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As our sexuality becomes ever more divorced from emotion and intimacy, a process already well underway, sex will increasingly be seen as simply a matter of provoking orgasm in the most efficient, reliable ways possible.

Human sexuality will continue to be subjected to the same commodification and mechanization as other aspects of our lives. Just as the 21st century saw friends replaced by Facebook friends, nature replaced by parks, ocean fisheries replaced by commercially farmed seafood, and sunshine largely supplanted by tanning salons, we’ll see sexual interaction reduced to mechanically provoked orgasm as human beings become ever more dominated by the machines and mechanistic thought processes that developed in our brains and societies like bacteria in a petri dish.

Gender identity will fade away as sexual interaction becomes less “human” and we grow less dependent upon binary interactions with other people. As more and more of our interactions take place with non-human partners, others’ expectations and judgments will become less relevant to the development of sexual identity, leading to greater fluidity and far less urgency and passion concerning sexual expression.

the collapse of western civilization may well be the best thing that could happen for human sexuality. Following the collapse of the consumerist, competitive mind-set that now dominates so much of human thought, we’d possibly be free to rebuild a social world more in keeping with our preagricultural origins, characterized by economies built upon sharing rather than hoarding, a politics of respect rather than of power, and a sexuality of intimacy rather than alienation.

Unlike previous tropical cyclones, the threat from typhoon Koppu is not so much from the wind but from the massive amount of rain. More than a metre of rainfall is forecast in just a few days in Luzon province. That is double what London gets in an entire year. In the south of Luzon, it has brought severe flooding with whole villages under water. But perhaps more dangerous are massive landslides. The fear is that with the ground heavy and saturated with water, whole hillsides could collapse.

Typhoon Koppu made landfall near the town of Casiguran on the main island of Luzon on Sunday morning, bringing winds of close to 200km/h (124mph) and cutting power to vast areas.

A teenager was killed by a fallen tree in Manila which also injured four others. A concrete wall also collapsed in the town of Subic, northwest of Manila, killing a 62-year-old woman, officials said.

dawn on Monday, wind speeds were down to 150 km/h (93 mph) in the northern town of Santiago, according to the state weather service.But floodwaters are preventing even military vehicles reaching many of the worst-hit villages, and rescuers report a shortage of boats."We haven't reached many areas. About 60% to 70% of our town is flooded, some as deep as three metres," said Henry Velarde, vice mayor of Jaen, a town in Nueva Ecija province."There are about 20,000 residents in isolated areas that need food and water."

Gloves and soap have vanished from some hospitals. Often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market. There is so little electricity that the government works only two days a week to save what energy is left.

At the University of the Andes Hospital in the mountain city of Mérida, there was not enough water to wash blood from the operating table. Doctors preparing for surgery cleaned their hands with bottles of seltzer water.

The hospital has no fully functioning X-ray or kidney dialysis machines because they broke long ago. And because there are no open beds, some patients lie on the floor in pools of their blood.

This nation has the largest oil reserves in the world, yet the government saved little money for hard times when oil prices were high.

So without water, gloves, soap or antibiotics, a group of surgeons prepared to remove an appendix that was about to burst, even though the operating room was still covered in another patient’s blood.

Ms. Parucho, a diabetic, was unable to receive kidney dialysis because the machines were broken. An infection had spread to her feet, which were black that night. She was going into septic shock.

In a supply room, cockroaches fled as the door swung open.

In April, the authorities arrested its director, Aquiles Martínez, and removed him from his post. Local news reports said he was accused of stealing equipment meant for the hospital, including machines to treat people with respiratory illnesses, as well as intravenous solutions and 127 boxes of medicine.

A holiday had been declared by the government to save electricity, and the blood bank took donations only on workdays.

For the past two and a half months, the hospital has not had a way to print X-rays. So patients must use a smartphone to take a picture of their scans and take them to the proper doctor.

Near him, a handwritten sign read, “We sell antibiotics — negotiable.” A black-market seller’s number was listed.

The ninth floor of the hospital is the maternity ward, where the seven babies had died the day before. A room at the end of the hall was filled with broken incubators.

The day of the power blackout, Dr. Rodríguez said, the hospital staff tried turning on the generator, but it did not work.

When I asked Jon Favreau, Obama’s lead speechwriter in the 2008 campaign, and a close friend of Rhodes’s, whether he or Rhodes or the president had ever thought of their individual speeches and bits of policy making as part of some larger restructuring of the American narrative, he replied, “We saw that as our entire job.”

I realize during our conversations that the role Rhodes plays in the White House bears less resemblance to any specific character on Beltway-insider TV shows like “The West Wing” or “House of Cards” than it does to the people who create those shows

“I love Don DeLillo,” I answer.“Yeah,” Rhodes answers. “That’s the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics. That’s his milieu. And that’s what it’s like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story

“I immediately understood that it’s a very important quality for a staffer,” Hamilton explained, “that he could come into a meeting and decide what was decided.” I suggested that the phrase “decide what was decided” is suggestive of the enormous power that might accrue to someone with Rhodes’s gifts. Hamilton nodded. “Absolutely,” he said.

Rhodes’s opinions were helpful in shaping the group’s conclusions — a scathing indictment of the policy makers responsible for invading Iraq. For Rhodes, who wrote much of the I.S.G. report, the Iraq war was proof, in black and white, not of the complexity of international affairs or the many perils attendant on political decision-making but of the fact that the decision-makers were morons.

when Rhodes joined the Obama campaign in 2007, he arguably knew more about the Iraq war than the candidate himself, or any of his advisers. He had also developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour

It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers

Obama relies on Rhodes for “an unvarnished take,” in part, she says, because “Ben just has no poker face,” and so it’s easy to see when he is feeling uncomfortable. “The president will be like, ‘Ben, something on your mind?’ And then Ben will have this incredibly precise lay-down of why the previous half-hour has been an utter waste of time, because there’s a structural flaw to the entire direction of the conversation.”

The literary character that Rhodes most closely resembles, Power volunteers, is Holden Caulfield. “He hates the idea of being phony, and he’s impetuous, and he has very strong views.”

He became aware of two things at once: the weight of the issues that the president was confronted with, and the intense global interest in even the most mundane presidential communications.

The job he was hired to do, namely to help the president of the United States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologie

As she explained how the process worked, I was struck by how naïve the assumption of a “state of nature” must seem in an information environment that is mediated less and less by experienced editors and reporters with any real prior knowledge of the subjects they write about. “People construct their own sense of source and credibility now,” she said. “They elect who they’re going to believe.

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

”This is something different from old-fashioned spin, which tended to be an art best practiced in person. In a world where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a “narrative” over any serious period of time

Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why

, I brought up the soft Orwellian vibe of an information space where old media structures and hierarchies have been erased by Silicon Valley billionaires who convinced the suckers that information was “free” and everyone with access to Google was now a reporter

Axelrod, a former newspaperman, sighed. “It’s not as easy as standing in front of a press conference and speaking to 70 million people like past presidents have been able to do,” he said. The bully pulpit by and large doesn’t exist anymore, he explained. “So more and more, over the last couple of years, there’s been an investment in alternative means of communication: using digital more effectively, going to nontraditional sources, understanding where on each issue your constituencies are going to be found,” he said. “I think they’ve approached these major foreign-policy challenges as campaign challenges, and they’ve run campaigns, and those campaigns have been very sophisticated.

Rhodes’s innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the publi

The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false

Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency. “It’s the center of the arc,” Rhodes explained to me two days after the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was implemented. He then checked off the ways in which the administration’s foreign-policy aims and priorities converged on Iran. “We don’t have to kind of be in cycles of conflict if we can find other ways to resolve these issues,” he said. “We can do things that challenge the conventional thinking that, you know, ‘AIPAC doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the Israeli government doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the gulf countries don’t like it.’ It’s the possibility of improved relations with adversaries. It’s nonproliferation. So all these threads that the president’s been spinning — and I mean that not in the press sense — for almost a decade, they kind of all converged around Iran.”

If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

By eliminating the fuss about Iran’s nuclear program, the administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural tension between the two countries, which would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.

Rhodes “was kind of like the quarterback,” running the daily video conferences and coming up with lines of attack and parry. “He was extremely good about immediately getting to a phrase or a way of getting the message out that just made more sense,” Kreikemeier remembers. Framing the deal as a choice between peace and war was Rhodes’s go-to move — and proved to be a winning argument.

we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal is literally going to be the tip of everything that we stand up online,” Somanader says. “And we’re going to map it onto what we know about the different audiences we’re dealing with: the public, pundits, experts, the right wing, Congress.” By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online — and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet.

The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration. By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making

During the course of the Iran talks, Malley told me, he always kept in close contact with Rhodes. “I would often just call him and say, ‘Give me a reality check,’ ” Malley explained. “He could say, ‘Here is where I think the president is, and here is where I think he will be.’ ” He continued, “Ben would try to anticipate: Does it make sense policywise? But then he would also ask himself: How do we sell it to Congress? How do we sell it to the public? What is it going to do to our narrative?”

I examine the president’s thoughts unfolding on the page, and the lawyerly, abstract nature of his writing process. “Moral imagination, spheres of identity, but also move beyond cheap lazy pronouncements,” one note reads. Here was the new American self — rational, moral, not self-indulgent. No longer one thing but multiple overlapping spheres or circles. Who is described here? As usual, the author is describing himself.

Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this

“We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.

Rhodes’s passion seems to derive not from any investment in the technical specifics of sanctions or centrifuge arrays, or any particular optimism about the future course of Iranian politics and society. Those are matters for the negotiators and area specialists. Rather, it derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely

When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign being run by a different administration is something that scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he said, shrugging. “But that’s impossible.”

Obama’s particular revulsion against a certain kind of global power politics is a product, Rhodes suggests, of his having been raised in Southeast Asia. “Indonesia was a place where your interaction at that time with power was very intimate, right?” Rhodes asks. “Tens or hundreds of thousands of people had just been killed. Power was not some abstract thing,” he muses. “When we sit in Washington and debate foreign policy, it’s like a Risk game, or it’s all about us, or the human beings disappear from the decisions. But he lived in a place where he was surrounded by people who had either perpetrated those acts — and by the way, may not have felt great about that — or else knew someone who was a victim. I don’t think there’s ever been an American president who had an experience like that at a young age of what power is.

The parts of Obama’s foreign policy that disturb some of his friends on the left, like drone strikes, Rhodes says, are a result of Obama’s particular kind of globalism, which understands the hard and at times absolute necessity of killing. Yet, at the same time, they are also ways of avoiding more deadly uses of force — a kind of low-body-count spin move

He shows me the president’s copy of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, a revision of an original draft by Favreau and Rhodes whose defining tension was accepting a prize awarded before he had actually accomplished anything. In his longhand notes, Obama relocated the speech’s tension in the fact that he was accepting a peace prize a week after ordering 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. King and Gandhi were the author’s heroes, yet he couldn’t act as they did, because he runs a state. The reason that the author had to exercise power was because not everyone in the world is rational.

In Panetta’s telling, his own experience at the Pentagon under Obama sometimes resembled being installed in the driver’s seat of a car and finding that the steering wheel and brakes had been disconnected from the engine. Obama and his aides used political elders like him, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton as cover to end the Iraq war, and then decided to steer their own course, he suggests. While Panetta pointedly never mentions Rhodes’s name, it is clear whom he is talking about.

“Was it a point of connection between you and the president that you had each spent some substantial part of your childhoods living in another country?” I ask. Her face lights up.

“Absolutely,” she answers. The question is important to her. “The first conversation we had over dinner, when we first met, was about what it was like for both of us to live in countries that were predominantly Muslim countries at formative parts of our childhood and the perspective it gave us about the United States and how uniquely excellent it is,” she says. “We talked about what it was like to be children, and how we played with children who had totally different backgrounds than our own but you would find something in common.”

Barack Obama is not a standard-issue liberal Democrat. He openly shares Rhodes’s contempt for the groupthink of the American foreign-policy establishment and its hangers-on in the press. Yet one problem with the new script that Obama and Rhodes have written is that the Blob may have finally caught on

“He is a brilliant guy, but he has a real problem with what I call the assignment of bad faith,” one former senior official told me of the president. “He regards everyone on the other side at this point as being a bunch of bloodthirsty know-nothings from a different era who play by the old book

Another official I spoke to put the same point more succinctly: “Clearly the world has disappointed him.

When I asked whether he believed that the Oval Office debate over Syria policy in 2012 — resulting in a decision not to support the uprising against Assad in any meaningful way — had been an honest and open one, he said that he had believed that it was, but has since changed his mind. “Instead of adjusting his policies to the reality, and adjusting his perception of reality to the changing realities on the ground, the conclusions he draws are exactly the same, no matter what the costs have been to our strategic interests,”

“In an odd way, he reminds me of Bush.” The comparison is a startling one — and yet, questions of tone aside, it is uncomfortably easy to see the similarities between the two men, American presidents who projected their own ideas of the good onto an indifferent world.

He understands the president’s pivot toward Iran as the logical result of a deeply held premise about the negative effects of use of American military force on a scale much larger than drone strikes or Special Forces raids. “I think the whole legacy that he was working on was, ‘I’m the guy who’s going to bring these wars to an end, and the last goddamn thing I need is to start another war,’ ” he explains of Obama. “If you ratchet up sanctions, it could cause a war. If you start opposing their interest in Syria, well, that could start a war, too.”

“The Iran experience was the place where I saw firsthand how policy, politics and messaging all had to be brought together, and I think that Ben is really at the intersection of all three,” Malley says. “He reflects and he shapes at the same time.

“There were staff people who put themselves in a position where they kind of assumed where the president’s head was on a particular issue, and they thought their job was not to go through this open process of having people present all these different options, but to try to force the process to where they thought the president wanted to be,” he says. “They’d say, ‘Well, this is where we want you to come out.’ And I’d say ‘[expletive], that’s not the way it works. We’ll present a plan, and then the president can make a decision

Perhaps the president and his aides were continually unable to predict the consequences of their actions in Syria, and made mistake after mistake, while imagining that it was going to come out right the next time

“Another read, which isn’t necessarily opposed to that,” I continue, “is that their actual picture is entirely coherent. But if they put it in blunt, unnuanced terms — ”Panetta completes my sentence: “ — they’d get the [expletive] kicked out of them.” He looks at me curiously. “Let me ask you something,” he says. “Did you present this theory to Ben Rhodes?

“Oh, God,” Rhodes says. “The reason the president has bucked a lot of establishment thinking is because he does not agree with establishment thinking. Not because I or Denis McDonough are sitting here.” He pushes back in his chair. “The complete lack of governance in huge swaths of the Middle East, that is the project of the American establishment,” he declares. “That as much as Iraq is what angered me.

Ben Rhodes wanted to do right, and maybe, when the arc of history lands, it will turn out that he did. At least, he tried. Something scared him, and made him feel as if the grown-ups in Washington didn’t know what they were talking about, and it’s hard to argue that he was wrong.

What has interested me most about watching him and his cohort in the White House over the past seven years, I tell him, is the evolution of their ability to get comfortable with tragedy. I am thinking specifically about Syria, I add, where more than 450,000 people have been slaughtered.

“Yeah, I admit very much to that reality,” he says. “There’s a numbing element to Syria in particular. But I will tell you this,” he continues. “I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we’re there — nearly a decade in Iraq.

Iraq is his one-word answer to any and all criticism.

He mutters something about John Kerry, and then goes off the record, to suggest, in effect, that the world of the Sunni Arabs that the American establishment built has collapsed. The buck stops with the establishment, not with Obama, who was left to clean up their mess.

Rhodes walks me out into the sunlight of the West Wing parking lot, where we are treated to the sight of the aged Henry Kissinger, who has come to pay a visit. I ask Rhodes if he has ever met the famous diplomat before, and he tells me about the time they were seated together at a state dinner for the president of China. It was an interesting encounter to imagine, between Kissinger, who made peace with Mao’s China while bombing Laos to bits, and Rhodes, who helped effect a similar diplomatic volte-face with Iran but kept the United States out of a civil war in Syria, which has caused more than four million people to become refugees. I ask Rhodes how it felt being seated next to the embodiment of American realpolitik. “It was surreal,” he says, looking off into the middle distance. “I told him I was going to Laos,” he continues. “He got a weird look in his eye.

He is not Henry Kissinger, or so his logic runs, even as the underlying realist suspicion — or contempt — for the idea of America as a moral actor is eerily similar. He is torn. As the president himself once asked, how are we supposed to weigh the tens of thousands who have died in Syria against the tens of thousands who have died in Congo? What power means is that the choice is yours, no matter who is telling the story.

Suddenly we find ourselves campaigning not for what could be, but for what was.

Now progressives are fighting desperately to hold on to what we’ve got, trying to stop the unravelling going any further.

If that makes us the new conservatives – with Bannon, Trump and the Brexiteers as the wrecking-ball radicals – then so be it.

Representative Paul Ryan’s fitness routine—he’s a big fan of what’s known as the P90X workout plan—has received three times as much television coverage as the ice loss

“President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans,” Romney declared in his convention speech in Tampa, pausing here to give the audience time to chuckle, “and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.

Obama at least got exercised enough to point out, in his convention speech, that “climate change is not a hoax.”

But that was as far as he was willing to go: no more grandiose claims about actually taking action.

as soon as law firms begin measuring their performance by the revenue each attorney generates, money begins to supplant all other means of assessing performance.

To professionals who choose careers in fields such as law, medicine, and teaching, it is demoralizing to be treated as a unit of production. Even some of the lawyers earning millions of dollars report that they find little or no fulfillment in the work they do.

by stoking the flames of competition between law firms and attorneys, the current system has engrained what economists call a “zero-sum” mentality. There is only a relatively fixed quantity of legal work to be done, and for one firm or attorney to command more of it, others must make due with less.

As a professional, a lawyer represents her clients in the courtroom, in her office and at the negotiating table. She operates with an appreciation for her role in the adversarial judicial process, the need to educate clients about the limits and purpose of the law, and the importance of helping clients create frameworks to work together to form organizations, build businesses, and plan for the future. Doing these things well provides a sense of meaning and value in work.

As a mere service provider, by contrast, her role is to provide a discrete technical service—usually assumed to be the same as any other lawyer would provide—for a fee. Her success is measured not in the professional insight and practical wisdom she offers but in the technical efficiency with which she provides services and her ability to attract other clients willing to pay her to do the same. The sense of professional fulfillment associated with the role of service provider is small at best. 

America’s greatest advantage is its pluralism: It can govern itself horizontally by its people of all colors and creeds forging social contracts to live together as equal citizens.

But right now we’re messing around with that incredible asset. Yes, we must control our borders; it is the essence of sovereignty. It has been a failure of both our political parties that the Mexican-American border has been so porous. So I am for a high wall, but with a very big gate — one that legally lets in energetic low-skilled workers and the high-I.Q. risk-takers who have made our economy the envy of the world — and for legislation that provides a pathway for the millions of illegal immigrants already here to gain legal status and eventually citizenship.

Every era spews up a Joe McCarthy type who tries to thrive by dividing and frightening us, and today his name is Donald Trump.

Greece, without its own currency, didn’t have that option.

the ruling leftist coalition, was willing to accept the austerity that has already been imposed. All it asked for was, in effect, a standstill on further austerity.

But the troika was having none of it. It’s easy to get lost in the details, but the essential point now is that Greece has been presented with a take-it-or-leave-it offer that is effectively indistinguishable from the policies of the past five years.

The purpose must therefore be to drive him from office, which will probably happen if Greek voters fear confrontation with the troika enough to vote yes next week.

But they shouldn’t, for three reasons. First, we now know that ever-harsher austerity is a dead end: after five years Greece is in worse shape than ever. Second, much and perhaps most of the feared chaos from Grexit has already happened. With banks closed and capital controls imposed, there’s not that much more damage to be done.

Finally, acceding to the troika’s ultimatum would represent the final abandonment of any pretense of Greek independence.

it’s time to put an end to this unthinkability. Otherwise Greece will face endless austerity, and a depression with no hint of an end.

Hooray for Obamacare JUN 25

he and the other authors acknowledged the challenge in gaining traction, even with such findings, given the deep-rooted human bias toward immediate gratification and the development and energy gaps that mean today’s poorer nations have few affordable choices other than fossil fuels. See my recent look at India’s argument for expanded coal use.)

It’s real important to think about these long time scales. Essentially, what our study shows is that the changes that we bring upon within the next decades can really change the face of the Earth for thousands of years to come.

Another aspect to it that really pushes it into our century, or even our decade, is that we are emitting the carbon now and it stays in the atmosphere for a long time and the temperature remains high even longer than the carbon remains high.

Hegel’s probing account means to show is that the defender of holier-than-thou virtue and the self-interested Wall Street banker are making the same error from opposing points of view.  Each supposes he has a true understanding of what naturally moves individuals to action.  The knight of virtue thinks we are intrinsically good and that acting in the nasty, individualist, market world requires the sacrifice of natural goodness; the banker believes that only raw self-interest, the profit motive, ever leads to successful actions.

Both are wrong because, finally, it is not motives but actions that matter, and how those actions hang together to make a practical world.  What makes the propounding of virtue illusory — just so much rhetoric — is that there is no world, no interlocking set of practices into which its actions could fit and have traction: propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.

Conversely, what makes self-interested individuality effective is not its self-interested motives, but that there is an elaborate system of practices that supports, empowers, and gives enduring significance to the banker’s actions.  Actions only succeed as parts of practices that can reproduce themselves over time.  To will an action is to will a practical world in which actions of that kind can be satisfied — no corresponding world, no satisfaction.  Hence the banker must have a world-interest as the counterpart to his self-interest or his actions would become as illusory as those of the knight of virtue.

Actions are elements of practices, and practices give individual actions their meaning. Without the game of basketball, there are just balls flying around with no purpose.  The rules of the game give the action of putting the ball through the net the meaning of scoring, where scoring is something one does for the sake of the team.   A star player can forget all this and pursue personal glory, his private self-interest.  But if that star — say, Kobe Bryant — forgets his team in the process, he may, in the short term, get rich, but the team will lose.  Only by playing his role on the team, by having an L.A. Laker interest as well as a Kobe Bryant interest, can he succeed.

Every account of the financial crisis points to a terrifying series of structures that all have the same character: the profit-driven actions of the financial sector became increasingly detached from their function of supporting and advancing the growth of capital.  What thus emerged were patterns of action which, may have seemed to reflect the “ways of the world” but in financial terms, were as empty as those of a knight of virtue, leading to the near collapse of the system as a whole.  A system of compensation that provides huge bonuses based on short-term profits necessarily ignores the long-term interests of investors. As does a system that ignores the creditworthiness of borrowers; allows credit rating agencies to be paid by those they rate and encourages the creation of highly complex and deceptive financial instruments.  In each case, the actions — and profits — of the financial agents became insulated from both the interests of investors and the wealth-creating needs of industry.

Nothing but fierce and smart government regulation can head off another American economic crisis in the future.  This is not a matter of “balancing” the interests of free-market inventiveness against the need for stability; nor is it a matter of a clash between the ideology of the free-market versus the ideology of government control.  Nor is it, even, a matter of a choice between neo-liberal economic theory and neo-Keynesian theory.  Rather, as Hegel would have insisted, regulation is the force of reason needed to undo the concoctions of fantasy.

The civil service, notorious for its inefficiency and endemic corruption, has long ago lost all popular confidence in it. It is also unable to collect tax revenue.

The failure of the state is clearly reflected in the fast deterioration of the services it provides in basic goods, such as education, health, sanitation, and transport. Diminished funds, frequent strikes, and low morale in public administration have combined to bring the state virtually to a halt.

Nor are authorities able to protect citizens, and their properties, from social disorder, widespread vandalism, and occasional bouts of violence

this has caused a breakdown in the rule of law.

Turn to the political class and you will find that its authority has vanished into thin air. Prime minister George Papandreou may have shown political courage at times, but has no control over either his party or his government.

Greece’s GDP will shrink by 5% this year and will be 2% smaller in 2012; the economy is expected to contract for four successive years. Greece is meanwhile faced with one of the greater human flights in her history. This includes three categories of individual, mostly young people, who should be the most valuable to Greece if Greece is to overcome its present crisis: academics and intellectuals; entrepreneurial middle-class professionals with technical skills and expertise; and long-term immigrants who, in the last two decades, were the backbone of Greece’s development

Evidently, the problem with Greece is far deeper and much more serious than this country’s (already deep and serious) financial crisis. It involves nothing less than a complete and drastic overhaul of the Greek state system. It should however be equally obvious that, as Greece is an EU country, Europe cannot but face up to this problem and contribute to its solution, as any alternative route must inevitably lead to the collapse of the entire project of European integration.

If Putin admits his Ukraine adventure was a mistake, he will look incredibly foolish and the long knives will be out for him in the Kremlin. If he doesn’t back down, Russians will pay a huge price. Either way, that system will be stressed with unpredictable spillovers on the global economy. Remember: Russia’s 1998 economic collapse — also triggered by low oil prices and the moratorium it declared on payments to foreign debtors — helped to sink the giant American hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, sparking a near meltdown on Wall Street.

in an age when machines and software are ensuring that average is over for workers in developed countries, and everyone needs to be upgrading their skills, what happens to the developing Arab states and Iran, who have used oil money to mask their deficits in knowledge, education and women’s empowerment? Egypt’s military-led government is highly in need of Arab oil money to get through its crisis. A bit of good news: The Islamic State, which depends on oil smuggling, will fail at governing even faster than it already has.

Turkey now “needs more than $200 billion of foreign financing a year, more than a quarter of gross domestic product, to maintain its current level of growth.” There will be less Arab and Russian oil money for that and, last week, with Erdogan being criticized by the European Union (a big source of investment income) for arresting his opponents, the Turkish lira hit a low against the dollar.

it was in the east, in the regions we now know as Poland, Ukraine, Austria, Hungary, Belarus, Russia. the Baltics and the Balkans where the fighting really never ended. Here the formal war of 1914 and 1918 was conducted in a more total fashion than it had been in the West. Armistice brought state collapse and a period of state building and regeneration through violence, population transfers and mass killing.

the war that nominally ended in late 1918 didn’t really end until the early 1920s. From a longer perspective this end of hostilities in the early 1920s was itself more of an interruption or lull from which hostilities picked up again in the late 1920s and continued, with continuing cycles of brutalizing violence and innovations in organized killing by ‘racial’ categories, which continued right through the middle 1940s

It is only today that we see the beginnings of comparable breakdowns in state relations, the rise of aggressive nationalisms and racialist movements that were the great story of that period

The modern GE was built by Jack Welch, the youngest CEO and chairman in company history when he took over in 1981. He ran it for 20 years, becoming the rare CEO who was also a household name, praised for his strategic and operational mastery.

their most obvious problem. GE couldn’t live without GE Capital, still so big it was essentially the nation’s seventh largest bank. But investors couldn’t live with GE Capital and its unshakable shadow of risk, either.

it worked more like a collection of businesses under the protection of a giant bank. As the financial sector came to drive more of the U.S. economy, GE Capital, the company’s finance arm, powered more of the company’s growth. At its height, Capital accounted for more than half of GE’s profits. It rivaled the biggest banks in the country, competed with Wall Street for the brightest M.B.A.s and employed hundreds of bankers.

The industrial spine of the company gave GE a AAA credit rating that allowed it to borrow money inexpensively, giving it an advantage over banks, which relied on deposits. The cash flowed up to headquarters where it powered the development of new jet engines and dividends for shareholders.

Capital also gave General Electric’s chief executives a handy, deep bucket of financial spackle with which to smooth over the cracks in quarterly earnings reports and keep Wall Street happy

GE shares were trading at 40 times its earnings when Welch retired in 2001, more than double where it had historically. And much of those profits were coming from deep within Capital, not the company’s factories.

When the financial crisis hit, Capital fell back to earth, taking GE’s share price and Immelt with it. The stock closed as low as $6.66 in March 2009. General Electric was on the brink of collapse. The market for short-term loans, the lifeblood of GE Capital, had frozen, and there was little in the way of deposits to fall back on. The Federal Reserve stepped in to save it after an emergency plea from Immelt.

the near-death experience taught investors to think of GE like a bank, a stock always vulnerable to another financial collapse

At its peak, General Electric was the most valuable company in the U.S., worth nearly $600 billion in August 2000. That year, GE’s third of a million employees operated 150 factories in the U.S., and another 176 in 34 other countries. Its pension plan covered 485,000 people.

What if the GE Jack Welch built didn’t work any more?

Cracks in the performance of the company’s industrial lines—its power turbines, jet engines, locomotives and MRI machines—would now be plain to see, some executives worried, without Capital’s cash to help cover the weak quarters and pay the sacrosanct dividend

Most of the shortfall came from its service contracts, which should have been the source of the easiest profits. Instead, the heart of the industrial business was hollow. And its failure was about to tip the entire company into crisis.

Former colleagues compared him to Bill Clinton because of his magnetic ability to hold the focus of a room. He sounded like a leader. He was a natural salesman.

Immelt was so confident in GE’s managerial excellence that he projected a sunny vision for the company’s future that didn’t always match reality. He was aware of the challenges, but he wanted his people to feel like they were playing for a winning team. That often left Immelt, in the words of one GE insider, trying to market himself out of a math problem.

Alstom’s problems hadn’t gone away, but now its stock was cheaper, and Immelt saw the makings of a deal that fit perfectly with his vision for reshaping his company. GE would essentially swap Capital, the cash engine that no longer made sense, for a new one that could churn out profits each quarter in the reliable way that industrial companies were supposed to.

To the dismay of some involved, GE’s bid crept upward, from the €30 a share that the power division’s deal team already believed was too high, to roughly €34, or almost $47. Immelt and Kron met one-on-one, and the deal team realized the game was over. The principals had shaken hands.

The visions for the present and the future were both fundamentally flawed. As GE’s research department was preparing white papers heralding “The Age of Gas,” the world was entering a multiyear decline in the demand for new gas power plants and for the electricity that made them profitable.

When advisers determined that the concessions to get the deal approved might have grown costly enough to trigger a provision allowing GE to back out, some in the Power business quietly celebrated, confiding in one another that they assumed management would abandon the deal. But Immelt and his circle of closest advisers wanted it done. That included Steve Bolze, the man who ran it and hoped someday to run all of General Electric.

“Steve’s our guy,” McElhinney said in one meeting. If Bolze was elevated to CEO, those behind him in Power would rise too. “Get on board,” he said. “We have to make the numbers.”

Immelt, trapped in Welch’s long shadow, craved a bold move to shock his company out of the doldrums that had plagued his tenure. It was time for GE to be reinvented again.

In the dry language of accounting in which he was so fluent, Flannery was declaring a pillar of Immelt’s pivot had failed: GE had been sending money out the door to repurchase its stock and pay dividends but wasn’t bringing in enough from its regular operations to cover them. It wasn’t sustainable. Buybacks and dividends are generally paid out of leftover funds.

when GE spun off Genworth, there was a chunk of the business, long-term-care insurance, that lingered. Policies designed to cover expenses like nursing homes and assisted living had proved to be a disaster for insurers who had drastically underestimated the costs

The bankers didn’t think the long-term-care business could be part of the Genworth spinoff. To make the deal more attractive, GE agreed to cover any losses. This insurance for insurers covered about 300,000 policies by early 2018, about 4% of all such policies written in the country. Incoming premiums weren’t covering payouts.

Two months after Miller flagged the $3 billion, it was clear the problem was a great deal larger. GE was preparing for it to be more than $6 billion and needed to come up with $15 billion in reserves regulators required it to have to cover possible costs in the future. The figure was gigantic. By comparison, even after the recent cut, GE’s annual dividend cost $4 billion.

JP Morgan analyst Steve Tusa, who led the pack in arguing that GE was harboring serious problems, removed his sell rating on the stock this week. GE’s biggest skeptic still thinks the businesses are broken but the risks are now known. The stock climbed back above $7 on Thursday, but is down more than 50% for the year and nearly 90% from its 2000 zenith.