Long Game

Telangana, the Andhra coastal plain and the interior Rayalaseema region.

The area that will become Telangana is sandwiched between the Godavari and Krishna rivers and sits on the Deccan plateau, west of the Eastern Ghats mountain range. Though the mostly barren north suffers from acute power shortages, has a high rate of poverty and is a hotbed for Naxalism -- India's Maoist militant movement -- its geographic boundaries include Hyderabad, one of India's most vibrant economic regions.

The new plan to divide Andhra Pradesh would have the residual non-Telangana parts -- coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema -- form the state of Seemandhra.

Telangana is poised to join a long list of states that have been created since India's independence in 1947. Before Telangana, the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttaranchal were carved out of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, respectively, in 2000. Goa defined its state boundaries in 1987, while Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram in the country’s far-flung northeast grew out of Assam in the same year. Manipur and Tripura earned their statehood in 1972, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh were carved out of Punjab state in 1966 and Bombay state in 1960 was divided along linguistic lines into Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister and the father of the Indian republic, quickly realized that the three-tier division the British Raj used to divide and administer India's governorships and princely states was ill-suited to the new country. In 1953, he launched a commission to figure out how to reorganize the country. Controversial political questions naturally emerged -- whether to redraw states along lines of linguistic and cultural unity, as well as how to preserve geographic continuity and financial viability. Leaders worried about the precedents any action could set in a country that speaks hundreds of languages and dialects and is beset by overlapping boundaries and economic interests.

The creation of a new state that affects Hyderabad, a major economic hub home to a number of multinational corporations, is going to be a messy affair. And the statehood question is being addressed at a time when the government is desperately trying to attract and retain long-term foreign direct investment to help it cope with the global economic crisis.

Second, ideas that once looked silly suddenly look wise. Just a few months ago, it was customary to make fun of Iranians, Russians and Chinese who, with their automatic distrust of all things American, spoke the bizarre language of “information sovereignty.”

Third, the sense of unconditional victory that civil society in both Europe and America felt over the defeat of the Total Information Awareness program – a much earlier effort to establish comprehensive surveillance – was premature.

From privately-run healthcare providers to privately-run prisons to privately-run militias dispatched to war zones, this is the public-private partnership model on which much of American infrastructure operates these days.

Fourth, the idea that digitization has ushered in a new world, where the good old rules of realpolitik no longer apply, has proved to be bunk. There’s no separate realm that gives rise to a new brand of “digital” power; it’s one world, one power, with America at the helm.

The sheer naivete of statements like this – predicated on the assumption that somehow one can “live” online the way one lives in the physical world and that virtual politics works on a logic different from regular politics – is illustrated by the sad case of Edward Snowden, a man with a noble mission and awful trip-planning skills.

Fifth, the once powerful myth that there exists a separate, virtual space where one can have more privacy and independence from social and political institutions is dead.

Convergence did happen – we weren’t fooled! – but, miraculously, technologies converged on the least secure and most wiretap-friendly option available.

It’s probably not a coincidence that LiveJournal, Russia’s favorite platform, suddenly had maintenance issues – and was thus unavailable for general use – at the very same time that a Russian court announced its verdict to the popular blogger-activist Alexei Navalny.

On matters of “Internet freedom” – democracy promotion rebranded under a sexier name – America enjoyed some legitimacy as it claimed that it didn’t engage in the kinds of surveillance that it itself condemned in China or Iran. Likewise, on matters of cyberattacks, it could go after China’s cyber-espionage or Iran’s cyber-attacks because it assured the world that it engaged in neither.

What is to be done? Let’s start with surveillance. So far, most European politicians have reached for the low-hanging fruit – law – thinking that if only they can better regulate American companies – for example, by forcing them to disclose how much data and when they share with NSA – this problem will go away.

As our gadgets and previously analog objects become “smart,” this Gmail model will spread everywhere. One set of business models will supply us with gadgets and objects that will either be free or be priced at a fraction of their real cost.

If this is, indeed, the future that we are heading towards, it’s obvious that laws won’t be of much help, as citizens would voluntarily opt for such transactions – the way we already opt for free (but monitorable) email and cheaper (but advertising-funded) ereaders.

For much of the 20th century, we assumed that our energy use was priced correctly and that it existed solely in the consumer paradigm of “I can use as much energy as I can pay for.” Under that paradigm, there was no ethics attached to our energy use: market logic has replaced morality – which is precisely what has enabled fast rates of economic growth and the proliferation of consumer devices that have made our households electronic paradises free from tiresome household work.

But of course we had never priced our energy use correctly because we never factored in the possibility that life on Earth might end even if we balance all of our financial statements.

Right now, your decision to buy a smart toothbrush with a sensor in it – and then to sell the data that it generates – is presented to us as just a purely commercial decision that affects no one but us.

But this is so only because we cannot imagine an information disaster as easily as we can imagine an environmental disaster.

there are profound political and moral consequences to information consumerism– and they are comparable to energy consumerism in scope and importance.

NSA surveillance, Big Brother, Prism: all of this is important stuff. But it’s as important to focus on the bigger picture -- and in that bigger picture, what must be subjected to scrutiny is information consumerism itself – and not just the parts of the military-industrial complex responsible for surveillance.

Some might say: If only we could have a digital party modeled on the Green Party but for all things digital. A greater mistake is harder to come by.

What we need is the mainstreaming of “digital” topics – not their ghettoization in the hands and agendas of the Pirate Parties or whoever will come to succeed them. We can no longer treat the “Internet” as just another domain – like, say, “the economy” or the “environment” – and hope that we can develop a set of competencies around it.

The Pirates’s tragic miscalculation was trying to do too much: they wanted to change both the process of politics and its content. That project was so ambitious that it was doomed to failure from the very beginning.

whatever reforms the Pirates have been advancing did not seem to stem from some long critical reflections of the pitfalls of the current political system but, rather, from their belief that the political system, incompatible with the most successful digital platforms from Wikipedia to Facebook, must be reshaped in their image. This was – and is – nonsense.

The least we can do is to acknowledge that the crisis is much deeper and that it stems from intellectual causes as much as from legal ones. Information consumerism, like its older sibling energy consumerism, is a much more dangerous threat to democracy than the NSA.

Another inland route would start in Chengdu and pass through Guizhou, Hunan, Jiangxi and Fujian's Xiamen, and cross the Taipei-administered Kinmen archipelago before eventually ending at Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan.

Besides the massive economic costs associated with building a bridge or tunnel across the Taiwan Strait, security concerns, geologic vulnerabilities (due to earthquakes) and the sheer width of the strait present technical challenges to its construction. Even if the infrastructure were built, it is not clear that they would be economically justifiable given that airliners and ships are now allowed to travel across the strait frequently.

Combined with logistical challenges, the absence of direct relations between the two makes it extremely unlikely that the infrastructure will built any time soon.

Compared to the much more ambitious proposal to link the mainland to Taiwan via bridge or tunnel, the pipeline with Kinmen is not in itself very significant. However, it does offer an example of Beijing sacrificing what is superficially pragmatic for the sake of its strategic goals. In particular, Kinmen had once been the leading military frontier until the end of cross-strait military standoff in 1992, and Beijing believes that assisting the island can offer an example of cross-strait integration. Beijing also believes it could allow more Taiwanese residents to benefit from growing economic interaction with China without undermining Taipei's political independence.

Instead, Beijing is focusing on a more conciliatory approach to reinforce the concept of interdependence and prevent Taiwan from distancing itself from the mainland economically and politically.

A less hostile government in Taipei has also been important for Beijing's political legitimacy internationally. Moreover, China allowed a much more open market and more preferential trade and investment policies to Taiwan than the island nation would find elsewhere.

Japan is making more moves to guard against China's rise

North Korea has also spurred Japan to change.

Japan's neighbors are naturally wary when they see the country relatively unified, experimenting with new policies and trying to show that it remains a major world power.

The U.S. tried for decades to encourage Japan to contribute more to international security, but Japan offered mostly tokens of support, using its pacifist constitution as a means of dodging heavier commitments.

Essentially, Washington must worry about both China's challenge to the status quo and Japan's potential recalcitrance to China's rise. Washington wants its allies, both Japan and also Korea, to carry more of the burden of preserving order, but it does not want to lose control over the initiation of conflict, which is a risk when the allies start taking on more responsibility and improving their power projection capabilities as they've done, for instance, with aerial refueling.

The Obama administration trapped Snowden in Russia. The U.S. unsealed the charges before it had Snowden in custody, revoked his passport, then downed the plane of the president of a sovereign state over other sovereign states because it thought Snowden was on board.

If a Russian Edward Snowden ended up in JFK Airport, there is no way in hell we'd turn him over to the Russians. Not in a hundred years, and not ever.

If you are a world leader worth your salt, and have a good diplomatic team working for you, you would know that. You would also know that when dealing with thugs like Putin, you know that things like this are better handled quietly. 

The Obama administration totally fucked this up. I mean, totally. Soup to nuts. Remember the spy exchange in the summer of 2010? Ten Russian sleeper agents—which is not what Snowden is—were uncovered by the FBI in the U.S. Instead of kicking up a massive, public stink over it, the Kremlin and the White House arranged for their silent transfer to Russia in exchange for four people accused in Russia of spying for the U.S.

My main beef with O'Donnell is not that he wouldn't let me make these 11 points—because, let's face it, that's not what the TV is for—but that he did exactly the same shit Russians did to me when I was in Russia. They assumed that the U.S. and its government was one sleek, well-functioning monolith, that Obama was omnipotent, and that everyone in the world, including other important (and nuclear!) world leaders, act and must act as Russia demands it should, using Russian foreign policy calculus, and with only Russian interests in mind.

Profiling, on the other hand, is based upon indirect experiences with broad groups (or types) of people.

Zimmerman is not alone in using race as a primary indicator of perceived dangerousness. A common refrain used to justify behavior like Zimmerman’s is that sadly young African-American males do commit the lions share of crime in America.

This argument uses Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data to back up its assertions. By that standard, it becomes very easy to then connect the dots and see somebody like Travyon Martin as a potential threat.

the UCR is not only voluntarily submitted by police departments but more importantly only measures crime actually reported to the police.

When our images of young African Amrican males are limited to hoodlums and athletes it should come as little surprise that Zimmerman (and the jury) thought he’d made the right call in his pursuit of Martin. This works both ways however.

One of my favorite courses to teach is Criminal Justice and Film. One of my favorite parts of the course is when I screen a double feature of “Dirty Harry” and “Taxi Driver.” Everybody always cheers and collectively feels a sense of relief when Eastwood takes matters into his own hands and guns down the psychotic Scorpio killer. At the end of the film, Eastwood tosses his badge away in disgust.

The reaction is markedly different with “Taxi Driver”. Instead of relief, the audience feels disgust and revulsion when the psychotic Travis Bickle saves a child prostitute by massacring a tenement full of pimps and thugs. The public reaction within the film treats Bickle as a hero. As an audience we know the truth, Bickle is a mentally disturbed Vet and a failed political assassin.

It becomes much easier to excuse and justify Harry’s actions simply because he’s a much more (seemingly) likable and charming person. This is why stand your ground laws are so problematic from a public policy perspective.

Public policy, particularly criminal justice policy, tends to be based more on conventional wisdom or common sense than empirical research.

Academics need to not only do a better job publicizing their research but we need to make it more accessible and relatable to non professional nerds. Only when this happens will public policy reflect science instead of somebody’s gut feeling. Let’s get to work.

By contrast, the Chinese J-31 does not appear compromised at all. Surrounded by rivals with powerful air forces — namely India, Russia, Japan and U.S. Pacific Command — and with no grudge-holding Marine Corps to hijack fighter design, it would make sense that China prioritized the air-combat prowess of its new jet over any historical score-settling.

The crux of China's demographic challenge lies in the fact that, unlike Japan, South Korea, the United States and Western European countries, China's population will grow old before the majority of it is anywhere near middle-income status, let alone rich.

Science commonly regards ghost-ish intuitions to be the result of ignorance, superstition, or faulty intelligence. In the attention schema theory, however, they are not simply ignorant mistakes. Those intuitions are ubiquitous among cultures because we humans come equipped with a handy, simplified model of attention. That model informs our intuitions.

The very existence of the out-of-body experience suggests that awareness is a computation and that the computation can be disrupted. Systems in the brain not only compute the information that I am aware, but also compute a spatial framework for it, a location, and a perspective. Screw up the computations, and I screw up my understanding of my own awareness.

a study by the psychologist Gerald Winer and colleagues at the University of Ohio in 2002 found that about half of American college students also think that we see because of rays that come out of the eyes.

Why should a physically inaccurate description of vision be so persistent? Perhaps because the brain constructs a simplified, handy model of attention in which there is such a thing as awareness, an invisible, intangible stuff that flows from inside a person out to some target object.

We have the ability to rise above our immediate intuitions and predispositions.

Most of us intuitively understand it to be an active thing: it helps us to decide what to do and when. And yet, at least some of the scientific work on consciousness has proposed the opposite, counter-intuitive view: that it doesn’t really do anything at all

It seems, therefore, that at least some of our conscious choices are rationalisations after the fact.

This idea that consciousness has no leverage in the world, that it’s just a rationalisation to make us feel better about ourselves, is terribly bleak.

It is not a theory about the uselessness or non-being of consciousness, but about its central importance. Why did an awareness of stuff evolve in the first place?

To attribute awareness to oneself, to have that computational ability, is the first step towards attributing it to others. That, in turn, leads to a remarkable evolutionary transition to social intelligence.

Al Assad is a ruthless man: He would not hesitate to use chemical weapons if he had to. He is also a very rational man: He would use chemical weapons only if that were his sole option. At the moment, it is difficult to see what desperate situation would have caused him to use chemical weapons and risk the worst.

Regardless of whether the charges against al Assad are true, the Russians will dispute them and veto any action. Going to the United Nations therefore only buys time.

This is no longer simply about Syria. The United States has stated a condition that commits it to an intervention.

Syria was not an issue that affected the U.S. national interest until Obama declared a red line. It escalated in importance at that point not because Syria is critical to the United States, but because the credibility of its stated limits are of vital importance.

The question therefore becomes what the United States and the new coalition of the willing will do if the red line has been crossed. The fantasy is that a series of airstrikes, destroying only chemical weapons, will be so perfectly executed that no one will be killed except those who deserve to die. But it is hard to distinguish a man's soul from 10,000 feet. There will be deaths, and the United States will be blamed for them.

attacking means al Assad loses all incentive to hold back on using chemical weapons. If he is paying the price of using them, he may as well use them. The gloves will come off on both sides as al Assad seeks to use his chemical weapons before they are destroyed. A war on chemical weapons has a built-in insanity to it.

He made a gesture to those in his administration who believe that the United States has a moral obligation to put an end to brutality. He also made a gesture to those who don't want to go to war again.

Libya was easy compared to Syria. Now, the president must intervene to maintain his credibility. But there is no political support in the United States for intervention.

Higher levels of female obesity correlated with higher levels of gender inequality in each nation Of course, that’s not the impression you will get from the admonishments of public-health agencies and wellness businesses.

Yet the scientists who study the biochemistry of fat and the epidemiologists who track weight trends are not nearly as unanimous as Bloomberg makes out. In fact, many researchers believe that personal gluttony and laziness cannot be the entire explanation for humanity’s global weight gain.

Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets.

‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me.

It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence

In rich nations, obesity is more prevalent in people with less money, education and status. Even in some poor countries, according to a survey published last year in the International Journal of Obesity, increases in weight over time have been concentrated among the least well-off. And the extra weight is unevenly distributed among the sexes, too.

The story might go like this: being poor is stressful, and stress makes you eat, and the cheapest food available is the stuff with a lot of ‘empty calories’, therefore poorer people are fatter than the better-off. These wheels-within-wheels are required because the mantra of the thermodynamic model is that ‘a calorie is a calorie is a calorie’: who you are and what you eat are irrelevant to whether you will add fat to your frame. The badness of a ‘bad’ food such as a Cheeto is that it makes calorie intake easier than it would be with broccoli or an apple.

More importantly, ‘things that alter the body’s fat metabolism’ is a much wider category than food. Sleeplessness and stress, for instance, have been linked to disturbances in the effects of leptin, the hormone that tells the brain that the body has had enough to eat.

If some or all of these factors are indeed contributing to the worldwide fattening trend, then the thermodynamic model is wrong.

According to Frederick vom Saal, professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri, an organic compound called bisphenol-A (or BPA) that is used in many household plastics has the property of altering fat regulation in lab animals.

BPA has been used so widely — in everything from children’s sippy cups to the aluminium in fizzy drink cans — that almost all residents of developed nations have traces of it in their pee. This is not to say that BPA is unique.

Contrary to its popular image of serene imperturbability, a developing foetus is in fact acutely sensitive to the environment into which it will be born, and a key source of information about that environment is the nutrition it gets via the umbilical cord.

It’s possible that widespread electrification is promoting obesity by making humans eat at night, when our ancestors were asleep

consider the increased control civilisation gives people over the temperature of their surroundings.

Temperatures above and below the neutral zone have been shown to cause both humans and animals to burn fat, and hotter conditions also have an indirect effect: they make people eat less.

A study by Laura Fonken and colleagues at the Ohio State University in Columbus, published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported that mice exposed to extra light (experiencing either no dark at all or a sort of semidarkness instead of total night) put on nearly 50 per cent more weight than mice fed the same diet who lived on a normal night-day cycle of alternating light and dark.

A virus called Ad-36, known for causing eye and respiratory infections in people, also has the curious property of causing weight gain in chickens, rats, mice and monkeys.

xperiments by Lee Kaplan and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston earlier this year found that bacteria from mice that have lost weight will, when placed in other mice, apparently cause those mice to lose weight, too.

It might be that every one of the ‘roads less travelled’ contributes to global obesity; it might be that some do in some places and not in others. The openness of the issue makes it clear that obesity isn’t a simple school physics experiment.

In a capitalistic quest for new markets and cheap materials and labour, Europeans take control of the economy in the late 18th or early 19th century. With taxes, fees and sometimes violent repression, their new system strongly ‘encourages’ the farmer and his neighbours to stop growing their own food and start cultivating some more marketable commodity instead – coffee for export, perhaps. Now that they aren’t growing food, the farmers must buy it. But since everyone is out to maximise profit, those who purchase the coffee crop strive to pay as little as possible, and so the farmers go hungry. Years later, when the farmer’s children go to work in factories, they confront the same logic: they too are paid as little as possible for their labour. By changing the farming system, capitalism first removes traditional protections against starvation, and then pushes many previously self-sufficient people into an economic niche where they aren't paid enough to eat well.

Eighty years later, the farmer’s descendants have risen out of the ranks of the poor and joined the fast-growing ranks of the world’s 21st-century middle-class consumers, thanks to globalisation and outsourcing. Capitalism welcomes them: these descendants are now prime targets to live the obesogenic life (the chemicals, the stress, the air conditioning, the elevators-instead-of-stairs) and to buy the kinds of foods and beverages that are ‘metabolic disturbers’.

Wells memorably calls this double-bind the ‘metabolic ghetto’, and you can’t escape it just by turning poor people into middle-class consumers: that turn to prosperity is precisely what triggers the trap.

The ‘unifying logic of capitalism’, Wells continues, requires that food companies seek immediate profit and long-term success, and their optimal strategy for that involves encouraging people to choose foods that are most profitable to produce and sell — ‘both at the behavioural level, through advertising, price manipulations and restriction of choice, and at the physiological level through the enhancement of addictive properties of foods’ (by which he means those sugars and fats that make ‘metabolic disturber’ foods so habit-forming).

One possible response, of course, is to decide that no obesity policy is possible, because ‘science is undecided’. But this is a moron’s answer: science is never completely decided; it is always in a state of change and self-questioning, and it offers no final answers. There is never a moment in science when all doubts are gone and all questions settled,

Faced with signs of a massive public-health crisis in the making, governments are right to seek to do something, using the best information that science can render, in the full knowledge that science will have different information to offer in 10 or 20 years.

The Kosovo Liberation Army may have been a nasty bunch by some accounts, with criminal elements. But it was not a threat to the United States like the transnational jihadists currently operating in Syria.

Kosovo did not have a complex of chemical weapons facilities scattered throughout its territory

The Kosovo war campaign did not have to countenance a strong and feisty Russia, which at the time was reeling from Boris Yeltsin's incompetent, anarchic rule.

The Kosovo war did not engage Iran as this war must. For all of the missiles that America can fire, it does not have operatives on the ground like Iran has.

The Kosovo war inflicted significant pain on Serbian civilians through airstrikes, but the Syrian population has already been pummeled by a brutal war for two years now

The goal in Kosovo was to limit Serbia's geographic influence and to ignite a chain of events that would lead to Milosevic's ouster.

If he chooses limited military strikes to send a message against the use of chemical weapons, he risks looking weak, especially following the powerful rhetoric employed by his secretary of state, John Kerry.

If he chooses regime change -- while not calling it that -- he threatens to unleash a jihadi nightmare.

Keep another thing in mind about Kosovo. At that time, the United States had not been in a ground war for a quarter-century and thus the American people were not weary of war.

Obama now faces a defining event that will test his commitment to keep America out of regional quicksand while being able to wield considerable power in the region at the same time.

What started to draw the United States into the matter was a statement made by the president in 2012, when he said that the use of chemical weapons would be a red line.

A significant faction pressed him on this in his foreign policy apparatus.

The point is that, leaving Iraq, this faction felt that the United States failed to carry out its moral obligations in Rwanda, and applauded the intervention in Kosovo. 

That war was more complicated than that, but there was an element of truth to it. And the world, on the whole, approved of American involvement there.

There was a romantic belief that the crowd in the street was always more virtuous than the tyrant in his palace. Sometimes they were right. It is not clear that the fall of the Shah reduced the sum total of human suffering.

Obama had learned a thing or two about the crowd, Arab and otherwise. He was far less romantic about their intent, particularly after Libya. After Libya he was also aware that after the self-congratulations, the United States would have to live with the chaos or new tyranny. He didn't want to attack, and that was clear in the first days after the affair.

First, he had lost confidence in the crowd.

Second, he had vowed not to go to war as Bush had, without international support validated by the United Nations

Obama resisted not the principle of attack but the scale Turkey wanted. 

This was one that the British had helped concoct, and the parliament voted against it, with many parliament members saying the United Kingdom was no longer the Americans' lap dog.

The Russians were completely committed to the survival of the regime.

The Russian calculations came down to its read of the United States, which is that it was not in a position to impose an international system in the region because of internal political weakness.

Others, like Poland, that had been with the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan also bowed out. The Poles are interesting because they had been the most eager for collaboration with the Americans, but felt the most betrayed by not getting an American commitment for significant military aid and collaboration.

The French -- and France's interventionist flow is fascinating (Libya, Mali, now Syria) -- stood with the United States. This is a tale to consider in itself, but not here. And the Canadians decided that much as they disliked chemical weapons use, they would not be available. The wheels just came off the strategy.

It is easy to blame Obama for losing control of the situation, but that is too simple. Every administration has its ideologues, and every president wants allies and no one wants to go to war without those allies flying aircraft beside them. And it would be nice if the United States could be just another country, but it isn't. The moment that it enters a coalition, it leads a coalition.

It is a strategy that is impossible to maintain, as the United States learned after World War I, Vietnam and Desert Storm. It is a seductive vision but a fantasy. The world comes visiting.

This is not over yet. If Congress votes for strikes, it is likely that Obama will do something. But at that point he will be doing it by himself, and the inevitable death of innocents in even the smallest attack will bring him under fire from some of those most insistent that he do something about the war crimes in Syria. 

However, the Syria situation differs from those of Afghanistan and Iraq. This time it is Washington's aversion to regime change that Tehran is trying to exploit.

An unfriendly Syria could cut Tehran off from Hezbollah, its pre-eminent non-state Arab ally, and jeopardize the position of its Iraqi allies.

limited airstrikes on Syria that do not undermine the al Assad regime could actually work in Iran's favor. Such airstrikes could divide the rebellion between factions that oppose military intervention and those that favor it.

what really gives Iran leverage is the fact that since 9/11, jihadists and Islamist groups have had the opportunity to gain power when Arab regimes collapse.

Unlike Syria's Arab neighbors, which want stability in the region, Iran welcomes disruption. It is reasonably secure internally, and it knows its spheres of influence may weaken but ultimately will not dissolve.

Like communism, this philosophy is defective in its misreading of human nature, misunderstanding of how societies work and utter failure to adapt to changing circumstances.

Some libertarians will claim we are arguing against a straw man and that no serious adherent to their philosophy advocates the extreme positions we describe. The public record of extreme statements by the likes of Cruz, Norquist and the Pauls speaks for itself. Reasonable people debate how best to regulate or how government can most effectively do its work -- not whether to regulate at all or whether government should even exist.

True citizenship means changing policy to adapt to changes in circumstance. Sometimes government isn’t the answer. Other times it is.

Freedom is responsibility.

The answer lies in the history of psychopharmacology, which is more deeply indebted to serendipity than most branches of medicine—in particular, to a remarkable series of accidental discoveries made in the fifteen or so years following the end of the Second World War.

By 1960, the major classes of psychiatric drugs—among them, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, antidepressants, and anti-anxiety drugs, known as anxiolytics—had been discovered and were on their way to becoming a seventy-billion-dollar market.

In 1965, Joseph Schildkraut, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, reverse-engineered antidepressants and offered an actual theory: at least when it came to depression, the imbalances were to be found in the neurotransmitters he thought were affected by the drugs, dopamine and norepinephrine. Seven years after antidepressants were invented, and five years after Ayd asserted that depression was a chemical problem, psychiatrists finally had a precise, scientific explanation for why they worked. The paper quickly became one of the most cited articles in the medical literature.

The serotonin-imbalance theory, however, has turned out to be just as inaccurate as Schildkraut’s. While S.S.R.I.s surely alter serotonin metabolism, those changes do not explain why the drugs work, nor do they explain why they have proven to be no more effective than placebos in clinical trials.

As Frank Ayd pointed out, this explanation helps reassure patients even as it encourages them to take their medicine, and it fits in perfectly with our expectation that doctors will seek out and destroy the chemical villains responsible for all of our suffering, both physical and mental. The theory may not work as science, but it is a devastatingly effective myth.

the dry pipeline of new drugs bemoaned by Friedman is an indication that the drug industry has begun to lose faith in the myth it did so much to create.

Bedazzled by the prospect of unraveling the mysteries of psychic suffering, researchers have spent recent decades on a fool’s errand—chasing down chemical imbalances that don’t exist. And the result, as Friedman put it, is that “it is hard to think of a single truly novel psychotropic drug that has emerged in the last thirty years.”

The tensions showcased at the G-20 between Washington and Moscow rekindled memories of the Cold War, a time when Russia was a global power. And that is precisely the mood Putin wanted to create. That's where Putin's bluff begins.

With China focused on its domestic issues and with Europe in disarray, the United States and Russia are the two major -- if not comparable -- global players, and the deterioration in relations can be significant. We need to understand what is going on here before we think about Syria.

Twenty years ago, the United States had little interest in relations with Russia, and certainly not with resetting them.

First, the Russians denied that there was a massacre of Albanians in Kosovo.

Second, the Russians did not want European borders to change.

Third, and most important, they felt that an attack without U.N. approval and without Russian support should not be undertaken both under international law and out of respect for Russia.

Russia felt it deserved more deference on Kosovo, but it couldn't have expected much more given its weak geopolitical position at the time. However, the incident served as a catalyst for Russia's leadership to try to halt the country's decline and regain its respect.

The United States has supported, financially and otherwise, the proliferation of human rights groups in the former Soviet Union. When many former Soviet countries experienced revolutions in the 1990s that created governments that were somewhat more democratic but certainly more pro-Western and pro-American, Russia saw the West closing in.

Putin began a process of suppressing all dissent in Russia, both from foreign-supported non-governmental organizations and from purely domestic groups. He saw Russia as under attack, and he saw these groups as subversive organizations. There was an argument to be made for this. But the truth was that Russia was returning to its historical roots as an authoritarian government, with the state controlling the direction of the economy and where dissent is treated as if it were meant to destroy the state.

Precisely how the Russo-Georgian war began is another story, but it resulted in Russian tanks entering a U.S. client state, defeating its army and remaining there until they were ready to leave.

The United States became more cautious in funding non-governmental organizations. The Russians became more repressive by the year in their treatment of dissident groups.

In fact, Russia remains a shadow of what the Soviet Union was. Its economy is heavily focused on energy exports and depends on high prices it cannot control. Outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, life remains hard and life expectancy short. Militarily, it cannot possibly match the United States. But at this moment in history, with the United States withdrawing from deep involvement in the Muslim world, and with the Europeans in institutional disarray, it exerts a level of power in excess of its real capacity.

The Snowden matter was perfect for the Russians. Whether they were involved in the Snowden affair from the beginning or entered later is unimportant. It has created two important impressions.

The United States had often accused the Russians of violating human rights, but with Snowden, the Russians were in a position where they protected the man who had revealed what many saw as a massive violation of human rights. It humiliated the Americans in terms of their own lax security and furthermore weakened the ability of the United States to reproach Russia for human rights violations. 

now that the United States is considering a strike on the Syrian regime following its suspected use of chemical weapons, Washington may be in a position to deal a setback to a Russia client state, and by extension, Moscow itself.

The al Assad regime's relations with Russia go back to 1970

In the past, the U.S. distraction with Iraq and Afghanistan served Russia's interests. But the United States is not very likely to get as deeply involved in Syria as it did in those countries.

The impact inside Russia will be interesting. There is some evidence of weakness in Putin's position. His greatest strength has been to create the illusion of Russia as an emerging global power. This will deal that a blow, and how it resonates through the Russian system is unclear. But in any event, it could change the view of Russia being on the offensive and the United States being on the defensive.

History will not turn on this event, and Putin's future, let alone Russia's, does not depend on his ability to protect Russia's Syrian ally.

If it can appear that Washington has refrained from an attack because of Russian maneuvers, Moscow's weight increases dramatically.

But he is aware that this week's dislike of war can turn into next week's contempt on charges of weakness. Obama is an outstanding politician and he knows he is in quicksand.

The weakness of the Russian position is that it has no real weight. The limit on American military action is purely domestic politics. If the United States chooses to hit Syria, Russia can do nothing about it and will be made to look weak, the tables thus turned on them.

The idea that this imbroglio will somehow disappear is certainly one that Obama is considering. But the Russians will not want that to happen. They do not want to let Obama off the hook and their view is that he will not act. Against this backdrop, they can appear to be the nemesis of the United States, its equal in power and its superior in cunning and diplomacy.