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Javier E

San Francisco Hangout Becomes Casualty of Tech Boom - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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san francisco housing real estate prices

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Since 1999, The Grove restaurant, with its warm, woodsy interior and comfort food, has marketed itself as “San Francisco’s living room.”
  • the landlords raised the annual rent to $246,816, or roughly $20,000 a month, for the 1,500 square foot ground floor space. That is 50 percent higher than what The Grove’s owners paid five years ago. They said the only way they could possibly keep pace would be to drastically raise prices.
  • Regulars complain that The Grove’s planned closure is just the latest confirmation that the tech boom is making San Francisco unlivable, and pricing long-time businesses and residents out of the market. As start-ups and established tech companies like Google, Facebook and Square poach one another’s engineers with high salaries, rents are, on average, up almost 8 percent from a year ago, to $2,768 for an apartment in a large complex,
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  • 4 of the 10 most expensive housing markets in the country — San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Marin counties — are in the greater Bay Area. Even Oakland, once a cheaper alternative to the city, saw average rent surge 11 percent in 2012 over the previous year.
  • Those lucky enough to live in rent-controlled apartments say they fear that they can never afford to move. Those who are not so lucky say the rent increases have left them with little choice but to leave the city.
  • Melissa Jensen, said she recently moved from Los Angeles where she paid less than $2,000 for a one-bedroom in a nice neighborhood. “To get that same space in San Francisco I’m realizing I’m going to have to pay twice that much,”
grayton downing

North Korea Expected to Indict American - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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korea north south culture

shared by grayton downing on 28 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • The announcement about the tour operator, Kenneth Bae, an American born in South Korea, could complicate Washington’s diplomatic balancing act
  • South Korean human rights advocates have described Mr. Bae as a devout Christian who not only ran tours to North Korea, but was also interested in helping orphans in the Communist country.
  • In 2009, North Korea arrested two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who it said had entered illegally and committed “hostile acts.” They were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor
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  • In 2010, another American, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, was arrested and sentenced to eight years of hard labor for illegal entry and “hostile acts.”
  • “It is only a matter of time” before the industrial complex, the last symbol of attempted reconciliation between the two Koreas, is shut down for good, a North Korean government spokesman told the news agency.
rachelramirez

ERP for OCD Works, But It's Expensive and Hard to Find - The Atlantic - 0 views

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OCD US

shared by rachelramirez on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The Only Cure for OCD Is Expensive, Elusive, and Scary
  • She can’t resist picking up litter whenever she spots it; the other day she cleaned up the entire parking lot of her apartment complex. Each night, she must place her phone in an exact spot on the nightstand in order to fall asleep.
  • Since then, a succession of therapists have failed to help her. They’ve told her, “I don't really know how to treat this,” she said. Or, they talked to her about the possible source of her troubles.
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  • there are no psychologists who specialize in exposure and response prevention, the specific kind of therapy she and many others with OCD require in order to break their crippling thought cycles.
  • At its worst, OCD can compel people to spend hours each day rehearsing an intricate mental dance they feel powerless to end.
  • Along with medication, exposure and response prevention, or ERP, therapy is the gold-standard treatment for people with OCD. It is radically different from more traditional talk therapy, which excavates patients’ childhoods or past relationships for clues to their present-day problems.
  • a person is forced to confront their obsessive thoughts relentlessly. The goal is to make the sufferer so accustomed to their obsessions that they no longer feel tempted to engage in soothing compulsions.
  • Because the symptoms can be entirely mental, it can take years for either patients or therapists to recognize OCD for what it is.
  • People obsessed with not offending God might hold a satanic ritual. Those assailed by persistent (and baseless) fears they will molest their siblings might read the incest tome Flowers in the Attic.
  • some studies estimate it takes OCD sufferers 17 years to find proper treatment from the onset of symptoms. Seeking certain forms of talk therapy can make them worse, not better. In the meantime, some experience symptoms so debilitating they are confined to their homes.
  • Most moderate OCD cases get at least partly better if the patient receives two or three months of ERP.
  • There is no mandatory number of hours that psychologists must spend training in either cognitive-behavioral therapy or ERP, said Lynn Bufka, a psychologist with the American Psychological Association. Bufka did not know what percentage of psychotherapists provide ERP, but she suspects it’s “small.”
  • Between 3 and 7 million Americans suffer from OCD at some point—a substantial number, but still far fewer than the vast multitudes who seek therapy for anxiety and depression.
  • ERP teaches people, “these thoughts are meaningless, you need to learn to ignore them.”
  • Access to ERP therapists is compounded by the already profound shortage of psychotherapists in rural areas. More than half of U.S. counties have no mental-health professionals at all.
  • ERP specialists might feel no need to take insurance, since they are so rare they often have no shortage of clients, Szymanski, of the International OCD Foundation, pointed out.
  • But the treatment was so expensive it contributed to the family’s decision to sell their house.
cjlee29

Mosul Fight Unleashes New Horrors on Civilians - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by cjlee29 on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Islamic State has moved hundreds of civilians from villages around the city to use as human shields,
  • United Nations said the militants may have killed nearly 200 people.
  • hit a Shiite mosque in northern Iraq, killing more than a dozen women and children.
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  • A sulfur plant set on fire by the Islamic State has sent dozens of people for treatment for respiratory problems, and several journalists have been hurt, and two killed, covering the fighting.
  • Although the government’s military operation itself is largely meeting its goals in progressing toward the city, the turmoil surrounding it is a sign of just how difficult it would be to secure a lasting peace across Iraq’s many divisions even after a victory.
  • The human toll and factional distrust are early examples of the complex humanitarian crisis
  • killed close to 200 people, including civilians and children, in and around Mosul in the past week.
  • Among them were said to have been 50 former Iraqi policemen
  • Mr. Colville said that in one case, several women and children, including a 4-year-old, who were being held as human shields by Islamic State fighters were suddenly gunned down by the militants, possibly because they were lagging behind the group.
  • “ISIS has lost hundreds of its members from airstrikes when they withdraw, so now they are forcibly displacing the residents of villages they are leaving and using them as human shields,”
  • So far, about 9,000 people have fled the fighting as Kurdish and Iraqi government forces have moved to secure villages around the city, according to the United Nations.
  • as the United Nations has worked to protect civilians, it has at times been undermined by the Iraqi security forces.
  • On the military front, the Islamic State has managed to launch two attacks on cities far from Mosul, diverting the attention of Iraqi security forces and the warplanes of the American-led coalition.
  • Kurdish officials in Kirkuk responded by forcing out hundreds of Arab families who had sought safety there, according to United Nations officials and local residents, as they feared that terrorists had sneaked into the city posing as displaced civilians.
  • local authorities were exacting collective punishment on Arabs for the crimes of the Islamic State
  • Local officials blamed the American-led coalition, but United States military officials have said the episode was not the result of a coalition airstrike.
  • Some have suggested that an artillery shell hit the mosque, but Human Rights Watch said the evidence it had seen “is consistent with an airstrike.” The Iraqi forces are also conducting airstrikes, and Human Rights called for a thorough investigation.
  • Citing safety concerns, the Iraqi government said recently that it would begin restricting journalists’ access to the front lines
Javier E

The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama's Foreign-Policy Guru - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bamas-foreign-policy-guru.html

obama history policy politics foreign policy realism journalism news

shared by Javier E on 07 May 16 - No Cached
  • Standing in his front office before the State of the Union, Rhodes quickly does the political math on the breaking Iran story. “Now they’ll show scary pictures of people praying to the supreme leader,” he predicts, looking at the screen. Three beats more, and his brain has spun a story line to stanch the bleeding. He turns to Price. “We’re resolving this, because we have relationships,” he says.
  • Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration’s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior White House officials” and “spokespeople.” I watch the message bounce from Rhodes’s brain to Price’s keyboard to the three big briefing podiums — the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon — and across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for mainstream outlets. It’s a tutorial in the making of a digital news microclimate — a storm that is easy to mistake these days for a fact of nature, but whose author is sitting next to me right now.
  • Watching Rhodes work, I remember that he is still, chiefly, a writer, who is using a new set of tools — along with the traditional arts of narrative and spin — to create stories of great consequence on the biggest page imaginable. The narratives he frames, the voices of senior officials, the columnists and reporters whose work he skillfully shapes and ventriloquizes, and even the president’s own speeches and talking points, are the only dots of color in a much larger vision about who Americans are and where we are going
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  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.”
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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?”
  • “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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • “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.
Javier E

Unusual Flavor of G.O.P. Primary Illustrates a Famous Paradox - The New York Times - 0 views

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social choice theory politics paradox political choice economics theory

shared by Javier E on 09 May 16 - No Cached
  • The failure of democracy to provide a coherent ranking of political hopefuls is a central insight of the sub-field of economics and political science known as social choice theory.
  • The issue is neatly illustrated by Condorcet’s paradox, which shows that a shifting set of coalitions can make a collective body appear that it has no idea what it wants.
  • The first possible defect is the problem the marquis illustrated — the problem of preference cycles.
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  • The problem is not that individual voters are clueless; in this story, they’re not. Even if each individual voter is rational and knows what he or she wants, the electorate as a whole can act as if it were clueless and can’t decide. Individually rational choices don’t necessarily add up to collectively rational choices.
  • The Marquis Condorcet, a French mathematician of the second half of the 18th century, showed how a majority-rule vote can lead to incoherent collective choices.
  • But Kenneth Arrow, the economics Nobel laureate, showed in his 1951 doctoral thesis that the problem runs far deeper than anyone had imagined. Mr. Arrow’s famous “impossibility theorem” says that there is no mechanism that can coherently speak for the will of the people.
  • Loosely speaking, this extraordinary result says that any mechanism that aims to speak for the will of the people — that is not a dictatorship — will be susceptible to at least one of three defects.
  • the will of the people is an incoherent concept
  • The second possible defect is that voters will make choices that suggest that the addition of irrelevant alternatives leads them to change their mind
  • The third possibility is that even when each voter individually prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla, that somehow collectively the voters will choose vanilla instead.
  • Mr. Arrow’s impossibility theorem suggests that maybe the Republican primary results say less about the desires of Republican voters than they do about tensions inherent in groups of people collectively deciding what to do
  • Economic theorists have also pointed to a reason that the modern G.O.P. may be particularly susceptible to making strange choices. If disagreements between voters are simple enough — such as when some want more liberal policies and others more conservative policies — simple majority rule won’t suffer any of the defects that concerned Mr. Arrow
  • Republicans disagree both about the desirability of conservative versus moderate policies and on the need for an outsider or an establishment leader. This extra complexity is too much for democracy to bear, again raising the possibility of collective madness even in the face of individual rationality.
  • The point isn’t that democracy is bad; merely that it’s imperfect. And so even if this theorem points to the impossibility of a truly rational democracy, it doesn’t mean that the alternatives are any better. As Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
Javier E

The age of stream of consciousness - and insanity - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-8e45-477372e89d78_story.html

consciousness internet culture

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Much has been written about the effects of the Internet on our minds and culture, including Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” Not only are we forging new neural pathways in the brain, but we’re also losing the capacity to absorb and retain complex information.
  • Computers and the Internet may make us smarter in some ways, as neuroscience finds, but baby boomers who grew up with three channels and rabbit ears are the last generation to have been formed primarily by books requiring lengthy, focused attention, as well as the experiential learning that comes from engaging one’s imagination rather than navigating someone else’s often-bizarre, interactive digital fictions.
Javier E

Barack Obama is now alone in Washington - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-9705-23e51a2f424d_story.html

obama asia foreign policy china Policy economic

shared by Javier E on 02 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • The direct purpose of his trip to China is to attend a meeting of the Group of 20, but perhaps more importantly, the visit is intended to breathe life into one of his big ideas: the pivot to Asia. It is a genuinely important policy, but Obama is now the last man standing willing to push for it.
  • when the flash points of today have passed, the rise of Asia will remain the dominant trend of our time.
  • According to the World Bank, in just 10 years, four of the five largest economies in the world will be in the Asia-Pacific region. The United States will be able to shape the 21st century only if it remains a vital Pacific power.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • One central task is obviously to prevent China from dominating i
  • But Washington’s policy is not containment. It can’t be. China is not the Soviet Union but rather the most important trading partner for every country in Asia. The larger project, writes Kurt Campbell, who was until 2013 the State Department’s top Asia hand, in his smart book “The Pivot,” is “to strengthen Asia’s operating system — that is, the complex legal, security and practical arrangements that have underscored four decades of Asian prosperity and security.”
  • That means bolstering freedom of navigation, free trade, multilateral groups and institutions, transparency and accountability, and such diplomatic practices as peaceful resolution of disputes.
  • The most vital of these right now, Campbell notes, is trade. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the sine qua non of Washington’s pivot to Asia because it works at many levels simultaneously — economic, political and strategic. It boosts growth, shores up U.S. alliances, sends a powerful signal to China and, most importantly, writes the rules of the 21st century in ways that are fundamentally American.
  • yet the TPP is under assault from every quarter in the United States.
  • The simple reality is that the United States is the country with the largest market. As a result, it has the most leverage and — as foreign officials have often complained to me — it uses it, asking for exemptions and exceptions that few other countries get. The TPP is no different. Asian countries have made most of the concessions. And because their markets are more closed than the United States’, the deal’s net result will be to open them more.
  • With the Asia pivot, Obama is pursuing the deepest, most enduring interests of the United States. But in doing so, he is now alone in a Washington that is increasingly awash in populism, protectionism and isolationism.
Javier E

Thoughts on the Taiwan Call - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...thoughts-on-the-taiwan-call

foreign policy trump china taiwan

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Not every taboo or shibboleth has to be respected forever. Indeed, they should be inspected with some regularity
  • One of the nice things about being a great power is that you have a lot of choices
  • But in each of these choices the question is not really can we do it, or do we want to do it or do our values dictate we do it so much as 1) have we accurately thought through the potential costs and 2) are the costs sustainable in the face of the benefits we're trying to achieve?
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • In the late Clinton administration we had an arrangement with North Korea in which they had shuttered their nuclear weapons program in exchange for regular shipments of fuel oil, assistance with nuclear energy technology which could not be used for nuclear weapons and various other inducements. This arguably also involved a continuous cat and mouse game with the North Koreans, periodic shakedowns for more assistance, various care and feeding, etc. The incoming Bush administration viewed this deal as appeasement and an example of American weakness and set about a cycle of confrontation that eventually cratered the deal. North Korean quickly proceeded to become a nuclear state. What was termed the 'Agreed Framework' was unlovely and unsatisfactory in a number of ways; the alternative we got was considerably worse.
  • The key was that the Bush administration saw the Agreed Framework as appeasement but they were not - though they sometimes suggested they would be - willing to adopt the likely alternative of military confrontation. (We could soon see a similar set of events unfolded with Iran.) Thus the Bush White House was able to stand strong against appeasement (with all the psychological self-affirmation and self-satisfaction that entails) at the cost of allowing North Korea to become a nuclear state, which it has now been for more than a decade.
  • It is not as though any of this emerges against a backdrop of harmonious US relations with China. In addition to the long-simmering friction over trade, the US and China are currently engaged in a complex and increasingly perilous struggle over which country will be the dominant power in the maritime waterways of East Asia, through which a huge amount of the world's trade flows.
  • The key predicate to wise action is understanding the range of potential outcomes and costs of different choices and whether you are ready and able to sustain them. One of the things I noticed early with the hawks in the Bush administration was a frequent willingness to commit leaders to future costs they may not fully understand secure in the knowledge that once the actions are taken the leader will have to pay those costs whether they like it or not.
  • Some people think Trump has no actual foreign policy. This is not true. He is extremely ignorant. But he has an instinctive and longstanding way of thinking about and approaching foreign policy questions which goes back decades before he ran for President
  • It is one that sees international relations in zero-sum terms (for me to win, you have to lose), sees the US as being taken advantage of by allies (either through advantageous trade deals or expenditures on defense). This is why you see economic nationalism going back decades with Trump and either skepticism or hostility toward international treaty organizations like NATO.
  • What you also have in Trump is someone who is impulsive and aggressive by nature - you see these qualities in primary colors in everything he does. These are highly dangerous qualities in a President.
  • They become magnified when such a person is being advised by people who provide an ideological purpose and justification to such impulsiveness and aggression.
  • That is where I fear and believe we are with Trump. Not everything in foreign policy is sacred. But here we have an impulsive and ignorant man whose comfort zone is aggression surrounded by advisors with dangerous ideas
  • Even President Bush had a coterie of more Realist-minded and cautious advisors to balance out the hotheads. They lost most of the key debates - especially in the first term. But they provided a restraining counter-balance in numerous debates. At present there is no one like that around Trump at all.
nataliedepaulo1

Is Humanism Really Humane? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-humanism-really-humane.html

humanism US

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 09 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Is Humanism Really Humane?
  • This is the tenth in a series of dialogues with philosophers and critical theorists on the question of violence.
  • “Posthumanism” could mean a variety of things. What is it for you, and how does it challenge the standard, liberal humanism we’re familiar with?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • a genealogy of posthumanist thought that stretches back well before the 21st or even 20th century. You find hints of it in anything that fundamentally decenters the human in relation to the world in which we find ourselves, whether we’re talking about other forms of life, the environment, technology or something else. Perhaps more importantly, you find it in the realization that when you don’t allow the concept of the “human” to do your heavy philosophical lifting, you are forced to come up with much more robust and complex accounts of whatever it is you’re talking about. And that includes, first and foremost, a more considered concept of the “human” itself.
lindsayweber1

Iraqi special forces sweep Mosul University for remaining militants: spokesman | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...east-crisis-iraq-idUSKBN14Z09G

iraq mosul isis military islamic state

shared by lindsayweber1 on 15 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • BAGHDAD Iraqi special forces swept through the campus of Mosul University on Sunday to clear it of any remaining Islamic State militants after taking full control of the area, a spokesman said.
  • "The university is completely liberated and forces are sweeping the complex for any hiding militants," CTS spokesman Sabah al-Numan told Reuters by phone on Sunday. "Most buildings are booby-trapped so we're being cautious."
  • Loss of Mosul could spell the end of the Iraqi side of IS's self-styled caliphate, which it declared from the city after sweeping through vast areas of Iraq and Syria.
ethanmoser

Iraqi forces raise flag at Mosul University in push against ISIS | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...sity-in-push-against-isis.html

mosul isis usa iraq

shared by ethanmoser on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Iraqi forces raise flag at Mosul University in push against ISIS
  • Published January 14, 2017 FoxNews.com Facebook0 Twitter0 Email Print A member of Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) stands in a military vehicle at the University of Mosul during a battle with Islamic State militants, in Mosul, Iraq, January 14, 2017. REUTERS/Ahmed Saad - RTSVHSV Iraqi special forces raised the Iraqi flag above the buildings at the Mosul University complex on Friday as they continued the battle for control of the city against Islamic State militants.
  • "We congratulate the Iraqi Security Forces on their continued progress in Eastern Mosul,” U.S. army Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the U.S.-led anti-IS coalition said in a statement. “Work still needs to be done but ISIL's days in Mosul are quickly coming to an end.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The U.S.-led coalition supporting the Iraqi forces offensive on Mosul told The Associated Press on Friday that the Islamic State group "warped the purpose of a beloved institution of higher learning when they used the university for military purposes."
  • "The entire university has been burned,"
  • "I think it will take at least two or three years to rebuild," he added
  • The extremist group, which controls most of Deir el-Zour province, has kept the provincial capital under siege since 2014. Government forces have withstood the encirclement thanks to air-dropped humanitarian assistance and weapons and ammunition flown into the airport. Remaining residents have reported malnourishment and starvation amid severe shortages of food, water and fuel. The Islamic State group, which in 2014 seized large parts of Iraq and Syria and established a so-called Islamic caliphate straddling both sides of the border, is under intense pressure in both countries where it has lost significant territory in recent months.
ethanmoser

Kremlin counts days to Trump's inauguration, blasts Obama | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...inauguration-blasts-obama.html

putin trump russia usa obama syria hacking

shared by ethanmoser on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Kremlin counts days to Trump's inauguration, blasts Obama
  • Exulted by Donald Trump's victory in the U.S., the Kremlin is counting the days to his inauguration and venting its anger at Barack Obama's outgoing administration, no holds barred.
  • Trump's open admiration of Putin has brought wide expectations of improved Moscow-Washington relations, but Trump has not articulated a clear Russia policy.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Careful not to hurt chances for a thaw in U.S.-Russia relations, President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have deferred questions about their plans for future contacts with Trump and any agenda for those talks until he takes office on Friday.
  • Moscow calls Obama's team a "bunch of geopolitical losers" engaged in a last-ditch effort to inflict the maximum possible damage to U.S.-Russia ties to make it more difficult for Trump to mend the rift.
  • His Cabinet nominees include both a retired general with a hawkish stance on Russia and an oil executive who has done extensive business in Russia.
  • While Putin and his lieutenants hope Trump will open up to Russia, they know any attempt to fix ties will face massive obstacles, including possible strong resistance in the U.S. Congress.
  • The complexity of the conflict in Syria — where opposition groups backed by regional players are pitted against Assad's troops and often fight each other — makes hopes for quick progress elusive.
  • Putin has pushed for the U.S. to recognize Moscow as an equal global heavyweight and to acknowledge that Russia's ex-Soviet neighbors are in its sphere of "vital interests" — demands rejected by the West. Many in Russia hope that Trump could be more inclined to strike a "grand bargain" with Putin, carving up spheres of influence and helping cement Russia's role as a global power.
  • U.S. intelligence officials' accusations that Russian hackers — acting on Putin's orders — interfered into the vote to help Trump win have put the U.S. president-elect in a difficult position. Trump has grudgingly conceded that Russia was likely responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee, but emphasized there was no evidence that hacking affected the U.S. election results. The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations and also hotly denied reports that it has collected compromising information about Trump.
  • Obama's administration still has a few days left to "destroy the world," Zakharova wrote.
Javier E

Ben Sasse's words of wisdom - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ben-sasses-words-of-wisdom

American idea democracy dignity constitution race class nativism crisis culture history civic education

shared by Javier E on 01 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • “We aren’t a nation rooted in blood. We aren’t a nation based in ethnicity . . .  America was an idea that was about something much bigger than what tribe you come from.”
  • That message was entirely absent — and remains absent — in the xenophobic, nativist ramblings of Trump and his followers. Trump’s supporters rallied to his cry of white resentment and anti-immigrant blame-mongering. His authoritarianism and contempt for the First Amendment were of no concern.
  • the right, for all its Constitutional veneration, has become proudly ignorant about our founding principles and instead has adopted the worst aspects of the left: race obsession and class resentment. In the hands of misogynistic and xenophobic opportunists, the right now seems to be all about getting even, getting what some Americans imagine was taken from them.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • That, too, seems to be a proposition — sensible internationalism — that center-right and left can agree upon.
  • It is here, perhaps, that the conscientious center-right and center-left can join forces. Both should reject the steady diet of xenophobia on the right and identity politics on the left. Both should insist on a revival of civic education.
  • a sense of shared responsibility for the fate of our neighbors, especially those facing economic or other hardship, should be the basis of our public policy discussion
  • “We can talk about a specific factory moving from Ohio or Indiana to Mexico and the jobs that might be saved or lost in a move like that, but the long-term factor is that each of those factories have so many fewer workers. We are talking about 7 percent of the U.S. workforce now working in industrial jobs.”
  • Neither party, he said, is focusing on the real challenges — creating lifetime learners who can navigate through economic shifts we cannot now anticipate.
  • Sasse is unusual because, sadly, so few pols talk to voters like adults, addressing rather than denying complexity and appealing to American ideals rather than base fears and tribal prejudices
ecfruchtman

Trump business terminates three overseas projects - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by ecfruchtman on 15 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 15 Dec 16
     
    Alan Garten said the Trump Organization terminated its licensing deal for a Trump Hotel in Baku Azerbaijan. In addition, the company has terminated its business licensing deals in Rio de Janeiro for both a hotel project and a five-building office complex that was part of the Marvelous Port Redevelopment plan.
Javier E

An Unprecedented President - Yuval Levin | National Review - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...cedented-president-yuval-levin

presidency crisis politics trump

shared by Javier E on 21 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • the presidency is for the most part a pre-defined role in a larger political drama—a niche that can be occupied by different people with different goals and characters, and used by them to their different ends while largely keeping its shape.
  • Trump’s way of speaking about his vision and intentions suggests his case will be different. He did not really run to occupy the presidency as it exists, and does not seem to think of himself as stepping now into a role he is obliged to carry out.
  • He ran to disrupt a broken system, and to be himself but with more power and authority.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • He is our president, but he has not taken on the job with any clear sense of the presidency as a distinct function and office which he should now stretch and bend to embody.
  • This has not been easy to accept, and so we have tended implicitly to wait for the moment when Trump would put aside his childish antics and step up into the role. Or else we have inclined to think about the prospects for Trump’s presidency in terms whether he would be too strong or too weak a president
  • But this is probably the wrong way to think about what Trump is doing. He is not filling the role in a certain way. He is playing a different role. He is being himself. 
  • Trump seems inclined to leave largely unfilled the part traditionally played by the president in our system while playing another part formed around the peculiar contours of his bombastic, combative, and at times surely disordered personality.
  • That means that Trump’s team, the Congress, the courts, and the public will need to confront the implications of both the absence of a more traditional president and the presence of a different and unfamiliar kind of figure at the heart of the constitutional order. These are two distinct problems. 
  • The presence of a bombastic populist in the White House could force some common sense on a political culture too dominated by abstract sloganeering.
  • Responding to the presence of this unusual figure at the heart of our politics with an effort to formulate responsible applications of his political instincts could redound to the good in some cases. 
  • But there are obviously dark sides to both facets too. The absence of an executive eager to play his complex part could easily drive our constitutional system badly out of balance and leave it unfocused and hapless
  • And in foreign policy it looks likely to undermine the post-World War II system of liberal-democratic alliances in which the President of the United States has had a distinct role to play for seven decades, about which Trump appears to know or care very little
  • And the presence of an undisciplined, aggressive performance artist at the heart of our system of government, a figure whose excesses are not structurally counterbalanced by others in the system (in the way that the excesses of the traditional presidency are), could alter the public’s expectations of government and politics in ways decidedly unhelpful to American constitutionalism. 
  • The morning after the election, I suggested we might think of this as a standing crisis in the executive—and that these years would yield many important opportunities, but also grave risks. The transition period has left me with the same sense
  • President Trump’s term seems less likely than that of any modern president’s to be defined by the role of the presidency in our system of government—not just by the limits of that role but even by its general form. Instead, to a greater degree than any modern president, his time in office seems likely to be shaped by his own character and personality. This is not good news. 
Javier E

Why You're Fooling Yourself About 'Fake News' - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...oling-yourself-about-fake-news

fake news ideology worldview politics culture psychology

shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • In many cases, 'fake news', the latest manufactured outrage, functions as a kind of ideational pornography, ideas and claims that excite people's political feelings, desires and fears and create feelings of connection with kindred political spirits.
  • some of you probably read the tour de force article in The Washington Post about the son of Stormfront founder Don Black's son Derek Black and how he left the world of white supremacist ideologues he'd been groomed to lead. Black's story is a complex one. But clearly entering a somewhat liberal college environment and leaving the self-reinforcing, echo-chamber of white supremacy he'd been raised in was the predicate for questioning and ultimate leaving that world.
  • political craziness, political decisions we find inane or abhorrent are not mainly being driven by "fake news" - eliminating "fake news" if such a thing were really possible wouldn't end it
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • This is largely a demand driven phenomenon. People want 'fake news' (news which maximally confirms their beliefs and excites their fears, regardless of its accuracy) and because of that people will pop up to provide it
  • The converse of this is what got so many people so frustrated during the election. There was no end of information, basically undisputed, that Donald Trump was manifestly unfit to be president: too corrupt, too dishonest, too impulsive. And yet it just didn't matter. The other forces - a mix of intense support and the partisan reinforcement that took effect after he was the nominee - were more powerful.
  • For people whose agenda is journalism I don't think there's anything to do but do more and better journalism. I don't think journalism's job is to make people believe factual information. It's to provide it and in a reasoned, empirically demonstrated way
  • For people whose agenda is politics and political change, it is important not to be fooled by the limited importance of factual detail can have on political beliefs. It's changing the beliefs themselves. And that comes from persuasion about deeper beliefs about political rights and wrongs, interests, at the end of the day, ideology.
  • The Derek Black story is actually an instructive one. It was a slow product of persuasion, about who people are, about what's right and wrong that shifted his thinking and led him to question the factual claims embedded in the racist ideology he'd been raised on. It wasn't exposing him to fact-checks of racist ideology
  • we shouldn't be obsessing about "fake news." The impact of truly "fake news" - completely made up stories - is likely less than we imagine. But the power of tendentious and misleading propaganda is driven by political beliefs that are not so easily changed and only do change by persuasion, activism and organizing.
maddieireland334

How America Lost Its Nerve - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...484655

US History Economy

shared by maddieireland334 on 29 May 16 - No Cached
  • Americans today are strangely averse to change. They are less likely to switch jobs, or move between states, or create new companies than they were 30 years ago.
  • In economist-speak, "the U.S. labor market has experienced marked declines in fluidity along a variety of dimensions."
  • They are a driving force behind regional inequality, and the phenomenon stems from a significant root cause: the cost of having a place to live in America’s most productive cities.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • . On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that productivity “is set to fall in the U.S. for the first time in more than three decades.”
  • States with more workers in routine-intensive tasks, like administrative duties, actually saw smaller declines in labor market fluidity.
  • Young people are more likely to switch jobs and move around.
  • If young people are tumbleweeds, adults are like trees: They grow roots, and they tend to stay put. So, as a country ages, it should become less dynamic.
  • The fraction of workers required to hold a government-issued license has sextupled since the 1950s, from less than 5 percent to almost 30 percent today. It’s harder to switch into an industry, especially one in a new state, that’s larded with licensing.
  • Geographic mobility was very high in the U.S. in the 19th century. This was initially due to the settling of the western frontier. But even after the “closing" of the frontier in 1890, mobility remained high for decades, according to the economists Jason Long and Joseph Ferrie.
  • In every major city, there are many stores, health-care facilities, and insurance offices. By and large, less educated workers might be less willing to move between states because they assume every area has generally the same type of work.
  • somebody moving from a small farm to Washington, D.C., would have to visit the capital to understand its culture, job mix, pretty falls, and humid summers. But today’s potential movers are more informed and therefore more strategic:
  • Between 1880 and 1980, people generally moved from poor states to rich states, seeking the best jobs. “The creation of a single automobile plant—Ford’s River Rouge complex, completed in 1928—boosted Michigan’s population by creating more than 100,000 workers,” as Tim Noah reported. Migration promoted geographical equality.
  • Smaller counties used to lead the nation in the growth in new businesses even through the early 1990s. But this decade, small counties have lost businesses, while venture capital, the lifeblood of high-growth startups, clustered in a handful of metros.
  • Land-use policies prevent more middle-class families from living in productive areas, because housing becomes too expensive. Meanwhile, the rich can afford to cluster in a handful of metros where entrepreneurship is a norm, while business dynamism falls in the rest of the country.
maddieireland334

Kenya tells longtime refugees living in camps to go home - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...84873092

Kenya Refugees Crisis

shared by maddieireland334 on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • Yussuf, who has lived here most of his life, has to leave by November because Kenya is shutting all its refugee camps, displacing 600,000 people. The government said the camps have become infiltrated by terrorists
  • Now the Kenya government wants to repatriate Dadaab refugees to Somalia. The government also wants to close another camp, Kakuma, that houses refugees from South Sudan, where a fragile cease-fire has taken hold in that country’s civil war.
  • Kenya announced in May that it would will shutter the camps by November and send refugees back to Somalia and elsewhere after numerous attacks staged by al-Shabab, a Somalia terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Al-Shabab militants also attacked Kenyan peacekeeping troops in Somalia, where the central government in Mogadishu is weak. Al-Shabab, hoping to establish a radical Islamic theocracy, claims it wants Kenyan forces to leave Somalia.
  • Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery said Kenyan security forces have thwarted numerous al-Shabab terrorism attempts over the years by arresting terror suspects at the Dadaab refugee complex and recovering caches of arms there.
  • Dadaab and Kakuma are also hotbeds for poaching, human trafficking, illegal arms sales and other criminal activities, he added.
  • But refugees at the camp say the government is punishing them for the mistakes of others.
  • Others said they could not afford to leave the camp.
  • The United States has  joined the United Nations and human rights groups in urging Kenya to rescind its decision to shut down the refugee camps.
  • Meanwhile, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights urged the international community to help Kenya shoulder the burden of hosting the refugees to avoid closing the camps.
cjlee29

Clinton: Trump is 'dangerously incoherent,' 'temperamentally unfit' to be president - T... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-b989-4e5479715b54_story.html

shared by cjlee29 on 02 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • described Trump’s ideas as “dangerously incoherent,
  • she made clear that her pivot to the fall contest is underway, even with a series of final primary contests against Sen. Bernie Sanders still ahead.
  • doesn’t understand America, or the world,” she said
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • They’re not really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.”
  • temperamentally unfit
  • It’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin,
  • She listed Trump statements on everything from the NATO alliance to threats from Russia and North Korea — and played Trump’s assertions about climate change for laughs.
  • “If Donald gets his way, they’ll be celebrating in the Kremlin,” she said. “We cannot let that happen.”
  • He is too reckless, ill-informed and egomaniacal to be entrusted with the biggest job in the world,
  • she has the experience, expertise and practical temperament to be commander in chief, and Trump does not.
  • Trump had sought to rebut Clinton before she even spoke, spending parts of the last two days criticizing Clinton for her temperament and legacy as secretary of state.
  • Her speech, Trump said, would be full of “such lies.”
  • Trump criticized Clinton’s support for both the Iraq war when she was a senator and military intervention in Libya when she was secretary of state, policies he had also supported.
  • He said she was “sleeping” during the seige of U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans in the closing months of her State Department tenure.
  • Although it has faded as a central campaign issue eight years later, both Trump and Sanders have sought to use her vote as evidence of poor decision-making.
  • comes as Clinton is trying to deny Sanders an embarrassing but symbolic victory in California’s primary.
  • put Clinton just two points ahead of Sanders in the nation’s most diverse state.
  • she is widely expected to secure the Democratic nomination the same day when five other states also hold primaries
  • On New Jersey on Wednesday, Clinton hammered Trump over the legal controversy surrounding his now-defunct Trump University, labeling him a “fraud.”
  • Her tenure as secretary of state may be a weapon for Trump
  • As we navigate this complex world, America cannot shirk the mantle of leadership,
  • We can’t be isolationists. It’s not possible in this globalized, interconnected world.
  • “Former secretaries of state are held in high regard; candidates are not — and she’s a candidate,
  • “Her strength is her temperament: she is so cautious so scripted that she won’t scare people in the knee jerk way that Donald Trump can scare people,”
  • risks knee jerk scaring people, but he’s against so many of the interventions that many of the American people themselves are against...it’s a real fair fight.”
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