that makes their games ideal for ethical exploration.
  • The first is that quality voice acting triggers complex emotional responses in players. The second is that allowing players to choose their next line in conversation based on emotion, not the precise words written down, creates a huge level of investment by the player in the main character.
  • Other media ask you to evaluate and observe the decisions of the main character. Mass Effect enables you to believe the world in which the story is told, to cast the major characters and to participate in the decisions and face the consequences of character choices. In short, one cannot help but become deeply invested in the universe and narrative Mass Effect builds.
  • Mass Effect has a simple message: human beings are delusional about their importance in the grand scheme of things.
  • Mass Effect starts with humanity in the galaxy where it should have been in the United Federation of Planets: unnoticed among the other minor species struggling to prove to the Council why they add anything of value to the civilization that is Citadel Space.
  • Star Wars and Star Trek start with the assumption that humans will be important in galactic civilization. Why? In part because the medium forced that decision, but more so because both universes assume that human beings add meaning to the universe. Mass Effect doesn't make such an assumption. Mass Effect never lets you forget that we might not add one jot of meaning or benefit to intelligent life beyond our solar system.
  • Humanity's minority and irrelevant status is underlined by the fact that on the Citadel we are not only new, but one among many second class species.
  • Mass Effect is colored by this message in three distinct ways.
  • First, the actions of many major human characters almost always have a subtle undercurrent of petulance or entitlement.
  • Mass Effect portrays our species from the perspective of the established species in the universe: we are fumbling neophytes with FTL drives.
  • Second, the lowering of human status diffuses any xenophobic urges a player might have.
  • The constant presence of other species on the Normandy, a human Alliance/Cerberus ship, is a perpetual reminder that we are out of our depth in the universe. No problem, no matter how much the player may want it to be, will be solved unilaterally by human gumption and know-how.
  • Ok, now imaging playing that character within a context whatever the player's gender, race, or orientation, that the simple humanity of the player is subjected to believable and, within the Mass Effect universe, true prejudice, insults, and scrutiny. The impact of the message on the player's interactions with other species is that, after facing what feels like unwarranted treatment, the player is forced to recognize the perspective of any species one might encounter along the way. Mass Effect makes you view the reflection of humanity in a mirror darkly.
  • Third, by undermining the player's sense of pride in being human, Mass Effect also opens doors to what would likely be highly controversial discussions were humanity "in charge."
  • In Star Trek (TOS, TNG, & DS9), those who are genetically engineered are seen as myopic elitists and supremacists, convinced of their own vaunted status, not wishing to allow their world to be "tainted" by those who are impure. In Mass Effect, Miranda and Grunt are rich and rounded characters who are genuinely superior in some aspects due to their modifications, but also reflect the increased self-awareness and contemplativeness we would hope to see in a superior being.
  • In Star Trek cyborgs (Borg) and androids (Data) are one of two things: a threat to humanity or desperate to emulate it. In Mass Effect, Shepard's resurrection leaves her largely cybernetic while EDI, the ship AI, and Legion, an autonomous mobile geth platform, are more interested in helping and understanding humans than they are attempting to become or obliterate human beings.
  • Shepard's constant discussions with, dependance upon, and similarities to her non-organic crew members is made more accessible to the player due to Mass Effect's questioning of human exceptionalism.
  • Mass Effect's message is designed to open up narrative complexity by destabilizing the player's sense of confidence in his or her own skin. By undermining the value of being human, threatening and novel lifeforms become relatable, minority aliens become allies, and human intentions become questionable.
  • In nearly great popular science fiction universe, there is a flaw. Born of systemic bias, the flaw is one that fundamentally undermines the narrative that carves its way through the characters, species, technologies and worlds that populate any given sci-fi story. Our greatest stories set in space often reference the flaw with oblique references to a long forgotten species, cataclysmic events, or godlike entities. Something is wrong with the universe, but we cannot place it.
  • The flaw in every science fiction series is that they shy from the deep horror of the existence of intelligent life in infinite spacetime – save for two: the one that brought first brought it to our attention and the one that sees this horror as the framework for reality.
  • The flaw is a simple one: the assumption that life has meaning, that intelligent life has a purpose, and that humanity contributes anything to the universe.
  • There is no recognizable divine presence, such as a god, in the universe, and humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence, and perhaps are just a small species projecting their own mental idolatries onto the vast cosmos, ever susceptible to being wiped from existence at any moment. This also suggests that the majority of undiscerning humanity are creatures with the same significance as insects in a much greater struggle between greater forces which, due to humanity's small, visionless and unimportant nature, it does not recognize.
  • Cosmicism is not merely the idea that there is no meaning in the universe. It's far worse. Instead, the argument is that there is meaning, but it is so far above and beyond human understanding that we can never attain meaningful existence.
  • Mass Effect forces the observant player to ask, "Why fight for survival in a meaningless universe?" From the answer stems a story that demands the player confront the purpose of human beings in the galaxy at every level. To play Mass Effect is to consider the value of the lives of other species, the meaning of life on a cosmic scale, and the importance of individual relationships in the face of cataclysm.
  • First, one must accept the premise that the technology to explore the universe is a trap and a structure that forces galactic civilization to follow an invariable path. Like Descartes' mischievous demon or Hume's apathetic creator, the universe is indeed the product of an intelligence, but a negligent one at best, a malicious one at worst.
  • Cosmicism underpins Mass Effect's ability to show the permutations of how the Drake Equation imagined intergalactic civilizations: warts and all.
  • Citadel Space is dominated by the same law as Dune's planetary empire: a ban on artificial intelligence.
  • The Reapers are biomechanical equivalents of the Elder Gods of H.P. Lovecraft. If the xenomorphs in Alien had a deity, it would be a Reaper. Inconceivable, immortal, uninvolved super-beings that are not divinities per se, but so far beyond our realm of existence as to drive insane those who encounter and worship them.
  • Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe indifferent to humanity. Amid the entertaining game play, the interspecies romance, and entertaining characters, cosmological questions about the value of existence influence every decision.
  • Therein the triple layered question – What value does galactic civilization bring to the universe; What value does humanity bring to galactic civilization, and What value do I bring to humanity – forces the player to recontextualize his or her participation in the experiment of existence.
  • The value of Mass Effect as a science fiction universe is that it is a critical starting point for discussion about the purpose of humanity in a materialistic universe. Without an answer to that question, there is no real reason for Ender to defeat the Buggers, or for humanity to seek out new life and new civilizations, or for us to not let non-organic life be the torch bearer for intelligence in the universe.
  • anonymous on 21 Feb 12
     
    "Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe indifferent to humanity. Amid the entertaining game play, the interspecies romance, and entertaining characters, cosmological questions about the value of existence influence every decision. The game is about justifying survival, not of mere intelligent life in the universe, the Reapers are that, but of a kind of intelligence. Therein the triple layered question - What value does galactic civilization bring to the universe; What value does humanity bring to galactic civilization, and What value do I bring to humanity - forces the player to recontextualize his or her participation in the experiment of existence."
  • Erik Hanson on 24 Feb 12
     
    Man, I would have liked to run this on GWJ.
  • anonymous on 24 Feb 12
     
    Yeah, it's very well written. I'm not in a position to, like, critique it or anything, but it's SO much fun to read. :)
anonymous

The Futility of European Elections - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...futility-european-elections

shared by anonymous on 19 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • The more elections are held, the more the public will force their leaders in various directions. More often than not, this direction will eschew austerity and Germany. Over time this will solidify into a new map. While this has yet to happen, the recent elections at the least are not solving Europe's problem. In fact, they may be further dividing the Continent. And there are many elections to go.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Jun 12
       
      This all strikes me as more of that 'boring stuff' that we ignore which will probably snowball into a huge role in whatever formal conflict appears in the future.
  • anonymous on 19 Jun 12
     
    Europe and the financial markets watched intently June 17 as Greece held general elections. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti all delayed their flights to the June 18 G-20 summit in Mexico to await the results.
anonymous

France's Strategy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...frances-strategy

shared by anonymous on 23 Jun 12 - Cached
  • Two events shaped modern French strategy. The first, of course, was the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the emergence of Britain as the world's dominant naval power and Europe's leading imperial power.
  • The second moment came in 1871 when the Prussians defeated France and presided over the unification of German states.
  • France had substantial military capabilities, perhaps matching and even exceeding that of Germany. However, France's strategy for dealing with Germany was to build a structure of alliances against Germany.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • First, it allied with Britain, less for its land capabilities than for the fact that Britain's navy could blockade Germany and therefore deter it from going to war. The second ally was Russia, the sheer size of which could threaten Germany with a two-front war if one began.
  • The combination of forces facing Germany convinced Berlin that it had to strike first, eliminating one enemy so that it would not be faced with a two-front war. In both the first and second world wars, Germany attempted to eliminate France first.
  • Charles de Gaulle recognized that France was incapable of competing with the United States and the Soviet Union on the global stage. At the same time, he wanted France to retain its ability to act independently of the two major powers if necessary. Part of the motivation was nationalism. Part of it was a distrust of the Americans. The foundation of post-war American and European defense policy was the containment of the Soviet Union.
  • De Gaulle was not convinced of the American guarantees, in part because he simply didn't see them as rational. The United States had an interest in Europe, but it was not an existential interest. De Gaulle did not believe that an American president would risk a nuclear counterattack on the United States to save Germany or France.
  • De Gaulle believed that if Western Europe simply relied on American hegemony without an independent European force, Europe would ultimately fall to the Soviets. He regarded the American guarantees as a bluff.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 12
       
      Back when I actually talked to friends about this, I was unuhmrrican for suggesting that this was a highly pragmatic stance and not just an example of 'frog sympathy.'
  • This was not because he was pro-Soviet. Quite the contrary, one of his priorities upon taking power in 1945 was blocking the Communists.
  • De Gaulle, above all others, understood national self-interest. But he did not believe that American national self-interest was identical to France's.
  • De Gaulle settled on the next best strategy, which was developing independent military capabilities sufficient to deter a Soviet attack on French territory without coming to the Americans for help.
  • But at the core of de Gaulle's thinking was a deeper idea. Caught between the Americans and the Soviets, with a fragmented Europe in between, half dominated by the Soviets and the other half part of an American-dominated NATO, he saw the fate of France as being in the hands of the two superpowers, and he trusted neither. Nor did he particularly trust the other Europeans, but he was convinced that in order to secure France there had to be a third force in Europe that would limit the power of both Americans and Soviets.
  • De Gaulle objected to NATO's structure because it effectively limited France's sovereignty. NATO's Military Committee was effectively in command of the military forces of the constituent nations, and at a time of war, NATO's supreme allied commander in Europe -- always an American -- would automatically take command.
  • De Gaulle understood the weakness in what would become the European Union, which was that national interests always dominated. No matter how embedded nations became in a wider system, so long as national leaders were answerable to their people, integration would never work in time of crisis and would compound the crisis by turning it from what it originally concerned into a crisis of mixed sovereignty. 
  • The foundation of this alliance had to be economic and military. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the urgency of the military threat dissolved. France's presidents since the end of the Cold War, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, believed that the Gaullist vision could be achieved solely through economic ties.
  • It is in this context that Hollande is going to Germany. Although Sarkozy went as a committed ally of Germany, Hollande will not necessarily be predisposed to German solutions for Europe's problems. This is somewhat startling in post-Cold War Franco-German relations, but it is very much what de Gaulle would have accepted. France's economic needs are different from those of Germany.
  • anonymous on 23 Jun 12
     
    New political leaders do not invent new national strategies. Rather, they adapt enduring national strategies to the moment. On Tuesday, Francois Hollande will be inaugurated as France's president, and soon after taking the oath of office, he will visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. At this moment, the talks are expected to be about austerity and the European Union, but the underlying issue remains constant: France's struggle for a dominant role in European affairs at a time of German ascendance.
anonymous

Tech startups: A Cambrian moment | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...ducts-and-services-have-caused

shared by anonymous on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Digital startups are bubbling up in an astonishing variety of services and products, penetrating every nook and cranny of the economy. They are reshaping entire industries and even changing the very notion of the firm. “Software is eating the world,” says Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
  • “Anyone who writes code can become an entrepreneur—anywhere in the world,” says Simon Levene, a venture capitalist in London. Here we go again, you may think: yet another dotcom bubble that is bound to pop. Indeed, the number of pure software startups may have peaked already. And many new offerings are simply iterations on existing ones.
  • The danger is that once again too much money is being pumped into startups, warns Mr Andreessen, who as co-founder of Netscape saw the bubble from close by: “When things popped last time it took ten years to reset the psychology.” And even without another internet bust, more than 90% of startups will crash and burn.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • But this time is also different, in an important way. Today’s entrepreneurial boom is based on more solid foundations than the 1990s internet bubble, which makes it more likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
  • One explanation for the Cambrian explosion of 540m years ago is that at that time the basic building blocks of life had just been perfected, allowing more complex organisms to be assembled more rapidly. Similarly, the basic building blocks for digital services and products—the “technologies of startup production”, in the words of Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School—have become so evolved, cheap and ubiquitous that they can be easily combined and recombined.
  • Some will work out, many will not. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, calls this “combinatorial innovation”. In a way, these startups are doing what humans have always done: apply known techniques to new problems.
  • Economic and social shifts have provided added momentum for startups. The prolonged economic crisis that began in 2008 has caused many millennials—people born since the early 1980s—to abandon hope of finding a conventional job, so it makes sense for them to strike out on their own or join a startup.
  • startups are a big part of a new movement back to the city.
  • In essence, software (which is at the heart of these startups) is eating away at the structures established in the analogue age. LinkedIn, a social network, for instance, has fundamentally changed the recruitment business. Airbnb, a website on which private owners offer rooms and flats for short-term rent, is disrupting the hotel industry. And Uber, a service that connects would-be passengers with drivers, is doing the same for the taxi business.
  • It is a story of technological change creating a set of new institutions which governments around the world are increasingly supporting.
  • Startups run on hype; things are always “awesome” and people “super-excited”. But this world has its dark side as well. Failure can be devastating. Being an entrepreneur often means having no private life, getting little sleep and living on noodles, which may be one reason why few women are interested. More ominously, startups may destroy more jobs than they create, at least in the shorter term.
  • Yet this report will argue that the world of startups today offers a preview of how large swathes of the economy will be organised tomorrow. The prevailing model will be platforms with small, innovative firms operating on top of them. This pattern is already emerging in such sectors as banking, telecommunications, electricity and even government. As Archimedes, the leading scientist of classical antiquity, once said: “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.”
  • anonymous on 21 Jan 14
     
    "Cheap and ubiquitous building blocks for digital products and services have caused an explosion in startups. Ludwig Siegele weighs its significance"
anonymous

Obama's Tightrope Walk - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...obamas-tightrope-walk

shared by anonymous on 03 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Begin with the fact that the United States was not the first country calling for military intervention in Syria after pictures of what appeared to be the dead from a chemical attack surfaced. That honor went to France, Turkey and Britain, each of whom called for action. Much as with Libya, where France and Italy were the first and most eager to intervene, the United States came late to the feast.
  • The United States did not have any overriding national interest in Syria.
  • The United States is in the process of recovering from Iraq and Afghanistan, and is not eager to try its hand at nation building in Syria, especially given the players.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • What started to draw the United States into the matter was a statement made by the president in 2012, when he said that the use of chemical weapons would be a red line.
  • He didn't mean he wanted to intervene. He set the red line because he figured that it was the one thing Assad wouldn't try. It was an attempt to stay out, not an announcement of interest. In fact, there had been previous evidence of small-scale chemical attacks, and the president had dodged commitment.
  • A significant faction pressed him on this in his foreign policy apparatus.
  • The point is that, leaving Iraq, this faction felt that the United States failed to carry out its moral obligations in Rwanda, and applauded the intervention in Kosovo. 
  • This faction is not small and appeals to an important tendency in American political culture that sees World War II as the perfect war, because it was waged against an unspeakable evil, and not for strategic or material gain.
  • That war was more complicated than that, but there was an element of truth to it. And the world, on the whole, approved of American involvement there.
  • Secure behind distance and power, the United States ought not be a typical insecure political power, but should use its strength to prevent the more extreme injustices in the world. 
  • There was a romantic belief that the crowd in the street was always more virtuous than the tyrant in his palace. Sometimes they were right. It is not clear that the fall of the Shah reduced the sum total of human suffering.
  • Obama had learned a thing or two about the crowd, Arab and otherwise. He was far less romantic about their intent, particularly after Libya. After Libya he was also aware that after the self-congratulations, the United States would have to live with the chaos or new tyranny. He didn't want to attack, and that was clear in the first days after the affair.
  • There were two reasons.
  • First, he had lost confidence in the crowd.
  • Second, he had vowed not to go to war as Bush had, without international support validated by the United Nations
  • Pressed by the human rights faction in his administration to take action in Syria, he was also under pressure from three key countries: Britain, France and Turkey.
  • Obama resisted not the principle of attack but the scale Turkey wanted. 
  • This was one that the British had helped concoct, and the parliament voted against it, with many parliament members saying the United Kingdom was no longer the Americans' lap dog.
  • Obama, who had worked so hard to avoid leadership, had become George W. Bush to the British Parliament.
  • The Russians were completely committed to the survival of the regime.
  • The United States was less passionate, but Obama, while willing to do the minimum gesture possible to satisfy his human rights impulse, did think about what would come later and didn't want to see the regime fall. In this, the Russians and Americans had common interests. 
  • The Russian calculations came down to its read of the United States, which is that it was not in a position to impose an international system in the region because of internal political weakness.
  • Therefore the Russians had a rare opportunity to impose if not a system, then a presence. Most of all, the Russian view was that it had nothing to fear from the United States, in spite of its power imbalance. Obama was not likely to take action.
  • Others, like Poland, that had been with the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan also bowed out. The Poles are interesting because they had been the most eager for collaboration with the Americans, but felt the most betrayed by not getting an American commitment for significant military aid and collaboration.
  • By the end of the week, the Russians were hurling insults at Obama, the British finally freed themselves from American domination, and the Turks were furious at American weakness.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 03 Sep 13
       
      Haha.
  • The French -- and France's interventionist flow is fascinating (Libya, Mali, now Syria) -- stood with the United States. This is a tale to consider in itself, but not here. And the Canadians decided that much as they disliked chemical weapons use, they would not be available. The wheels just came off the strategy.
  • It is easy to blame Obama for losing control of the situation, but that is too simple. Every administration has its ideologues, and every president wants allies and no one wants to go to war without those allies flying aircraft beside them. And it would be nice if the United States could be just another country, but it isn't. The moment that it enters a coalition, it leads a coalition.
  • The United States had a strategic interest in neither faction taking power in Syria -- its Lebanonization. That is brutal, but it is true, and the United States was not the only country with that interest.
  • The real problem is this: After the Islamist wars, the United States has, as happened before, sought to minimize its presence in the world and while enjoying the benefits of being the world's leading economy, not pay any political or military price for it.
  • It is a strategy that is impossible to maintain, as the United States learned after World War I, Vietnam and Desert Storm. It is a seductive vision but a fantasy. The world comes visiting.
  • driven by an insufficient national strategy, the president was trapped by internal ideologies, the penchant of foreign allies and the temptation to do something, however ineffective. But as we know, the ineffective frequently becomes more expensive than the effective, and choosing where to be effective -- and where to pass -- is essential. 
  • This is not over yet. If Congress votes for strikes, it is likely that Obama will do something. But at that point he will be doing it by himself, and the inevitable death of innocents in even the smallest attack will bring him under fire from some of those most insistent that he do something about the war crimes in Syria. 
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 03 Sep 13
       
      Yes, because all national actions happen flawlessly, with no negative repurcussions, as long as your heart is in the right place.
  • It is not easy to be president, nor is it easy to be the world's leading power. It is nice to be able to sit in moral judgment of men like Assad, but sadly not have the power to do anything. Where life gets hard is when sitting in moral judgment forces you to do something because you can. It teaches you to be careful in judging, as the world will both demand that you do something and condemn you for doing it.
  • anonymous on 03 Sep 13
     
    "Last week began with certainty that an attack on Syria was inevitable and even imminent. It ended with the coalition supporting the attack somewhere between falling apart and not coming together, and with U.S. President Barack Obama making it clear that an attack was inevitable, maybe in a month or so, if Congress approves, after Sept. 9 when it reconvenes. This is a comedy in three parts: the reluctant warrior turning into the raging general and finding his followers drifting away, becoming the reluctant warrior again."
anonymous

Libertarians Are the New Communists - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ns-are-the-new-communists.html

shared by anonymous on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Where communism was adopted, the result was misery, poverty and tyranny. If extremist libertarians ever translated their beliefs into policy, it would lead to the same kinds of catastrophe.
  • By radical libertarianism, we mean the ideology that holds that individual liberty trumps all other values.
  • By communism, we mean the ideology of extreme state domination of private and economic life.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • social libertarians aren’t the problem. It is the nihilist anti-state libertarians of the Koch-Cruz-Norquist-Paul (Ron and Rand alike) school who should worry us.
  • Like communism, this philosophy is defective in its misreading of human nature, misunderstanding of how societies work and utter failure to adapt to changing circumstances.
  • We say the conditional “would” because radical libertarianism has a fatal flaw: It can’t be applied across a functioning society.
  • Radical libertarians would be great at destroying. They would have little concept of creating or governing. It is in failed states such as Somalia that libertarianism finds its fullest actual expression.
  • Some libertarians will claim we are arguing against a straw man and that no serious adherent to their philosophy advocates the extreme positions we describe. The public record of extreme statements by the likes of Cruz, Norquist and the Pauls speaks for itself. Reasonable people debate how best to regulate or how government can most effectively do its work -- not whether to regulate at all or whether government should even exist.
  • The alternative to this extremism is an evolving blend of freedom and cooperation. The relationship between social happiness and economic success can be plotted on a bell curve, and the sweet spot is away from the extremes of either pure liberty or pure communitarianism. That is where true citizenship and healthy capitalism are found.
  • True citizenship means changing policy to adapt to changes in circumstance. Sometimes government isn’t the answer. Other times it is.
  • Freedom is responsibility.
  • anonymous on 07 Sep 13
     
    "Most people would consider radical libertarianism and communism polar opposites: The first glorifies personal freedom. The second would obliterate it. Yet the ideologies are simply mirror images. Both attempt to answer the same questions, and fail to do so in similar ways. Where communism was adopted, the result was misery, poverty and tyranny. If extremist libertarians ever translated their beliefs into policy, it would lead to the same kinds of catastrophe."
anonymous

What Happened to Psychiatry's Magic Bullets? - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...health-theory-discredited.html

shared by anonymous on 09 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Despite our ambivalence, sales of psychiatric drugs amounted to more than seventy billion dollars in 2010. They have become yet another commodity that consumers have learned to live with or even enjoy, like S.U.V.s or Cheetos.
  • In the past few years, one pharmaceutical giant after another—GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi—has shrunk or shuttered its neuroscience research facilities.
  • Clinical trials have been halted, lines of research abandoned, and the new drug pipeline has been allowed to run dry.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The answer lies in the history of psychopharmacology, which is more deeply indebted to serendipity than most branches of medicine—in particular, to a remarkable series of accidental discoveries made in the fifteen or so years following the end of the Second World War.
  • By 1960, the major classes of psychiatric drugs—among them, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, antidepressants, and anti-anxiety drugs, known as anxiolytics—had been discovered and were on their way to becoming a seventy-billion-dollar market.
  • Having been discovered by accident, however, they lacked one important element: a theory that accounted for why they worked (or, in many cases, did not).
  • —they fashioned an explanation: mental illness was the result of imbalances among these neurotransmitters, which the drugs treated in the same way that insulin treats diabetes.
  • In 1965, Joseph Schildkraut, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, reverse-engineered antidepressants and offered an actual theory: at least when it came to depression, the imbalances were to be found in the neurotransmitters he thought were affected by the drugs, dopamine and norepinephrine. Seven years after antidepressants were invented, and five years after Ayd asserted that depression was a chemical problem, psychiatrists finally had a precise, scientific explanation for why they worked. The paper quickly became one of the most cited articles in the medical literature.
  • But Schildkraut was wrong. Within a few years, as technology expanded our ability to peer into the brain, it became clear that antidepressants act mostly by increasing the availability of the neurotransmitter serotonin—rather than dopamine and norepinephrine, as previously thought.
  • The serotonin-imbalance theory, however, has turned out to be just as inaccurate as Schildkraut’s. While S.S.R.I.s surely alter serotonin metabolism, those changes do not explain why the drugs work, nor do they explain why they have proven to be no more effective than placebos in clinical trials.
  • Despite their continued failure to understand how psychiatric drugs work, doctors continue to tell patients that their troubles are the result of chemical imbalances in their brains.
  • As Frank Ayd pointed out, this explanation helps reassure patients even as it encourages them to take their medicine, and it fits in perfectly with our expectation that doctors will seek out and destroy the chemical villains responsible for all of our suffering, both physical and mental. The theory may not work as science, but it is a devastatingly effective myth.
  • the dry pipeline of new drugs bemoaned by Friedman is an indication that the drug industry has begun to lose faith in the myth it did so much to create.
  • Bedazzled by the prospect of unraveling the mysteries of psychic suffering, researchers have spent recent decades on a fool’s errand—chasing down chemical imbalances that don’t exist. And the result, as Friedman put it, is that “it is hard to think of a single truly novel psychotropic drug that has emerged in the last thirty years.”
  • anonymous on 09 Sep 13
     
    "It's been just over twenty-five years since Prozac came to market, and more than twenty per cent of Americans now regularly take mind-altering drugs prescribed by their doctors. Almost as familiar as brands like Zoloft and Lexapro is the worry about what it means that the daily routine in many households, for parents and children alike, includes a dose of medications that are poorly understood and whose long-term effects on the body are unknown. "
anonymous

Questions Surround the Netherlands' Future - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ns-surround-netherlands-future

shared by anonymous on 19 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • In light of its economic problems and its leadership's waning popularity, the Netherlands will likely soften austerity measures in the short- and medium-term. In May, the European Commission gave The Hague permission to miss its deficit target for 2013. The country will probably fail to meet the required EU deficit goals again in 2014 -- the Dutch government has become increasingly worried about the negative effects of expedited spending cuts. While the European Commission is likely to pressure The Netherlands to implement additional spending cuts, it probably will not punish the country when it does not comply with those demands.
  • This goes beyond austerity measures; the Dutch parliament is currently assessing its broader relationship with the European Union. In a document released in June, the Dutch Cabinet indicated that no additional concessions of sovereignty should be made to supranational institutions, and that The Hague should keep as many of its own prerogatives as possible.
  • Because of its physical location in Europe, the Netherlands keeps strong political and economic ties with France and Germany. The Dutch will avoid any meaningful policy decisions until after Germans elections, which are scheduled for late September. The Hague will not openly criticize Berlin or Brussels as Paris has, but it will pursue a more independent fiscal policy by relaxing austerity at home in order to avoid a further drop in popular support.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Regardless of who governs Germany after September, in the short term Europeans will have to debate measures to reactivate financing for small- and medium-sized companies to try to stimulate economic growth and create new jobs.
  • In the long term, Germany and France will have to begin discussions for reforming European treaties. EU institutions and member states simply are reaching the limits of what they can do in the bloc's current institutional framework.
  • Both negotiations will force the Netherlands to define its position in Europe. As a country that traditionally relies on trade, the Netherlands will support any measure that protects the European free trade agreements -- which means that The Hague will not opt out of the European Union.
  • anonymous on 19 Jul 13
     
    "In a new indication that the economic crisis has reached the eurozone's core countries, the Dutch statistics office announced today that seasonally adjusted unemployment reached 8.5 percent in June, up from 6.3 percent the previous year. Clearly the EU unemployment crisis is far from over, and the bloc's structural weaknesses continue to affect even Europe's politically and economically stable nations."
anonymous

Nate Silver's genius isn't math. It's journalism. - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...enius-isnt-math-its-journalism

shared by anonymous on 24 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The typical answer to this is, well, “the election.” But getting the election right was no great feat.
  • The betting markets got the election right. The pollsters got the election right. The polling aggregators, like Real Clear Politics, got the election right. The modelers — which included Silver, but also included Sam Wang and Drew Linzer, among others — got the election right. Wonkblog’s election model called the election right — and it did it in June.
  • The truth is that 2012 just wasn’t a very hard election to call. The polling data all pointed in the same direction
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Silver had two other innovations, both of which are, I think, more important in explaining the appeal — and potential scalability — of his work.
  • The first is that his model begins many, many months before the election, and long before the polls become particularly predictive or frequent. 
  • I think of that model as a journalistic innovation more than a statistical one.
  • But if that early model didn’t work to predict the election, it served Silver’s other, and most important, journalistic strength: narrativizing the data.
  • The way a lot of horserace coverage deals with this problem is by blowing up unimportant news — gaffes and ads and the like — into stories that makes the readers feel like they’re learning urgent new facts about the campaign even as nothing changed that day and whatever gaffe or ad or speech got made stands almost no chance of influencing the campaign.
  • There’ve been election models before Silver’s. But their proprietors proudly stood in opposition to this trend. They pointed to their models and said, “See? Most of this stuff doesn’t matter, and there’s no reason to be covering it.” Analytically, they might well have been right about that. But people still wanted to read about the election.
  • Silver’s reputation as a math wizard often obscures his innovations as a journalist. But it’s the latter that makes him such a valuable hire for ESPN and ABC News.
  • anonymous on 24 Jul 13
     
    "The news that Nate Silver is leaving the New York Times for a role at ESPN and ABC News (corporate synergies! They're a thing!) has occasioned some interesting posts on what he got right during the election."
anonymous

Lawrence O'Donnell Yells at Julia Ioffe About Putin and Snowden - 0 views

www.newrepublic.com/...-ioffe-about-putin-and-snowden

shared by anonymous on 11 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • I decided to contest O'Donnell's premise that Russia had this thing planned and under control from the beginning, and that they did, in fact, create the situation.
  • We then squabbled over whether Putin personally controls everything in Russia: what TV anchors say, everything that happens at Sheremetyevo, even every breath that Snowden takes.
  • I am also seriously suggesting the following things:Vladimir Putin is not omnipotent. He does not control everything that happens in the Russian Federation, a vast and often inhospitable landmass that spans 10 time zones. Similarly, Barack Obama does not have total control over the minutiae of the United States of America.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The Obama administration trapped Snowden in Russia. The U.S. unsealed the charges before it had Snowden in custody, revoked his passport, then downed the plane of the president of a sovereign state over other sovereign states because it thought Snowden was on board.
  • If a Russian Edward Snowden ended up in JFK Airport, there is no way in hell we'd turn him over to the Russians. Not in a hundred years, and not ever.
  • If you are a world leader worth your salt, and have a good diplomatic team working for you, you would know that. You would also know that when dealing with thugs like Putin, you know that things like this are better handled quietly. 
  • The Obama administration totally fucked this up. I mean, totally. Soup to nuts. Remember the spy exchange in the summer of 2010? Ten Russian sleeper agents—which is not what Snowden is—were uncovered by the FBI in the U.S. Instead of kicking up a massive, public stink over it, the Kremlin and the White House arranged for their silent transfer to Russia in exchange for four people accused in Russia of spying for the U.S.
  • My main beef with O'Donnell is not that he wouldn't let me make these 11 points—because, let's face it, that's not what the TV is for—but that he did exactly the same shit Russians did to me when I was in Russia. They assumed that the U.S. and its government was one sleek, well-functioning monolith, that Obama was omnipotent, and that everyone in the world, including other important (and nuclear!) world leaders, act and must act as Russia demands it should, using Russian foreign policy calculus, and with only Russian interests in mind.
  • Sound ridiculous? Believe me, it sounds just as insane in reverse. The problem is that this was not in the ranting comments section, but was coming from the host of a prime time, national television show. And if you don't have the good sense and education or, hell, the reporting experience to know better, then just let the guests you invited on speak.
  • anonymous on 11 Aug 13
     
    "Tonight, I went on Lawrence O'Donnell's show, and Lawrence O'Donnell yelled at me. Or, rather, he O'Reilly'd at me. That O'Donnell interrupted and harangued and mansplained and was generally an angry grandpa at me is not what I take issue with, however. What bothers me is that, look: your producers take the time to find experts to come on the show, answer your questions, and, hopefully, clarify the issue at hand. "
anonymous

Obama's Bluff - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...obamas-bluff

shared by anonymous on 27 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Damascus' close ties to Iran and Russia give the United States reason to be hostile toward Syria, and Washington participated in the campaign to force Syrian troops out of Lebanon. Still, the United States has learned to be concerned not just with unfriendly regimes, but also with what could follow such regimes.
  • The United States has been reluctant to heed these calls. As mentioned, Washington does not have a direct interest in the outcome, since all possible outcomes are bad from its perspective.
  • U.S. President Barack Obama therefore adopted an extremely cautious strategy. He said that the United States would not get directly involved in Syria unless the al Assad regime used chemical weapons, stating with a high degree of confidence that he would not have to intervene.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Al Assad is a ruthless man: He would not hesitate to use chemical weapons if he had to. He is also a very rational man: He would use chemical weapons only if that were his sole option. At the moment, it is difficult to see what desperate situation would have caused him to use chemical weapons and risk the worst.
  • The truth here has been politicized, and whoever claims to have found the truth, whatever it actually is, will be charged with lying. Nevertheless, the dominant emerging story is that al Assad carried out the attack, killing hundreds of men, women and children and crossing the red line Obama set with impunity. The U.S. president is backed into a corner. 
  • The United States has chosen to take the matter to the United Nations. Obama will make an effort to show he is acting with U.N. support. But he knows he won't get U.N. support.
  • Regardless of whether the charges against al Assad are true, the Russians will dispute them and veto any action. Going to the United Nations therefore only buys time.
  • This is no longer simply about Syria. The United States has stated a condition that commits it to an intervention.
  • If it does not act when there is a clear violation of the condition, Obama increases the chance of war with other countries like North Korea and Iran.
  • If these countries come to believe that the United States is actually bluffing, then the possibility of miscalculation soars.
  • Syria was not an issue that affected the U.S. national interest until Obama declared a red line. It escalated in importance at that point not because Syria is critical to the United States, but because the credibility of its stated limits are of vital importance.
  • The question therefore becomes what the United States and the new coalition of the willing will do if the red line has been crossed. The fantasy is that a series of airstrikes, destroying only chemical weapons, will be so perfectly executed that no one will be killed except those who deserve to die. But it is hard to distinguish a man's soul from 10,000 feet. There will be deaths, and the United States will be blamed for them.
  • attacking means al Assad loses all incentive to hold back on using chemical weapons. If he is paying the price of using them, he may as well use them. The gloves will come off on both sides as al Assad seeks to use his chemical weapons before they are destroyed. A war on chemical weapons has a built-in insanity to it.
  • When Obama proclaimed his red line on Syria and chemical weapons, he assumed the issue would not come up.
  • He made a gesture to those in his administration who believe that the United States has a moral obligation to put an end to brutality. He also made a gesture to those who don't want to go to war again.
  • It was one of those smart moves that can blow up in a president's face when it turns out his assumption was wrong.
  • Obama can get overwhelming, indisputable proof that al Assad did not -- and that isn't going to happen -- Obama will either have to act on the red line principle or be shown to be one who bluffs
  • Libya was easy compared to Syria. Now, the president must intervene to maintain his credibility. But there is no political support in the United States for intervention.
  • anonymous on 27 Aug 13
     
    "Images of multiple dead bodies emerged from Syria last week. It was asserted that poison gas killed the victims, who according to some numbered in the hundreds. Others claimed the photos were faked while others said the rebels were at fault. The dominant view, however, maintains that the al Assad regime carried out the attack."
anonymous

The Case Against High-School Sports - Amanda Ripley - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309447

shared by anonymous on 19 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • One element of our education system consistently surprises them: “Sports are a big deal here,” says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in 18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling.
  • Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      It does in my home.
  • When I surveyed about 200 former exchange students last year, in cooperation with an international exchange organization called AFS, nine out of 10 foreign students who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their peers back home did. A majority of Americans who’d studied abroad agreed.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • As states and districts continue to slash education budgets, as more kids play on traveling teams outside of school, and as the globalized economy demands that children learn higher-order skills so they can compete down the line, it’s worth reevaluating the American sporting tradition. If sports were not central to the mission of American high schools, then what would be?
  • On October 12, 1900, the Wall School of Honey Grove played St. Matthew’s Grammar School of Dallas in football, winning 5–0. The event was a milestone in Texas history: the first recorded football game between two high-school teams.
  • Until then, most American boys had played sports in the haphazard way of boys the world over: ambling onto fields and into alleys for pickup games or challenging other loosely affiliated groups of students to a match. Cheating was rampant, and games looked more like brawls than organized contests. Schools got involved to contain the madness.
  • The ruling elite feared that all this schooling would make Anglo-Saxon boys soft and weak, in contrast to their brawny, newly immigrated peers.
  • Sports, the thinking went, would both protect boys’ masculinity and distract them from vices like gambling and prostitution. “Muscular Christianity,” fashionable during the Victorian era, prescribed sports as a sort of moral vaccine against the tumult of rapid economic growth.
  • Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student. For the price of one football season, the district could have hired a full-time elementary-school music teacher for an entire year.
  • But, despite the fact that Premont’s football team had won just one game the previous season and hadn’t been to the playoffs in roughly a decade, this option never occurred to anyone.
  • “We were freaking out,” says Mariela, a former cheerleader and tennis and volleyball player. American kids expect to participate in school sports as a kind of rite of passage. “We don’t get these years back,” she told me. “I’m never going to get the experience of cheering as captain under the lights.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      This is so absurd.
  • But there was an upside to the quiet. “The first 12 weeks of school were the most peaceful beginning weeks I’ve ever witnessed at a high school,” Singleton says. “It was calm. There was a level of energy devoted to planning and lessons, to after-school tutoring. I saw such a difference.”
  • Nathan missed the adrenaline rush of running out onto the field and the sense of purpose he got from the sport. But he began playing flag football for a club team on the weekends, and he admitted to one advantage during the week: “It did make you focus. There was just all this extra time. You never got behind on your work.”
  • Premont’s culture changed. “There’s been a definite decline in misbehavior,” says Desiree Valdez, who teaches speech, theater, and creative writing at Premont. “I’m struggling to recall a fight. Before, it was one every couple of weeks.”
  • Meanwhile, communities throughout Texas, alarmed by the cancellation of football, raised $400,000 for Premont via fund-raisers and donations—money that Singleton put toward renovating the science labs.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      So much awesome.
  • In many schools, sports are so entrenched that no one—not even the people in charge—realizes their actual cost.
  • When Marguerite Roza, the author of Educational Economics, analyzed the finances of one public high school in the Pacific Northwest, she and her colleagues found that the school was spending $328 a student for math instruction and more than four times that much for cheerleading—$1,348 a cheerleader.
  • “And it is not even a school in a district that prioritizes cheerleading,” Roza wrote. “In fact, this district’s ‘strategic plan’ has for the past three years claimed that math was the primary focus.”
  • Football is, far and away, the most expensive high-school sport.
  • Even maintaining a grass field can cost more than $20,000 a year. Reconditioning helmets, a ritual that many teams pay for every year, can cost more than $1,500 for a large team.
  • That kind of constant, low-level distraction may be the greatest cost of all.
  • During football season in particular, the focus of American principals, teachers, and students shifts inexorably away from academics.
  • Sure, high-school football players spend long, exhausting hours practicing (and according to one study, about 15 percent experience a brain injury each season), but the commitment extends to the rest of the community, from late-night band practices to elaborate pep rallies to meetings with parents.
  • Athletics even dictate the time that school starts each day: despite research showing that later start times improve student performance, many high schools begin before 8 a.m., partly to reserve afternoon daylight hours for sports practice.
  • But here’s the thing: most American principals I spoke with expressed no outrage over the primacy of sports in school. In fact, they fiercely defended it. “If I could wave a magic wand, I’d have more athletic opportunities for students, not less,” Bigham, the former Tennessee principal, told me.
  • His argument is a familiar one: sports can be bait for students who otherwise might not care about school. “I’ve seen truancy issues completely turned around once students begin playing sports,” he says. “When students have a sense of belonging, when they feel tied to the school, they feel more part of the process.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      "The process" equals sports, not education. Dipstick.
  • But at this moment in history, now that more than 20 countries are pulling off better high-school-graduation rates than we are, with mostly nominal athletic offerings, using sports to tempt kids into getting an education feels dangerously old-fashioned.
  • America has not found a way to dramatically improve its children’s academic performance over the past 50 years, but other countries have—and they are starting to reap the economic benefits.
  • “Our analysis suggests that the most engaging environment you can offer students is one of cognitive challenge combined with individualised pedagogical support,” he told me in an e-mail. “If you offer boring and poor math instruction and try to compensate that with interesting sport activities, you may get students interested in sports but I doubt it will do much good to their engagement with school.”
  • But only 40 percent of seniors participate in high-school athletics, and what’s harder to measure is how the overriding emphasis on sports affects everyone who doesn’t play.
  • One study of 30,000 students at the University of Oregon found that the grades of men who did not play sports went down as the football team’s performance improved. Both men and women reported that the better their football team did, the less they studied and the more they partied.
  • Each year, Spelman was spending nearly $1 million on athletics—not for those students, but for the 4 percent of the student body that played sports.
  • Tatum’s signal was clear: lifelong health habits matter more than expensive, elite sporting competitions with rival schools. One priority has real and lasting benefits; the other is a fantasy.
  • Both approaches can be dysfunctional; both set kids up for stress and disappointment. The difference is that 93 percent of South Korean students graduate from high school, compared with just 77 percent of American students—only about 2 percent of whom receive athletic scholarships to college.
  • “I actually believe that sports are extremely important,” Olga Block, a Basis co-founder, told me. “The problem is that once sports become important to the school, they start colliding with academics.”
  • anonymous on 19 Sep 13
     
    "The United States routinely spends more tax dollars per high-school athlete than per high-school math student-unlike most countries worldwide. And we wonder why we lag in international education rankings?"
  • Ed Webb on 20 Sep 13
     
    Awesome read. The whole sports thing is bizarre, at K-12 or college level. Such a distraction, such a distortion of resources & effort.
  • anonymous on 23 Sep 13
     
    It's *such* a distraction, but - dear god - don't even mention that you are entertaining such a notion, even in my ultra-liberal Seattle neighborhood. It's worst than being a baby-killer. Sports are apparantly important because of... reasons. And I though right-wing Christians were the most likely to embrace blind faith in something.
anonymous

Parking rules raise your rent - 0 views

grist.org/...parking-rules-raise-your-rent

shared by anonymous on 26 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • What’s all the excavation for? It’s for parking. Underground parking. In most cities and in most soil conditions, the giant holes are only there to satisfy off-street parking rules, and to do that, you need a deep, deep hole. A hole like this one.
  • One Portland developer told me that each successive layer of excavation — each floor down in the garage — costs two to three times as much as the previous one.
  • City requirements for off-street parking spaces raise rents. They jack it up a lot at the bottom of the housing ladder. Proportionally speaking, the bigger the quota and the smaller the apartment, the larger the rent hike.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • For one-bedroom apartments with two parking places, as is required in places including Bothell and Federal Way, Wash., as much as one-third of the rent may actually pay for parking.
  • a case study of residential real estate development may illuminate how critical parking is to the affordability of housing.
  • But there’s a problem, the architect points out. She reminds you that your city requires you to provide off-street parking on the property for each of the apartments you build. 
  • access ramps to the underground garage will subtract six apartments, and your general contractor estimates that excavating will cost $55,000 per parking space — almost as much as the $60,000 you’ve budgeted to build each apartment.
  • To make a 7 percent return on investment, you’ll have to raise the rent up to $1,300 a month on the remaining units. Will the market support that price?
  • You contemplate whether to dig a second subterranean level in the garage, but the deeper you go, the contractor explains, the more expensive it gets.
  • You’re now considering a building with 30 apartments, plus 19 spaces behind. That’s only 0.6 parking spaces apiece, so you’ll still be in trouble with the city. To get one space per apartment, you’ll need to drop down to 25 apartments or fewer and raise the rent again.
  • The whole situation is aggravating, because the area surrounding your building has vast, untapped reservoirs of parking: surface lots at grocery stores and movie theaters, underground spaces at shopping complexes and office buildings, and idle spots at nearby apartments.
  • You could even rent a group of overnight spaces at a nearby garage and sublet them to tenants, but such innovative solutions are not a legal substitute for on-site parking in your city.
  • You’re stuck with no good options: a long and risky waiver application, underground parking with extremely high rents, or a half-sized building with high rent and slots out back.
  • You now understand why architects, in moments of dark humor, change their discipline’s mantra of “form follows function” to “form follows parking.” And you’re starting to understand how parking requirements are such an enormous barrier to affordable housing.
  • How do parking requirements raise rents? They do it in five ways, some of which affect all of the housing market and some of which only affect parts of it.
  • More costly housing.
  •  Parking quotas drive up construction costs. (“But supply and demand, not cost, set prices,” I hear my Econ 101 professor Hirschel Kasper pointing out.
  • There’s no way you can legally build your no-parking $800-a-month apartments, nor can anyone else, anywhere in town. The whole apartment market will be missing its bottom end.
  • Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute has modeled a typical affordable housing development and concluded that including one parking space per dwelling raises the cost of each rental unit by 12.5 percent
  • adding a second parking space doubles that to 25 percent.
  • Less housing.
  • Parking quotas constrain the supply of dwelling units, particularly of modest, economical ones, which causes their price to rise.
  • Building conversions blocked.
  • Parking quotas often make it prohibitively expensive to adapt buildings for other uses. Developers cannot convert vacant warehouses into lofts, or aging office blocks into condos, unless they somehow shoehorn floors of parking into the historic structures.
  • Dispersed housing.
  • By suppressing the number of apartments on each city lot (see Nos. 2 and 3), quotas force housing demand to spread outward across the landscape.
  • Billing non-parkers.
  •  Parking quotas shift the cost of storing vehicles from those vehicles’ owners into the rent of non-owners. By flooding the market for parking, quotas make it impossible to recoup the full cost of parking by charging its users.
  • This effect does not raise the rent on average beyond what effects 1, 2, and 3 do, but it does shift the cost of storing vehicles from car owners to non-owners. Even tenants who do not use parking pay for it.
  • A forthcoming Sightline analysis will likely reach similar conclusions. If preliminary results hold up, it will show that, at actual apartment and condominium projects in Seattle, the cost of parking is as much as 35 percent of monthly rent.
  • The cost of parking, furthermore, exceeds its market price almost everywhere in King County, so even tenants who do not own cars end up paying for parking through their rent.
  • These five effects interact and reinforce one another. They knock the bottom off of the apartment market, pushing working-class people to double up or commute longer distances. They raise the rent for everyone, driving up the cost of living while lowering the price of parking. And they shift parking costs to those who don’t use it.
  • In 1961, Oakland introduced a quota of one space per new apartment. Immediately, as housing economist Brian Bertha has documented (see page 143), the construction cost per apartment jumped by 18 percent and typical apartment buildings shrank: The number of units per new building fell by 30 percent. Developers built fewer, larger apartments, and the rent rose.
  • A newer proof comes from urban planning professor Michael Manville of Cornell University. He described in the Journal of the American Planning Association what happened in downtown Los Angeles after 1999 when the city enacted an adaptive reuse ordinance (ARO).
  • Quickly, the deregulation of parking yielded more than 6,000 new apartments and condominiums, some of them in previously dilapidated historic office buildings that dated from the Art Deco era.
  • When parking requirements are removed, developers provide more housing and less parking, and also … developers provide different types of housing: housing in older buildings, in previously disinvested areas, and housing marketed toward non-drivers. This latter category of housing tends to sell for less than housing with parking spaces.
  • Minimum parking requirements do not jack the rent up much in the kinds of pricey buildings where the developer would have installed an abundance of parking anyway.
  • What’s more, half of the parking spaces developers provided to tenants were at neighboring or nearby properties. In fact, at 16 of the 57 ARO buildings, all the parking was off-site. These developers did what you wanted to do for your 50-unit building: They secured tenant parking not by pouring concrete but by sipping coffee with the owners of nearby garages.
  • anonymous on 26 Sep 13
     
    "Have you ever watched the excavation that precedes a tall building? It seems to take forever. Then, when the digging is finally done, construction rockets upward in no time. For the past few months, I've been watching a crew excavate the site of a new condo tower on Seattle's First Hill. It's on a route I walk three times a week, so I've had a ringside seat. And here's the thing that finally dawned on me, after years of not really thinking about these holes in the urban ground: What's all the excavation for?"
anonymous

Voters, Not Tycoons, Should Set Priorities - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-tycoons-should-set-priorities

shared by anonymous on 27 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Charity is a virtue -- and it is one of the great, traditional strengths of U.S. civil society. The problem is that as the gap between the rich and everyone else increases, among the super-elite there is a creeping temptation to conflate charity with taxation.
  • "I think we should get rid of taxes as much as we can," Friess explained. "Because you get to decide how you spend your money, rather than the government. I mean, if you have a certain cause, an art museum, or a symphony, and you want to support it, it would be nice if you had the choice to support it. Where we're headed, you'll be taxed, your money taken away, and the government will support it."
  • From the point of view of the person writing the check, the appeal of the self-tax is self-evident: you get to choose where your money goes and you get the kudos for contributing it. But for society as a whole, the self-tax is dangerous. For one thing, someone needs to pay for a lot of unglamourous but essential services, like roads and bank regulation, which are rarely paid for by private charity.
  • anonymous on 27 Nov 13
     
    "Philanthro-capitalism, as its fans have dubbed the muscular and innovative charitable giving favored by today's super-rich, can be an energetic contribution to global civil society. But it must not replace or, worse yet, usurp, public policy as formulated and implemented by our society as a whole. That is called democracy, and it takes taxes, including those paid by the philanthro-capitalists, to pay for it."
anonymous

The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor - 0 views

www.cracked.com/...you-develop-growing-up-poor_p2

shared by anonymous on 27 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • #2. You Become an Obsessive Bean-Counter
  • Paying the bills becomes a work of algebraic artistry as you find out how much they'll take in order to not shut off your gas. Then calculate on the fly the smallest amount of money you need to survive for the next four days, then subtract that from your current bank account, then make adjustments where necessary and eventually arrive at X ... where X equals how much today's bill is going to fuck you for the next three weeks.
  • You get to a point where you stop worrying about exact numbers, and you start to drift into a place where rounding off the bills and bank account isn't a big deal. But your mind still panics when you realize that you don't know exactly how much money is in your checking.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • #1. You Only Spend with the Short Term in Mind
  • But I still only own four pairs of pants myself, and every time I go out to buy a pair, this weird sense of guilt stops me. A gnat buzzing around my head, telling me, "Are you crazy? You don't need another pair of pants. You do laundry every other day, so you always have clean pants to wear. By the way, if you catch me, you'll be rich because I'm a goddamn talking gnat." And then as I'm frantically swatting the air, a security guard politely asks me to leave. Pantsless.
  • This is a problem, because that's actually a very shitty way to manage a budget. You skip over the great 2-for-1 deal on laundry detergent because you're not out of laundry detergent yet. It's kind of opposite of the way we bought food when I was a kid -- where you should be stocking up because buying in bulk is cheaper and the stuff is on sale, you wait until you're scraping the residue off the lid.
  • Then you have to take whatever goddamned price the store gives you that day, because you can't wash your clothes otherwise. If you think that's a minor thing, realize that you're applying this to everything you buy. You're not buying the dryer because Sears is having their once a year "Get these fucking dryers out of our warehouse 50 percent off sale," but because the dryer that's been making that funny noise for a year and a half finally broke.
  • You have to take the first one you see, at whatever price, because your wet clothes are sitting there getting moldy. That "wait until you're desperate" mindset means your money just doesn't go as far.
  • Being poor is a mindset. And it's one that, if given the chance, will make your ass poor again.
  • anonymous on 27 Nov 13
     
    Part 2.
anonymous

The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor | Cracked.com - 0 views

www.cracked.com/...ts-you-develop-growing-up-poor

shared by anonymous on 27 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • #5. You Develop a Taste for Shitty Food
  • Forget about fresh produce or fresh baked goods or fresh anything. Canned vegetables are as cheap as a gang tattoo, and every poor person I knew (including myself) had them as a staple of their diet. Fruit was the same way. Canned peaches could be split between three kids for half the cost of fresh ones, and at the end you had the extra surprise of pure, liquefied sugar to push you into full-blown hyperglycemia.
  • If it wasn't canned, it was frozen. TV dinners, pot pies, chicken nuggets ... meals that can be frozen forever, and preparation isn't more complicated than "Remove from box. Nuke. Eat."
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Just like with the canned food, you grow up thinking that this is the way it's supposed to taste. It's not that you grow to like it, necessarily, but you do grow to expect it.
  • To this day, my kids won't eat fresh green beans. There's such a huge difference in texture and taste compared to the canned version that they're honestly like two different foods. None of us will eat homemade macaroni and cheese. If it doesn't come out of a box, it tastes weird. And the list is a mile long. We've eaten these things for so long, we've grown to prefer them to the fresh version.
  • People who have never been poor love to point out overweight people in the ghetto and sarcastically exclaim, "Yeah, it really looks like she's starving!" And they have no idea that the reason many of them have weight problems is because everything they're putting into their bodies is dirt-cheap, processed bullshit. Grab a TV dinner and look at the nutritional information.
  • Fresh food is expensive and takes forever to prepare. It goes bad quickly, so it requires multiple trips to the grocery store per week, which is something most impoverished people can't do. And since all of those time-saving frozen meals are high in salt and fat, they take up residence in the expanding asses of the people who can't afford anything else.
  • #4. Extra Money Has to Be Spent Right Goddamn Now!
  • And just like many poor people, we'd be broke within days of cashing that check, our living room sporting a new TV. Or we'd replace our old computers and all of our furniture. There's a reason many poor people blow through that money instead of saving it for future bills.
  • When you live in poverty, you're used to your bank account revolving very tightly around a balance of zero. Your work money comes in and goes right back out to bills, leaving you breaking even each month (if you're lucky). That's the life you've gotten used to. It's normal for you.
  • When a windfall check is dropped in your lap, you don't know how to handle it. Instead of thinking, "This will cover our rent and bills for half a year," you immediately jump to all the things you've been meaning to get, but couldn't afford on your regular income.
  • Don't misunderstand me here, it's never a "greed" thing. It's a panic thing. "We have to spend this before it disappears."
  • Have you heard those stories about lottery winners who are bankrupt within a year or two, despite winning millions? That's because they can't turn that off. They can't shake the idea that the money is perishable.
  • When you don't have the extra cash, you don't know how to handle it when you do get some. When you escape that level of poverty, and you find yourself having extra money for the first time, you eventually learn how to manage it.
  • Like anything else, it takes practice, and the poor never get the chance.
  • #3. You Want to Go Overboard on Gift-Giving
  • being the provider of the household, it makes you feel like a failure. And like anything else, that makes you want to overcompensate.
  • After we exhausted our bank account, my fiance and I looked at the number of boxes around the tree and pointed out that it didn't look like all that much. So we waited until our next check and went back for more.We overcompensated so much in the other direction that we damn near drove ourselves back into the poorhouse.
  • anonymous on 27 Nov 13
     
    "But as anybody who's been through the poverty gauntlet can tell you, it changes a person. And it doesn't go away just because you're no longer fighting hobos for their moonshine. For instance ..."
anonymous

U.S. and Iranian Realities - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...us-and-iranian-realities

shared by anonymous on 01 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Though the Iranians are now in a weak strategic position, they had been on the offensive since 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq.
  • They welcomed the invasion; Saddam Hussein had been a mortal enemy of Iran ever since the 1980-1989 Iran-Iraq War. The destruction of his regime was satisfying in itself, but it also opened the door to a dramatic shift in Iran's national security situation.
  • Iraq was Iran's primary threat after the collapse of the Soviet Union because it was the only direction from which an attack might come.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • The United States came to realize that it was threatened from two directions, and it found itself battling both Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. The purpose of the surge in 2007 was to extricate itself from the war with the Sunnis and to block the Shia.
  • It succeeded with the former to a great extent, but it was too late in the game for the latter.
  • Iran thus came to have nothing to fear from Iraq, and could even dominate it. This was a tremendous strategic victory for Iran, which had been defeated by Iraq in 1989.
  • With Iraq contained and the United States withdrawing from the region, Saudi Arabia emerged as Iran's major challenger. Tehran now had the pieces in place to challenge Riyadh.
  • Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had fairly realistic visions of Iranian power along Saudi Arabia's northern border, completely changing the balance of power in the region.
  • The Russians also liked the prospect of a strengthened Iran.
  • First, they were fighting Sunnis in the northern Caucasus.
  • Second, an Iranian sphere of influence not only would threaten Saudi Arabia, it also would compel the United States to re-engage in the region to protect Saudi Arabia and Israel.
  • Creating a strategic crisis for the United States thus suited Moscow's purposes.
  • In 2009, it had appeared extremely likely that an Iran loosely aligned with Russia would enjoy a sphere of influence north of Saudi Arabia.
  • By 2013, this vision was shattered, and with it the more grandiose strategic vision of Ahmadinejad and his allies in Iran.
  • It was Stratfor's view that Iran had less interest in actually acquiring a nuclear weapon than in having a program to achieve one.
  • Possessing a handful of nuclear weapons would be a worst-case scenario for Iran, as it might compel massive attacks from Israel or the United States that Iran could not counter.
  • But having a program to develop one, and making it credible, gave the Iranians a powerful bargaining chip and diverted U.S. and Israeli attention from the growing Iranian sphere of influence.
  • ernally, opposition to any accommodation with the United States was strong. But so was the sense that Ahmadinejad had brought disaster on Iran strategically and economically.
  • There is profound domestic opposition in the United States to dealing with the Iranian regime. Just as the Iranians still genuinely resent the 1953 coup that placed the shah on the throne, the Americans have never forgotten the seizure of the U.S. Embassy and the subsequent yearlong hostage crisis.
  • We must now wait and see what language Iran will craft regarding the hostage crisis to reciprocate the courtesy of Obama's acknowledging the 1953 coup.
  • It has interests in the region, however, and chief among those are avoiding the emergence of a regional hegemon that might destabilize the Middle East.
  • It needs a way to manage the Islamic world without being in a constant state of war.
  • A weakened Iran needs support in its fight with the Sunnis. The United States is interested in ensuring that neither the Sunni nor the Shia win -- in other words, in the status quo of centuries.
  • Having Iran crumble internally therefore is not in the American interest, since it would upset the internal balance.
  • While sanctions were of value in blocking Iranian ascendancy, in the current situation stabilizing Iran is of greater interest.
  • The United States cannot proceed unless the nuclear program is abandoned. Rouhani understands that, but he must have and end to sanctions and a return of Western investment to Iran in exchange.
  • There are two threats to a potential resolution.
  • The primary threat is domestic. In both countries, even talking to each other seems treasonous to some.
  • In Iran, economic problems and exhaustion with grandiosity opens a door. In the United States right now, war is out of the question. And that paves the way to deals unthinkable a few years ago.
  • A second threat is outside interference.
  • Israel comes to mind
  • Saudi Arabia meanwhile will be appalled at a U.S.-Iranian deal.
  • The Russian position will be more interesting.
  • Syria was a tactical victory for them; Iran would be a strategic defeat.
  • The Iranian and American realities argue for a settlement. The psyche of both countries is in the balance.
  • But given how the Iranians and Americans see their positions, the odds are, that something will happen. In my book, The Next Decade, I argued that in the long run Iran and the United States have aligning interests and that an informal alliance is likely in the long run. This isn't the long run yet, and the road will be bumpy, but the logic is there.
  • anonymous on 01 Oct 13
     
    "U.S. President Barack Obama called Iranian President Hassan Rouhani last week in the first such conversation in the 34 years since the establishment of the Islamic Republic. The phone call followed tweets and public statements on both sides indicating a willingness to talk. Though far from an accommodation between the two countries, there are reasons to take this opening seriously -- not only because it is occurring at such a high level, but also because there is now a geopolitical logic to these moves. Many things could go wrong, and given that this is the Middle East, the odds of failure are high. But Iran is weak and the United States is avoiding conflict, and there are worse bases for a deal."
anonymous

In search of perfection, young adults turn to Adderall at work - 1 views

america.aljazeera.com/...dultsturntoadderallatwork.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Benson (whose name, like all the people in this story who discuss their ADHD drug use, has been changed to protect her identity) is typical of a growing population of young adults who went to college in the 2000s. As they age out into the workplace, they’re taking with them the ADHD med habits they developed in college — and finding the drugs still work.
  • a more complete explanation suggests an environment that encourages stimulant use.
  • what is fast becoming the modern condition: guilt and anxiety over any minute not spent working or promoting that work.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • According to IMS Health, in 2007, 5.6 million monthly prescriptions for ADHD medications were written for people ages 20 to 39.
  • By 2011, that number had jumped to 14 million, a staggering 150 percent increase.
  • The active ingredients in Adderall target the parts of the brain responsible for executive function. In other words, Adderall solves the very problems the modern world creates. Long now uses the drug daily
  • The drugs are so popular because they work. “Adderall opens up time for you,” Collier said, emphasizing that using it enables him to get all his work done and still have time to work on other projects.
  • Essentially, Chatterjee argues that the advances in cognitive neuroscience and neuropharmacology mean the question of to what extent we want to create and live in a drug-enhanced society may no longer be relevant. That way of life is already here, and society must now account for the moral implications it brings.
  • Like cosmetic surgery, cosmetic neurology will likely be available only to those with the disposable income to afford elective medicine, expanding the already wide gap between the haves and have-nots.
  • An added concern is that the growing use of stimulants in the workplace will produce a new work environment in which use of neurological enhancement through pharmaceuticals is just one more thing expected of the perfect worker.
  • “Everyone is in an arms race of accomplishment,” Chatterjee said.
  • anonymous on 04 Dec 13
     
    "Ella Benson was a junior in college the first time she took it. With a class assignment due, she was offered the drug as a means to stay up all night and crank out something respectable by morning. It worked, and Benson now says it was the first time she "really connected" with something she was working on. "It was the first paper I wrote where I felt like I came up with an idea that was meaningful and important," she said. "I got an A on it." An A for Adderall."
anonymous

Israel's New Strategic Position - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...israels-new-strategic-position

shared by anonymous on 03 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • After two years of stress, its peace treaty with Egypt remains in place. Syria is in a state of civil war that remains insoluble.
  • Hezbollah does not seem inclined to wage another war with Israel
  • In other words, the situation that has existed since the Camp David Accords were signed remains in place. Israel's frontiers are secure from conventional military attack. In addition, the Palestinians are divided among themselves, and while ineffective, intermittent rocket attacks from Gaza are likely, there is no Intifada underway in the West Bank.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Clearly, a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv would be catastrophic for Israel. Its ability to tolerate that threat, regardless of how improbable it may be, is a pressing concern for Israel.
  • In this context, Iran's nuclear program supersedes all of Israel's other security priorities. Israeli officials believe their allies, particularly those in the United States, should share this view.
  • Israel understands that however satisfactory its current circumstances are, those circumstances are mercurial and to some extent unpredictable.
  • There are plenty of scenarios in which Israel would not be able to manage security threats without American assistance.
  • Thus, Israel has an overriding interest in maintaining its relationship with the United States and in ensuring Iran never becomes a nuclear state. So any sense that the United States is moving away from its commitment to Israel, or that it is moving in a direction where it might permit an Iranian nuclear weapon, is a crisis.
  • Israel's response to the Iran talks -- profound unhappiness without outright condemnation -- has to be understood in this context, and the assumptions behind it have to be examined.
  • Iran does not appear to have a deliverable nuclear weapon at this point. Refining uranium is a necessary but completely insufficient step in developing a weapon. A nuclear weapon is much more than uranium. It is a set of complex technologies, not the least of which are advanced electrical systems and sensors that, given the amount of time the Iranians have needed just to develop not-quite-enough enriched uranium, seems beyond them.
  • Iran simply does not have sufficient fuel to produce a device.
  • The idea that the Iranians will use the next six months for a secret rush to complete the weapon simply isn't the way it works.
  • Nations do not even think of deploying nuclear weapons without extensive underground tests -- not to see if they have uranium but to test that the more complex systems work. That is why they can't secretly develop a weapon: They themselves won't know they have a workable weapon without a test.
  • Of course, there are other strategies for delivering a weapon if it were built. One is the use of a ship to deliver it to the Israeli coast. Though this is possible, the Israelis operate an extremely efficient maritime interdiction system, and the United States monitors Iranian ports.
  • But these weapons are not small. There is such a thing as a suitcase bomb, but that is a misleading name; it is substantially larger than a suitcase, and it is also the most difficult sort of device to build.
  • even assuming Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon, its use against Israel would kill as many Muslims -- among them Shia -- as Israelis, an action tantamount to geopolitical suicide for Tehran.
  • If the Israelis forward-deployed to other countries, the Iranians would spot them. The Israelis can't be certain which sites are real and which are decoys.
  • Some will dismiss this as overestimating Iranian capabilities. This frequently comes from those most afraid that Tehran can build a nuclear weapon and a delivery system. If it could do the latter, it could harden sites and throw off intelligence gathering.
  • But ultimately, the real reason Israel has not attacked Iran's nuclear sites is that the Iranians are so far from having a weapon. If they were closer, the Israelis would have attacked regardless of the difficulty.
  • The Americans, on the other hand, saw an opportunity in the fact that there are no weapons yet and that the sanctions were hurting the Iranians. Knowing that they were not in a hurry to complete and knowing that they were hurting economically, the Iranians likewise saw an opportunity to better their position.
  • What the Americans wanted was an understanding with the Iranians, whereby their role in the region would be balanced against those of other countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, the Arabian emirates and to some extent Israel.
  • Washington wants to have multiple relations with regional actors, not just Israel and Saudi Arabia.
  • The Israelis tempered their response initially because they knew the status of Iran's nuclear program. Even though a weapon is still a grave concern, it is a much longer-term problem than the Israelis admit publicly.
  • if the negotiations fail, no one will be in a more dangerous position for trying. Six months won't make a difference.
  • The Israelis could not simply applaud the process because there is, in fact, a strategic threat to Israel embedded in the talks. Israel has a strategic dependency on the United States.
  • But they understand that the outcome of these talks, if successful, means more than the exchange of a nuclear program for eased sanctions; it means the beginning of a strategic alignment with Iran.
  • As Richard Nixon's China initiative shows, ideology can relent to geopolitical reality. On the simplest level, Iran needs investment, and American companies want to invest. On the more complex level, Iran needs to be certain that Iraq is friendly to its interests and that neither Russia nor Turkey can threaten it in the long run.
  • The United States is trying to create a multipolar region to facilitate a balance-of-power strategy in place of American power.
  • Egypt went from disaster in 1967 to a very capable force in 1973. They had a Soviet patron. They might have another patron in 10 years.
  • But the real Israeli fear is that the United States is moving away from direct intervention to a more subtle form of manipulation. That represents a threat to Israel if Israel ever needs direct intervention rather than manipulation.
  • it threatens Israel because the more relationships the United States has in the region, the less significant Israel is to Washington's strategy.
  • In the end, Israel is a small and weak power. Its power has been magnified by the weakness of its neighbors. That weakness is not permanent
  • anonymous on 03 Dec 13
     
    "Israel has expressed serious concerns over the preliminary U.S.-Iranian agreement, which in theory will lift sanctions levied against Tehran and end its nuclear program. That was to be expected. Less obvious is why the Israeli government is concerned and how it will change Israel's strategic position."
« First ‹ Previous 161 - 180 of 289 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page