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anonymous

Israel's New Strategic Position - 0 views

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

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

Voters, Not Tycoons, Should Set Priorities - 0 views

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israelis, Saudis and the Iranian Agreement - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...s-saudis-and-iranian-agreement

shared by anonymous on 26 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The mere fact that the U.S. secretary of state would meet openly with the Iranian foreign minister would have been difficult to imagine a few months ago, and unthinkable at the beginning of the Islamic republic. 
  • The U.S. goal is to eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons before they are built, without the United States having to take military action to eliminate them.
  • The Iranians' primary goal is regime preservation.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • Western sanctions have dramatically increased the economic pressure on Iran and have affected a wide swath of the Iranian public.
  • The election of President Hassan Rouhani to replace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after the latter's two terms was a sign of unhappiness.
  • The logic here suggests a process leading to the elimination of all sanctions in exchange for the supervision of Iran's nuclear activities to prevent it from developing a weapon. Unless this is an Iranian trick to somehow buy time to complete a weapon and test it, I would think that the deal could be done in six months.
  • An Iranian ploy to create cover for building a weapon would also demand a reliable missile and a launch pad invisible to surveillance satellites and the CIA, National Security Agency, Mossad, MI6 and other intelligence agencies. The Iranians would likely fail at this, triggering airstrikes however risky they might be and putting Iran back where it started economically. While this is a possibility, the scenario is not likely when analyzed closely.
  • There is a bit of irony in Israel and Saudi Arabia being allied on this issue, but only on the surface. Both have been intense enemies of Iran, and close allies of the United States; each sees this act as a betrayal of its relationship with Washington.
  • In a way, this marks a deeper shift in relations with Saudi Arabia than with Israel.
  • It was a massive producer of oil. It was also the protector of Mecca and Medina, two Muslim holy cities, giving the Saudis an added influence in the Islamic world on top of their extraordinary wealth. 
  • It was in British and American interests to protect Saudi Arabia from its enemies, most of which were part of the Muslim world.
  • Absent the United States in the Persian Gulf, Iran would have been the most powerful regional military power.
  • The problem from the Saudi point of view is that while there was a wide ideological gulf between the United States and Iran, there was little in the way of substantial issues separating Washington from Tehran.
  • The United States did not want Iran to develop nuclear weapons. The Iranians didn't want the United States hindering Iran's economic development. The fact was that getting a nuclear weapon was not a fundamental Iranian interest, and crippling Iran's economy was not a fundamental interest to the United States absent an Iranian nuclear program.
  • The Iranians want investment in their oil sector and other parts of their economy. American oil companies would love to invest in Iran, as would other U.S. businesses.
  • There are other significant political issues that can't be publicly addressed. The United States wants Iran to temper its support for Hezbollah's militancy, and guarantee it will not support terrorism. The Iranians want guarantees that Iraq will not develop an anti-Iranian government, and that the United States will work to prevent this.
  • From the Saudi point of view, Iranian demands regarding Iraq will be of greatest concern.
  • From the Israeli point of view, there are two threats from Iran. One is the nuclear program.
  • The other is Iranian support not only for Hezbollah but also for Hamas and other groups in the region.
  • But in the end, this is not the problem that the Saudis and Israelis have. Their problem is that both depend on the United States for their national security. Neither country can permanently exist in a region filled with dangers without the United States as a guarantor.
  • Israel needs access to American military equipment that it can't build itself, like fighter aircraft. Saudi Arabia needs to have American troops available as the ultimate guarantor of their security, as they were in 1990.
  • What frightens them the most about this agreement is that fact. If the foundation of their national security is the American commitment to them, then the inability to influence Washington is a threat to their national security.
  • The fact is that neither the Saudis nor the Israelis have a potential patron other than the United States.
  • The United States is not abandoning either Israel or Saudi Arabia. A regional policy based solely on the Iranians would be irrational. What the United States wants to do is retain its relationship with Israel and Saudi Arabia, but on modified terms.
  • The modification is that U.S. support will come in the context of a balance of power, particularly between Iran and Saudi Arabia. While the United States is prepared to support the Saudis in that context, it will not simply support them absolutely.
  • The Saudis and Israelis will have to live with things that they have not had to live with before -- namely, an American concern for a reasonably strong and stable Iran regardless of its ideology.
  • The American strategy is built on experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington has learned that it has interests in the region, but that the direct use of American force cannot achieve those goals, partly because imposing solutions takes more force than the United States has and partly because the more force it uses, the more resistance it generates. Therefore, the United States needs a means of minimizing its interests, and pursuing those it has without direct force.
  • Saudi Arabia is not abandoned, but nor is it the sole interest of the United States.
  • In the same sense, the United States is committed to the survival of Israel.
  • If Iranian nuclear weapons are prevented, the United States has fulfilled that commitment, since there are no current threats that could conceivably threaten Israeli survival. Israel's other interests, such as building settlements in the West Bank, do not require American support.
  • With this opening to Iran, the United States will no longer be bound by its Israeli and Saudi relationships. They will not be abandoned, but the United States has broader interests than those relationships, and at the same time few interests that rise to the level of prompting it to directly involve U.S. troops.
  • anonymous on 26 Nov 13
     
    "A deal between Iran and the P-5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) was reached Saturday night. The Iranians agreed to certain limitations on their nuclear program while the P-5+1 agreed to remove certain economic sanctions. The next negotiation, scheduled for six months from now depending on both sides' adherence to the current agreement, will seek a more permanent resolution. The key players in this were the United States and Iran. "
anonymous

This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading - 0 views

www.wired.com/...vaclav-smil-wired

shared by anonymous on 25 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Let’s talk about manufacturing. You say a country that stops doing mass manufacturing falls apart. Why? In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.
  • You also say that manufacturing is crucial to innovation. Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing—from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What’s very important is in-house research. Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.
  • American companies do still innovate, though. They just outsource the manufacturing. What’s wrong with that? Look at the crown jewel of Boeing now, the 787 Dreamliner. The plane had so many problems—it was like three years late. And why? Because large parts of it were subcontracted around the world. The 787 is not a plane made in the USA; it’s a plane assembled in the USA. They subcontracted composite materials to Italians and batteries to the Japanese, and the batteries started to burn in-flight. The quality control is not there.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Restoring manufacturing would mean training Americans again to build things. Only two countries have done this well: Germany and Switzerland. They’ve both maintained strong manufacturing sectors and they share a key thing: Kids go into apprentice programs at age 14 or 15. You spend a few years, depending on the skill, and you can make BMWs. And because you started young and learned from the older people, your products can’t be matched in quality. This is where it all starts.
  • You claim Apple could assemble the iPhone in the US and still make a huge profit. It’s no secret! Apple has tremendous profit margins. They could easily do everything at home. The iPhone isn’t manufactured in China—it’s assembled in China from parts made in the US, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and so on. The cost there isn’t labor. But laborers must be sufficiently dedicated and skilled to sit on their ass for eight hours and solder little pieces together so they fit perfectly.
  • But Apple is supposed to be a giant innovator. Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad—yet everyone worships them. This new iPhone, there’s nothing new in it. Just a golden color. What the hell, right? When people start playing with color, you know they’re played out.
  • Let’s talk about energy. You say alternative energy can’t scale. Is there no role for renewables? I like renewables, but they move slowly. There’s an inherent inertia, a slowness in energy transitions. It would be easier if we were still consuming 66,615 kilowatt-hours per capita, as in 1950. But in 1950 few people had air-conditioning. We’re a society that demands electricity 24/7. This is very difficult with sun and wind.
  • What about nuclear? The Chinese are building it, the Indians are building it, the Russians have some intention to build. But as you know, the US is not. The last big power plant was ordered in 1974. Germany is out, Italy has vowed never to build one, and even France is delaying new construction. Is it a nice thought that the future of nuclear energy is now in the hands of North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Iran? It’s a depressing thought, isn’t it?
  • You call this Moore’s curse—the idea that if we’re innovative enough, everything can have yearly efficiency gains. It’s a categorical mistake. You just cannot increase the efficiency of power plants like that. You have your combustion machines—the best one in the lab now is about 40 percent efficient. In the field they’re about 15 or 20 percent efficient. Well, you can’t quintuple it, because that would be 100 percent efficient. Impossible, right? There are limits. It’s not a microchip.
  • So what’s left? Making products more energy-efficient? Innovation is making products more energy-efficient — but then we consume so many more products that there’s been no absolute dematerialization of anything. We still consume more steel, more aluminum, more glass, and so on. As long as we’re on this endless material cycle, this merry-go-round, well, technical innovation cannot keep pace.
  • What is the simplest way to make your house super-efficient? Insulation!
  • Right. I have 50 percent more insulation in my walls. It adds very little to the cost. And you insulate your basement from the outside—I have about 20 inches of Styrofoam on the outside of that concrete wall. We were the first people building on our cul-de-sac, so I saw all the other houses after us—much bigger, 3,500 square feet. None of them were built properly. I pay in a year for electricity what they pay in January. You can have a super-efficient house; you can have a super-efficient car, a little Honda Civic, 40 miles per gallon.
  • Your other big subject is food. You’re a pretty grim thinker, but this is your most optimistic area. You actually think we can feed a planet of 10 billion people—if we eat less meat and waste less food. We pour all this energy into growing corn and soybeans, and then we put all that into rearing animals while feeding them antibiotics. And then we throw away 40 percent of the food we produce.
  • So the answers are not technological but political: better economic policies, better education, better trade policies. Right. Today, as you know, everything is “innovation.” We have problems, and people are looking for fairy-tale solutions—innovation like manna from heaven falling on the Israelites and saving them from the desert. It’s like, “Let’s not reform the education system, the tax system. Let’s not improve our dysfunctional government. Just wait for this innovation manna from a little group of people in Silicon Valley, preferably of Indian origin.”
  • anonymous on 25 Nov 13
     
    ""There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil," Bill Gates wrote this summer. That's quite an endorsement-and it gave a jolt of fame to Smil, a professor emeritus of environment and geography at the University of Manitoba. In a world of specialized intellectuals, Smil is an ambitious and astonishing polymath who swings for fences. His nearly three dozen books have analyzed the world's biggest challenges-the future of energy, food production, and manufacturing-with nuance and detail. They're among the most data-heavy books you'll find, with a remarkable way of framing basic facts. (Sample nugget: Humans will consume 17 percent of what the biosphere produces this year.)"
anonymous

The Internet Is Killing the Middle Class - 1 views

mag.newsweek.com/...-killing-the-middle-class.html

shared by anonymous on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • There are two viable courses of action for the U.S., or any other nation.
  • One is to pass laws that redistribute wealth from the top tier down.
  • The second option is to do everything possible to shift large segments of the population into a new kind of job. 
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Some smart companies and educators contend that the next middle class will be made up of this new kind of worker: one who deals in creativity, philosophy, and idea synthesis, thinking that can’t be easily networked or automated. 
  • anonymous on 24 Oct 13
     
    The growing U.S. income gap has little to do with policy or politics and everything to do with technology.
anonymous

How We Teach Our Kids That Women Are Liars - 0 views

www.rolereboot.org/...-our-kids-that-women-are-liars

shared by anonymous on 22 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 22 Nov 13
     
    "Two weeks ago a man in France was arrested for raping his daughter. She'd gone to her school counselor and then the police, but they needed "hard evidence." So, she videotaped her next assault. Her father was eventually arrested. His attorney explained, "There was a period when he was unemployed and in the middle of a divorce. He insists that these acts did not stretch back further than three or four months. His daughter says longer. But everyone should be very careful in what they say." Because, really, even despite her seeking help, her testimony, her bravery in setting up a webcam to film her father raping her, you really can't believe what the girl says, can you?"
anonymous

The history of inequality (by Peter Turchin) - 0 views

www.aeonmagazine.com/...peter-turchin-wealth-poverty

shared by anonymous on 21 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. The top one per cent of fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth.
  • As the Congressional Budget Office concluded in 2011: ‘the precise reasons for the rapid growth in income at the top are not well understood’.
  • In his book Wealth and Democracy (2002), Kevin Phillips came up with a useful way of thinking about the changing patterns of wealth inequality in the US.
  • ...67 more annotations...
  • He looked at the net wealth of the nation’s median household and compared it with the size of the largest fortune in the US. The ratio of the two figures provided a rough measure of wealth inequality, and that’s what he tracked, touching down every decade or so from the turn of the 19th century all the way to the present.
  • We found repeated back-and-forth swings in demographic, economic, social, and political structures
  • From 1800 to the 1920s, inequality increased more than a hundredfold.
  • Then came the reversal: from the 1920s to 1980, it shrank back to levels not seen since the mid-19th century.
  • From 1980 to the present, the wealth gap has been on another steep, if erratic, rise. Commentators have called the period from 1920s to 1970s the ‘great compression’. The past 30 years are known as the ‘great divergence’.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      I'd like to pull this citation and superimpose another period-chart onto my timeline.
  • when looked at over a long period, the development of wealth inequality in the US appears to be cyclical. And if it’s cyclical, we can predict what happens next.
  • Does observing just one and a half cycles really show that there is a regular pattern in the dynamics of inequality? No, by itself it doesn’t.
  • In our book Secular Cycles (2009), Sergey Nefedov and I applied the Phillips approach to England, France and Russia throughout both the medieval and early modern periods, and also to ancient Rome.
  • And the cycles of inequality were an integral part of the overall motion.
  • Cycles in the real world are chaotic, because complex systems such as human societies have many parts that are constantly moving and influencing each other.
  • Understanding (and perhaps even forecasting) such trend-reversals is at the core of the new discipline of cliodynamics, which looks at history through the lens of mathematical modelling.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      Cliodynamics - Another thing to learn a bit more about.
  • First, we need to think about jobs.
  • One of the most important forces affecting the labour supply in the US has been immigration
  • it turns out that immigration, as measured by the proportion of the population who were born abroad, has changed in a cyclical manner just like inequality.
  • Another reason why the labour supply in the US went up in the 19th century is, not to put too fine a point on it, sex.
  • This connection between the oversupply of labour and plummeting living standards for the poor is one of the more robust generalisations in history.
  • The population of England doubled between 1150 and 1300.
  • causing the population of London to balloon from 20,000 to 80,000.
  • fourfold increase in food prices and a halving of real wages.
  • when a series of horrible epidemics, starting with the Black Death of 1348, carried away more than half of the population, the same dynamic ran in reverse.
  • The tug of war between the top and typical incomes doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, but in practice it often is
  • Much the same pattern can be seen during the secular cycle of the Roman Principate.
  • Naturally, the conditions affecting the labour supply were different in the second half of the 20th century in the US. An important new element was globalisation
  • an oversupply of labour tends to depress wages for the poorer section of the population. And just as in Roman Egypt, the poor in the US today eat more energy-dense foods — bread, pasta, and potatoes — while the wealthy eat more fruit and drink wine.
  • Falling wages isn’t the only reason why labour oversupply leads to inequality. As the slice of the economic pie going to employees diminishes, the share going to employers goes up.
  • And so in 13th-century England, as the overall population doubles, we find landowners charging peasants higher rents and paying less in wages: the immiseration of the general populace translates into a Golden Age for the aristocrats.
  • the number of knights and esquires tripled between 1200 and 1300.
  • Only the gentry drank wine, and around 1300, England imported 20,000 tuns or casks of it from France per year. By 1460, this declined to only 5,000.
  • In the US between around 1870 and 1900, there was another Golden Age for the elites, appropriately called the Gilded Age.
  • And just like in 13th-century England, the total number of the wealthy was shooting up. Between 1825 and 1900, the number of millionaires (in constant 1900 dollars) went from 2.5 per million of the population to 19 per million.
  • In our current cycle, the proportion of decamillionaires (those whose net worth exceeds 10 million in 1995 dollars) grew tenfold between 1992 and 2007 — from 0.04 to 0.4 per cent of the US population.
  • On the face of it, this is a wonderful testament to merit-based upward mobility. But there are side effects. Don’t forget that most people are stuck with stagnant or falling real wages. Upward mobility for a few hollows out the middle class and causes the social pyramid to become top-heavy.
  • As the ranks of the wealthy swell, so too do the numbers of wealthy aspirants for the finite supply of political positions.
  • The civil wars of the first century BC, fuelled by a surplus of politically ambitious aristocrats, ultimately caused the fall of the Republic and the establishment of the Empire.
  • So far I have been talking about the elites as if they are all the same. But they aren’t: the differences within the wealthiest one per cent are almost as stark as the difference between the top one per cent and the remaining 99.
  • very intense status rivalry
  • Archaeology confirms a genuine and dramatic shift towards luxury.
  • Social Darwinism took off during the original Gilded Age, and Ayn Rand (who argued that altruism is evil) has grown astonishingly popular during what we might call our Second Gilded Age.
  • Twilight of the Elites (2012): ‘defenders of the status quo invoke a kind of neo-Calvinist logic by saying that those at the top, by virtue of their placement there, must be the most deserving’. By the same reasoning, those at the bottom are not deserving. As such social norms spread, it becomes increasingly easy for CEOs to justify giving themselves huge bonuses while cutting the wages of workers.
  • Labour markets are especially sensitive to cultural norms about what is fair compensation, so prevailing theories about inequality have practical consequences.
  • the US political system is much more attuned to the wishes of the rich than to the aspirations of the poor.
  • Inverse relationship between well-being and inequality in American history. The peaks and valleys of inequality (in purple) represent the ratio of the largest fortunes to the median wealth of households (the Phillips curve). The blue-shaded curve combines four measures of well-being: economic (the fraction of economic growth that is paid to workers as wages), health (life expectancy and the average height of native-born population), and social optimism (the average age of first marriage, with early marriages indicating social optimism and delayed marriages indicating social pessimism).
  • In some historical periods it worked primarily for the benefit of the wealthy. In others, it pursued policies that benefited the society as a whole. Take the minimum wage, which grew during the Great Compression era and declined (in real terms) after 1980.
  • The top marginal tax rate was 68 per cent or higher before 1980; by 1988 it declined to 28 per cent.
  • In one era, government policy systematically favoured the majority, while in another it favoured the narrow interests of the wealthy elites. This inconsistency calls for explanation.
  • How, though, can we account for the much more broadly inclusive policies of the Great Compression era? And what caused the reversal that ended the Gilded Age and ushered in the Great Compression? Or the second switch, which took place around 1980?
  • Unequal societies generally turn a corner once they have passed through a long spell of political instability.
  • We see this shift in the social mood repeatedly throughout history — towards the end of the Roman civil wars (first century BC), following the English Wars of the Roses (1455-85), and after the Fronde (1648-53), the final great outbreak of violence that had been convulsing France since the Wars of Religion began in the late 16th century.
  • Put simply, it is fear of revolution that restores equality. And my analysis of US history in a forthcoming book suggests that this is precisely what happened in the US around 1920.
  • The worst incident in US labour history was the West Virginia Mine War of 1920—21, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain.
  • Although it started as a workers’ dispute, the Mine War eventually turned into the largest armed insurrection that the US has ever seen, the Civil War excepted. Between 10,000 and 15,000 miners armed with rifles battled against thousands of strikebreakers and sheriff deputies.
  • Quantitative data indicate that this period was the most violent in US history, second only to the Civil War. It was much, much worse than the 1960s.
  • The US, in short, was in a revolutionary situation, and many among the political and business elites realised it.
  • The US elites entered into an unwritten compact with the working classes. This implicit contract included the promise that the fruits of economic growth would be distributed more equitably among both workers and owners. In return, the fundamentals of the political-economic system would not be challenged (no revolution).
  • The deal allowed the lower and upper classes to co-operate in solving the challenges facing the American Republic — overcoming the Great Depression, winning the Second World War, and countering the Soviet threat during the Cold War.
  • while making such ‘categorical inequalities’ worse, the compact led to a dramatic reduction in overall economic inequality.
  • The co-operating group was mainly native-born white Protestants. African-Americans, Jews, Catholics and foreigners were excluded or heavily discriminated against.
  • When Barry Goldwater campaigned on a pro-business, anti-union and anti-big government platform in the 1964 presidential elections, he couldn’t win any lasting support from the corporate community. The conservatives had to wait another 16 years for their triumph.
  • But by the late 1970s, a new generation of political and business leaders had come to power. To them the revolutionary situation of 1919-21 was just history. In this they were similar to the French aristocrats on the eve of the French Revolution, who did not see that their actions could bring down the Ancien Régime — the last great social breakdown, the Fronde, being so far in the past.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      This heavily mirrors many aspects of Strauss & Howe's observations. Namely that generational cohorts roughly conform to archetypes precisely *because* memory of prior situations moves from accessible-memory (in those who have it) to history/myth once those who remember it have died.
  • It is no coincidence that the life of Communism (from the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) coincides almost perfectly with the Great Compression era.
  • when Communism collapsed, its significance was seriously misread. It’s true that the Soviet economy could not compete with a system based on free markets plus policies and norms that promoted equity.
  • Yet the fall of the Soviet Union was interpreted as a vindication of free markets, period. The triumphalist, heady atmosphere of the 1990s was highly conducive to the spread of Ayn Randism and other individualist ideologies. The unwritten social contract that had emerged during the New Deal and braved the challenges of the Second World War had faded from memory.
  • all of these trends are part of a complex and interlocking system. I don’t just mean that everything affects everything else; that would be vacuous.
  • Rather, that cliodynamic theory can tell us specifically how demographic, economic and cultural variables relate to one another, and how their interactions generate social change.
  • Cliodynamics also explains why historical reversals in such diverse areas as economics and culture happen at roughly similar times. The theory of secular cycles was developed using data from historical societies, but it looks like it can provide answers to questions about our own society.
  • Three years ago I published a short article in the science journal Nature. I pointed out that several leading indicators of political instability look set to peak around 2020.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Nov 13
       
      2020-2025 is a date-range that continues to pop up in my forecasting readings - and from quite a variety of sources.
  • In other words, we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp, at which the US will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval. This prediction is not a ‘prophecy’. I don’t believe that disaster is pre-ordained, no matter what we do. On the contrary, if we understand the causes, we have a chance to prevent it from happening. But the first thing we will have to do is reverse the trend of ever-growing inequality.
  • anonymous on 21 Nov 13
     
    "After thousands of scholarly and popular articles on the topic, one might think we would have a pretty good idea why the richest people in the US are pulling away from the rest. But it seems we don't. As the Congressional Budget Office concluded in 2011: 'the precise reasons for the rapid growth in income at the top are not well understood'. Some commentators point to economic factors, some to politics, and others again to culture. Yet obviously enough, all these factors must interact in complex ways. What is slightly less obvious is how a very long historical perspective can help us to see the whole mechanism."
anonymous

4 Bad Justifications For Detoxing - 0 views

www.burnthefatblog.com/...ustifications-for-detoxing.php

shared by anonymous on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • For the sake of this article, I’ll use the terms “cleanse” and “detox” interchangeably as any dietary strategy that employs strict rules on eating or drinking – usually involving the elimination of many foods/drinks/substances and/or involves fasting or the addition of special supplements for a period of time.
  • 1.  want to rid my body of toxins:
  • The word “toxin” itself is largely misunderstood and misrepresented by peddlers of cleansing plans.  They keep things intentionally obscurantist when it comes to the precisely what they mean by “toxins” for good reason.   Making specific claims ie. “Our sooper-dooper clenz™ removes polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons”, would place a specific burden of proof on the manufacturer.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • 2. I just need a weight loss “boost”:
  • Will subsisting on ridiculously low amounts of calories for days on end “boost” weight loss?  Very likely, yes.  Your likelihood of keeping it off, however… almost zero.  Prolonged periods of sizeable caloric deficits will force your body to slow down and conserve energy. 
  • I don’t care what supplements/herbs/juices you are taking, there is no substitute for getting adequate calories from good old-fashioned food.
  • 3.  I’ve been eating like crap/boozing too much:
  • Along with our aforementioned “instant/quick fix” mentality, we as a westernized culture are poster children for all-or-nothing thinking.  We think we can atone for dietary sins by going on strict plans.  The problem is that it simply doesn’t work.
  • 4. It makes me feel WONDERFUL!
  • these feelings are both short-lived and deceptive.  I would first contend that people who feel “energized” and “happy” are falling victim to the power of suggestion and the placebo effect.
  • Psychology aside, there may be some short-lived physiological effects of cleansing.  If we think about how most people eat on a day-to-day basis (read: highly processed, empty calorie), ANY half-way drastic eating changes could trigger warm-and-fuzzy, high energy feelings.  The reality, however is that consuming very low calories and/or protein for any extended period will sooner or later bring your energy levels to a grinding halt.
  • How to “detox” without really “detoxing”. 
  • anonymous on 19 Nov 13
     
    "One of the most nonsensical (not to mention irritating) trends in health is "cleansing" or "detox" programs.  They exist in abundance in health circles and can be found everywhere - usually touted as a panacea for any given health problem.  From bookshelves to yoga studios to multi-level marketing campaigns, "cleanses" remain the most prominent socially accepted eating disorder of today."
anonymous

Letter from Tangier - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...letter-tangier

shared by anonymous on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Those mountains that almost seem a stone's throw away are where a Moroccan general, Tariq ibn Ziyad, massed his troops for a conquest ordered by the sixth Umayyad caliph in the early 8th century to expand the frontier of the caliphate to the Iberian Peninsula.
  • Tangier and the Spanish-controlled city of Ceuta slightly to the east are the closest Africa gets to Europe.
  • The highlands are inhabited by Morocco's local natives, given the name Berbers by Greeks and Romans who regarded them as "barbari," Greek for "barbarians," who refused to adapt to their ways.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Unlike in many of its ill-defined neighbors to its east and south, there is a geographic logic to Morocco's boundaries that has allowed it to develop a strong identity over the centuries.
  • With Islamic power centers far away to the east in Baghdad and Damascus, Morocco was able to cultivate a much more experimental relationship with Islam.
  • This tradition of liberalism in theology continues to this day as contemporary religious-political movements in Morocco espouse a postmodern Islamist model to attract youth who are semi-fluent in Western philosophy but who, out of frustration, are searching for an alternative to the current system.
  • distance is a virtue for Morocco. Overstretched politically, financially and militarily, the Ottomans, nominal overlords from the 16th to 19th century, fell short of claiming Morocco as part of their empire
  • Distance also enabled Morocco to develop a uniquely cooperative relationship with Israel. As one older Berber man with leathery skin and kind eyes told me over mint tea, "You cannot dance to music that you cannot hear."
  • In other words, enough land lies between Morocco and Israel to insulate Morocco from the more vitriolic relationships Israel has with its Arab neighbors.
  • With no navigable rivers to facilitate inland development, Morocco has been and remains a capital-poor territory.
  • As Morocco fell more and more in debt to the Europeans, it saw its sovereignty erode, a trend that culminated in the French and Spanish protectorates of the early 20th century.
  • Morocco's vulnerability to Europe marked the foundation of its relationship with the United States. While the Europeans were busy fighting among themselves, Morocco looked eagerly across the Atlantic at 13 colonies developing along North America's eastern seaboard. Morocco was desperate for a patron and ally with enough power, strategic interest -- and enough distance from Morocco -- to effectively balance against its European neighbors, and it found one in the United States.
  • As a sign of Morocco's geopolitical foresight, the sultan ensured that Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States in December 1777
  • Morocco stands out for its relative stability. As one of the last standing monarchies of the region, Morocco enjoys strong support from the Gulf Arab monarchies that are deeply unnerved by the U.S. pursuit of a strategic detente with Iran.
  • Morocco is also a country that the United States can look to as a political model for managing the stresses of the hangover from the Arab Spring.
  • Morocco's historically flexible interpretation of Islam engendered a more dynamic relationship between Moroccan rulers and their constituencies.
  • The idea that sultans were not invincible laid the groundwork for constitutional monarchy in Morocco.
  • Youth unemployment is believed to be as high as 30 percent
  • Morocco's occupation of a strategic transit point between Atlantic and Mediterranean commerce applies to the drug trade as well.
  • Morocco cannot escape its economic pressures, but it does retain the tools and legitimacy to manage them, unlike many of its neighbors.
  • King Mohammed VI will be looking for U.S. backing for Morocco's claim to Western Sahara
  • The state-owned Moroccan press is meanwhile issuing articles that allege Algerian imperialist ambitions in the region.
  • Morocco's claims to the Western Sahara do not figure into Washington's priorities for the region. Taking sides in this issue now would only complicate the U.S. relationships with Algeria and other African countries without providing any clear benefit in return.
  • anonymous on 19 Nov 13
     
    "Morocco rarely figures into international news headlines these days, something of a virtue in this restive part of the world. The term Maghreb, which translates as "land of the setting sun," eventually came to denote a stretch of land starting in the Western Sahara and running through the Atlas Mountains and ending before the Nile River Valley, encompassing modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. However, the Maghreb originally meant the lands that define Morocco, where the setting sun marked the Western frontier of the Islamic empire."
anonymous

The Insanity of Our Food Policy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...he-insanity-of-our-food-policy

shared by anonymous on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The House has proposed cutting food stamp benefits by $40 billion over 10 years — that’s on top of $5 billion in cuts that already came into effect this month with the expiration of increases to the food stamp program that were included in the 2009 stimulus law.
  • Meanwhile, House Republicans appear satisfied to allow farm subsidies, which totaled some $14.9 billion last year, to continue apace.
  • The proposal is a perfect example of how growing inequality has been fed by what economists call rent-seeking. As small numbers of Americans have grown extremely wealthy, their political power has also ballooned to a disproportionate size.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • While the money that they’ve picked from each individual American’s pocket is small, the aggregate is huge for the rent-seeker. And this in turn deepens inequality.
  • FARM subsidies were much more sensible when they began eight decades ago, in 1933, at a time when more than 40 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Farm incomes had fallen by about a half in the first three years of the Great Depression. In that context, the subsidies were an anti-poverty program.
  • Some three-quarters of the subsidies went to just 10 percent of farms. These farms received an average of more than $30,000 a year — about 20 times the amount received by the average individual beneficiary last year from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program, or SNAP, commonly called food stamps.
  • More than 80 percent of the 45 million or so Americans who participated in SNAP in 2011, the last year for which there is comprehensive data from the United States Department of Agriculture, had gross household incomes below the poverty level.
  • Historically, food stamp programs and agricultural subsidies have been tied together.
  • The Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen has reminded us that even famines are not necessarily caused by a lack of supply, but by a failure to get the food that exists to the people who need it. This was true in the Bengal famine of 1943 and in the Irish potato famine a century earlier: Ireland, controlled by its British masters, was exporting food even as its citizens died of starvation.
  • A similar dynamic is playing out in the United States. American farmers are heralded as among the most efficient in the world. Our country is the largest producer and exporter of corn and soybeans, to name just two of its biggest crops. And yet millions of Americans still suffer from hunger, and millions more would, were it not for the vital programs that government provides to prevent hunger and malnutrition — the programs that the Republicans are now seeking to cut back.
  • While they encourage overproduction, they pay little attention to the quality and diversity of foods our farms produce. The heavy subsidization of corn, for instance, means that many unhealthful foods are relatively cheap.
  • This is part of the reason that Americans face the paradox of hunger out of proportion to their wealth, along with some of the world’s highest obesity rates, and a high incidence of Type 2 diabetes. Poor Americans are especially at risk for obesity.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Nov 13
       
      This is such a raw example of Unintend Consequences. The intention of policy architecture just can't account for ingenious manipulation 
  • Indian friends I met that day and in the following week were puzzled by this news: How could it be that in the richest country of the world there was still hunger?
  • Their puzzlement was understandable: Hunger in this rich land is unnecessary. What my Indian friends didn’t understand is that 15 percent of Americans — and 22 percent of America’s children — live in poverty.
  • Someone working full time (2,080 hours a year) at the minimum wage of $7.25 would earn about $15,000 a year, far less than the poverty threshold for a family of four ($23,492 in 2012), and even less than the poverty level of a family of three.
  • In his famous 1941 “four freedoms” speech, Franklin D. Roosevelt enunciated the principle that all Americans should have certain basic economic rights, including “freedom from want.”
  • And those numbers increased drastically with the onset of the Great Recession. The number of Americans on food stamps went up by more than 80 percent between 2007 and 2013.
  • In 2012, for example, two in five SNAP recipients had gross incomes that were less than half of the poverty line.
  • The amount they get from the program is very small — $4.39 a day per recipient.
  • The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that SNAP lifted four million Americans out of poverty in 2010.
  • with American consumption diminished from what it otherwise would be and production increased, food exports will inevitably increase.
  • By cutting back on food stamps, we are ensuring the perpetuation of inequality, and at that, one of its worst manifestations: the inequality of opportunity.
  • All of this exposes the Republicans’ argument in favor of these food policies — a concern for our future, particularly the impact of the national debt on our children — as a dishonest and deeply cynical pretense.
  • anonymous on 19 Nov 13
     
    "American food policy has long been rife with head-scratching illogic. We spend billions every year on farm subsidies, many of which help wealthy commercial operations to plant more crops than we need. The glut depresses world crop prices, harming farmers in developing countries. Meanwhile, millions of Americans live tenuously close to hunger, which is barely kept at bay by a food stamp program that gives most beneficiaries just a little more than $4 a day."
anonymous

You Broke Peer Review. Yes, I Mean You | Code and Culture - 0 views

codeandculture.wordpress.com/...youbrokepeerreview

shared by anonymous on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • no more anonymous co-authors making your paper worse with a bunch of non sequiturs or footnotes with hedging disclaimers.
  • The thing is though that optimistic as I am about the new journal, I don’t think it will replace the incumbent journals overnight and so we still need to fix review at the incumbent journals.
  • So fixing peer review doesn’t begin with you, the author, yelling at your computer “FFS reviewer #10, maybe that’s how you would have done it, but it’s not your paper”
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • Nor, realistically, can fixing peer review happen from the editors telling you to go ahead and ignore comments 2, 5, and 6 of reviewer #6.
  • First, it would be an absurd amount of work
  • Second, from the editor’s perspective the chief practical problem is recruiting reviewers
  • they don’t want to alienate the reviewers by telling them that half their advice sucks in their cover letter
  • Rather, fixing peer review has to begin with you, the reviewer, telling yourself “maybe I would have done it another way myself, but it’s not my paper.”
  • You need to adopt a mentality of “is it good how the author did it” rather than “how could this paper be made better” (read: how would I have done it). That is the whole of being a good reviewer, the rest is commentary. That said, here’s the commentary.
  • Do not brainstorm
  • Responding to a research question by brainstorming possibly relevant citations or methods
  • First, many brainstormed ideas are bad.
  • When I give you advice as a peer reviewer there is a strong presumption that you take the advice even if it’s mediocre
  • Second, many brainstormed ideas are confusing.
  • When I give you advice in my office you can ask follow-up questions
  • When I give advice as a peer reviewer it’s up to you to hope that you read the entrails in a way that correctly augurs the will of the peer reviewers.
  • Being specific has the ancillary benefit that it’s costly to the reviewer which should help you maintain the discipline to thin the mindfart herd stampeding into the authors’ revisions.
  • Third, ideas are more valuable at the beginning of a project than at the end of it.
  • When I give you advice about your new project you can use it to shape the way the project develops organically. When I give it to you as a reviewer you can only graft it on after the fact.
  • it is essential to keep in mind that no matter how highly you think of your own expertise and opinions, you remember that the author doesn’t want to hear it.
  • time is money. It usually takes me an amount of time that is at least the equivalent of a course release to turn-around an R&R and at most schools a course release in turn is worth about $10,000 to $30,000 if you’re lucky enough to raise the grants to buy them.
  • Distinguish demands versus suggestions versus synapses that happened to fire as you were reading the paper
  • A lot of review comments ultimately boil down to some variation on “this reminds me of this citation” or “this research agenda could go in this direction.” OK, great. Now ask yourself, is it a problem that this paper does not yet do these things or are these just possibilities you want to share with the author?
  • As a related issue, demonstrate some rhetorical humility.
  • There’s wrong and then there’s difference of opinion
  • On quite a few methodological and theoretical issues there is a reasonable range of opinion. Don’t force the author to weigh in on your side.
  • For instance, consider Petev ASR 2013. The article relies heavily on McPherson et al ASR 2006, which is an extremely controversial article (see here, here, and here).
  • One reaction to this would be to say the McPherson et al paper is refuted and ought not be cited. However Petev summarizes the controversy in footnote 10 and then in footnote 17 explains why his own data is a semi-independent (same dataset, different variables) corroboration of McPherson et al.
  • These footnotes acknowledge a nontrivial debate about one of the article’s literature antecedents and then situates the paper within the debate.
  • Theoretical debates are rarely an issue of decisive refutation or strictly cumulative knowledge but rather at any given time there’s a reasonable range of opinions and you shouldn’t demand that the author go with your view but at most that they explore its implications if they were to.
  • There are cases where you fall on one side of a theoretical or methodological gulf and the author on another to the extent that you feel that you can’t really be fair.
  • you as the reviewer have to decide if you’re going to engage in what philosophers of science call “the demarcation problem” and sociologists of science call “boundary work” or you’re going to recuse yourself from the review.
  • Don’t try to turn the author’s theory section into a lit review.
  • The theory section is not about demonstrating basic competence or reciting a creedal confession and so it does not need to discuss every book or article ever published on the subject or even just the things important enough to appear on your graduate syllabus or field exam reading list.
  • If the submission reminds you of a citation that’s relevant to the author’s subject matter, think about whether it would materially affect the argument.
  • anonymous on 19 Nov 13
     
    "I'm as excited as anybody about Sociological Science as it promises a clean break from the "developmental" model of peer review by moving towards an entirely evaluative model. That is, no more anonymous co-authors making your paper worse with a bunch of non sequiturs or footnotes with hedging disclaimers. (The journal will feature frequent comment and replies, which makes debate about the paper a public dialog rather than a secret hostage negotiation). The thing is though that optimistic as I am about the new journal, I don't think it will replace the incumbent journals overnight and so we still need to fix review at the incumbent journals."
anonymous

China: The Next Phase of Reform - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...china-next-phase-reform

shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The much-anticipated Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee concluded Nov. 12 after four days of closed-door deliberations among top political elites.
  • the initial information suggests China's leaders are seeking more significant changes in their policies
  • important policy changes include the establishment of a committee to guide the country’s comprehensive reform agenda, the establishment of an integrated National Security Committee responsible for coordinating public safety and national strategy, and the easing of the country's 33-year-old family planning policy to allow more couples to have a second child.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The country's massive pool of cheap labor previously underpinned its economic and social transformation, but as China prepares to transition toward a consumer-based economy, its aging population is a problem.
  • China is now at a turning point. The country's economic growth has firmly cemented Chinese businesses and national interests around the globe. It has raised the living standards, but also the expectations, of China's citizens.
  • There is a growing sense of Chinese patriotism that exists beyond the confines of the Communist Party.
  • Modern forms of communication such as social media give Chinese citizens the ability to rapidly share successes and grievances across the country, to identify and single out cases of political corruption and to more actively keep the Party and leadership under scrutiny. At the same time, the expanded Chinese imports of raw materials and exports of commodities have substantially expanded China's active foreign interests, requiring a more nuanced and potentially a more activist foreign policy.
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 13
     
    "The commitment and ability of China's leaders to follow through on new policies and to meet rising expectations will be tested as they strive to balance competing social, economic, political and security challenges. Three decades ago, China embarked on a new path, creating a framework that encouraged the country's rapid economic rise. The successes of those policies have transformed China, and the country's leadership now faces another set of strategic choices to address China's new economic and international position."
anonymous

The McRib: Enjoy Your Symptom - Ian Bogost - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281413

shared by anonymous on 15 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 15 Nov 13
     
    "Each year, the McRib makes a brief visit to Earth. Its arrival elicits reactions ranging from horror to awe. And for good reason: this would-be rib sandwich is really a restructured pork patty pressed into the rough shape of a slab of ribs, its slathering of barbecue sauce acting as camouflage as much as coating."
anonymous

slacktivist » The 'biblical view' that's younger than the Happy Meal - 2 views

www.patheos.com/...ts-younger-than-the-happy-meal

shared by anonymous on 10 Nov 13 - No Cached
Ed Webb and Erik Hanson liked it
  • Ask any American evangelical, today, what the Bible says about abortion and they will insist that this is what it says. (Many don’t actually believe this, but they know it is the only answer that won’t get them in trouble.) They’ll be a little fuzzy on where, exactly, the Bible says this, but they’ll insist that it does.
  • That’s new. If you had asked American evangelicals that same question the year I was born you would not have gotten the same answer.
  • That year, Christianity Today — edited by Harold Lindsell, champion of “inerrancy” and author of The Battle for the Bible — published a special issue devoted to the topics of contraception and abortion.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • For example, one article by a professor from Dallas Theological Seminary criticized the Roman Catholic position on abortion as unbiblical. Jonathan Dudley quotes from the article in his book Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics. Keep in mind that this is from a conservative evangelical seminary professor, writing in Billy Graham’s magazine for editor Harold Lindsell:
  • God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.
  • At some point between 1968 and 2012, the Bible began to say something different. That’s interesting.
  • Even more interesting is how thoroughly the record has been rewritten. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
  • Click over to Dr. Norman L. Geisler’s website and you’ll find all the hallmarks of a respected figure in the evangelical establishment.
  • Geisler is, of course, anti-abortion, just like Mohler and Packer and every other respected figure in the evangelical establishment is and, of course, must be.
  • But back in the day, Dudley notes, Geisler “argued for the permissibility of abortion in a 1971 book, stating ‘The embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.’” That was in Ethics: Alternatives and Issues, published by Zondervan. It’s still in print, kind of, as Christian Ethics: Contemporary Issues and Options. And now it says something different. Now it’s unambiguously anti-abortion.
  • But it wasn’t what they believed 30 years ago. Thirty years ago they all believed quite the opposite. Again, that’s interesting.
  • By the mid-1980s, the evangelical right was so successful with this strategy that the popular evangelical community would no longer tolerate any alternative position. Hence, the outrage over a book titled Brave New People published by InterVarsity Press in 1984. In addition to discussing a number of new biotechnologies, including genetic engineering and in vitro fertilization, the author, an evangelical professor living in New Zealand, also devoted a chapter to abortion.
  • His position was similar to that of most evangelicals 15 years prior. Although he did not believe the fetus was a full-fledged person from conception, he did believe that because it was a potential person, it should be treated with respect. Abortion was only permissible to protect the health and well-being of the mother, to preclude a severely deformed child, and in a few other hard cases, such as rape and incest.
  • Although this would have been an unremarkable book in 1970, the popular evangelical community was outraged. Evangelical magazines and popular leaders across the country decried the book and its author, and evangelicals picketed outside the publisher’s office and urged booksellers to boycott the publisher. One writer called it a “monstrous book.” … The popular response to the book — despite its endorsements from Carl F.H. Henry, the first editor of Christianity Today, and Lew Smedes, an evangelical professor of ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary — was so overwhelmingly hostile that the book became the first ever withdrawn by InterVarsity Press over the course of nearly half a century in business.
  • The book was republished a year later by Eerdmans Press. In a preface, the author noted, “The heresy of which I appear to be guilty is that I cannot state categorically that human/personal life commences at day one of gestation. This, it seems, is being made a basic affirmation of evangelicalism, from which there can be no deviation. … No longer is it sufficient to hold classic evangelical affirmations on the nature of biblical revelation, the person and work of Christ, or justification by faith alone. In order to be labeled an evangelical, it is now essential to hold a particular view of the status of the embryo and fetus.”
  • The poor folks at InterVarsity Press, Carl Henry, Lewis Smedes and everyone else who was surprised by the totality of this reversal, by its suddenness and the vehemence with which it came to be an “essential” and “basic affirmation of evangelicalism” quickly got on board with the new rules.
  • By the time of the 1988 elections, no one any longer spoke sarcastically of “the heresy” of failing to “state categorically that human/personal life commences at day one of gestation.” By that time, it was simply viewed as an actual heresy. By the time of the 1988 elections, no one was aghast that a strict anti-abortion position was viewed as of equal — or greater — importance than one’s views of biblical revelation or the work of Christ. That was just a given.
  • By the time of the 1988 elections, everyone in American evangelicalism was wholly opposed to legal abortion and everyone in American evangelicalism was pretending that this had always been the case. We have always been at war with Eastasia. Everyone knows that.
  • anonymous on 10 Nov 13
     
    "In 1979, McDonald's introduced the Happy Meal. Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception. Ask any American evangelical, today, what the Bible says about abortion and they will insist that this is what it says. (Many don't actually believe this, but they know it is the only answer that won't get them in trouble.) They'll be a little fuzzy on where, exactly, the Bible says this, but they'll insist that it does."
anonymous

United States: The Problem of Aging Infrastructure on Inland Waterways - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...nfrastructure-inland-waterways

shared by anonymous on 07 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • This is not a new or unknown problem, but measures to address the problem have been limited, and there is no immediate, rapid solution.
  • The United States' inland waterways system -- more than 19,000 kilometers (12,000 miles) of navigable routes maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers overlaid with expansive farmlands -- has contributed greatly to the country's success. 
  • Most of these locks were constructed in the early 20th century, with an expected lifetime of 50 years. Seventy or 80 years later, many of these locks are still in operation.
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  • Under the current policy, the cost of maintaining this infrastructure falls to the federal government, but funding for major construction and rehabilitation projects on inland waterways is split equally between federally appropriated funds and money from a trust, the Inland Waterways Trust Fund, which currently secures revenue through a 20 cent tax on commercial barge operators' fuel.
  • Unlike the fund for inland waterways, the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund has a surplus.
  • Because the trust fund is supplied from taxes on traded goods, ports that have higher traffic contribute more to the fund, but these ports are often not the ones that require the most dredging maintenance.
  • A total of $8 billion in projects, including flood prevention and port expansion projects, would be approved under the new House bill, while $12 billion in projects would be eliminated.
  • The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that it will cost $125 billion or more to revamp the entire inland waterway system. Some estimates show that just maintaining the status quo of unscheduled delays for the more than 200 locks on U.S. inland waterways would require an investment of roughly $13 billion dollars by 2020, averaging out to more than $1.5 billion annually.
  • The agricultural, coal, petroleum and fertilizer industries rely heavily on U.S. rivers to transport goods. Each year, more than 600 million metric tons of cargo, valued at roughly $180 billion, is handled along inland waterways managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
  • According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, costs attributed to delays reached $33 billion in 2010 and are projected to rise to $49 billion by 2020.
  •  Since a single 15 barge tow is equivalent to roughly 1,000 trucks or more than 200 rail cars, shifting traffic from rivers to road or rail likely will increase congestion on these transportation routes.
  • Moreover, waterways remain the least expensive mode of long-distance transport for freight, with operating costs of roughly 2 cents per ton per mile compared to under 4 cents per ton per mile for rail and slightly less than 18 cents per ton per mile for truck.
  • However, as U.S. government funding for infrastructure spending has dropped significantly in recent years, increases in user fees, tolls or private funding likely will be needed to fully pay for all current and future necessary improvements to the U.S. inland waterways.
  • anonymous on 07 Nov 13
     
    "The United States continues to face the problem of aging infrastructure on major water-based transport routes. A new waterways bill that is likely to be finalized soon -- the first such legislation since 2007 -- addresses some of the inefficiencies in the current system. However, the larger looming problem of insufficient funding remains. The U.S. inland waterways infrastructure is old, much-needed improvements have been delayed and the total cost of rehabilitation is expected to rise."
anonymous

Geopolitical Intelligence, Political Journalism and 'Wants' vs. 'Needs' - 2 views

www.stratfor.com/...-journalism-and-wants-vs-needs

shared by anonymous on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • At Stratfor, the case is frequently the opposite: Our readers typically are expert in the topics we study and write about, and our task is to provide the already well-informed with further insights. But the question is larger than that.
  • We co-exist in this ecosystem, but geopolitical intelligence is scarcely part of the journalistic flora and fauna. Our uniqueness creates unique challenges
  • Instead, let's go to the core dynamic of the media in our age and work back outward through the various layers to what we do in the same virtual space, namely, intelligence.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • You could get the same information with a week's sorting of SEC filings. But instead, you have just circumvented that laborious process by going straight to just one of the "meta-narratives" that form the superstructure of journalism.
  • Meta-Narratives at Journalism's Core Welcome to the news media's inner core.
  • For the fundamental truth of news reporting is that it is constructed atop pre-existing narratives comprising a subject the reader already knows or expects, a description using familiar symbolism often of a moral nature, and a narrative that builds through implicit metaphor from the stories already embedded in our culture and collective consciousness.
  • The currency of language really is the collection of what might be called the "meta-stories."
  • There's nothing wrong with this. For the art of storytelling -- journalism, that is -- is essentially unchanged from the tale-telling of Neolithic shamans millennia ago up through and including today's New York Times. Cultural anthropologists will explain that our brains are wired for this. So be it.
  • We at Stratfor may not "sync up." Journalists certainly do.
  • Meta-Narratives Meet Meta-Data There is nothing new in this; it is a process almost as old as the printing press itself. But where it gets particularly new and interesting is with my penultimate layer of difference, the place where meta-narratives meet meta-data.
  • "Meta-data," as the technologists call it, is more simply understood as "data about data."
  • Where the online battle for eyeballs becomes truly epic, however, (Google "the definition of epic" for yet another storyteller's meta-story) is when these series of tags are organized into a form of meta-data called a "taxonomy."
  • And thus we arrive at the outermost layer of the media's skin in our emerging and interconnected age. This invisible skin over it all comes in the form of a new term of art, "search engine optimization," or in the trade just "SEO."
  • With journalists already predisposed by centuries of convention to converge on stories knitted from a common canon, the marriage of meta-narrative and meta-data simply accelerates to the speed of light the calibration of topic and theme.
  • If a bit simplified, these layers add up to become the connective tissue in a media-centric and media-driven age. Which leads me back to the original question of why Stratfor so often "fails to sync up with the media."
  • For by the doctrines of the Internet's new commercial religion, a move disrupting the click stream was -- and is -- pure heresy. But our readers still need to know about Colombia, just as they need our unique perspectives on Syria.
  • Every forecast and article we do is essentially a lab experiment, in which we put the claims of politicians, the reports on unemployment statistics, the significance of a raid or a bombing to the test of geopolitics.
  • We spend much more time studying the constraints on political actors -- what they simply cannot do economically, militarily or geographically -- than we do examining what they claim they will do.
  • The key characteristic to ponder here is that such methodology -- intelligence, in this case -- seeks to enable the acquisition of knowledge by allowing reality to speak for itself. Journalism, however, creates a reality atop many random assumptions through the means described. It is not a plot, a liberal conspiracy or a secret conservative agenda at work, as so many media critics will charge. It is simply the way the media ecosystem functions. 
  • Journalism, in our age more than ever before, tells you what you want to know. Stratfor tells you what you need to know. 
  • anonymous on 29 Oct 13
     
    "Just last week, the question came again. It is a common one, sometimes from a former colleague in newspaperdom, sometimes from a current colleague here at Stratfor and often from a reader. It is always to the effect of, "Why is Stratfor so often out of sync with the news media?" All of us at Stratfor encounter questions regarding the difference between geopolitical intelligence and political journalism. One useful reply to ponder is that in conventional journalism, the person providing information is presumed to know more about the subject matter than the reader. At Stratfor, the case is frequently the opposite: Our readers typically are expert in the topics we study and write about, and our task is to provide the already well-informed with further insights. But the question is larger than that."
  • Erik Hanson on 05 Nov 13
     
    Excuse me while I guffaw. Stratfor is not the first to claim that they're the only ones not swayed by financial factors. Stratfor has its own metanarratives (especially geographic determinism) as much as anyone else does.
anonymous

China's Inevitable Changes - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...chinas-inevitable-changes

shared by anonymous on 05 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • China's current economic model, and by extension its political and social model, is reaching its limits just as it had prior to Deng's administration.
  • It is worth recalling just how extraordinary Deng's 1978 meeting was. Mao Zedong had died only two years earlier, taking with him what little remained of the old pillars of Communist Party legitimacy. China was a mess, ravaged by years of economic mismanagement and uncontrolled population growth and only beginning to recover from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution.
  • Had the People's Republic fallen in 1978 or shortly thereafter, few would have been truly surprised. Of course, in those tense early post-Mao years hardly anyone could foresee just how rapid China's transformation would be.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Nonetheless, battling enormous institutional constraints, Deng and his colleagues quickly set up new pillars of social, political and economic stability that guided China through the fall of the Soviet Union and into the 21st century.
  • Jiang, emerging as a post-Tiananmen Square leader, was faced with a situation where the Party was rapidly losing its legitimacy and where state-owned enterprises were encumbering China's economic opening and reform.
  • by the time he took on the additional role of president in 1993, the decline of the Japanese economy and the boom in the United States and the rest of Asia left an opening for China's economy to resurge.
  • When Hu succeeded Jiang in 2002-2003, China's economic growth was seemingly unstoppable, perhaps even gaining steam from the Asian economic crisis.
  • As Xi prepares his 10-year plan, China has reached the end of the economic supercycle set in motion by Deng. Public criticism of officials and thus of the Party is rampant, and China's military appears much more capable than it actually is, putting China is a potentially dangerous situation.
  • Once again the United States is looking at China as a power perhaps to contain or at least constrain. China's neighbors seem eager for Washington's assistance to counterbalance Beijing's influence, and long-dormant Japan is awakening once again.
  • Xi may not have to rebuild a fractured Party or state as Deng did, but in some ways he faces the same fundamental challenge: redirecting and redefining China.
  • Deng emerged as China's paramount leader out of the struggles and chaos of the Gang of Four era and the Cultural Revolution. He redefined what China was and where China was going, not out of a desire to try something different or an infatuation with "Western" economic models but out of a fundamental need to change course.
  • Reform, with "Chinese characteristics," is not about Westernizing the Chinese model. Rather, it is about reshaping the relationship between the Party, the economy and the people in a way that will maintain the centrality of the Party.
  • while this will likely entail selectively scaling back the Party's power in certain areas, it does not mean the overall reduction of Party power.
  • The consolidation of Party and political leadership was made clear in the formula. It is matched by the general secretary and president also holding the dual roles of chairman on the two parallel Central Military Commissions, one under the Party and the other under the state.
  • Jiang's accession to the presidency formalized Party-government leadership, but consensus leadership constrained his power. Jiang may have technically held all the key posts of power, but other power brokers in the Politburo could counterbalance him.
  • The system ensured that the paramount leader remained constrained.
  • Ensuring the right web of connections often became more important than fulfilling the responsibilities of the Party or the state.
  • The intertwining threads were just too complex. Rapid policy swings were impossible and factional battles that threatened the fabric of the state were effectively eliminated, but the cost was a decision-making process that was increasingly cumbersome and timid.
  • This worked well during China's boom.
  • Though China was corrupt, beset with a cumbersome regulatory environment and prone to violations of intellectual property rights, it was fairly predictable overall, unlike so many other developing economies.
  • But when the foundation of China's economy began to shake after 2008, when China's very success drove up wages and prices as its biggest consumers faced serious economic problems of their own, China's consensus leadership proved unequal to the task.
  • During China's rise, Beijing needed only minor adjustments to maintain stability and growth. But now that the country is in a far different set of circumstances, Beijing needs a major course correction. The problem is that consensus rarely allows for the often radical but necessary response. And for good reason: The success of radical change is not guaranteed. In fact, history suggests otherwise, as it did notably with the case of Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union.
  • To overcome the limitations of consensus leadership, Xi apparently is trying to strengthen the role of president.
  • He wants to redefine the presidency so that it is not merely the concomitant title for the Party leader but also a post with a real leadership role, similar to the presidencies of other major countries.
  • This is a way to compromise somewhere between consensus and strongman.
  • The first target is the bloated bureaucracy.
  • This should add efficiency to the system (its stated goal), but it may also confer greater central oversight and control by cutting through the webs of vested interests that have taken hold in many of China's most powerful institutions.
  • The reforms slated for the economic sector are similar.
  • They will introduce more market and competitive mechanisms while giving Beijing greater control over the overall structure.
  • Consolidation, efficiency, transparency, reform and restructuring are all words that possess dual meanings -- one regarding more efficient and more flexible systems, the other regarding systems that the center is better able to direct.
  • to create a more nimble and adaptive government, Xi is seeking to harness the people in a slight reversal, using his role as president to rebuild the legitimacy of the Party
  • But China is at a turning point, and without nimble leadership, a system as large and complex as China can move very rapidly down an unpredictable and uncontrollable path.
  • anonymous on 05 Nov 13
     
    "The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China will convene its Third Plenum meeting Nov. 9. During the three-day session, President Xi Jinping's administration will outline core reforms to guide its policymaking for the next decade. The Chinese government would have the world believe that Xi's will be the most momentous Third Plenary Session since December 1978, when former supreme leader Deng Xiaoping first put China on the path of economic reform and opening."
anonymous

The Monster Within Us - 0 views

alistapart.com/...the-monster-within-us

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • The amygdala, one of the earliest to evolve parts of the brain, is responsible for the fight or flight instinct: that reflexive, subconscious reaction that protects us in moments of dire danger.
  • In the amygdala’s world, the only thing between life and sudden death is a few measly milliseconds.
  • But in our #firstworldproblems, we rarely encounter life-or-death situations. And as a result, there’s a diminished need for the amygdala’s role as bodyguard. Instead of being on the lookout for predators or incoming spears from rivals, the amygdala spends all its time on relatively more trivial matters. Like protecting our delicate egos.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • We are phenomenal at dressing our monster-driven opinions as fact, thanks to our ability to confabulate.
  • But in reality, we’re simply characters in an issue of Modern Jackass
  • people taking a tiny smidgen of understanding and stretching it far past the breaking point. This applies even to the brightest among us.
  • Under a critical lens, each of the above examples possesses one and only one objective truth, and they all have it in common: they’re defensive in nature.
  • And when you take away the thin veils of our shaky rationalizations that we’re defending everything from beauty and freedom to capitalism and craft, they reveal what we’re truly defending: ourselves.
  • The manifestation of our monsters on the web is but an amplification of their already thriving existence. The internet simply helps wipe the condensation off the mirror, so to speak.
  • As with most problems, the solution seems to lie in nipping the offending behavior in the the bud: by catching a defense mechanism before it can mutate into committed jackassery. And our weapon of choice is introspection—using our mind to monitor our brain.
  • Among the many strategies you can find online and in books, my favorite technique is known as affect labeling, an elegant aikido-like maneuver that uses the brain’s weakness to gain the advantage.
  • It involves labeling what you’re feeling in moments of conflict.
  • For instance, if someone does something that upsets you, you identify exactly how you are upset by saying to yourself, “I feel disappointed. Walt’s behavior really disappointed me.” This labeling of your feelings trades off a potentially monstrous reaction for conscious thought, effectively reducing the load on the amygdala, and allowing your higher brain to work through the problem.
  • But before we get carried away with best practices and extemporaneous problem-solving, it’s worth pausing to remind ourselves of that old adage, “The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that there is one.” Nothing is harder than recognizing a problem with ourselves. If you take away only one thing from this article, let it be the following: There is a monster within you (and me).
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 13
     
    "I recently learned that the phrase "trick or treat" is short for "Give me a treat or I will play a trick on you." It's actually a threat. It also happens to be a frighteningly good metaphor for how our brains work. "Give me short-term gratification, or I will make your life miserable!" is the brain's modus operandi as it communicates with itself to help us live our lives."
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