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Britain now seems all too comfortable with cutting its coat according to its cloth. The spirit of the Money Saving Expert is endemic. Both the country and households are stuck in a scarcity mindset, focused on coping and managing, rather than leveraging the biggest changes. The country needs to allow itself to become richer. This is, in part, an elite problem – but our politicians largely respond to electoral incentives, rather than leading the

To hear Bankman-Fried tell it, the idea was to make billions through his crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, and FTX, the exchange he created for it — funneling the proceeds into the humble cause of “bed nets and malaria,” thereby saving poor people’s lives.

ast summer Bankman-Fried was telling The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus something quite different. “He told me that he never had a bed-nets phase, and considered neartermist causes — global health and poverty — to be more emotionally driven,” Lewis-Kraus wrote in August. Effective altruists talk about both “neartermism” and “longtermism.

Bankman-Fried said he wanted his money to address longtermist threats like the dangers posed by artificial intelligence spiraling out of control. As he put it, funding for the eradication of tropical diseases should come from other people who actually cared about tropical diseases: “Like, not me or something.”

today I think we see more and more expressions of cultural identity from white men qua white men, as they seek to claim a place of their own in the multicultural firmament. Sometimes this identity is described as being Southern, or rural; other times, as Lewis puts it, it's about "redneck" culture. He contrasts this with having "a cosmopolitan background," a.k.a. hailing from a racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse urban community.

What they all share is a philosophy in which a certain construction of masculinity is, in style and substance, superior to the that of their opponents, whom they see as somehow soft, feminized, and lacking in legitimacy.

The argument of gun culture is an argument against a vision of masculinity that is seen as feminized, but it is also an argument deeply skeptical of the ability of government to provide security, and one that valorizes the gun-owner as a heroic, or potentially heroic, individual.

The dystopia often imagined in the world of artificial intelligence—in which computers somehow take on a life of their own and come to rule mankind—has actually happened in the world of finance. The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own, beyond human control. The people flow into and out of them but have only incidental effect on their direction and behavior. The firms may not be intent on evil; they aren't intent on anything except short-term profits: they're insensible.

Stop and think once more about what has just happened on Wall Street: its most admired firm conspired to flood the financial system with worthless securities, then set itself up to profit from betting against those very same securities, and in the bargain helped to precipitate a world historic financial crisis that cost millions of people their jobs and convulsed our political system. In other places, or at other times, the firm would be put out of business, and its leaders shamed and jailed and strung from lampposts. (I am not advocating the latter.) Instead Goldman Sachs, like the other too-big-to-fail firms, has been handed tens of billions in government subsidies, on the theory that we cannot live without them. They were then permitted to pay politicians to prevent laws being passed to change their business, and bribe public officials (with the implicit promise of future employment) to neuter the laws that were passed—so that they might continue to behave in more or less the same way that brought ruin on us all.

If Goldman Sachs is going to change, it will be only if change is imposed upon it from the outside—either by the market's decision that it is no longer viable in its current form or by the government's decision that we can no longer afford it.

Also at the congress, which got underway Friday, Kim said North Korea would not use its nuclear weapons unless its sovereignty was violated,

aid the plan is a “big deal” because Kim is taking public responsibility for economic development, something his father never did.

“The announcement of a five-year economic plan slightly proves the hypothesis that Kim Jong Un is ruling like his grandfather — he even appropriated a Kim Il Sung policy direction here — with more formal lines of contro

Is it O.K., morally and politically, to declare the man about to move into the White House illegitimate?

Yes, it is. In fact, it’s an act of patriotism.

Hillary Clinton would almost surely have won if the F.B.I. hadn’t conveyed the false impression that it had damaging new information about her, just days before the vote. This was grotesque, delegitimizing malfeasance, especially in contrast with the agency’s refusal to discuss the Russia connection.

The Day the Republican Party Died

Where were you the night Donald Trump killed the Republican Party as we knew it? Trump was right where he belonged: in the gilt-draped skyscraper with his name on it, Trump Tower in Manhattan, basking in the glory of his final, definitive victory.

To his left, stopped for the night, was the golden escalator he’d ridden down when he announced his campaign last June with a rambling, unscripted address that invoked the “rapists” he said were pouring over the Mexican border, beginning what would be an uninterrupted series of shocks to the political system.

“That’s not who we are.” So said President Obama, again and again throughout his administration, in speeches urging Americans to side with him against the various outrages perpetrated by Republicans.

If close to half of America voted for Republicans in the Obama years and support Trump today, then clearly something besides the pieties of cosmopolitan liberalism is very much a part of who we are.

This self-undermining flaw makes the trope a useful way to grasp the dilemmas facing Trump’s opponents. In seeking to reject Trump’s chauvinist vision, they end up excluding too much of what a unifying counternarrative would require.

the phone call was troubling because it showed that Trump has not taken the time to learn anything about nuclear policy since the election. “He knows one thing, which is that Obama signed it, so he’s going to rail against it,” Lewis said.

While the United States and Israel are using the weapons to slow the nuclear bomb-making abilities of Iran, they could also be used to disrupt power grids and financial systems or even wreak havoc with military defenses.

The United States has long objected to the Russian crusade for an online arms control ban. “There is no broad international support for a cyberweapon ban,” says James A. Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “This is a global diplomatic ploy by the Russians to take down a perceived area of U.S. military advantage.”

The wide disclosure of the details of the Flame virus by Kaspersky Lab also seems intended to promote the Russian call for a ban on cyberweapons like those that blocked poison gas or expanding bullets from the armies of major nations and other entities.

In effect, Lewis’s book is a manifesto that calls for a revolutionary change in thinking, especially to restore the idea of the citizen-soldier as it had been during the Second World War, to increase the manpower range of the army, and to cancel the idea of an all volunteer force.

In his opinion, the changes after the Second World War led to the removal of the American people from the conduct of war. This central claim is well based and is carefully presented.

The importance of this book is shown by the fact that Routledge has issued a second edition. In addition, even though the book presents a specific thesis that is merged within the fascinating historiographical debate over the American way of war, it also provides an in-depth discussion of U.S. military history of the past sixty years.

No Exit, the new book from Gideon Lewis-Kraus, should be required reading for anybody who thinks it might be a good idea to found a startup in Silicon Valley. It shows just how miserable the startup founder’s life is

Silicon Valley is gripped by a mass delusion, compounded by a deep “fake it til you make it” attitude toward success. Why do so many people in Silicon Valley want to be founders? Because every founder they meet is always killing it, crushing it, having massive success, just about to close a huge round, etc etc

people tend to believe the evidence of their own eyes, and what they see is a combination of two things: the founders they know all seemingly doing great, and also a steady stream of headlines showing other founders cashing out for millions or even billions of dollars.

the two most decisive factors in the outcome of the war were incompetent micromanagement by PresidentLyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara

and Hanoi’s brilliant propaganda campaign, which fueled a gullible—and often disingenuous—global peace movement. Protesters, as angry as they were misinformed, ultimately persuaded Congress in May 1973 to prohibit spending on further U.S. combat operations in Indochina.

As Yale University’s John Lewis Gaddis wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2005, “Historians now acknowledge that American counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict; the problem was that support for the war had long since crumbled at home.”

Many still imagine that Britain’s decision-makers were all decently reluctant to plunge into war, and that they did so only at the last moment. According to the long-lived legend, Britain went to war only for high ideological goals, to face down German authoritarianism and to stand up for democracy. The British government and people, some insist, were instantly united behind a war that was embarked upon essentially to protect Belgium’s neutrality.

The private papers of the major players reveal that in 1914 the Cabinet of Britain’s Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was deeply divided. While the Cabinet’s Radicals struggled to keep Britain focussed upon diplomatic mediation, the inner executive, dominated by Liberal Imperialists, forced the pace, manipulated the Cabinet and parliament toward war, and rushed to a premature choice for war – before Belgium’s invasion. There was intense opposition.

It is hardly realized today that Britain’s decision for war in 1914 was a very close-run thing. Lewis Harcourt, the Colonial Secretary, was the leader of the powerful faction of neutralists inside the nineteen-man Cabinet. His cabinet journal has only recently become available. It reveals that on Monday 27 July, at the beginning of the crisis, Harcourt listed eleven ministers as pledged disciples with him in a “Peace party which if necessary shall break up the Cabinet in the interest of our abstention.”

Dès 1991, le grand orientaliste Bernard Lewis s'inquiétait de voir Israël devenir, sur le modèle du Liban, «une association difficile, une de plus, entre ethnies et groupes religieux en conflit». Et il ajoutait: «les juifs se trouveraient dans la position dominante qu'avaient autrefois les Maronites avec la perspective probable d'un destin à la libanaise en fin de parcours.» Pour empêcher cette prédiction de se réaliser, il serait urgent de faire ce qu'Ariel Sharon, à la fin de sa vie, appelait de «douloureuses concessions territoriales». Si ses successeurs y répugnent, c'est parce qu'ils se défient de leur partenaire, mais c'est surtout parce qu'ils ont peur de leurs propres extrémistes. Ils craignent la guerre civile entre Israéliens qui accompagnerait le démantèlement des implantations de Cisjordanie.

Si la civilisation de l'image n'était pas en train de détruire l'intelligence de la guerre, personne ne soutiendrait que les bombardements israéliens visent les civils. Avez-vous oublié Dresde? Quand une aviation surpuissante vise des civils, les morts se comptent par centaines de milliers. Non: les Israéliens préviennent les habitants de Gaza de toutes les manières possibles des bombardements à venir. Et lorsqu' on me dit que ces habitants n'ont nulle part où aller, je réponds que les souterrains de Gaza auraient dû être faits pour eux. Il y a aujourd'hui des pièces bétonnées dans chaque maison d'Israël.

Je critique la politique israélienne. Je plaide sans relâche depuis le début des années quatre-vingt pour la solution de deux Etats. Je condamne la poursuite des constructions dans les implantations en Cisjordanie. Je dis que l'intransigeance vis-à-vis du Hamas devrait s'accompagner d'un soutien effectif à l'autorité palestinienne.

Affirmative action at universities in doubt as U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments

It was clear that the court's conservatives, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., believe that using affirmative action in admission decisions is unneeded and unconstitutional.

In the past, when the high court has upheld affirmative action, it did so with the understanding that it was a "temporary" measure, the chief justice said. "When do you think your program will be done?" he asked.

What If the Allies Had Lost World War I?

A journalist who lived through both the first and second world wars, Frederick Lewis Allen, marveled that the United States went to war in 1941 “with no enthusiasm and no dissent.”

Only cranks now question the necessity to fight and defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.