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GMO Labeling is Bad Science and Good Politics - 0 views

theumlaut.com/...-bad-science-and-good-politics
shared by anonymous on 31 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • when we’ve reached the point of marketing salt crystals as non-GMO, it may be time to take a deep breath, relax, and re-evaluate fears of genetic engineering.
  • Within the environmental movement, there are signs that genetically modified foods are beginning to receive a more balanced appraisal.
  • Mark Lynas’ public reversal at the Oxford Farming Conference this past winter.
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  • The case challenges knee-jerk opposition to GMOs. Is it better to risk letting orange cultivation become more costly and pesticide-intensive, or to embrace genetically tweaked orange trees?
  • At The New York Times, reporter Amy Harmon wrote a much-lauded feature this summer on the struggle to save Florida’s orange crop
  • The environmental magazine Grist has lately featured an excellent series by Nathanael Johnson deeply exploring the costs and benefits of GMOs.
  • The longer answer is that an individual GMO could conceivably cause unforeseen harms. Reasonable people may disagree about whether existing pre-market testing should be more stringent, or how the risks of relatively precise genetic engineering compare to those of creating new crops through conventional breeding or mutagenesis, the process of inducing random mutations with chemicals or radiation and hoping they turn out to be beneficial.
  • But it’s extremely implausible that GMOs in general, all expressing different genes, are uniformly dangerous for consumers. The scientific consensus has landed squarely on the conclusion that consumption of approved GMOs is safe.
  • Unfortunately, this balanced approach to GMOs has not much spread to the culinary community, in which opposition remains a fashionable stance.
  • Titled “Transparency and GMOs: The More You Know, The Better,” the panel’s guests were Delana Jones from the Washington-based pro-labeling group Yes on 522, Robyn O’Brien from Allergy Kids Foundation; Errol Schweizer from Whole Foods, and Arran Stephens from Nature’s Path. EarthFix journalist David Steves moderated. As one might guess from the line-up, there was no one to offer a pro-GMO voice, allowing the panelists to veer into one-sided alarmism without fear of rebuttal.
  • I would have lost an over/under bet on how long it took the panelists to float the idea that genetically modified crops may be to blame for increased diagnosis of autism. Robyn O’Brien presented this as a possibility in her opening remarks, along with suggestions that GMOs may be to blame for cancer, insulin dependence, and allergies.
  • Her claims were based almost entirely on rough correlation with rising consumption of GMOs since their debut in the 1990s. By such a flimsy standard of evidence, one might cheekily suggest that the real culprit is organic food, sales of which have also boomed over the same period—but good luck persuading Whole Foods to sponsor a panel about that.
  • None of this criticism made it into initial press about the paper due to a very unusual embargo policy imposed on journalists by the scientific team. Reporters were required to sign confidentiality agreements forbidding them from seeking comment from other scientists, ensuring that initial coverage would be uncritical. In response to later questions, Seralini’s team refused to make their raw data available for analysis. Editors at the journal Nature condemned the tactics as a “public-relations offensive” that denied journalists and scientists alike the opportunity to evaluate the research.
  • The contradiction of defending this paper at an event dedicated to the virtues of transparency was seemingly lost on the panel.
  • Jones works for Yes on 522 campaign, supporting a ballot initiative that would require labeling of many foods containing GMOs in Washington state. She smartly stresses that labeling is not about the science, but about consumers’ right to know what they are eating. In a best case scenario, labels would perform a purely informative function.
  • I would be more sympathetic to the cause of GMO labeling if its advocates were not so intent on stigmatizing genetic engineering.
  • Instead, whether for reasons of political expediency, profit, or simply poor judgment, they too often associate with any idea that could bolster their cause, regardless of its scientific merits. Thus we end up with labeling advocates on stage in front of a Whole Foods banner, sowing fear among foodies that exposure to genetically modified crops may cause autism in their children.
  • as Mark Lynas put it in a recent post, mandatory labeling “may be bad science, but it is good politics.” The cause is not yet a fait accompli, but it’s very close. Labeling laws in Maine and Connecticut will go into effect if more states follow suit, as seems likely. Once a few states pass these laws, larger companies may come to prefer a uniform national standard over of patchwork ordinances, increasing pressure for a federal rule.
  • anonymous on 31 Oct 13
     
    "A few weeks ago I was at New Seasons Market, a competitor to Whole Foods here in Portland, Oregon, buying salt for my kitchen. Though my city is home to a self-described "selmelier"-that's a sommelier for salt-my tastes and budget for everyday cooking run a little more pedestrian. So I picked a jar from the bottom shelf labeled "No Additives, Unrefined, Unbleached, Kosher Certified." Bonus: It was certified non-GMO."
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Observations: Saturated fat is not the major issue - 0 views

www.bmj.com/...-saturated-fat-not-major-issue
shared by anonymous on 28 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Aseem Malhotra, interventional cardiology specialist registrar at Croydon University Hospital in London, says scientific evidence shows that advice to reduce saturated fat intake “has paradoxically increased our cardiovascular risks.”
  • Saturated fat has been demonised since the 1970s when a landmark study concluded that there was a correlation between incidence of coronary heart disease and total cholesterol, which then correlated with the percentage of calories provided by saturated fat, explains Malhotra. “But correlation is not causation,” he says. Nevertheless, we were advised to “reduce fat intake to 30% of total energy and a fall in saturated fat intake to 10%.”
  • One of the earliest obesity experiments, published in the Lancet in 1956, compared groups consuming diets of 90% fat versus 90% protein versus 90% carbohydrate and revealed that the greatest weight loss was in the fat consuming group.
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  • Malhotra also points to the United States, where percentage calorie consumption from fat has declined from 40% to 30% in the past 30 years (although absolute fat consumption has remained the same), yet obesity has rocketed. One reason, he says, is that the food industry “compensated by replacing saturated fat with added sugar.”
  • And despite the fact that in the UK, 8 million people take statins regularly, he asks why has there been no demonstrable effect on heart disease trends during this period? Adopting a Mediterranean diet after a heart attack is almost three times as powerful in reducing mortality as taking a statin, writes Malhotra. “Doctors need to embrace prevention as well as treatment.”
  • Commenting on the article, Professor David Haslam, Chair of Britain's National Obesity Forum said: "It's extremely naive of the public and the medical profession to imagine that a calorie of bread, a calorie of meat and a calorie of alcohol are all dealt in the same way by the amazingly complex systems of the body. The assumption has been made that increased fat in the bloodstream is caused by increased saturated fat in the diet, whereas modern scientific evidence is proving that refined carbohydrates and sugar in particular are actually the culprits."
  • Professor Robert Lustig, Paediatric Endocrinologist, University of San Francisco added: "Food should confer wellness, not illness. And real food does just that, including saturated fat. But when saturated fat got mixed up with the high sugar added to processed food in the second half of the 20th century, it got a bad name. Which is worse, the saturated fat or the added sugar? The American Heart Association has weighed in - the sugar many times over. Plus added sugar causes all of the diseases associated with metabolic syndrome. Instead of lowering serum cholesterol with statins, which is dubious at best, how about serving up some real food?”
  • anonymous on 28 Oct 13
     
    "Professor Robert Lustig, Paediatric Endocrinologist, University of San Francisco added: 'Food should confer wellness, not illness. And real food does just that, including saturated fat. But when saturated fat got mixed up with the high sugar added to processed food in the second half of the 20th century, it got a bad name. Which is worse, the saturated fat or the added sugar? The American Heart Association has weighed in - the sugar many times over. Plus added sugar causes all of the diseases associated with metabolic syndrome. Instead of lowering serum cholesterol with statins, which is dubious at best, how about serving up some real food?'"
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Cognitive biases, not science, poses ethical dilemmas - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...science-poses-ethical-dilemmas
shared by anonymous on 21 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • “Is it okay to introduce non-human DNA in our genome?”
  • The premise is false. A substantial proportion of the human genome is derived from viruses.
  • “Should we biologically enhance non-human animals?”
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  • Last I checked selection was a biological process. Domestication events have radically changed many organisms.
  • I recently listened to a radio interview with an activist for organic crops who expressed horror at transgenic organisms. Of course he himself is in some fashion transgenic (being a human, and loaded with viral sequence).
  • But the strange can become the familiar. There is little controversy over a process as unnatural as in vitro fertilization. We’ve gotten over it.
  • Similarly, our reactions to our obsequious and often malformed “best friend” is not horror, but affection. As far as transgenics goes, the issue is that humans have a false intuition for how we come into being, and what our essence is.
  • anonymous on 21 Oct 13
     
    "Yesterday I pointed to an io9 post, These Unresolved Ethical Questions Are About to Get Real, on my Twitter feed. It's interesting (that's why I tweeted it!), but there were some aspects which I thought were specious, and reflect common intuitions and fears in the public. Two in particular I want to highlight."
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Problems with scientific research: How science goes wrong - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-itself-how-science-goes-wrong
shared by anonymous on 19 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis (see article).
  • A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic.
  • Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk—and much of it is too far from the market to do so—it squanders money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds.
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  • In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the second world war, it was still a rarefied pastime.
  • Nowadays verification (the replication of other people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.
  • In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page.
  • And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise.
  • “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990.
  • The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.
  • When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.
  • What might be done to shore it up?
  • One priority should be for all disciplines to follow the example of those that have done most to tighten standards. A start would be getting to grips with statistics, especially in the growing number of fields that sift through untold oodles of data looking for patterns.
  • Geneticists have done this, and turned an early torrent of specious results from genome sequencing into a trickle of truly significant ones.
  • Ideally, research protocols should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to fiddle with the experiment’s design midstream so as to make the results look more substantial than they are.
  • (It is already meant to happen in clinical trials of drugs, but compliance is patchy.) Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test.
  • Some government funding agencies, including America’s National Institutes of Health, which dish out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication.
  • Journals should allocate space for “uninteresting” work, and grant-givers should set aside money to pay for it.
  • Peer review should be tightened—or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using public money also respect the rules.
  • Science still commands enormous—if sometimes bemused—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong.
  • anonymous on 19 Oct 13
     
    "A SIMPLE idea underpins science: "trust, but verify". Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better."
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Wonkbook: Five reasons Republicans lost - and one reason they won - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...s-lost-and-one-reason-they-won
shared by anonymous on 17 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • 1) Republicans got nothing.
  • Typically, the law that passes at the end of these standoffs could never have passed at the beginning.
  • Not this time. The bill, which cleanly funds the government, suspends the debt ceiling, and creates a bicameral budget committee, passed with mostly Democratic votes.
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  • 2) The GOP's Obamacare boomerang.
  • The shutdown was meant to stop Obamacare. Instead, it provided crucial aid to the struggling law. If not for the drama in Washington, HealthCare.gov's disastrous launch would've been the top news story in the country. Instead, it was knocked off the front pages. Many assumed, reasonably but wrongly, that the flaws were attributable to the GOP's shutdown. And Obamacare actually gained in the polls. Rarely has a strategy failed so completely.
  • 3) The Republican Party is horribly unpopular.
  • Multiple polls found that the Republican Party is less popular than it's been since pollsters began asking the question. Gallup found their favorability at 28 percent. The NBC/Wall Street Journal disagreed: The GOP's favorability was actually 24 percent, they reported.
  • 4) The Republican Party devalued hostage taking.
  • Republicans took the wrong lesson from 2011. They thought they won major policy concessions because they were willing to take the debt ceiling hostage. In fact, they won major policy concessions because they'd won the 2010 election. The hostage taking was perhaps a necessary strategy to effectuate their mandate, but it wasn't sufficient without the electoral win.
  • By unwisely deploying the same strategy this year, after they lost an election, they proved its weakness -- and they let Democrats establish a principle that they won't negotiate policy under these terms. Going forward, Republicans will be more afraid of this kind of brinksmanship and Democrats will be far less afraid of it.
  • 5) They split their party.
  • The shutdown began with a schism. Republican leaders thought Sen. Ted Cruz's defund-and-shutdown strategy was lunacy. They tried everything they could think of to get out of it. They failed.
  • But there's one silver lining for Republicans:
  • They held their spending number. Even though Democrats won the 2012 election, Republicans have managed to keep sequestration's spending levels.
  • By making this about Obamacare and the legitimacy of hostage taking as a routine political strategy, the GOP lost terribly. But in terms of what fights over bills to fund the government are supposed to be about -- spending -- Republicans didn't give an inch. Sequestration is still there, and it still gives Republicans real leverage in the coming budget negotiations with Democrats.
  • anonymous on 17 Oct 13
     
    "Our not-that-long national nightmare is finally over. Last night, the House and Senate passed, and President Obama signed, a bill ending the shutdown. And for Republicans, this has been an utter disaster -- although there's one bright spot."
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What is a Dictator? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...what-dictator
shared by anonymous on 17 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Deng Xiaoping was a dictator, right? After all, he was the Communist Party boss of China from 1978 to 1992. He was not elected. He ruled through fear. He approved the massacre of protesters at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.
  • But he also led China in the direction of a market economy that raised the standard of living and the degree of personal freedoms for more people in a shorter period of time than perhaps ever before in recorded economic history. For that achievement, one could arguably rate Deng as one of the greatest men of the 20th century, on par with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
  • So is it fair to put Deng in the same category as Saddam Hussein, or even Hosni Mubarak, the leader of Egypt
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  • Or what about Lee Kuan Yew and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali? During the early phases of Lee's rule in Singapore he certainly behaved in an authoritarian style, as did Ben Ali throughout his entire rule in Tunisia. So don't they both deserve to be called authoritarians? Yet Lee raised the standard of living and quality of life in Singapore from the equivalent of some of the poorest African countries in the 1960s to that of the wealthiest countries in the West by the early 1990s. He also instituted meritocracy, good governance, and world-class urban planning.
  • Dividing the world in black and white terms between dictators and democrats completely misses the political and moral complexity of the situation on the ground in many dozens of countries.
  • The twin categories of democrats and dictators are simply too broad for an adequate understanding of many places and their rulers -- and thus for an adequate understanding of geopolitics.
  • But because reality is by its very nature complex, too much simplification leads to an unsophisticated view of the world. One of the strong suits of the best intellectuals and geopoliticians is their tendency to reward complex thinking and their attendant ability to draw fine distinctions.
  • Fine distinctions should be what geopolitics and political science are about. It means that we recognize a world in which, just as there are bad democrats, there are good dictators. World leaders in many cases should not be classified in black and white terms, but in many indeterminate shades, covering the spectrum from black to white.
  • Nawaz Sharif and his rival, the late Benazir Bhutto, when they alternately ruled Pakistan in the 1990s were terrible administrators. They were both elected by voters, but each governed in a thoroughly corrupt, undisciplined and unwise manner that made their country less stable and laid the foundation for military rule.
  • They were democrats, but illiberal ones.
  • The late King Hussein of Jordan and the late Park Chung Hee of South Korea were both dictators, but their dynamic, enlightened rules took unstable pieces of geography and provided them with development and consequent relative stability.
  • They were dictators, but liberal ones.
  • Amid this political and moral complexity that spans disparate regions of the Earth, some patterns do emerge.
  • On the whole, Asian dictators have performed better than Middle Eastern ones.
  • All of these men, including the Muslim Mahathir, were influenced, however indirectly and vaguely, by a body of values known as Confucianism: respect for hierarchy, elders, and, in general, ethical living in the here-and-now of this world.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 17 Oct 13
       
      This would work nicely with John Green's bit on Confucianism in Crash Course World History.
  • Rather than Confucianism, Saddam and al Assad were motivated by Baathism, a half-baked Arab socialism so viciously opposed to Western colonialism that it created a far worse tyranny of its own.
  • Beyond the Middle East and Asia there is the case of Russia. In the 1990s, Russia was ruled by Boris Yeltsin, a man lauded in the West for being a democrat. But his undisciplined rule led to sheer economic and social chaos.
  • Finally, there is the most morally vexing case of all: that of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. In the 1970s and 1980s, Pinochet created more than a million new jobs, reduced the poverty rate from a third of the population to as low as a tenth, and the infant mortality rate from 78 per 1,000 to 18.
  • Pinochet's Chile was one of the few non-Asian countries in the world to experience double-digit Asian levels of economic growth at the time. Pinochet prepared his country well for eventual democracy, even as his economic policy became a model for the developing and post-Communist worlds.
  • But Pinochet is also rightly the object of intense hatred among liberals and humanitarians the world over for perpetrating years of systematic torture against tens of thousands of victims. So where does he fall on the spectrum from black to white?
  • The question of whether ends justify means should not only be answered by metaphysical doctrine, but also by empirical observation -- sometimes ends do justify means, sometimes they don't.
  • Sometimes the means are unconnected to the ends, and are therefore to be condemned, as is the case with Chile. Such is the intricacy of the political and moral universe. Complexity and fine distinctions are things to be embraced; otherwise geopolitics, political science, and related disciplines distort rather than illuminate.
  • anonymous on 17 Oct 13
     
    "What is a dictator, or an authoritarian? I'll bet you think you know. But perhaps you don't. Sure, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong were dictators. So were Saddam Hussein and both Hafez and Bashar al Assad. But in many cases the situation is not that simple and stark. In many cases the reality -- and the morality -- of the situation is far more complex."
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The U.S. Debt Crisis from the Founders' Perspective - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...bt-crisis-founders-perspective
shared by anonymous on 15 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Striving for ineffectiveness seems counterintuitive. But there was a method to the founders' madness, and we first need to consider their rationale before we apply it to the current dilemma afflicting Washington.
  • The founders did not want an efficient government. They feared tyranny and created a regime that made governance difficult. Power was diffused among local, state and federal governments, each with their own rights and privileges. Even the legislative branch was divided into two houses.
  • It was a government created to do little, and what little it could do was meant to be done slowly.
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  • Except for times of emergency or of overwhelming consensus, the founders liked what we today call gridlock.
  • So while they feared government, they saw government as a means to staggeringly ambitious ends -- even if those ends were never fully defined.
  • The founders were fascinated by Rome and its notion of governance. Their Senate was both a Roman name and venue for the Roman vision of the statesman, particularly Cincinnatus, who left his farm to serve (not rule) and then returned to it when his service was over.
  • They also wanted virtuous rulers.
  • Specifically they lauded Roman virtue. It is the virtue that most reasonable men would see as praiseworthy: courage, prudence, kindness to the weak, honoring friendship, resolution with enemies.
  • The Founding Father who best reflects these values is, of course, George Washington.
  • Among the founders, it is he whom we should heed as we ponder the paralysis-by-design of the founders' system and the current conundrum threatening an American debt default.
  • He understood that the public would be reluctant to repay debt and that the federal government would lack the will to tax the public to pay debt on its behalf. He stressed the importance of redeeming and discharging public debt. He discouraged accruing additional debt and warned against overusing debt.
  • This is not a technical argument for those who see debt as a way to manage the economy. It is a moral argument built around the virtue of prudence.
  • Of course, he made this argument at a time when the American dollar was not the world's reserve currency, and when there was no Federal Reserve Bank able to issue money at will. It was a time when the United States borrowed in gold and silver and had to repay in the same. Therefore in a technical sense, both the meaning and uses of debt have changed. From a purely economic standpoint, a good argument can be made that Washington's views no longer apply.
  • But Washington was making a moral argument, not an argument for economists.
  • As for federally mandated health care, I think they would be wary of entrusting such an important service to an entity they feared viscerally. But they wouldn't have been fanatical in their resistance to it. As much as federally mandated health care would frighten them, I believe fanaticism would have frightened them even more.
  • The question of a default would have been simple. They would have been disgusted by any failure to pay a debt unless it was simply impossible to do so. They would have regarded self-inflicted default -- regardless of the imprudence of the debt, or health care reform or any such subject -- as something moderate people do not contemplate, let alone do.
  • The republic of the mind was always greater than the republic itself. Still, when we come to moments such as these, it is useful to contemplate what the founders had in mind and measure ourselves against that.
  • anonymous on 15 Oct 13
     
    "The U.S. government is paralyzed, and we now face the possibility that the United States will default on its debt. Congress is unable to resolve the issue, and President Obama is as obstinate as the legislators who oppose him. To some extent, our political system is functioning as intended -- the Founding Fathers meant for it to be cumbersome. But as they set out to form a more perfect union, they probably did not anticipate the extent to which we have been able to cripple ourselves."
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Nate Silver on the U.S. government shutdown - 0 views

www.grantland.com/...-silver-us-government-shutdown
shared by anonymous on 10 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Oct 13
     
    "What follows are a series of points that I consider to be on relatively firm ground. Some are critiques of the conventional wisdom; some are points of context; some concern relatively fine details of the situation; some are obvious things that I don't think have been emphasized quite enough. None of them constitute a prediction of how the shutdown is going to turn out, or exactly what the political fallout will be. But perhaps they can serve as useful guidance as you read coverage of the shutdown elsewhere."
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In Praise of Idleness By Bertrand Russell - 0 views

www.zpub.com/idle.html
shared by anonymous on 08 Oct 13 - Cached
  • Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.
  • Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.
  • A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men's thoughts and opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system, and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world.
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  • The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
  • Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many.
  • But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good.
  • And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.
  • Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.
  • This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose.
  • The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day.
  • When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.
  • We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all.
  • By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man.
  • anonymous on 08 Oct 13
     
    "I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work."
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The Roots of the Government Shutdown - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...roots-government-shutdown
shared by anonymous on 08 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 08 Oct 13
     
    "In general, Stratfor deals with U.S. domestic politics only to the extent that it affects international affairs. Certainly, this topic has been argued and analyzed extensively. Nevertheless, the shutdown of the American government is a topic that must be understood from our point of view, because it raises the issue of whether the leading global power is involved in a political crisis so profound that it is both losing its internal cohesion and the capacity to govern. If that were so, it would mean the United States would not be able to act in global affairs, and that in turn would mean that the international system would undergo a profound change. I am not interested in the debate over who is right. I am, however, interested in the question of what caused this shutdown, and ultimately what it tells us about the U.S. capacity to act."
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U.S. and Iranian Realities - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...us-and-iranian-realities
shared by anonymous on 01 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Though the Iranians are now in a weak strategic position, they had been on the offensive since 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq.
  • They welcomed the invasion; Saddam Hussein had been a mortal enemy of Iran ever since the 1980-1989 Iran-Iraq War. The destruction of his regime was satisfying in itself, but it also opened the door to a dramatic shift in Iran's national security situation.
  • Iraq was Iran's primary threat after the collapse of the Soviet Union because it was the only direction from which an attack might come.
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  • The United States came to realize that it was threatened from two directions, and it found itself battling both Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. The purpose of the surge in 2007 was to extricate itself from the war with the Sunnis and to block the Shia.
  • It succeeded with the former to a great extent, but it was too late in the game for the latter.
  • Iran thus came to have nothing to fear from Iraq, and could even dominate it. This was a tremendous strategic victory for Iran, which had been defeated by Iraq in 1989.
  • With Iraq contained and the United States withdrawing from the region, Saudi Arabia emerged as Iran's major challenger. Tehran now had the pieces in place to challenge Riyadh.
  • Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had fairly realistic visions of Iranian power along Saudi Arabia's northern border, completely changing the balance of power in the region.
  • The Russians also liked the prospect of a strengthened Iran.
  • First, they were fighting Sunnis in the northern Caucasus.
  • Second, an Iranian sphere of influence not only would threaten Saudi Arabia, it also would compel the United States to re-engage in the region to protect Saudi Arabia and Israel.
  • Creating a strategic crisis for the United States thus suited Moscow's purposes.
  • In 2009, it had appeared extremely likely that an Iran loosely aligned with Russia would enjoy a sphere of influence north of Saudi Arabia.
  • By 2013, this vision was shattered, and with it the more grandiose strategic vision of Ahmadinejad and his allies in Iran.
  • It was Stratfor's view that Iran had less interest in actually acquiring a nuclear weapon than in having a program to achieve one.
  • Possessing a handful of nuclear weapons would be a worst-case scenario for Iran, as it might compel massive attacks from Israel or the United States that Iran could not counter.
  • But having a program to develop one, and making it credible, gave the Iranians a powerful bargaining chip and diverted U.S. and Israeli attention from the growing Iranian sphere of influence.
  • ernally, opposition to any accommodation with the United States was strong. But so was the sense that Ahmadinejad had brought disaster on Iran strategically and economically.
  • There is profound domestic opposition in the United States to dealing with the Iranian regime. Just as the Iranians still genuinely resent the 1953 coup that placed the shah on the throne, the Americans have never forgotten the seizure of the U.S. Embassy and the subsequent yearlong hostage crisis.
  • We must now wait and see what language Iran will craft regarding the hostage crisis to reciprocate the courtesy of Obama's acknowledging the 1953 coup.
  • It has interests in the region, however, and chief among those are avoiding the emergence of a regional hegemon that might destabilize the Middle East.
  • It needs a way to manage the Islamic world without being in a constant state of war.
  • A weakened Iran needs support in its fight with the Sunnis. The United States is interested in ensuring that neither the Sunni nor the Shia win -- in other words, in the status quo of centuries.
  • Having Iran crumble internally therefore is not in the American interest, since it would upset the internal balance.
  • While sanctions were of value in blocking Iranian ascendancy, in the current situation stabilizing Iran is of greater interest.
  • The United States cannot proceed unless the nuclear program is abandoned. Rouhani understands that, but he must have and end to sanctions and a return of Western investment to Iran in exchange.
  • There are two threats to a potential resolution.
  • The primary threat is domestic. In both countries, even talking to each other seems treasonous to some.
  • In Iran, economic problems and exhaustion with grandiosity opens a door. In the United States right now, war is out of the question. And that paves the way to deals unthinkable a few years ago.
  • A second threat is outside interference.
  • Israel comes to mind
  • Saudi Arabia meanwhile will be appalled at a U.S.-Iranian deal.
  • The Russian position will be more interesting.
  • Syria was a tactical victory for them; Iran would be a strategic defeat.
  • The Iranian and American realities argue for a settlement. The psyche of both countries is in the balance.
  • But given how the Iranians and Americans see their positions, the odds are, that something will happen. In my book, The Next Decade, I argued that in the long run Iran and the United States have aligning interests and that an informal alliance is likely in the long run. This isn't the long run yet, and the road will be bumpy, but the logic is there.
  • anonymous on 01 Oct 13
     
    "U.S. President Barack Obama called Iranian President Hassan Rouhani last week in the first such conversation in the 34 years since the establishment of the Islamic Republic. The phone call followed tweets and public statements on both sides indicating a willingness to talk. Though far from an accommodation between the two countries, there are reasons to take this opening seriously -- not only because it is occurring at such a high level, but also because there is now a geopolitical logic to these moves. Many things could go wrong, and given that this is the Middle East, the odds of failure are high. But Iran is weak and the United States is avoiding conflict, and there are worse bases for a deal."
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Parking rules raise your rent - 0 views

grist.org/...parking-rules-raise-your-rent
shared by anonymous on 26 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • What’s all the excavation for? It’s for parking. Underground parking. In most cities and in most soil conditions, the giant holes are only there to satisfy off-street parking rules, and to do that, you need a deep, deep hole. A hole like this one.
  • One Portland developer told me that each successive layer of excavation — each floor down in the garage — costs two to three times as much as the previous one.
  • City requirements for off-street parking spaces raise rents. They jack it up a lot at the bottom of the housing ladder. Proportionally speaking, the bigger the quota and the smaller the apartment, the larger the rent hike.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • For one-bedroom apartments with two parking places, as is required in places including Bothell and Federal Way, Wash., as much as one-third of the rent may actually pay for parking.
  • a case study of residential real estate development may illuminate how critical parking is to the affordability of housing.
  • But there’s a problem, the architect points out. She reminds you that your city requires you to provide off-street parking on the property for each of the apartments you build. 
  • access ramps to the underground garage will subtract six apartments, and your general contractor estimates that excavating will cost $55,000 per parking space — almost as much as the $60,000 you’ve budgeted to build each apartment.
  • To make a 7 percent return on investment, you’ll have to raise the rent up to $1,300 a month on the remaining units. Will the market support that price?
  • You contemplate whether to dig a second subterranean level in the garage, but the deeper you go, the contractor explains, the more expensive it gets.
  • You’re now considering a building with 30 apartments, plus 19 spaces behind. That’s only 0.6 parking spaces apiece, so you’ll still be in trouble with the city. To get one space per apartment, you’ll need to drop down to 25 apartments or fewer and raise the rent again.
  • The whole situation is aggravating, because the area surrounding your building has vast, untapped reservoirs of parking: surface lots at grocery stores and movie theaters, underground spaces at shopping complexes and office buildings, and idle spots at nearby apartments.
  • You could even rent a group of overnight spaces at a nearby garage and sublet them to tenants, but such innovative solutions are not a legal substitute for on-site parking in your city.
  • You’re stuck with no good options: a long and risky waiver application, underground parking with extremely high rents, or a half-sized building with high rent and slots out back.
  • You now understand why architects, in moments of dark humor, change their discipline’s mantra of “form follows function” to “form follows parking.” And you’re starting to understand how parking requirements are such an enormous barrier to affordable housing.
  • How do parking requirements raise rents? They do it in five ways, some of which affect all of the housing market and some of which only affect parts of it.
  • More costly housing.
  •  Parking quotas drive up construction costs. (“But supply and demand, not cost, set prices,” I hear my Econ 101 professor Hirschel Kasper pointing out.
  • There’s no way you can legally build your no-parking $800-a-month apartments, nor can anyone else, anywhere in town. The whole apartment market will be missing its bottom end.
  • Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute has modeled a typical affordable housing development and concluded that including one parking space per dwelling raises the cost of each rental unit by 12.5 percent
  • adding a second parking space doubles that to 25 percent.
  • Less housing.
  • Parking quotas constrain the supply of dwelling units, particularly of modest, economical ones, which causes their price to rise.
  • Building conversions blocked.
  • Parking quotas often make it prohibitively expensive to adapt buildings for other uses. Developers cannot convert vacant warehouses into lofts, or aging office blocks into condos, unless they somehow shoehorn floors of parking into the historic structures.
  • Dispersed housing.
  • By suppressing the number of apartments on each city lot (see Nos. 2 and 3), quotas force housing demand to spread outward across the landscape.
  • Billing non-parkers.
  •  Parking quotas shift the cost of storing vehicles from those vehicles’ owners into the rent of non-owners. By flooding the market for parking, quotas make it impossible to recoup the full cost of parking by charging its users.
  • This effect does not raise the rent on average beyond what effects 1, 2, and 3 do, but it does shift the cost of storing vehicles from car owners to non-owners. Even tenants who do not use parking pay for it.
  • A forthcoming Sightline analysis will likely reach similar conclusions. If preliminary results hold up, it will show that, at actual apartment and condominium projects in Seattle, the cost of parking is as much as 35 percent of monthly rent.
  • The cost of parking, furthermore, exceeds its market price almost everywhere in King County, so even tenants who do not own cars end up paying for parking through their rent.
  • These five effects interact and reinforce one another. They knock the bottom off of the apartment market, pushing working-class people to double up or commute longer distances. They raise the rent for everyone, driving up the cost of living while lowering the price of parking. And they shift parking costs to those who don’t use it.
  • In 1961, Oakland introduced a quota of one space per new apartment. Immediately, as housing economist Brian Bertha has documented (see page 143), the construction cost per apartment jumped by 18 percent and typical apartment buildings shrank: The number of units per new building fell by 30 percent. Developers built fewer, larger apartments, and the rent rose.
  • A newer proof comes from urban planning professor Michael Manville of Cornell University. He described in the Journal of the American Planning Association what happened in downtown Los Angeles after 1999 when the city enacted an adaptive reuse ordinance (ARO).
  • Quickly, the deregulation of parking yielded more than 6,000 new apartments and condominiums, some of them in previously dilapidated historic office buildings that dated from the Art Deco era.
  • When parking requirements are removed, developers provide more housing and less parking, and also … developers provide different types of housing: housing in older buildings, in previously disinvested areas, and housing marketed toward non-drivers. This latter category of housing tends to sell for less than housing with parking spaces.
  • Minimum parking requirements do not jack the rent up much in the kinds of pricey buildings where the developer would have installed an abundance of parking anyway.
  • What’s more, half of the parking spaces developers provided to tenants were at neighboring or nearby properties. In fact, at 16 of the 57 ARO buildings, all the parking was off-site. These developers did what you wanted to do for your 50-unit building: They secured tenant parking not by pouring concrete but by sipping coffee with the owners of nearby garages.
  • anonymous on 26 Sep 13
     
    "Have you ever watched the excavation that precedes a tall building? It seems to take forever. Then, when the digging is finally done, construction rockets upward in no time. For the past few months, I've been watching a crew excavate the site of a new condo tower on Seattle's First Hill. It's on a route I walk three times a week, so I've had a ringside seat. And here's the thing that finally dawned on me, after years of not really thinking about these holes in the urban ground: What's all the excavation for?"
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Central Asia and Afghanistan: A Tumultuous History | Stratfor - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...afghanistan-tumultuous-history
shared by anonymous on 26 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Contrary to popular perception, Central Asia is not likely to see an immediate explosion of violence and militancy after the U.S. and NATO drawdown from Afghanistan in 2014. However, Central Asia's internal issues and the region's many links with Afghanistan -- including a web of relationships among militant groups -- will add to the volatility in the region. 
  • Central Asia is linked to Afghanistan geographically; Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan share borders with Afghanistan that collectively span more than 2,000 kilometers (about 1,240 miles).
  • the topography of Afghanistan's frontiers with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan is largely desert. 
  • ...13 more annotations...
  •  Afghanistan is an ethnically diverse country, with more than a dozen ethno-linguistic groups represented substantially in the country's population of slightly more than 31 million.
  • The Pashtuns are the largest such group (42 percent), with Tajiks (27 percent), Hazaras (9 percent), Uzbeks (9 percent) and Turkmen (3 percent) constituting significant cohorts as well.
  • Historically, Afghanistan's borders with the Central Asian states did not exist in a modern sense; rather, they consisted of frontier areas that constantly shifted hands, given that warfare in the region was the norm.
  • Russia's imperial expansion into Central Asia coincided with the growth of the British domain over India, and the result was the establishment of a buffer zone in what is now Afghanistan.
  • This set the borders of Afghanistan as we know them and -- with the transition from the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union in the early 20th century -- led to a closing off of the borders between Central Asia and Afghanistan for the first time in history.
  • The ensuing 70 years of Soviet rule in Central Asia created significantly different political and cultural identities among the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen in the Soviet Union and those within Afghanistan, given the vastly different governing structures.
  • Because of the geography of the border areas, interaction and movement between the peoples of Central Asia and Afghanistan was difficult to stop.
  • The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union only two years later created a dramatically new environment both within Central Asia and within Afghanistan.
  • In 1991, the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (along with Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan farther north) became independent states for the first time in modern history.
  • Beginning in 1994 and starting from their stronghold in Kandahar, the Taliban were able to spread their influence and control over much of Afghanistan. It took the movement only months to take control of most southern provinces from various Pashtun warlords, and they quickly made progress in capturing regional centers in the west and east of the country like Herat and Jalalabad.
  • The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan coincided with a number of significant developments in Central Asia. The post-Soviet regimes in the region had no experience of ruling their territories directly. Moreover, Central Asia faced immense economic and political challenges as Russia withdrew subsidies and the Soviet military-industrial complex with which the Central Asians were so integrated collapsed.
  • Tajikistan descended into civil war almost immediately, when groups from the Kulyabi and Khujand regions known as the Popular Front were pitted against an array of opposition elements including Islamists, democrats and the Pamiri clan from the east collectively known as the United Tajik Opposition. 
  • Outside groups got involved in the civil war, supporting the different sides along political and ideological lines. Russia and Uzbekistan supported the secular and neo-communist Popular Front, while many Tajiks in Afghanistan supported the United Tajik Opposition, particularly the Islamist elements of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan. 
  • anonymous on 26 Sep 13
     
    "This is the first installment of a two-part series on the relationship between Central Asia and Afghanistan and the expected effects of the U.S. drawdown in Afghanistan on Central Asian security."
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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."
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Geopolitical Journey: The U.S.-European Relationship, Then and Now - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...pean-relationship-then-and-now
shared by anonymous on 24 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • We have spoken of the Russians, but for all the flash in their Syria performance, they are economically and militarily weak -- something they would change if they had the means to do so. It is Europe, taken as a whole, that is the competitor for the United States. Its economy is still slightly larger than the United States', and its military is weak, though unlike Russia this is partly by design.
  • American intervention helped win World War I, and American involvement in Europe during World War II helped ensure an allied victory. The Cold War was a transatlantic enterprise, resulting in the withdrawal of Soviet forces from the European Peninsula.
  • The question now is: What will the relationship be between these two great economic entities, which together account for roughly 50 percent of the world's gross domestic product, in the 21st century? That question towers over all others globally.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • The Syrian crisis began not with the United States claiming that action must be taken against al Assad's use of chemical weapons but with calls to arms from the United Kingdom, France and Turkey.
  • The United States was rather reluctant, but ultimately it joined these and several other European countries. Only then did the Europeans' opinions diverge.
  • Most important to note was the division of Europe. Each country crafted its own response -- or lack of response -- to the Syrian crisis. The most interesting position was taken by Germany, which was unwilling to participate and until quite late unwilling to endorse participation.
  • Their differences have not manifested as virulently as they did before 1945, but still, it can no longer be said that their foreign policies are synchronized. In fact, the three major powers on the European Peninsula currently are pursuing very different foreign policies.
  • Nothing has ruptured in Europe, but then Europe as a concept has always been fluid. The European Union is a free trade zone that excludes some European countries. It is a monetary union that excludes some members of the free trade zone. It has a parliament but leaves defense and foreign policy prerogatives to sovereign nation-states. It has not become more organized since 1945; in some fundamental ways, it has become less organized.
  • Where previously there were only geographical divisions, now there are also conceptual divisions.
  • no individual European nation has the ability by itself to conduct an air attack on Syria. As Libya showed, France and Italy could not execute a sustained air campaign. They needed the United States.
  • I am old enough to remember that Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case.
  • After some irrational exuberance from the European left, Obama has now been deemed naive, just as George W. Bush was deemed a cowboy.
  • Amid profound differences and distrust, U.S. and Soviet leaders managed to avoid the worst. Given their track record, Europe's leaders might have plunged the world further into disaster.
  • The Europeans think well of the sophistication of their diplomacy. I have never understood why they feel that way.
  • We saw this in Syria.
  • First, Europe was all over the place. Then the coalition that coaxed the Americans in fell apart, leaving the United States virtually alone. When Obama went back to his original position, they decided that he had been outfoxed by the Russians. Had he attacked, he would have been dismissed as another cowboy.
  • Whichever way it had gone, and whatever role Europe played in it, it would have been the Americans that simply didn't understand one thing or another.
  • The American view of Europe is a combination of indifference and bafflement. Europe has not mattered all that much to the United States since the end of the Cold War.
  • all of Europe became Scandinavia. It was quite prosperous, a pleasure to visit, but not the place in which history was being made.
  • When Americans can be bothered to think of Europe, they think of it as a continent with strong opinions of what others should do but with little inclination to do something itself.
  • The American perception of Europe is that it is unhelpful and irritating but ultimately weak and therefore harmless.
  • The Europeans are obsessed with the U.S. president because, fool or cowboy or both, he is extraordinarily powerful. The Americans are indifferent to the Europeans not because they don't have sophisticated leaders but because ultimately their policies matter more to each other than they do to the United States.
  • But the most profound rift between the Americans and Europeans, however, is not perception or attitude. It is the notion of singularity, and many of the strange impressions or profound indifferences between the two stem from this notion.
  • The dialogue between Europe and the United States is a dialogue between a single entity and the tower of Babel.
  • For example, a friend pointed out that he spoke four languages but Americans seem unable to learn one. I pointed out that if he took a weekend trip he would need to speak four languages. Citizens of the United States don't need to learn four languages to drive 3,000 miles.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Sep 13
       
      This is an absolutely crucial point and another reason why geography is a very powerful - and perplexingly invisible - determiner of action.
  • The United States is a unified country with unified economic, foreign and defense policies. Europe never fully came together; in fact, for the past five years it has been disintegrating.
  • Division, as well as a fascinating pride in that division, is one of Europe's defining characteristics. Unity, as well as fascinating convictions that everything is coming apart, is one of the United States' defining characteristics.
  • Europe's past is magnificent, and its magnificence can be seen on the streets of any European capital. Its past haunts and frightens it. Its future is not defined, but its present is characterized by a denial and a distance from its past. U.S. history is much shallower. Americans build shopping malls on top of hallowed battlefields and tear down buildings after 20 years. The United States is a country of amnesia. It is obsessed with its future, and Europe is paralyzed by its past. 
  • Where once we made wars together, we now take vacations. It is hard to build a Syria policy on that framework, let alone a North Atlantic strategy.
  • anonymous on 24 Sep 13
     
    "Most discussions I've had in my travels concern U.S. President Barack Obama's failure to move decisively against Syria and how Russian President Vladimir Putin outmatched him. Of course, the Syrian intervention had many aspects, and one of the most important ones, which was not fully examined, was what it told us about the state of U.S.-European relations and of relations among European countries. This is perhaps the most important question on the table."
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The Case Against High-School Sports - Amanda Ripley - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309447
shared by anonymous on 19 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • One element of our education system consistently surprises them: “Sports are a big deal here,” says Jenny, who moved to America from South Korea with her family in 2011. Shawnee High, her public school in southern New Jersey, fields teams in 18 sports over the course of the school year, including golf and bowling.
  • Sports are embedded in American schools in a way they are not almost anywhere else. Yet this difference hardly ever comes up in domestic debates about America’s international mediocrity in education.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      It does in my home.
  • When I surveyed about 200 former exchange students last year, in cooperation with an international exchange organization called AFS, nine out of 10 foreign students who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their peers back home did. A majority of Americans who’d studied abroad agreed.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • As states and districts continue to slash education budgets, as more kids play on traveling teams outside of school, and as the globalized economy demands that children learn higher-order skills so they can compete down the line, it’s worth reevaluating the American sporting tradition. If sports were not central to the mission of American high schools, then what would be?
  • On October 12, 1900, the Wall School of Honey Grove played St. Matthew’s Grammar School of Dallas in football, winning 5–0. The event was a milestone in Texas history: the first recorded football game between two high-school teams.
  • Until then, most American boys had played sports in the haphazard way of boys the world over: ambling onto fields and into alleys for pickup games or challenging other loosely affiliated groups of students to a match. Cheating was rampant, and games looked more like brawls than organized contests. Schools got involved to contain the madness.
  • The ruling elite feared that all this schooling would make Anglo-Saxon boys soft and weak, in contrast to their brawny, newly immigrated peers.
  • Sports, the thinking went, would both protect boys’ masculinity and distract them from vices like gambling and prostitution. “Muscular Christianity,” fashionable during the Victorian era, prescribed sports as a sort of moral vaccine against the tumult of rapid economic growth.
  • Football at Premont cost about $1,300 a player. Math, by contrast, cost just $618 a student. For the price of one football season, the district could have hired a full-time elementary-school music teacher for an entire year.
  • But, despite the fact that Premont’s football team had won just one game the previous season and hadn’t been to the playoffs in roughly a decade, this option never occurred to anyone.
  • “We were freaking out,” says Mariela, a former cheerleader and tennis and volleyball player. American kids expect to participate in school sports as a kind of rite of passage. “We don’t get these years back,” she told me. “I’m never going to get the experience of cheering as captain under the lights.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      This is so absurd.
  • But there was an upside to the quiet. “The first 12 weeks of school were the most peaceful beginning weeks I’ve ever witnessed at a high school,” Singleton says. “It was calm. There was a level of energy devoted to planning and lessons, to after-school tutoring. I saw such a difference.”
  • Nathan missed the adrenaline rush of running out onto the field and the sense of purpose he got from the sport. But he began playing flag football for a club team on the weekends, and he admitted to one advantage during the week: “It did make you focus. There was just all this extra time. You never got behind on your work.”
  • Premont’s culture changed. “There’s been a definite decline in misbehavior,” says Desiree Valdez, who teaches speech, theater, and creative writing at Premont. “I’m struggling to recall a fight. Before, it was one every couple of weeks.”
  • Meanwhile, communities throughout Texas, alarmed by the cancellation of football, raised $400,000 for Premont via fund-raisers and donations—money that Singleton put toward renovating the science labs.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      So much awesome.
  • In many schools, sports are so entrenched that no one—not even the people in charge—realizes their actual cost.
  • When Marguerite Roza, the author of Educational Economics, analyzed the finances of one public high school in the Pacific Northwest, she and her colleagues found that the school was spending $328 a student for math instruction and more than four times that much for cheerleading—$1,348 a cheerleader.
  • “And it is not even a school in a district that prioritizes cheerleading,” Roza wrote. “In fact, this district’s ‘strategic plan’ has for the past three years claimed that math was the primary focus.”
  • Football is, far and away, the most expensive high-school sport.
  • Even maintaining a grass field can cost more than $20,000 a year. Reconditioning helmets, a ritual that many teams pay for every year, can cost more than $1,500 for a large team.
  • That kind of constant, low-level distraction may be the greatest cost of all.
  • During football season in particular, the focus of American principals, teachers, and students shifts inexorably away from academics.
  • Sure, high-school football players spend long, exhausting hours practicing (and according to one study, about 15 percent experience a brain injury each season), but the commitment extends to the rest of the community, from late-night band practices to elaborate pep rallies to meetings with parents.
  • Athletics even dictate the time that school starts each day: despite research showing that later start times improve student performance, many high schools begin before 8 a.m., partly to reserve afternoon daylight hours for sports practice.
  • But here’s the thing: most American principals I spoke with expressed no outrage over the primacy of sports in school. In fact, they fiercely defended it. “If I could wave a magic wand, I’d have more athletic opportunities for students, not less,” Bigham, the former Tennessee principal, told me.
  • His argument is a familiar one: sports can be bait for students who otherwise might not care about school. “I’ve seen truancy issues completely turned around once students begin playing sports,” he says. “When students have a sense of belonging, when they feel tied to the school, they feel more part of the process.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Sep 13
       
      "The process" equals sports, not education. Dipstick.
  • But at this moment in history, now that more than 20 countries are pulling off better high-school-graduation rates than we are, with mostly nominal athletic offerings, using sports to tempt kids into getting an education feels dangerously old-fashioned.
  • America has not found a way to dramatically improve its children’s academic performance over the past 50 years, but other countries have—and they are starting to reap the economic benefits.
  • “Our analysis suggests that the most engaging environment you can offer students is one of cognitive challenge combined with individualised pedagogical support,” he told me in an e-mail. “If you offer boring and poor math instruction and try to compensate that with interesting sport activities, you may get students interested in sports but I doubt it will do much good to their engagement with school.”
  • But only 40 percent of seniors participate in high-school athletics, and what’s harder to measure is how the overriding emphasis on sports affects everyone who doesn’t play.
  • One study of 30,000 students at the University of Oregon found that the grades of men who did not play sports went down as the football team’s performance improved. Both men and women reported that the better their football team did, the less they studied and the more they partied.
  • Each year, Spelman was spending nearly $1 million on athletics—not for those students, but for the 4 percent of the student body that played sports.
  • Tatum’s signal was clear: lifelong health habits matter more than expensive, elite sporting competitions with rival schools. One priority has real and lasting benefits; the other is a fantasy.
  • Both approaches can be dysfunctional; both set kids up for stress and disappointment. The difference is that 93 percent of South Korean students graduate from high school, compared with just 77 percent of American students—only about 2 percent of whom receive athletic scholarships to college.
  • “I actually believe that sports are extremely important,” Olga Block, a Basis co-founder, told me. “The problem is that once sports become important to the school, they start colliding with academics.”
  • anonymous on 19 Sep 13
     
    "The United States routinely spends more tax dollars per high-school athlete than per high-school math student-unlike most countries worldwide. And we wonder why we lag in international education rankings?"
  • Ed Webb on 20 Sep 13
     
    Awesome read. The whole sports thing is bizarre, at K-12 or college level. Such a distraction, such a distortion of resources & effort.
  • anonymous on 23 Sep 13
     
    It's *such* a distraction, but - dear god - don't even mention that you are entertaining such a notion, even in my ultra-liberal Seattle neighborhood. It's worst than being a baby-killer. Sports are apparantly important because of... reasons. And I though right-wing Christians were the most likely to embrace blind faith in something.
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Europe: What to Expect After Germany's Elections | Stratfor - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...xpect-after-germanys-elections
shared by anonymous on 19 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Germany's economic performance is tied strongly to external developments because of the country's reliance on exports.
  • Europe is Germany's largest customer, so the German economy depends on the strength of the European consumer base.
  • However, Germany's economy has not escaped the crisis unscathed. Over the past few years, German economic growth has slowed. According to the International Monetary Fund, Germany's GDP grew by only 0.9 percent in 2012, down from 4 percent in 2010.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Strengthening domestic demand -- by raising wages, for example -- would limit its exposure to external risks, but it would also make German exports less competitive.
  • One option under consideration is the introduction of a minimum wage.
  • Berlin will also address its immigration issue.
  • Germany has actually seen an uptick of immigrants over the past few years due to its resilience to the crisis, but historically it has trouble retaining them. Any new government will have to introduce policies to retain immigrants while allaying fears that foreigners will abuse the national social security system.
  • A third priority for the new German government will be re-evaluating the country's energy strategy.
  • Because Germany has few domestic energy resources, the country's energy strategy is also part of its foreign policy. Infrastructure integration with other countries is important for German energy imports, as are bilateral relations with Russia, Germany's main oil and natural gas provider.
  • How effectively Germany integrates Europe will depend largely on its willingness to aid other European countries, particularly those in the eurozone.
  • Continued financial assistance is a crucial element in Germany's national strategy of ensuring cohesion in Europe and preserving the currency union.
  • Legal and institutional hurdles will limit Berlin's ability to be proactive in helping other countries. Even if there were general consensus among the political elite that Germany should provide aid more extensively, small opposition groups can challenge and delay assistance plans relatively easily.
  • To ensure survival of the eurozone, Germany will also try to preserve the Franco-German alliance. Historically, European integration meant solidifying German economic strength and French political leadership, but the European crisis has strained their relationship. The pressure Berlin will face in giving in to French demands, which include allowing more government spending, mutualizing debt and changing the European Central Bank's role to accept higher inflation and to more openly intervene in sovereign bond markets, will largely depend on how strongly the economic performance of both countries diverges.
  • anonymous on 19 Sep 13
     
    "Much of Europe is eagerly anticipating the results of Germany's Sept. 22 parliamentary elections, but this anticipation may be somewhat misplaced. Of course, Germany's importance to Europe is well founded. It is Europe's largest economy and its main bailout creditor to struggling eurozone countries, so Germany's economic health is vital to the economic health of Europe as a whole. But the relationship goes both ways: Germany's economy relies on the free trade zone and on exports, which the rest of Europe can buy only if it can afford to do so. Thus any government in Berlin will continue to aid countries afflicted by the European crisis -- even at the risk of growing domestic opposition."
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Strategy, Ideology and the Close of the Syrian Crisis - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...eology-and-close-syrian-crisis
shared by anonymous on 17 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • In searching for the meaning behind every gesture, diplomats start to regard every action merely as a gesture.
  • In the past month, the president of the United States treated the act of bombing Syria as a gesture intended to convey meaning rather than as a military action intended to achieve some specific end. This is the key to understanding the tale that unfolded over the past month.
  • The threat of war is useful only when the threat is real and significant. This threat, however, was intended to be insignificant.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • When he took office, Obama did not want to engage in any war. His goal was to raise the threshold for military action much higher than it had been since the end of the Cold War, when Desert Storm, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq and other lesser interventions formed an ongoing pattern in U.S. foreign policy.
  • Strategy and the specifics of Syria both argued for American distance, and Obama followed this logic. Once chemical weapons were used, however, the reasoning shifted. Two reasons explain this shift.
  • One was U.S. concerns over weapons of mass destruction.
  • Tens of thousands have died in the Syrian civil war. The only difference in the deaths that prompted Obama's threats was that chemical weapons had caused them. That distinction alone caused the U.S. foreign policy apparatus to change its strategy.
  • The second cause of the U.S. shift is more important. All American administrations have a tendency to think ideologically, and there is an ideological bent heavily represented in the Obama administration that feels that U.S. military power ought to be used to prevent genocide.
  • This feeling dates back to World War II and the Holocaust, and became particularly intense over Rwanda and Bosnia, where many believe the United States could have averted mass murder. Many advocates of American intervention in humanitarian operations would oppose the use of military force in other circumstances, but regard its use as a moral imperative to stop mass murder.
  • His solution was to loudly threaten military action that he and his secretary of state both indicated would be minimal. The threatened action aroused little concern from the Syrian regime, which has fought a bloody two-year war. Meanwhile, the Russians, who were seeking to gain standing by resisting the United States, could paint Washington as reckless and unilateral.  
  • Obama wanted all of this to simply go away, but he needed some guarantee that chemical weapons in Syria would be brought under control.
  • For that, he needed al Assad's allies the Russians to promise to do something. Without that, he would have been forced to take ineffective military action despite not wanting to.
  • Therefore, the final phase of the comedy played out in Geneva, the site of grave Cold War meetings (it is odd that Obama accepted this site given its symbolism), where the Russians agreed in some unspecified way on an uncertain time frame to do something about Syria's chemical weapons. Obama promised not to take action that would have been ineffective anyway, and that was the end of it.
  • the point of the agreement was not dealing with chemical weapons, it was to buy time and release the United States from its commitment to bomb something in Syria.
  • The United States and Russia both want the al Assad regime in place to block the Sunnis. They both want the civil war to end, the Americans to reduce the pressure on themselves to aid the Sunnis, the Russians to reduce the chances of the al Assad regime collapsing.
  • The most important outcome globally is that the Russians sat with the Americans as equals for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, the Russians sat as mentors, positioning themselves as appearing to instruct the immature Americans in crisis management. To that end, Putin's op-ed in The New York Times was brilliant.
  • This should not be seen merely as imagery: The image of the Russians forcing the Americans to back down resonates all along the Russian periphery. In the former Soviet satellites, the complete disarray in Europe on this and most other issues, the vacillation of the United States, and the symbolism of Kerry and Lavrov negotiating as equals will shape behavior for quite awhile. 
  • The Obama administration has demonstrated a tendency to judge regimes that are potential allies on the basis of human rights without careful consideration of whether the alternative might be far worse. Coupled with an image of weakness, this could cause countries like Azerbaijan to reconsider their positions vis-a-vis the Russians.
  • The alignment of moral principles with national strategy is not easy under the best of circumstances. Ideologies tend to be more seductive in generalized terms, but not so coherent in specific cases. This is true throughout the political spectrum. But it is particularly intense in the Obama administration, where the ideas of humanitarian intervention, absolutism in human rights, and opposition to weapons of mass destruction collide with a strategy of limiting U.S. involvement -- particularly military involvement -- in the world. The ideologies wind up demanding judgments and actions that the strategy rejects.
  • The result is what we have seen over the past month with regard to Syria: A constant tension between ideology and strategy that caused the Obama administration to search for ways to do contradictory things.
  • anonymous on 17 Sep 13
     
    "It is said that when famed Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich heard of the death of the Turkish ambassador, he said, "I wonder what he meant by that?" True or not, serious or a joke, it points out a problem of diplomacy. In searching for the meaning behind every gesture, diplomats start to regard every action merely as a gesture. In the past month, the president of the United States treated the act of bombing Syria as a gesture intended to convey meaning rather than as a military action intended to achieve some specific end. This is the key to understanding the tale that unfolded over the past month."
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Analytic Guidance: The Syria Crisis - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...analytic-guidance-syria-crisis
shared by anonymous on 12 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • the threat of war has not dissolved. It has, however, been pushed off beyond this round of negotiations. 
  • There is no chance of an attack on chemical weapons stockpiles. Therefore, the attack, if any, will be on command and control and political targets
  • Remember that all public statements now are meant to obscure real plans and intentions. They are intended to shape the environment. Read them, but do not look at them as anything more than tactics.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The issue has morphed into a U.S.-Russian confrontation.
  • If it can appear that Washington has refrained from an attack because of Russian maneuvers, Moscow's weight increases dramatically.
  • The Russian ploy on weapons controls was followed by the brilliant move of abandoning strike options. Obama's speech the night of Sept. 10 was addressed to the U.S. public and Obama's highly fractured base; some of his support base opposes and some -- a particular audience -- demands action.
  • But he is aware that this week's dislike of war can turn into next week's contempt on charges of weakness. Obama is an outstanding politician and he knows he is in quicksand.
  • The weakness of the Russian position is that it has no real weight. The limit on American military action is purely domestic politics. If the United States chooses to hit Syria, Russia can do nothing about it and will be made to look weak, the tables thus turned on them.
  • The idea that this imbroglio will somehow disappear is certainly one that Obama is considering. But the Russians will not want that to happen. They do not want to let Obama off the hook and their view is that he will not act. Against this backdrop, they can appear to be the nemesis of the United States, its equal in power and its superior in cunning and diplomacy.
  • anonymous on 12 Sep 13
     
    "In the wake of President Barack Obama's change of tack from a strike on Syria, the threat of war has not dissolved. It has, however, been pushed off beyond this round of negotiations."
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Europe's public health disaster: How austerity kills - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...h-disaster-how-austerity-kills
shared by anonymous on 10 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Sep 13
     
    "Editor's note: UK political economist and epidemiologist David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, a U.S. physician and epidemiologist, have analyzed the consequences of economic crashes and crises on human health. The results were recently published under the title 'The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills.'"
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