Long Game

"I almost gave in and listened to that guy defend Islam with words I didn't want to hear," Gentries said. "But then I remembered how much easier it is to live in a world of black-and-white in which I can assign the label of 'other' to someone and use him as a vessel for all my fears and insecurities."

When I heard about it – in passing, in a soundbite – I figured it was a US example of the sort of inanely confrontational fantasy scheme Anjem Choudary might issue a press release about if he fancied winding up the tabloids for the 900th time this year. I was wrong. The "Ground Zero mosque" is a genuine proposal, but it's slightly less provocative than its critics' nickname makes it sound. For one thing, it's not at Ground Zero. Also, it isn't a mosque.

The latest book in the wave of economics-for-the-layman texts, piggybacking on the global sense of “WTF just happened?” in the wake of the subprime collapse and its ripples, is 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism from Cambridge economist Doctor Ha-Joon Chang, who apparently manages to play a currently popular theme (“free markets are bad”) with a less-popular counterpoint (“the welfare state should be expanded”)

Kudos to any pundit honest enough to admit that they don’t have a silver bullet in the breech.

even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours – the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life.

Aren’t we at least more productive by virtue of the amount of time we’re putting in? No. Look at their productivity rates. They’re like ours.

How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe.

With a humanitarian crisis in Pakistan which dwarfs the combined devastation of the 2004 Asian tsunami, the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the lack of media attention that the flooding has received is surprising.

1)  An early childhood of peace and prosperity -- a.k.a., the Nineties; 2)  The September 11th attacks; 3)  Two Very Long Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; 4)  One Financial Panic/Great Recession; 5)  The ascent of China under the shadow of U.S. hegemony. 

This would be an extraordinary development considering that Russia accounts for 17 percent of global grain output and exported 20 percent of its nearly 100 million ton production last year to major markets in the Middle East and North Africa. Some estimates have Russian grain harvests falling to as little as 60 million tons this year, and the projections seem to drop precipitously every week.

Making sure that its population is fed is one of the fundamental policy challenges for Moscow. In Russia, food security and state security are practically indistinguishable.

Russian cities are essentially islands of dense populations dependent on grain-producing regions that can be quite far away.

The art of the "big lie" is to repeat something often enough, and with a powerful enough megaphone, such that your distortions are not challenged.

By trying to rewrite the narrative of the economic cataclysm we have lived through, the deniers are attempting to challenge the common-sense conclusions that flow from an accurate understanding of history.

Greenberg was removed as CEO of AIG by his own board—of its own volition—after his refusal to answer questions about his involvement in fraudulent reinsurance contracts that his company had created. Five people were convicted by a jury in Connecticut in 2008 for their role in these frauds. The federal prosecutor, in his summation, called Greenberg an unindicted co-conspirator in the scheme. In New York, the judge who will hear the case based on these facts, brought by the state when I was attorney general, called the case "devastating" and referred to AIG as a "criminal enterprise." AIG as a corporate entity settled the case with my office in 2006 by restating its financial results and paying a fine of $1.6 billion. Shareholders are now awaiting judicial approval of an additional $750 million settlement to compensate them for damages they suffered from these accounting frauds.

So the architect—and later your building engineer, too—each asks you to sign a document saying you won't sue them when beavers eat a load-bearing wall and your entire family is crushed by forest debris. You make the mistake of mentioning this arrangement to your family, and they leave you. But you are not deterred because you're saving the planet, damn it. You'll get a new family. A greener one.

Conclusion: Photovoltaic systems are a waste of money. But I'd do it again in a heartbeat, because I love the Earth, damn it. In my defense, the price of your future photovoltaic system will never come down unless idiots like me pay too much today. You're welcome.

The list admittedly looks a bit sexist by today’s standards, but it illustrates the idea well.

Wilson and Schooler were curious about something. Some of their previous research had suggested than when asked to analyze their reasons for making decisions or ratings, people tend to screw things up. The theory goes that we are often aware of our preferences for products (or art, or whatever), but when asked to explain WHY, we often feel obligated to include the most salient (that is, apparent) and plausible explanations. Even if we would have otherwise ignored them.

Puny humans are pretty bad at combining an array of weighted factors so as to arrive at a rating or decision –it’s just not how our minds were designed. Jelly or game review guidelines that require us to over analyze our decisions or check them off against a standardized list of factors (graphics, sound, etc.) can exacerbate this limitation and lead us to consider what should be irrelevant information when making our ratings.

At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above.

After the attack, Grabar spoke of how these towers related to the architecture of Islam, where "the entire surface is meaningful" and "every part is both construction and ornament." A number of designers from the Middle East agreed, describing the entire façade as a giant "mashrabiya," the tracery that fills the windows of mosques.

Having rejected modernism and the Saudi royal family, it's no surprise that Bin Laden would turn against Yamasaki's work in particular. He must have seen how Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality. Such mixing of the sacred and the profane is old hat to us—after all, Cass Gilbert's classic Woolworth Building, dubbed the Cathedral to Commerce, is decked out in extravagant Gothic regalia. But to someone who wants to purify Islam from commercialism, Yamasaki's implicit Mosque to Commerce would be anathema. To Bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but also a false idol.