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anonymous

An E-Reader Annotation Mini-Manifesto - 1 views

www.teleread.com/...ader-annotation-mini-manifesto

annotation education ereaders research tablets

shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 13 - Cached
  • This, in my opinion, is where digital annotation really becomes interesting: If we share what we highlight with other people, and bring a discussion right into the margin of a book, what do we have, and what have we done? We have added value to the digital reading experience. And looking at annotation in this way, there’s a clear reason why we should give it a little more thought.
  • 1. IT MAKES THE BOOK A SOCIAL OBJECT 
  • 2. IT KEEPS BOOKS ALIVE
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 3. IT’S THE BEST WAY TO DISCOVER
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 13
     
    "I was fascinated to see an article here on Teleread last week regarding digital annotation. For me, this topic is one full of immense possibility. But after reading it through and looking at the comments, I came to the conclusion that, amongst diluted split opinion and some focus on hardware, many seemed to have missed the point."
anonymous

Boston Bombing Suspects: Grassroots Militants from Chechnya - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-grassroots-militants-chechnya

geopolitics immigration reform

shared by anonymous on 19 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Just after 10 p.m. on April 18, the Tsarnaev brothers were identified after having robbed a convenience store in Cambridge, Mass., just three miles from Boston, hours earlier. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, who responded to the robbery, was shot and killed and found in his car by fellow responding officers. The two suspects later hijacked an SUV at gunpoint, releasing the driver unharmed. Authorities later caught up to the suspects, and a car chase ensued.
  • Just after midnight, the car chase ended with a gunfight in Watertown, Mass. The suspects reportedly threw explosive devices at police, though it is not yet confirmed what types of explosives allegedly were used. During the firefight, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was wounded, taken into custody and later reported dead. Dzhokar escaped by driving the stolen SUV through the police barricade and remains at large.
  • According to The New York Times, the two men are from Chechnya. Their family also reportedly lived briefly in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, before moving to the United States in 2002.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's profile on VKontakte, a Russian social media website, said he attended school at the School No. 1 of Makhachkala, spoke English, Russian and Chechen and listed his worldview as Islam. A school administrator from the School No. 1 said the two suspects and their family had previously lived in Kyrgyzstan before moving to Dagestan.
  • Given that they are grassroots actors, there is likely only a small chance that the authorities will discover a formal link between the suspects and a state sponsor or a professional terrorist group, such as al Qaeda or one of its franchise groups.
  • Moreover, given what we have learned about the suspects and the nature of the improvised explosive devices they constructed, it is very likely that the authorities will find that the brothers had read and studied al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's Inspire Magazine.
  • This case also highlights our analysis that the jihadist threat now predominantly stems from grassroots operatives who live in the West rrather than teams of highly trained operatives sent to the United States from overseas, like the team that executed the 9/11 attacks.
  • This demonstrates how the jihadist threat has diminished in recent years -- a trend we expect to continue.
  • There will always be plenty of soft targets in a free society, and it is incredibly easy to kill people, even by untrained operatives. In this case the brothers conducted an attack that was within their capabilities rather than attempting something more grandiose that would require outside assistance - and which could therefore have put them in jeopardy of running into a government informant as they sought help.  It is thus important for citizens to practice good situational awareness and to serve as grassroots defenders against the grassroots threat.
  • anonymous on 19 Apr 13
     
    "The identity of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing -- Chechen brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 -- confirms several of our suspicions. From this profile, the simple nature of the attack, their efforts to rob a convenience store and their lack of an escape plan, we can conclude that they were what we refer to as grassroots militants. Despite being amateurs, such militants clearly still pose a significant threat."
anonymous

The Cuban Spy Network in the U.S. Government - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...uban-spy-network-us-government

cuban spy network

shared by anonymous on 02 May 13 - Cached
  • Velazquez, a former attorney adviser at the U.S. Department of Transportation and a legal officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development, fled the United States for Sweden in 2002 and was indicted in 2004.
  • Velazquez apparently selected Sweden because the country considers espionage to be a political offense, therefore it is not covered under its extradition treaty with the United States.
  • Though the Velazquez indictment is several years old, it provides a detailed and fascinating account of Cuban espionage activity inside the United States. It also raises some significant implications about the daunting challenges facing American counterintelligence agencies.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • The U.S. government alleges that Velazquez was first recruited by the Cuban intelligence service in 1983 while a student at Johns Hopkins. She reportedly traveled from Washington to Mexico City where she met with a Cuban intelligence officer and was formally recruited as an agent. During her studies at Johns Hopkins, the government claims that Velazquez served as a spotter agent who helped the Cuban intelligence service identify, assess and recruit people who occupied sensitive national security positions or who had the potential to move into such positions in the future.
  • During the early 1980s, a left-wing movement developed in many American universities. The movement opposed Reagan's Central American policies, such as opposition to the Sandinistas, support for the Contra rebels and support of the regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala.
  • The indictment alleges that in the fall of 1984, while Montes was working as a clerk at the Department of Justice, Velazquez took her to New York to meet a friend who Velazquez said could provide Montes an opportunity to help the Nicaraguan people.
  • The friend was an intelligence officer assigned to the Cuban mission to the United Nations. The women again traveled to New York together in early 1985 and met the Cuban intelligence officer a second time. He arranged for the two women to secretly travel together to Cuba via Spain.
  • In March of 1985, Velazquez and Montes traveled to Madrid, Spain, where they were met by a Cuban intelligence officer, who provided them with false passports and other documents. They then used these documents to travel to Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia. Once in Prague they were met by another Cuban intelligence officer who provided them with yet another set of false documents, as well as new sets of clothing. The Cuban officer they met in Prague then traveled with the women to Havana.
  • Upon returning to Washington, Montes applied for a job at the Defense Intelligence Agency using Velazquez as a character reference. She was hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency as an analyst in September 1985. Montes would excel at the agency and eventually became the Defense Intelligence Agency's most senior Cuba analyst. She served at that agency until the FBI arrested her in September 2001.
  • Montes pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage charges in March 2002 and is currently serving a 25-year sentence.
  • The Velazquez case, when studied in conjunction with those of Montes and Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, provides a fascinating window into the scope and nature of Cuban intelligence efforts inside the United States.
  • With Velazquez at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Montes at the Defense Intelligence Agency and Myers in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Cubans had incredible coverage of the American government's foreign policy and intelligence community. Even after Montes was arrested and Velazquez fled to Sweden, Myers remained at the State Department until his retirement in 2007.
  • The fact that there were three high-profile Cuban agents who penetrated the U.S. government and who were all associated with the School of Advanced International Studies would seem to be an incredible coincidence.
  • The FBI is probably still looking for potential agents who Myers could have spotted for recruitment when they studied there from 2007 to 2009.
  • MICE stands for money, ideology, compromise and ego.
  • Traditionally, money has proved to be the top motivation for Americans arrested for espionage, but as seen in the Velazquez, Montes and Myers cases, the Cubans were very successful in recruiting American agents using ideology.
  • In addition to the Cuban preference for ideologically motivated agents, this case also shows that the Cuban intelligence service is very patient and is willing to wait years for the agents it recruits to move into sensitive positions within the U.S. government rather than just focus on immediate results.
  • It is also clear that Cuban espionage efforts against the United States did not end with the Cold War and continue to this day.   
  • Perhaps the most disturbing revelation from the Velazquez case for American counterintelligence officials, though, is the fact that Velazquez was not caught due to some operational mistake or intelligence coup.
  • The only reason she was discovered is because of Montes' arrest and confession, which uncovered her activities.
  • This means that her espionage tradecraft was solid for the nearly 18 years that she worked as a Cuban agent within the U.S. government. Furthermore, the background investigations conducted for the security clearances she held with the Department of Transportation and the Agency for International Development did not pick up on her anti-American sentiments -- even the "full field" investigation that would have been conducted prior to her being granted a Top Secret clearance.  
  • It is not surprising that the background investigations failed to uncover Velazquez's espionage activities. Background investigations often are seen as mundane tasks, and thus are not given high priority -- especially when there are so many other "real" cases to investigate.
  • these investigations are most often done by contract investigators whose bureaucratic bosses emphasize speed over substance, meaning important leads are often ignored because of a case deadline.
  • In fact, contractors who do attempt to dig deep are sometimes accused of trying to milk the system in an effort to acquire more points (the basis upon which contract investigators are paid) by running additional leads and interviewing additional people.
  • Quite frankly, when it comes to background investigations, the prevalent attitude is to do the minimum work necessary to check off the prerequisite boxes and get the investigation over as quickly -- and as superficially -- as possible.
  • Background investigations have become perfunctory bureaucratic processes that lack the ability to uncover the type of information required to catch a spy who does not want to be caught.  
  • the polygraph that Velazquez and Montes received during their first trip to Cuba underscores the limitation of polygraph examinations -– they only work really well on honest people.
  • If a small, poor nation like Cuba can successfully recruit so many agents and place them in critical positions within the U.S. government for so long, what does this portend about the efforts and successes of larger or richer countries with aggressive intelligence agencies like China, Russia, Israel and India?
  • anonymous on 02 May 13
     
    "On April 25, the U.S. government announced that it was unsealing an indictment charging Marta Rita Velazquez with conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Cuban government. Velazquez, a former attorney adviser at the U.S. Department of Transportation and a legal officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development, fled the United States for Sweden in 2002 and was indicted in 2004. Velazquez apparently selected Sweden because the country considers espionage to be a political offense, therefore it is not covered under its extradition treaty with the United States. She and her husband also lived in Sweden from 1998 to 2000, so the country was familiar to them."
anonymous

The oldest story ever written - 1 views

www.salon.com/...gilgamesh

salon history ancient biblical

shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 13 - Cached
  • David Damrosch’s artful, engrossing new history, “The Buried Book,” relates how “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was lost and found — or rather how it was found and lost, since he tells the story backward, from the present to the past, in an archaeological fashion.
  • Think of it: He asks you to be excited about what the characters in his story are discovering even before you know quite how important it is.
  • The recovery of the “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was less dramatic, mostly because it was drawn out over decades, but the prize was even more fabulous than the treasures of King Tut’s tomb: the oldest story ever told — or, at least, the oldest one told in writing.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • It is the tale of a king, and full of sex, violence, love, thievery, defiance, grief and divine retribution. It’s the first buddy picture, the first depiction of the Underworld, the precursor to the legend of Noah and his ark.
  • If it were like hundreds of other great and ancient stories — the death and resurrection of Osirus, the quest of Orpheus, Sigurd’s slaying of the dragon Fafnir — it would have reached us through countless retellings, gradually morphing and splitting and fusing with other stories over the years.
  • Those stories come to us like the DNA of our ancestors, still present within us, but reshaped by generations of mutations and ultimately as familiar as our own faces.
  • Instead, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” preserved on 12 clay tablets, fell into a kind of time capsule in the fabled cradle of civilization.
  • much of the epic feels both fresh and alien, a piece of the past all Westerners (and many Asians) share, unsmoothed by the passage of the centuries.
  • The announcement that some of those old, broken slabs of clay seemed to confirm the biblical story of the flood and Noah’s Ark made headlines and instantly catapulted the brand-new discipline of Assyriology to public attention.
  • Smith, too, seized upon the scenes of the flood as validation of the Old Testament account; many early archaeologists were obsessed with biblical verification. Not everyone agreed, however.
  • The New York Times suggested that the inscription “may be regarded as a confirmation of the statement that there are various traditions of the deluge apart from the Biblical one, which is perhaps legendary like the rest.” (In fact, stories of global floods crop up in all sorts of disconnected mythologies.)
  • Certainly, the epic didn’t point to human sinfulness as the cause of the flood, as the Bible does. According to Uta-napishtim, the gods wiped out humanity because the exploding population was making too much noise and disturbing their sleep.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Apr 13
       
      I love ancient gods. They have such personality.
  • largely because he wasn’t mentioned in the Bible.
  • The story of the story, though, is something else again. Luck most definitely played a role. Had a roof beam or a column fallen a different way during the sacking and destruction of Ashurbanipal’s palace in 612 B.C., the tablets might not have been left broken but largely intact.
  • Had “The Epic of Gilgamesh” been taken to another library, the tablets might have been worn out by use and discarded or lost in other disasters like the burning of the great Library at Alexandria
  • Damrosch reminds us that only seven of Aeschylus’ 90 tragedies have survived to modern times. Without the work of dedicated Assyriologists we might have the tablets but be unable to read them.
  • To the ancient Mesopotamians, it probably seemed impossible that one day Gilgamesh would be forgotten — for us, that would be like forgetting Heracles or Superman or Little Red Riding Hood. After a while, people stopped telling his story, and if it weren’t for those buried tablets and the men who dug them up, his name would have vanished forever. In a way, Gilgamesh got his immortality after all.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Apr 13
       
      I purposely didn't highlight the stories. You have to *read those* on the page to truly appreciate them. The Epic of Gilgamesh was one of those stories that I learned about during my difficult recovery from adolescent Fundy-Xtianity. In youthful, rebellious glee, I enjoyed that I could dismiss The Flood. With age, though, I see both - and many other heavily borrowed from stories - as part of a continuum of folklore and wisdom. Quite fascinating.
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 13
     
    "There's no better illustration of the fragility and the power of literature than the history of 'The Epic of Gilgamesh,' the oldest known literary work, composed in Babylonia more than 3,000 years ago. About 400 years later, after one of the ruthless, bloody sieges typical of that time, the epic was buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace. There it lay, utterly forgotten along with the name of the king who once reigned in that palace, until a British archaeologist and his Iraqi assistant unearthed it not far from the modern city of Mosul in 1840." Hat tip to George Station (originally from Hsiao-yun Chan), both on Google+
anonymous

Signaling, Education, and Culture - 0 views

cafehayek.com/...ing-education-and-culture.html

shared by anonymous on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • For example, suppose you discover that Star Trek uniforms are cheaper, more comfortable, and safer than conventional clothing. Before you switch to full-time Trekkie wear, you would be wise to ponder other people’s reaction to your fashion statement. If you’re even vaguely connected to mainstream American society, that reaction would probably be very negative. You’d probably lose your job, your friends, and maybe even your spouse. (If any). Why? Because you’re acting weird, and most people loathe the weird… or the correlates of the weird.
  • At the end of the post, Bryan notes that his critique of differentness is partly an argument against online education. He’s arguing that online education is unlikely to take off because you’ll be signaling that you’re weird for getting an online degree instead of going to a bricks-and-mortar college.
  • Empirically, how does Bryan explain the home-schooling movement? In 2007 there were 1.5 million home-schooled children, about 3% of the school-age population. I call that a big number though Bryan might disagree. But the point is that millions of kids and their parents risked the stigma of appearing extremely different to their neighbors. They did that because they thought it was worth it. Eventually, it doesn’t look so different.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • On theoretical grounds, if Star Trek uniforms really are cheaper, more comfortable, and safer than conventional clothing, there will be cultural forces that will work to make them more appealing. Otherwise how does any innovation happen?
  • Bryan wants to argue that conformity ossifies our behavior, but the world around us is full of non-conformity that eventually becomes no big deal. The first few people who bought a Palm Pilot looked goofy poking at a screen with a stylus. I remember. I was one of them. Now, it is totally culturally acceptable to poke at a screen with a stylus. How did that happen? PDAs are useful, so there were market forces to encourage tolerating the poking behavior.
  • anonymous on 22 Jan 13
     
    "Bryan Caplan explains the costs of being different or appearing different:"
anonymous

Calorie restriction and longevity: Monkey study shows hunger doesn't increase longevity, but type of food does. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...type_of_food_does_.single.html

shared by anonymous on 10 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Since early adulthood, Canto had been fed 30 percent less food than Owen. The two monkeys were part of a long-running study of dietary restriction and aging, conducted at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center in Madison. Beginning in the late 1980s, the researchers had been deliberately underfeeding Canto and some of his unfortunate colleagues. By late 2008, enough animals had died that the scientists could report meaningful results in Science.
  • The differences were as striking as the side-by-side photos: The calorie-restricted monkeys were far healthier, in terms of basic measures such as blood pressure, and had far less incidence of age-related disease, such as diabetes and cancer. And they seemed to be living longer: While 37 percent of the control monkeys had died of age-related causes at the time of the report, only 13 percent of the restricted monkeys had done so.
  • The results seemed to confirm one of the longest-held beliefs about aging: That eating less—a lot less—will help you live longer.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Now a new paper has come out in Nature, reporting a parallel monkey study conducted by the National Institute of Aging. The NIA study began around the same time as the Wisconsin study, with similar experimental conditions. But the Nature authors found no increase in lifespan; the calorically restricted animals lived no longer, statistically, than their well-fed cousins. Even stranger, the NIA control monkeys, the ones who ate a lot, actually lived just as long as the calorie-restricted Wisconsin primates. What gives?
  • Many of us simply roll our eyes and click away when yet another medical study contradicts the last study—so what else is new? Coffee’s bad for you, until it’s good for you—and so is red wine. Antioxidants are essential, or they’re useless. And so on. Contradictory studies are an essential part of the science-news stream—and, in fact, an important part of science itself. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
  • The fact that it didn’t, and that the two studies conflict, has unintentionally revealed a different truth about diet and aging. In both studies, the monkeys that ate less were healthier by a number of measures—and suffered far less from age-related disease. Even better, when taken together, both studies reveal a different path toward living a healthier life—one that doesn’t require self-starvation.
  • Over the years, various researchers have shown that caloric restriction can extend life in bats, dogs, and even spiders, and on down to nematode worms and single-celled organisms like yeast. After decades of work, it remains the only way known to increase maximum lifespan. So a lot is riding on the concept, scientifically speaking.
  • In the 1990s, Leonard Guarente of MIT discovered a class of longevity genes in yeast called sirtuins that appear to be activated by a lack of food. Sirtuins appeared to be “conserved” in evolution, meaning that they appear in nearly all species, on up to humans. Sirtuins are thought to have evolved as a way to enable animals to survive periods of famine. They seem to work by regulating certain metabolic pathways and reduce the amount of damage cells endure.
  • If researchers could somehow identify and isolate that mechanism, they’d be that much closer to some kind of longevity pill. Except for one inconvenient fact: Caloric restriction itself does not always work.
  • While 80 percent of the monkeys were still alive, the restricted animals had better measures of cardiovascular health, hormone levels, and blood-sugar management, an early indicator of diabetes risk. So it came as a bit of a surprise, eight years later, to find that the hungry monkeys are not actually living longer.
  • In fact, caloric restriction really seemed to work best in standard laboratory mice. This may be because they are predisposed to eat a lot, gain weight, and reproduce early—and thus are more sensitive to reduced food intake. (Slate’s Daniel Engber has written about how overfed lab mice have distorted scientific research.)
  • But in a long-awaited, well-funded monkey study like this, an “odd” result could not be ignored. Still stranger was the fact that even though the underfed monkeys were healthier than the others, they still didn’t live longer. They had lower incidence of cardiovascular disease, as well as diabetes and cancer—and when these diseases did appear, they did so later
  • At first, it seemed like a scientist’s nightmare: The control group is indistinguishable from the test group. In clinical trials, a result like this would kill any drug candidate. Then de Cabo took a closer look at a seemingly minor difference between the Wisconsin and NIA studies: the animals’ diets.
  • It didn’t take him long to realize that the animals’ food was more important than anyone had thought. The NIA monkeys were fed a natural-ingredient diet, made from ground wheat, ground corn, and other whole foods; the Wisconsin animals ate a “purified” diet, a heavily refined type of food that allowed the researchers to control the nutritional content more precisely. Because the NIA monkeys were eating more natural ingredients, de Cabo realized, they were taking in more polyphenols, micronutrients, flavonoids, and other compounds that may have health-promoting effects.
  • Furthermore, the NIA diet consisted of 4 percent sucrose—while in the Wisconsin diet, sucrose accounted for some 28 percent of the total calories.
  • “In physics, a calorie is a calorie,” says de Cabo. “In nutrition and animal physiology, there is more and more data coming out that says that the state of the animal is going to depend more on where the calories are coming from.”
  • In other words, it matters whether you eat at Whole Foods, like the suburban-Maryland NIA monkeys—or at the ballpark, like the Wisconsin monkeys. Guess which works out better in the end?
  • In his study based on the two-year experience, Walford reported that the main effect of caloric restriction was to drastically lower his fellow crew members’ cholesterol levels, to 140 and below—well below the average for people in the industrialized world. Walford concluded that a calorie-restricted diet would have the same beneficial effects that he and other scientists had observed in mice.
  • Several studies have shown that excessive leanness—seen often in calorie-restricting humans—can be as risky as obesity. Taken together, these studies suggest that the optimal body-mass index is about 25, which is on the verge of being overweight.
  • But if it’s OK to be almost overweight, it might not pay to go beyond that. Another key difference between the two monkey studies has to do with the definition of “ad libitum.” While the Wisconsin control-group monkeys were allowed to stuff themselves, with the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat buffet for several hours at feeding times, the NIA monkeys were given a fixed amount of food. “You could view it as the Wisconsin monkeys were overindulging, like the rest of the American population,” says Rozalyn Anderson, a member of the Wisconsin team. Compared with           their Wisconsin brothers, then, the NIA monkeys in the non-calorie-restricted control group were arguably practicing a mild form of calorie restriction—and that, Anderson suggests, might have made a difference.
  • anonymous on 10 Sep 12
     
    "Rhesus monkeys do not often appear on the front page of the New York Times, but on July 10, 2009, there were two, pictured side by side: Canto, age 27, and Owen, age 29. In monkey terms, this made them the equivalent of senior citizens, but the striking thing was that Owen looked like he could have been Canto's beer-drinking, dissipated dad. His hair was patchy, his face sagged, and his body was draped in rolls of fat. Canto, on the other hand, sported a thick (if graying) mane, a slender frame, and an alert, lively mien. What made the difference? Diet."
anonymous

War and Bluff: Iran, Israel and the United States - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-iran-israel-and-united-states

geopolitics iran israel united states

shared by anonymous on 12 Sep 12 - Cached
  • The Israeli and American positions are intimately connected, but the precise nature of the connection is less clear. Israel publicly casts itself as eager to strike Iran but restrained by the United States, though unable to guarantee it will respect American wishes if Israel sees an existential threat emanating from Iran. The United States publicly decries Iran as a threat to Israel and to other countries in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia, but expresses reservations about military action out of fears that Iran would respond to a strike by destabilizing the region and because it does not believe the Iranian nuclear program is as advanced as the Israelis say it is.
  • The Israelis have less tolerance for risk than the Americans, who have less tolerance for the global consequences of an attack.
  • From the Iranian point of view, a nuclear program has been extremely valuable. Having one has brought Iran prestige in the Islamic world and has given it a level of useful global political credibility.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Having countries like Russia and China unwilling to see Iran crushed has helped. Iran can survive sanctions.
  • A failed military action would benefit Iran, proving its power. By contrast, a successful attack that dramatically delayed or destroyed Iran's nuclear capability would be a serious reversal.
  • Although the United States hailed Stuxnet as a major success, it hardly stopped the Iranian program, if the Israelis are to be believed. In that sense, it was a failure.
  • The principle of mutual assured destruction, which stabilized the U.S.-Soviet balance in the Cold War, would govern Iran's use of nuclear weapons. If Iran struck Israel, the damage would be massive, forcing the Iranians to assume that the Israelis and their allies (specifically, the United States) would launch a massive counterattack on Iran, annihilating large parts of Iran's population.
  • It is here that we get to the heart of the issue. While from a rational perspective the Iranians would be fools to launch such an attack, the Israeli position is that the Iranians are not rational actors and that their religious fanaticism makes any attempt to predict their actions pointless. Thus, the Iranians might well accept the annihilation of their country in order to destroy Israel in a sort of megasuicide bombing. The Israelis point to the Iranians' rhetoric as evidence of their fanaticism. Yet, as we know, political rhetoric is not always politically predictive. In addition, rhetoric aside, Iran has pursued a cautious foreign policy, pursuing its ends with covert rather than overt means. It has rarely taken reckless action, engaging instead in reckless rhetoric.
  • Herein lies the root of the great Israeli debate that pits the Netanyahu government, which appears to regard Iran as irrational, against significant segments of the Israeli military and intelligence communities, which regard Iran as rational.
  • Assuming the Iranians are rational actors, their optimal strategy lies not in acquiring nuclear weapons and certainly not in using them, but instead in having a credible weapons development program that permits them to be seen as significant international actors.
  • Up to this point, the Iranians have not even fielded a device for testing, let alone a deliverable weapon.
  • For all their activity, either their technical limitations or a political decision has kept them from actually crossing the obvious redlines and left Israel trying to define some developmental redline.
  • Both want to appear more fearsome than either is actually willing to act.
  • The Iranian strategy has been to maintain ambiguity on the status of its program, while making it appear that the program is capable of sudden success -- without ever achieving that success. The Israeli strategy has been to appear constantly on the verge of attack without ever attacking and to use the United States as its reason for withholding attacks, along with the studied ambiguity of the Iranian program.
  • If a country can develop nuclear weapons, there is no reason it can't develop hardened and dispersed sites and create enough ambiguity to deprive Israeli and U.S. intelligence of confidence in their ability to determine what is where.
  • I am reminded of the raid on Son Tay during the Vietnam War. The United States mounted an effort to rescue U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam only to discover that its intelligence on where the POWs were located was completely wrong. Any politician deciding whether to attack Iran would have Son Tay and a hundred other intelligence failures chasing around their brains, especially since a failed attack on Iran would be far worse than no attack.
  • Dispersed sites reduce Israel's ability to strike hard at a target and to acquire a battle damage assessment that would tell Israel three things:
  • first, whether the target had been destroyed when it was buried under rock and concrete; second, whether the target contained what Israel thought it contained; and third, whether the strike had missed a backup site that replicated the one it destroyed.
  • if the Israelis had an ultrasecret miracle weapon, postponing its use might compromise its secrecy. I suspect that if they had such a weapon, they would have used it by now.
  • The Americans emphasize these points, but they are happy to use the Israeli threats to build pressure on the Iranians. The United States wants to undermine Iranian credibility in the region by making Iran seem vulnerable. The twin forces of Israeli rhetoric and sanctions help make Iran look embattled. The reversal in Syria enhances this sense. Naval maneuvers in the Strait of Hormuz add to the sense that the United States is prepared to neutralize Iranian counters to an Israeli airstrike, making the threat Israel poses and the weakness of Iran appear larger.
  • When we step back and view the picture as a whole, we see Iran using its nuclear program for political reasons but being meticulous not to make itself appear unambiguously close to success.
  • We see the Israelis talking as if they were threatened but acting as if they were in no rush to address the supposed threat.
  • And we see the Americans acting as if they are restraining Israel, paradoxically appearing to be Iran's protector even though they are using the Israeli threat to increase Iranian insecurity.
  • It is the U.S.-Israeli byplay that is most fascinating. On the surface, Israel is driving U.S. policy. On closer examination, the reverse is true. Israel has bluffed an attack for years and never acted. Perhaps now it will act, but the risks of failure are substantial. If Israel really wants to act, this is not obvious.
  • Speeches by politicians do not constitute clear guidelines.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 12 Sep 12
       
      No kidding.
  • Rather than seeing Netanyahu as trying to force the United States into an attack, it is more useful to see Netanyahu's rhetoric as valuable to U.S. strategy. Israel and the United States remain geopolitically aligned. Israel's bellicosity is not meant to signal an imminent attack, but to support the U.S. agenda of isolating and maintaining pressure on Iran. That would indicate more speeches from Netanyahu and greater fear of war. But speeches and emotions aside, intensifying psychological pressure on Iran is more likely than war.
  • anonymous on 12 Sep 12
     
    "For the past several months, the Israelis have been threatening to attack Iranian nuclear sites as the United States has pursued a complex policy of avoiding complete opposition to such strikes while making clear it doesn't feel such strikes are necessary. At the same time, the United States has carried out maneuvers meant to demonstrate its ability to prevent the Iranian counter to an attack -- namely blocking the Strait of Hormuz. While these maneuvers were under way, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said no "redline" exists that once crossed by Iran would compel an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The Israeli government has long contended that Tehran eventually will reach the point where it will be too costly for outsiders to stop the Iranian nuclear program."
anonymous

Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don't Realize It) - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...260639

shared by anonymous on 12 Sep 12 - Cached
  • The inequality of wealth and income in the U.S. has become an increasingly prevalent issue in recent years. One reason for this is that the visibility of this inequality has been increasing gradually for a long time--as society has become less segregated, people can now see more clearly how much other people make and consume.
  • imagine that we took all Americans and sorted them by wealth along a line with the poorest on the left and continuing as wealth increases until on the right we have the richest. Now, imagine that we divide them into five buckets with an equal number of citizens in each. The first bucket contains the poorest 20% of the population, the next contains the second wealthiest tier, and so on down to the wealthiest 20% (see Figure 1).
  • With this in mind, from the total pie of wealth (100%) what percent do you think the bottom 40% (that is, the first two buckets together) of Americans possess? And what about the top 20%? If you guessed around 9% for the bottom and 59% for the top, you're pretty much in line with the average response we got when we asked this question of thousands of Americans.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • The reality is quite different. Based on Wolff (2010), the bottom 40% of the population combined has only 0.3% of wealth while the top 20% possesses 84% (see Figure 2). These differences between levels of wealth in society comprise what's called the Gini coefficient, which is one way to quantify inequality.
  • When economists consider the desirable level of inequality, they usually define the ideal inequality from the perspective of economic efficiency: What level of inequality will motivate people to be the most productive and move up the wealth ladder? What level of inequality will allow those at the top to lift up society as a whole (say, by having the resources to invent new technologies)? What level of wealth will keep salaries low and competition high?
  • inequality is not just about economic efficiency. It's also about our day-to-day experience as citizens, the influence of envy, our social mobility, the importance of equal opportunity, our mutual dependency on each other, etc.
  • We took a step back and examined social inequality based on the definition that the philosopher John Rawls gave in his book A Theory of Justice. In Rawls' terms, a society is just if a person understands all the conditions within that society and is willing to enter it in a random place (in terms of socio-economic status, gender, race, and so on).
  • They could be among the poorest or the richest, or anywhere in between. Rawls called this idea the "veil of ignorance" because the decision of whether to enter a particular society is disconnected from the particular knowledge that the individual has about the level of wealth that he or she will have after making the decision.
  • we did two things.
  • First, we asked 5,522 people to create a distribution of wealth among the five buckets such that they themselves would be willing to enter that society at a random place.
  • What was particularly surprising about the results was that when we examined the ideal distributions for Republicans and Democrats, we found them to be quite similar (see Figure 4).
  • When we examined the results by other variables, including income and gender, we again found no appreciable differences. It seems that Americans -- regardless of political affiliation, income, and gender -- want the kind of wealth distribution shown in Figure 3, which is very different from what we have and from what we think we have (see Figure 2).
  • in another task, we made things simpler (see Figure 5) and asked people to choose between two unidentified distributions (again under the veil of ignorance). The first option, unbeknownst to participants, reflected the distribution of wealth in America. For the second option we modified the distribution found in Sweden, making it substantially more equal (we referred to this fictional nation as "Equalden").
  • We discovered that 92% of Americans preferred the distribution of "Equalden" to America's. And if one were to assume that the 8% who preferred America's distribution was made up of wealthy Republican men, he or she would be mistaken. The preference for "Equalden" was slightly different for Republicans and Democrats, and in the expected direction, but the magnitude was very small: 93.5% of Democrats and 90.2% of Republicans preferred the more equal distribution.
  • similarity across the political spectrum is far more substantial than the differences.
  • There are a few lessons that we can learn from this.
  • The first is that we vastly underestimate the level of inequality that we have in America.
  • Second, we want much more equality than both what we have and what we think we have.
  • when asked in a way that avoids hot-button terms, misconceptions, and the level of wealth people currently possess, Americans are actually in agreement about wanting a more equal distribution of wealth.
  • In fact, the vast majority of Americans prefer a distribution of wealth more equal than what exists in Sweden, which is often placed rhetorically at the extreme far left in terms of political ideology
  • A third lesson concerns the political gap between Democrats and Republicans
  • how is it possible that we found so little difference between them in our study?
  • One reason for this could be our inability to separate our ideology from our current state of wealth.
  • Another reason could be politicians, who, in order to rally people to their side, try to generate feelings of greater difference and opposition--and therefore conflict--than actually exist.
  • The veil of ignorance accomplishes something similar to blind taste testing.
  • when we express opinions about politics and life in general, we can't help but be influenced by our own varying degrees wealth and ignorance of others' lives. The veil of ignorance works to separate our core beliefs from the biases and prejudices we develop over time and through the subjective experience of being part of a certain class and demographic.
  • It is one thing to get people to tell us what kind of society the would want to join, and another to get them part with their money in order to create that society.
  • Social justice and optimal wealth distribution are highly complex topics, and it's hard to imagine that any study could dramatically change opinions about education, welfare, or tax reform. But consider this. When we ran the same basic experiment in Australia, we found Australians did not differ much from Americans in their views of the ideal distribution. When we ran another version of it with NPR listeners, and then readers of Forbes Magazine, the results were still basically the same. And most likely, if you participated in one of our tests, your response too would have fallen in line with these findings.
  • anonymous on 12 Sep 12
     
    "We asked thousands of people to describe their ideal distribution of wealth, from top to bottom. The vast majority -- rich, poor, GOP and Democrat -- imagined a far more equal nation. Here's why it matters."
anonymous

Information Consumerism: The Price of Hypocrisy - 0 views

www.faz.net/...ice-of-hypocrisy-12292374.html

shared by anonymous on 05 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • let us not pass over America’s surveillance addiction in silence. It is real; it has consequences; and the world would do itself a service by sending America to a Big Data rehab. But there’s more to learn from the Snowden affair.
  • It has also busted a number of myths that are only peripherally related to surveillance: myths about the supposed benefits of decentralized and commercially-operated digital infrastructure, about the current state of technologically-mediated geopolitics, about the existence of a separate realm known as “cyberspace.”
  • First of all, many Europeans are finally grasping, to their great dismay, that the word “cloud” in “cloud computing” is just a euphemism for “some dark bunker in Idaho or Utah.”
  • ...50 more annotations...
  • Second, ideas that once looked silly suddenly look wise. Just a few months ago, it was customary to make fun of Iranians, Russians and Chinese who, with their automatic distrust of all things American, spoke the bizarre language of “information sovereignty.”
  • Look who’s laughing now: Iran’s national email system launched a few weeks ago. Granted the Iranians want their own national email system, in part, so that they can shut it down during protests and spy on their own people AT other times. Still, they got the geopolitics exactly right: over-reliance on foreign communications infrastructure is no way to boost one’s sovereignty. If you wouldn’t want another nation to run your postal system, why surrender control over electronic communications?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Aug 13
       
      This could have been written by StratFor.
  • Third, the sense of unconditional victory that civil society in both Europe and America felt over the defeat of the Total Information Awareness program – a much earlier effort to establish comprehensive surveillance – was premature.
  • The problem with Total Information Awareness was that it was too big, too flashy, too dependent on government bureaucracy. What we got instead, a decade later, is a much nimbler, leaner, more decentralized system, run by the private sector and enabled by a social contract between Silicon Valley and Washington
  • This is today’s America in full splendor: what cannot be accomplished through controversial legislation will be accomplished through privatization, only with far less oversight and public control.
  • From privately-run healthcare providers to privately-run prisons to privately-run militias dispatched to war zones, this is the public-private partnership model on which much of American infrastructure operates these days.
  • Communications is no exception. Decentralization is liberating only if there’s no powerful actor that can rip off the benefits after the network has been put in place.
  • Fourth, the idea that digitization has ushered in a new world, where the good old rules of realpolitik no longer apply, has proved to be bunk. There’s no separate realm that gives rise to a new brand of “digital” power; it’s one world, one power, with America at the helm.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Aug 13
       
      THIS right here, is crucial.
  • The sheer naivete of statements like this – predicated on the assumption that somehow one can “live” online the way one lives in the physical world and that virtual politics works on a logic different from regular politics – is illustrated by the sad case of Edward Snowden, a man with a noble mission and awful trip-planning skills.
  • Fifth, the once powerful myth that there exists a separate, virtual space where one can have more privacy and independence from social and political institutions is dead.
  • Microsoft’s general counsel wrote that “looking forward, as Internet-based voice and video communications increase, it is clear that governments will have an interest in using (or establishing) legal powers to secure access to this kind of content to investigate crimes or tackle terrorism. We therefore assume that all calls, whether over the Internet or by fixed line or mobile phone, will offer similar levels of privacy and security.”
  • Read this again: here’s a senior Microsoft executive arguing that making new forms of communication less secure is inevitable – and probably a good thing.
  • Convergence did happen – we weren’t fooled! – but, miraculously, technologies converged on the least secure and most wiretap-friendly option available.
  • This has disastrous implications for anyone living in dictatorships. Once Microsoft and its peers start building software that is insecure by design, it turbocharges the already comprehensive spying schemes of authoritarian governments. What neither NSA nor elected officials seem to grasp is that, on matters of digital infrastructure, domestic policy is also foreign policy; it’s futile to address them in isolation.
  • This brings us to the most problematic consequence of Snowden’s revelations. As bad as the situation is for Europeans, it’s the users in authoritarian states who will suffer the most.
  • And not from American surveillance, but from domestic censorship. How so? The already mentioned push towards “information sovereignty” by Russia, China or Iran would involve much more than protecting their citizens from American surveillance. It would also trigger an aggressive push to shift public communication among these citizens – which, to a large extent, still happens on Facebook and Twitter – to domestic equivalents of such services.
  • It’s probably not a coincidence that LiveJournal, Russia’s favorite platform, suddenly had maintenance issues – and was thus unavailable for general use – at the very same time that a Russian court announced its verdict to the popular blogger-activist Alexei Navalny.
  • For all the concerns about Americanization and surveillance, US-based services like Facebook or Twitter still offer better protection for freedom of expression than their Russian, Chinese or Iranian counterparts.
  • This is the real tragedy of America’s “Internet freedom agenda”: it’s going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning.
  • On matters of “Internet freedom” – democracy promotion rebranded under a sexier name – America enjoyed some legitimacy as it claimed that it didn’t engage in the kinds of surveillance that it itself condemned in China or Iran. Likewise, on matters of cyberattacks, it could go after China’s cyber-espionage or Iran’s cyber-attacks because it assured the world that it engaged in neither.
  • Both statements were demonstrably false but lack of specific evidence has allowed America to buy some time and influence.
  • What is to be done? Let’s start with surveillance. So far, most European politicians have reached for the low-hanging fruit – law – thinking that if only they can better regulate American companies – for example, by forcing them to disclose how much data and when they share with NSA – this problem will go away.
  • This is a rather short-sighted, naïve view that reduces a gigantic philosophical problem – the future of privacy – to seemingly manageable size of data retention directives.
  • Our current predicaments start at the level of ideology, not bad policies or their poor implementation.
  • As our gadgets and previously analog objects become “smart,” this Gmail model will spread everywhere. One set of business models will supply us with gadgets and objects that will either be free or be priced at a fraction of their real cost.
  • In other words, you get your smart toothbrush for free – but, in exchange, you allow it to collect data on how you use the toothbrush.
  • If this is, indeed, the future that we are heading towards, it’s obvious that laws won’t be of much help, as citizens would voluntarily opt for such transactions – the way we already opt for free (but monitorable) email and cheaper (but advertising-funded) ereaders.
  • In short, what is now collected through subpoenas and court orders could be collected entirely through commercial transactions alone.
  • Policymakers who think that laws can stop this commodificaton of information are deluding themselves. Such commodification is not happening against the wishes of ordinary citizens but because this is what ordinary citizen-consumer want.
  • Look no further than Google’s email and Amazon’s Kindle to see that no one is forced to use them: people do it willingly. Forget laws: it’s only through political activism and a robust intellectual critique of the very ideology of “information consumerism” that underpins such aspirations that we would be able to avert the inevitable disaster.
  • Where could such critique begin? Consider what might, initially, seem like a bizarre parallel: climate change.
  • For much of the 20th century, we assumed that our energy use was priced correctly and that it existed solely in the consumer paradigm of “I can use as much energy as I can pay for.” Under that paradigm, there was no ethics attached to our energy use: market logic has replaced morality – which is precisely what has enabled fast rates of economic growth and the proliferation of consumer devices that have made our households electronic paradises free from tiresome household work.
  • But as we have discovered in the last decade, such thinking rested on a powerful illusion that our energy use was priced correctly – that we in fact paid our fair share.
  • But of course we had never priced our energy use correctly because we never factored in the possibility that life on Earth might end even if we balance all of our financial statements.
  • The point is that, partly due to successful campaigns by the environmental movement, a set of purely rational, market-based decisions have suddenly acquired political latency, which has given us differently designed cars, lights that go off if no one is in the room, and so forth.
  • It has also produced citizens who – at least in theory – are encouraged to think of implications that extend far beyond the ability to pay their electricity bill.
  • Right now, your decision to buy a smart toothbrush with a sensor in it – and then to sell the data that it generates – is presented to us as just a purely commercial decision that affects no one but us.
  • But this is so only because we cannot imagine an information disaster as easily as we can imagine an environmental disaster.
  • there are profound political and moral consequences to information consumerism– and they are comparable to energy consumerism in scope and importance.
  • We should do our best to suspend the seeming economic normalcy of information sharing. An attitude of “just business!” will no longer suffice. Information sharing might have a vibrant market around it but it has no ethical framework to back it up.
  • NSA surveillance, Big Brother, Prism: all of this is important stuff. But it’s as important to focus on the bigger picture -- and in that bigger picture, what must be subjected to scrutiny is information consumerism itself – and not just the parts of the military-industrial complex responsible for surveillance.
  • As long as we have no good explanation as to why a piece of data shouldn’t be on the market, we should forget about protecting it from the NSA, for, even with tighter regulation, intelligence agencies would simply buy – on the open market – what today they secretly get from programs like Prism.
  • Some might say: If only we could have a digital party modeled on the Green Party but for all things digital. A greater mistake is harder to come by.
  • What we need is the mainstreaming of “digital” topics – not their ghettoization in the hands and agendas of the Pirate Parties or whoever will come to succeed them. We can no longer treat the “Internet” as just another domain – like, say, “the economy” or the “environment” – and hope that we can develop a set of competencies around it.
  • Forget an ambiguous goal like “Internet freedom” – it’s an illusion and it’s not worth pursuing. What we must focus on is creating environments where actual freedom can still be nurtured and preserved.
  • The Pirates’s tragic miscalculation was trying to do too much: they wanted to change both the process of politics and its content. That project was so ambitious that it was doomed to failure from the very beginning.
  • whatever reforms the Pirates have been advancing did not seem to stem from some long critical reflections of the pitfalls of the current political system but, rather, from their belief that the political system, incompatible with the most successful digital platforms from Wikipedia to Facebook, must be reshaped in their image. This was – and is – nonsense.
  • A parliament is, in fact, different from Wikipedia – but the success of the latter tells us absolutely nothing about the viability of the Wikipedia model as a template for remodeling our political institutions
  • In as much as the Snowden affair has forced us to confront these issues, it’s been a good thing for democracy. Let’s face it: most of us would rather not think about the ethical implications of smart toothbrushes or the hypocrisy involved in Western rhetoric towards Iran or the genuflection that more and more European leaders show in front of Silicon Valley and its awful, brain-damaging language, the Siliconese.
  • The least we can do is to acknowledge that the crisis is much deeper and that it stems from intellectual causes as much as from legal ones. Information consumerism, like its older sibling energy consumerism, is a much more dangerous threat to democracy than the NSA.
  • anonymous on 05 Aug 13
     
    "The problem with the sick, obsessive superpower revealed to us by Edward Snowden is that it cannot bring itself to utter the one line it absolutely must utter before it can move on: "My name is America and I'm a dataholic.""
anonymous

The Banality of Systemic Evil - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-banality-of-systemic-evil

shared by anonymous on 24 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Tellingly, a recent Time magazine cover story has pointed out a marked generational difference in how people view these matters: 70 percent of those age 18 to 34 sampled in a poll said they believed that Snowden “did a good thing” in leaking the news of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.
  • Hannah Arendt made an observation about what she called “the banality of evil.”
  • a statement about what happens when people play their “proper” roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing — or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The mid-level managers that he spoke with were not “evil” people in their everyday lives, but in the context of their jobs, they had a separate moral code altogether, what Jackall calls the “fundamental rules of corporate life”:
  • (1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as a boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do your job and you keep your mouth shut.
  • Swartz, who committed suicide in January at age 26 (many believe because of his prosecution), said that “Moral Mazes” did an excellent job of “explaining how so many well-intentioned people can end up committing so much evil.”
  • Swartz engaged in an act of civil disobedience to liberate that knowledge, arguing that “there is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.”
  • Upon investigating the matter, Manning discovered that none of the 15 had previous ties to anti-Iraqi actions or suspected terrorist organizations. Manning had the allegedly anti-Iraqi literature translated and found that, contrary to what the federal police had said, the published literature in question “detailed corruption within the cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government and the financial impact of his corruption on the Iraqi people.” When Manning reported this discrepancy to the officer in charge (OIC), she was told to “drop it,” she recounted.
  • The bureaucracy was telling him to shut up and move on (in accord with the five rules in “Moral Mazes”), but Snowden felt that doing so was morally wrong.
  • But wasn’t there arrogance or hubris in Snowden’s and Manning’s decisions to leak the documents? After all, weren’t there established procedures determining what was right further up the organizational chart? Weren’t these ethical decisions better left to someone with a higher pay grade? The former United States ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, argued that Snowden “thinks he’s smarter and has a higher morality than the rest of us … that he can see clearer than other 299, 999, 999 of us, and therefore he can do what he wants. I say that is the worst form of treason.”
  • For the leaker and whistleblower the answer to Bolton is that there can be no expectation that the system will act morally of its own accord.
  • The chief executive is not in a better position to recognize systemic evil than is a middle level manager or, for that matter, an IT contractor. Recognizing systemic evil does not require rank or intelligence, just honesty of vision.
  • The media’s desire to psychoanalyze members of generation W is natural enough. They want to know why these people are acting in a way that they, members of the corporate media, would not.
  • But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; if there are psychological motivations for whistleblowing, leaking and hacktivism, there are likewise psychological motivations for closing ranks with the power structure within a system — in this case a system in which corporate media plays an important role.
  • anonymous on 24 Sep 13
     
    "In recent months there has been a visible struggle in the media to come to grips with the leaking, whistle-blowing and hacktivism that has vexed the United States military and the private and government intelligence communities. This response has run the gamut. It has involved attempts to condemn, support, demonize, psychoanalyze and in some cases canonize figures like Aaron Swartz, Jeremy Hammond, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden."
anonymous

Cul-de-sacs are killing America - 3 views

theweek.com/...ul-de-sacs-are-killing-america

shared by anonymous on 12 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • The crux of his argument isn't new: Cul-de-sacs discourage mobility and increase our dependence on cars to get around. Not surprisingly, the health of Americans who have chosen to live outside of city centers is slowly eroding. These maze-like neighborhoods "engineer their travel behavior," which studies have shown can have tangible effects in several areas of their lives
  • Consider Atlanta. The average working adult in Atlanta's suburbs now drives 44 miles a day. (That's 72 minutes a day behind the wheel, just getting to work and back.) Ninety-four percent of Atlantans commute by car. They spend more on gas than anyone else in the country. In a study of more than 8,000 households, investigators from the Georgia Institute of Technology led by Lawrence Frank discovered that people's environments were shaping their travel behavior and their bodies. They could actually predict how fat people were by where they lived in the city. Frank found that a white male living in Midtown, a lively district near Atlanta's downtown, was likely to weigh 10 pounds less than his identical twin living out in a place like, say, Mableton, in the cul-de-sac archipelago that surrounds Atlanta, simply because the Midtowner would be twice as likely to get enough exercise every day. [Slate]
  • suburban group-think has largely deviated from the practical grid layout featured in older, bigger cities
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Organizing neighborhoods in a lattice shape isn't just less confusing; it also encourages different kinds of mobility. Grids encourage walking. Perpendicular intersections make life easier for bike commuters. Streets that don't twist and turn make public transportation like buses and rail more viable commuting options, thus diminishing our over-reliance on cars.
  • Most of the oldest cities in America — not to mention the oldest capitals in Europe, or in the Roman Empire, for that matter — were laid out in neat, densely interconnected grids that enabled people to get around before cars came along... These communities had what Scott Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, calls "location efficiency," a rough analogue to the idea of energy efficiency that captures the extent to which your job, your grocery store, and your favorite pub are all convenient to you. Around the turn of the century, U.S. cities of all sizes built thousands of miles of railway for streetcars that made the urban grid even more efficient. "It happened everywhere, it happened brilliantly," Bernstein says, "and we threw it away." [The Atlantic Cities]
  • Indeed, deviating from the tightly woven grid pattern creates all kinds of impractical weirdness. The planners behind the labyrinthine suburbs sprouting up in Las Vegas are quickly running out of names for their streets, as Willy Staley pointed out at The Awl. Incidentally, the street names therein have already reached their comically absurd end, like Big Bird Court or Tupac Lane.
  • It isn't exactly a secret, either, that urban flight has all sorts of psychological and sociological drawbacks, engendering seclusion, a lack of diversity and shared ideas, and a "disassociation from the reality of contact with other people," as The New York Times put it in 1999.
  • "The way we organize most cities actually encourages individuals to make choices that make everyone's life harder," Frank told Montgomery. "The system fails because it promises rewards for irrational behavior."
  • anonymous on 12 Dec 13
     
    "A big house with a yard is a shining emblem of the American Dream. And cul-de-sacs, the culmination of winding roads that slice suburbia into space-maximizing lots, are just one mechanism suburban planners use to entice homeowners into buying property. They create space, make us feel safe, and allow for conveniences like large driveways."
anonymous

early christians emphasized paradise, not crucifixion - 1 views

www.uuworld.org/...107992.shtml

shared by anonymous on 18 Apr 14 - No Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • We had learned in church—and in graduate school—that Christians believed the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ saved the world and that this idea was the core of Christian faith.
  • In Proverbs of Ashes, we challenged this idea because we saw that it contributed to sanctioning intimate violence and war: The doctrine of substitutionary atonement uses Jesus’s death as the supreme model of self-sacrificing love, placing victims of violence in harm’s way and absolving perpetrators of their responsibility for unethical behavior.
  • We were unprepared for the possibility that Christians did not focus on the death of Jesus for a thousand years.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • As we visited ancient sites, consulted with art historians, and read ancient texts, we stepped back, astonished at the weight of the reality: Jesus’s dead body was just not there.
  • And as we realized that the Crucifixion was absent, we began to pay attention to what was present in early Christian art.
  • Paradise, we realized, was the dominant image of early Christian sanctuaries.
  • And to our surprise and delight, we discovered that early Christian paradise was something other than “heaven” or the afterlife. In the early church, paradise—first and foremost—was this world, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God.
  • Our new book, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, reaches back nearly four thousand years to explore how the ancient people of West Asia imagined paradise.
  • It shows how the Bible’s Hebrew prophets invoked the Garden of Eden to challenge the exploitation and carnage of empires. It shows how Jesus’s teachings and the practices of the early church affirmed life in this world as the place of salvation. Within their church communities, Christians in the first millennium sought to help life flourish in the face of imperial power, violence, and death.
  • As the paradise of early Christianity entered our vision and seeped into our consciousness, Crucifixion-centered Christianity seemed increasingly strange to us.
  • When and why did Christianity shift to an obsession with atoning death and redemption through violence? What led Western Christianity to replace resurrection and life with a Crucifixion-centered salvation and to relegate paradise to a distant afterlife?
  • In short, the needs of empire—and theologies that justified and then sanctified violence and war—transformed Christianity and alienated Western Christians from a world they had once perceived as paradise.
  • anonymous on 18 Apr 14
     
    "Images of Jesus's Crucifixion did not appear in churches until the tenth century. Why not? This question set us off on a five-year pilgrimage. Initially, we didn't believe it could be true. Surely the art historians were wrong. The crucified Christ was too important to Western Christ­ianity. How could it be that images of Jesus' suffering and death were absent from early churches?"
  • Erik Hanson on 22 Apr 14
     
    Thanks for sharing this! I'm definitely going to spend some time with it.
anonymous

What Do We Mean By "Rationality"? - 0 views

lesswrong.com/...what_do_we_mean_by_rationality

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Epistemic rationality: believing, and updating on evidence, so as to systematically improve the correspondence between your map and the territory.  The art of obtaining beliefs that correspond to reality as closely as possible.  This correspondence is commonly termed "truth" or "accuracy", and we're happy to call it that.
  • First, the Bayesian formalisms in their full form are computationally intractable on most real-world problems.  No one can actually calculate and obey the math, any more than you can predict the stock market by calculating the movements of quarks.
  • we have to learn our own flaws, overcome our biases, prevent ourselves from self-deceiving, get ourselves into good emotional shape to confront the truth and do what needs doing, etcetera etcetera and so on
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Second, sometimes the meaning of the math itself is called into question.  The exact rules of probability theory are called into question by e.g. anthropic problems in which the number of observers is uncertain. 
  • We aren't interested in probability theory because it is the holy word handed down from Laplace.  We're interested in Bayesian-style belief-updating (with Occam priors) because we expect that this style of thinking gets us systematically closer to, you know, accuracy, the map that reflects the territory.
  • How can you improve your conception of rationality?  Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.”  By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception.  Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, “The sky is green,” and you look up at the sky and see blue.  If you think:  “It may look like the sky is blue, but rationality is to believe the words of the Great Teacher,” you lose a chance to discover your mistake.
  • You cannot change reality, or prove the thought, by manipulating which meanings go with which words.
  • Instrumental rationality: achieving your values.  Not necessarily "your values" in the sense of being selfish values or unshared values: "your values" means anything you care about.  The art of choosing actions that steer the future toward outcomes ranked higher in your preferences.  On LW we sometimes refer to this as "winning".
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 10
     
    By Eliezer Yudkowsky at Less Wrong on March 16, 2009.
anonymous

Return to Nothingness - 0 views

www.3quarksdaily.com/...virtual-ritual.html

gaming whimsy philosophy

shared by anonymous on 02 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The major difference between Tetris and other games is the simplicity of its construction and complexity of play. Most importantly, it is a game that does not have a goal or end. There is no castle to storm or high score to achieve – the only way to end your game is to lose.
  • It has also been shown to have beneficial effects outside the game itself, making it a powerful tool for personal development, mirroring certain aspects of Confucian ritual.
  • There are many aspects to Confucian thought, but ritual (whether complex or mundane) stands out as a core belief that enables one to transform laborious tasks into care-free instincts. Ritual to a Confucian would include both ceremonial functions and, more importantly, personal routines comprising everyday life.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Any game resembling Mario does not represent a ritual in the way I am defining it; it is merely a task (which, most would say, is an enjoyable one). To access the self-improving ethos of ritual, there must be more than set goals to complete. To play Tetris well, you must figure out new ways to play it, so your advancement in skill is about advancing your own learning.
  • Hank Rogers, the man responsible for bringing Tetris to Nintendo and the rest of the world, says of the game “It satisfies a basic human desire, and that is to make order out of chaos.” If this is true – and I would posit that it is – then Tetris accesses a basic human desire that was the genesis of rituals in ancient China.
  • if one is responsive to the natural structure of the game and plays it with a will to learn rather than overcome, Tetris can be a method of personal cultivation. It is a matter of finding one’s balance and then responding instantaneously to a number of stimuli, letting all affect the outcome for the better.
  • I have watched as my mother discovered the game (after my suggesting that she try it), and to see her moving the bricks at first was exhilarating to me simply because it was so true to how one should play the game: without any conceptions of skill or strategy. When confronted with this unknown challenge, I think the human mind will attempt to play Tetris in a way that is respectful to the game, but without skill. This is not completely different to the way in which we should be reverent to other people, the order of things, or when encountering anything greater than ourselves.
  • In addition, Tetris is about repeatable, consistent improvisational problem solving, not about having that one lucky shot or burst of successes.
  • Playing Tetris in the right way leads to a sense of harmony with underlying principles, but because of the randomness of the game, it is impossible to conform to a set of goals.
  • There are many ways to play Tetris, but they can be organized into two categories: to try to win or try and play well.
  • The first anecdotal evidence that Tetris provided lasting effects came soon after its inception into pop culture and was called the “Tetris Effect.” Gamers would report seeing falling blocks after playing, or obsessions with trying to organizse everyday objects into small spaces like little blocks.
  • Mihály Csikszentmihalyi, the renowned psychologist responsible for bringing forward the theory of “flow” talks at length in various books about his desire to move away from psychology obsessed with instinct and drives, saying instead that we are more about focus than desires.
  • And not only does it allow me to reflect, my level of clarity is directly connected with my progress in the game. If I have a calm and levelheaded approach to my life, I can attain a calm instinctive playing style.
  • It is a fulcrum around which both subconscious and conscious thought can pivot to find a level with each other.
  • Tetris, in its highest and purest form, is about learning how to fail.
  • anonymous on 02 Jun 10
     
    By Angus McCullough at 3 Quarks Daily on May 31, 2010.
anonymous

Twelve Virtues of Rationality - 0 views

yudkowsky.net/virtues

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • The first virtue is curiosity.
  • The second virtue is relinquishment.
  • The third virtue is lightness.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The fourth virtue is evenness.
  • The fifth virtue is argument.
  • The sixth virtue is empiricism.
  • The seventh virtue is simplicity.
  • The eighth virtue is humility.
  • The ninth virtue is perfectionism.
  • The tenth virtue is precision.
  • The eleventh virtue is scholarship.
  • Every step of your reasoning must cut through to the correct answer in the same movement. More than anything, you must think of carrying your map through to reflecting the territory.
  • These then are twelve virtues of rationality: Curiosity, relinquishment, lightness, evenness, argument, empiricism, simplicity, humility, perfectionism, precision, scholarship, and the void.
  • How can you improve your conception of rationality? Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.” By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception. Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, “The sky is green,” and you look up at the sky and see blue. If you think: “It may look like the sky is blue, but rationality is to believe the words of the Great Teacher,” you lose a chance to discover your mistake.
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 10
     
    By Eliezer S. Yudkowsky in 2006.
anonymous

Russian Spies and Strategic Intelligence - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ies_and_strategic_intelligence

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 10 - Cached
  • The way the media has reported on the issue falls into three groups: That the Cold War is back, That, given that the Cold War is over, the point of such outmoded intelligence operations is questionable, And that the Russian spy ring was spending its time aimlessly nosing around in think tanks and open meetings in an archaic and incompetent effort.
  • First, it needs to know what other nations are capable of doing.
  • Second, the nation needs to know what other nations intend to do.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • The more powerful a nation is, the more important it is to understand what it is doing.
  • Knowing what the United States will do, and shifting policy based on that, can save countries from difficulties and even disaster.
  • What they excelled at, however, was placing undetectable operatives in key positions. Soviet talent scouts would range around left-wing meetings to discover potential recruits. These would be young people with impeccable backgrounds and only limited contact with the left. They would be recruited based on ideology, and less often via money, sex or blackmail. They would never again be in contact with communists or fellow travelers.
  • Recruiting people who were not yet agents, creating psychological and material bonds over long years of management and allowing them to mature into senior intelligence or ministry officials allowed ample time for testing loyalty and positioning. The Soviets not only got more reliable information this way but also the ability to influence the other country’s decision-making.
  • There were four phases: Identifying likely candidates, Evaluating and recruiting them, Placing them and managing their rise in the organization, And exploiting them.
  • It is difficult to know what the Russian team was up to in the United States from news reports, but there are two things we know about the Russians: They are not stupid, and they are extremely patient.
  • If we were to guess — and we are guessing — this was a team of talent scouts.
  • One of the Russian operatives, Don Heathfield, once approached a STRATFOR employee in a series of five meetings.
  • We would guess that Anna Chapman was brought in as part of the recruitment phase of talent scouting.
  • Each of the phases of the operatives’ tasks required a tremendous amount of time, patience and, above all, cover. The operatives had to blend in (in this case, they didn’t do so well enough).
  • Were the Americans to try the same thing, they would have to convince people to spend years learning Russian to near-native perfection and then to spend 20-30 years of their lives in Russia. Some would be willing to do so, but not nearly as many as there are Russians prepared to spend that amount of time in the United States or Western Europe.
  • The United States has substituted technical intelligence for this process. Thus, the most important U.S. intelligence-collection agency is not the CIA; it is the National Security Agency (NSA).
  • In many ways, this provides better and faster intelligence than the placement of agents, except that this does not provide influence.
  • it assumes that what senior (and other) individuals say, write or even think reveals the most important things about the country in question.
  • The fall of the Shah of Iran and the collapse of the Soviet empire were events of towering importance for the United States.
  • Either of those scenarios would not have made any difference to how events played out. This is because, in the end, the respective senior leadership didn’t know how events were going to play out. Partly this is because they were in denial, but mostly this is because they didn’t have the facts and they didn’t interpret the facts they did have properly. At these critical turning points in history, the most thorough penetration using either American or Russian techniques would have failed to provide warning of the change ahead.
  • The people being spied on and penetrated simply didn’t understand their own capabilities — i.e., the reality on the ground in their respective countries — and therefore their intentions about what to do were irrelevant and actually misleading.
  • if we regard anticipating systemic changes as one of the most important categories of intelligence, then these are cases where the targets of intelligence may well know the least and know it last.
  • We started with three classes of intelligence: capabilities, intentions and what will actually happen.
  • The first is an objective measure that can sometimes be seen directly but more frequently is obtained through data held by someone in the target country. The most important issue is not what this data says but how accurate it is.
  • For example, George W. Bush did not intend to get bogged down in a guerrilla war in Iraq. What he intended and what happened were two different things because his view of American and Iraqi capabilities were not tied to reality.
  • But in the end, the most important question to ask is whether the most highly placed source has any clue as to what is going to happen.
  • Knowledge of what is being thought is essential. But gaming out how the objective and impersonal forces will interact and play out it is the most important thing of all.
  • The events of the past few weeks show intelligence doing the necessary work of recruiting and rescuing agents. The measure of all of this activity is not whether one has penetrated the other side, but in the end, whether your intelligence organization knew what was going to happen and told you regardless of what well-placed sources believed. Sometimes sources are indispensable. Sometimes they are misleading. And sometimes they are the way an intelligence organization justifies being wrong.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 13 Jul 10
       
      This feels like that old saying, amateurs study tactics but experts study logistics. Perhaps that's the angle on this spying stuff that we haven't taken because we subconsciously imagine the crap of popular culture where knowledge should be.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 13 Jul 10
       
      It certainly makes my thoughts here (http://longgame.org/2010/07/spies-like-them/) feel pretty damned quaint.
  • There appeared to be no goal of recruitment; rather, the Russian operative tried to get the STRATFOR employee to try out software he said his company had developed. We suspect that had this been done, our servers would be outputting to Moscow. We did not know at the time who he was.
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 10
     
    Some amount of spying is the cost of doing business for any power. By George Friedman at StratFor on July 13, 2010.
anonymous

Psychedelic Drugs Show Promise as Anti-Depressants - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

layscience

shared by anonymous on 19 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Ketamine—a powerful anesthetic for humans and animals that lists hallucinations among its side effects and therefore is often abused under the name Special K—delivers rapid relief to chronically depressed patients, and researchers may now have discovered why. In fact, the latest evidence reinforces the idea that the psychedelic drug could be the first new drug in decades to lift the fog of depression.
  • More specifically, as the researchers report in the August 20 issue of Science, ketamine seems to stimulate a biochemical pathway in the brain (known as mTOR) to strengthen synapses in a rat's prefrontal cortex—the region of the brain associated with thinking and personality in humans.
  • In fact, ketamine has shown promise at reducing the risk of suicide and is currently being tested in humans for effectiveness in treating bipolar disorder and addiction.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Regardless, it is unlikely that ketamine, psilocybin or any of these psychedelics would be used directly, because of their hallucinogenic and other side effects. According to Duman, several pharmaceutical companies have already begun the search for alternative compounds that target the same biochemistry or brain function, including some that his lab is testing.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Aug 10
       
      A commenter wryly points out that it is probably the halluciatory effects that is the *reason* for the decreased depression.
  • anonymous on 19 Aug 10
     
    "Scientists suggest that some psychedelics are remarkably good at treating disorders like depression-and may now have a clue as to why." By David Biello at Scientific American on August 19, 2010.
anonymous

Psychological Reactance and Bioware Games - 0 views

www.psychologyofgames.com/...al-reactance-and-bioware-games

gaming psychology

shared by anonymous on 23 Jul 10 - Cached
  • So why is this? Why do I invest so much mental and emotional energy into this pointless choice between make-believe people in a video game and why am I so reluctant to commit?
  • Well, part of the reason is that humans hate to lose choices. Or, more to the point, we hate to lose options.
  • Behavioral economist Dan Ariely provided a neat example of psychological reactance in his book, Predictably Irrational, and I think it’s directly relevant to my inability to let go of romance options in Dragon Age.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Even after discovering which room yielded the highest payout –in real money– they STILL tended to go back and waste clicks on lower paying doors just to keep those options open even thought they didn’t intend to actually exercise them. This was totally irrational, but psychological reactance made them reluctant to lose those options.
  • anonymous on 23 Jul 10
     
    "Bioware has been presenting me with this same basic choice since Baldur's Gate and I always end up doing the same thing: I string everyone along as far as I can until I'm absolutely forced to make a choice. So why is this?" By Jamie Madigan at The Psychology of Video Games on July 22, 2010.
anonymous

What I Think About Atlas Shrugged - 0 views

whatever.scalzi.com/...t-i-think-about-atlas-shrugged

objectivism

shared by anonymous on 05 Oct 10 - Cached
  • That said, it’s a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don’t get enough hugs. (This is, incidentally, where you can start your popcorn munching.) Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn — if you’re an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by “going Galt” has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I’ll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I’ll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world who can’t figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being pushed through the birth canal will be left out for the coyotes. Which if nothing else solves the problem of day care.
  • Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick. Indeed, if John Galt were portrayed as an intelligent cup of yogurt rather than poured into human form, this would be obvious. Oh my god, that cup of yogurt wants to kill most of humanity to make a philosophical point! Somebody eat him quick! And that would be that.
  • In a similiar vein Rand seemed to think that all rational thought led to the same conclusion. This is on its face false and simplistic. Scientists can looks at the same data results and draw different conclusions. How do they resolve this difference? They do further experiments, they challenge currently held assumptions that were themselves the result of a rational thought process. Rationality and empiricism inherantly encourage doubt and self examination. I didn’t see any of this in the “converted” Atlases. Once Galt had his claws (or fangs if you prefer) in them they were zombiefied. No an objection raised to the deaths of millions (that could have been prevented), not a doubt uttered as to their own righteousness, not a single second thought about what they were doing. There’s a term for that: cult. We in the real world tend to frown upon such organizations but Rand holds them up of having discovered the one eternal Truth. As Patton once said, “If everyone is thinking alike than no one is thinking.”
  • anonymous on 05 Oct 10
     
    "That said, it's a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don't get enough hugs. (This is, incidentally, where you can start your popcorn munching.) Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn - if you're an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by "going Galt" has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I'll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I'll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world who can't figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being pushed through the birth canal will be left out for the coyotes. Which if nothing else solves the problem of day care." By John Scalzi at Whatever on October 5, 2010.
anonymous

Can Americans Think (Strategically)? - Council on Foreign Relations - 0 views

www.cfr.org/...icans_think_strategically.html

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 26 Oct 10 - Cached
  • And to answer your question, "Can Americans think strategically," the answer is yes. You can think strategically, but you have not been doing so. And the thing that -- that's puzzling here is that geopolitics is supposed to work on the basis of logic.
  • And you know, my first time I spoke in the council here was in 1985, 25 years ago. Peter Tarnoff was the head then. And the topic that I chose was why the American naval base would be moved from Subic Bay to Cam Ranh Bay, right? And this is 1985, at the height of the Cold War. The United States was isolating Vietnam. And I said no, in due course Vietnam will move closer to the United States of America because Vietnam's primary geopolitical contradiction is with China and not the United States of America. And over time the geopolitical logic fell into place, and today the number-one supporter of American naval presence in Southeast Asia is Vietnam. So you could see that 25 years ago.
  • But here I want to emphasize, I don't see China as an enemy of the United States of America, okay? That's not my message. Actually, I do think you can work out a long-term win-win arrangement with the U.S. and China. But to be able to do that, you got to focus on China. Eighty percent of your resources should be focused in dealing with China, and you should get out of this mess that you have had within the Islamic world.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • And let me just -- let me end with one story. This illustrates how brilliant the Chinese geopolitical behavior can be. You know, in my previous book, I tell this story. You know, after -- as you know, after United States invaded Iraq, in March 2003, you discovered you had a problem because there was no Security Council resolution -- (inaudible) -- invasion. Technically, the American/British occupation of Iraq was therefore illegal under international law. And the previous Security Council sanctions were still in place for America to not export Iraqi oil.
  • So some brilliant move on their part. They got direct geopolitical benefits and long-term indirect geopolitical benefits. But that's an example of what I call good geopolitical behavior, focusing on what your long-term needs and interests are. And the thing that many of us in the rest of the world are worried about is when is America going to focus on its own long-term geopolitical interests?
  • anonymous on 26 Oct 10
     
    "WINSTON LORD: So I think we'll get going. My name is Winston Lord. I'm delighted to be presiding at this session. Let's get the housekeeping out of the way at the beginning. This meeting actually is on the record. Please turn off your cell phones -- not only noises but vibrations. And the way this is going to work, as I think most of you know, is that for the first 25 minutes or so I'll interview Kishore and we'll have a conversation, and then we'll turn back to you for your questions or comments, which I know will be concise and will be preceded by your grabbing the microphone and identifying yourself. So that's the basic ground rules. Let's get down to business here."
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