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lucieperloff

Danish energy fund to lead massive green hydrogen project in Spain - 0 views

  • On Tuesday, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners announced details of a partnership with Spanish companies Naturgy, Enagás and Fertiberia. Vestas, the Danish wind turbine manufacturer, is also involved.
  • A pipeline will link Aragon with Valencia in the east of Spain, sending the hydrogen to a green ammonia facility. CIP said this ammonia would then be “upgraded” into fertilizer.
  • Hydrogen has a diverse range of applications and can be deployed in a wide range of industries. It can be produced in a number of ways. One method includes using electrolysis, with an electric current splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen.
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  • The scale of the overall development is considerable. “Once fully implemented, Catalina will produce enough green hydrogen to supply 30% of Spain’s current hydrogen demand,” CIP said.
  • And in July 2021, a briefing from the World Energy Council said low-carbon hydrogen was not currently “cost-competitive with other energy supplies in most applications and locations.” It added that the situation was unlikely to change unless there was “significant support to bridge the price gap.”
  • For its part, the European Commission has laid out plans to install 40 GW of renewable hydrogen electrolyzer capacity in the European Union by the year 2030.
Javier E

Chartbook-Unhedged Exchange: China under pressure, a debate - 0 views

  • China’s investment-driven, debt-heavy development model needs replacement. Its geopolitical and economic position will become more precarious if the globe’s authoritarian and liberal democratic blocs decouple, a threat made vivid by the war in Ukraine. Its demographics will be a drag on growth
  • Adam sees reasons for hope:
  • Similarly, the Chinese state’s recent intervention in the tech sector, while it has led to market volatility, is aimed at doing exactly what western regulators want to do, but can’t seem to do: stop huge companies from extracting monopoly rents from the economy. 
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  • China’s technocrats have, to date, demonstrated competence in managing the economy’s imbalances.
  • we think China’s underlying growth story is coming to an end as the country’s economic imbalances become unsustainable and global decoupling picks up steam. The volatility and low valuations, on the other hand, are likely here to stay. 
  • “On balance,” Adam sums up, “If you want to be part of history-making economic transformation, China is still the place to be.”
  • The third point is where we disagree. We just don’t see China as having any good options for maintaining strong growth. 
  • Mainland China has delivered significant extra returns -- 87 basis points a year more than the mighty S&P -- for anyone willing to hack the wild volatility
  • Replace bad investment with domestic consumption. 
  • What imbalances are we talking about? In crude summary, China’s growth has been driven by debt-funded investment, especially in property and infrastructure. The problem is that the returns on these investments are in fast decline, even as debt continues to build up.
  • This can’t go on forever. Eventually, you have all the bridges, trains, airports and apartment blocks you need, and the return on new ones falls below zero (How do you know that you have arrived at that point? When you have a financial crisis).
  • The problem is that without a healthy consumer, China’s only real options to create growth are investment and exports -- and at the same time as return on internal investments are declining, the rest of the world, led by the US, are increasingly wary of dependence on Chinese exports. 
  • What are China’s policy options? Broadly, there are five, as Micheal Pettis explained to us:
  • Stay with the current model.
  • Beijing has policy options.
  • Replace bad investment in things like infrastructure and real estate with good investment in things like tech and healthcare.
  • Replace bad investment with (even) move exports and a wider current account surplus.
  • Just quit it with the bad investment. 
  • we think that options 1 and 5 are not really options at all. The current model will lead to a financial crisis as return on investment falls further and further behind the costs of debt. Simply ceasing to overinvest in infrastructure and real estate, without changing anything else, will simply kill growth. 
  • Option 2 might be summed up -- as Jason Hsu of Ralient Global Advisors summed it up to us -- as China becoming more like Germany.
  • The idea is that China would steer more and more money away from real estate and towards high value-add sectors from biotech to chip manufacturing. 
  • The problem with option 2 is that investment is such a huge part of the Chinese economy that it is difficult to see how that the capital could be efficiently allocated to the country's tech-heavy, high value-add sectors, which are comparatively small
  • The most promising Chinese firms are swimming in capital as it is. And developing productive capacity isn't just about capital. It takes things the state can't rapidly deploy, like knowhow and intellectual property.
  • Option 3 is more promising. China could start, as Adam suggests, by building up a proper welfare safety net. But it is reasonable to expect pretty serious social and institutional resistance to this sort of mass redistribution.
  • why hasn’t China increased its welfare state until now? Longtime China watcher and friend of Unhedged George Magnus suggests it is because of a deep bias in the Chinese policy establishment. “It’s how Leninist systems operate: they think production and supply are everything … if you see a demand problem as a supply problem, you get the wrong answers.”
  • Option 4, increasing exports’ share of China’s economy even further, may be in the abstract the most appealing. But it runs directly into the fact that both China and the US and its allies have reasons to reduce mutual dependence on their economies.
  • The emergence of geopolitical divisions between the west, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other, will put globalisation at risk. The autocracies will try to reduce their dependence on western currencies and financial markets. Both they and the west will try to reduce their reliance on trade with adversaries. Supply chains will shorten and regionalise… 
  • Russia must remain a pariah so long as this vile regime survives. But we will also have to devise a new relationship with China. We must still co-operate. Yet we can no longer rely upon this rising giant for essential goods. We are in a new world. Economic decoupling will now surely become deep and irreversible.
  • In all, the most likely scenario is that China’s growth just keeps slowing. That does not mean that investors in China will necessarily lose money. But it does suggest that generic China exposure -- simply owning Chinese equity or credit indices -- is going to be a losing proposition in the long-term
Javier E

Germany's Far-Right AfD Is Worse Than the Rest of Europe's Populists - 0 views

  • Founded in 2013, the AfD isn’t brand new, nor is its provocative, thinly veiled racism and Islamophobia. But over the course of the past five years—and in the face of damning revelations last week about a secret meeting that took place in November—it has radicalized dramatically. The AfD is now more extreme than many fellow far-right parties across Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, among others.
  • Germany’s foremost expert on the subject, sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer, said the AfD now stands for an “authoritarian national radicalism,” namely, an ideology that propagates a hierarchically ordered, ethnically homogeneous society overseen by a strong-arm state. What’s particularly radical, he said, is the party’s communication with and mobilization of misanthropic groups that rain violence on select minorities
  • Its victims are refugees, foreign nationals, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people.
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  • Research published in the weekly Der Spiegel shows that the AfD, a party started by nationally minded economists who advocated a return to the Deutsche mark as the national currency, now uses language nearly identical to that of the defunct National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a small, virulently xenophobic, and openly neo-Nazi party that ran in German elections for decades but never managed to win seats in the Bundestag.
  • “They have major ideological overlaps. The AfD measures up to the NPD [of 2012] in almost all areas, even if the AfD appears more moderate in its party program.”
  • Documents attributed to both parties employ reactionary terminology, some of it straight from Nazi Germany, such as Umvolkung (population replacement) and Volkstod (death of the German nation), as well as Stimmvieh (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties and Passdeutschen (foreign nationals holding German passports). And like the NPD, Spiegel reported in another study, the AfD maintains close links with violent militants.
  • this radicalism, which in the past had turned Germans off, has now lifted the AfD to new heights: It is polling at 22 percent support nationwide, second only to the Christian Democrats, and well over 30 percent in several states, making it the number one political force there in advance of autumn elections.
  • The current outburst of popular indignation at the AfD, echoed by all of the other major political parties, comes on the heels of an investigative exposé that found that at a clandestine meeting in November, ranking AfD personalities met with known neo-Nazis and wealthy financiers to hammer out plans for the forced deportation of foreign nationals and even foreign-born German citizens.
  • The extremists congregated at a hotel near Potsdam to design what they called a “remigration master plan” to forcibly repatriate millions of people. Shocked observers drew parallels to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held not far from Potsdam, at which the Nazis coordinated their plan to deport and murder the entire Jewish population of Europe.
  • While some AfD politicos have tried to distance the party from the Potsdam meeting, others endorsed its purpose. “Remigration is not a secret plan, but a promise. … and there’s no better way to put it,” announced Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD point person in the Brandenburg state parliament, on Jan. 17.
  • they confirm the diagnosis of many experts that the AfD, under the leadership of its most extreme figures—particularly Björn Höcke, a member of the Thuringia legislature—has outpaced other European far-right parties in its radicalism. “The current AfD wouldn’t find a place in the ranks of the Sweden Democrats and most of the other more moderate far-right parties among the European Conservatives and Reformists faction in the European Parliament,”
  • She explained that like the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party (formerly the True Finns), and the Danish People’s Party are opposed to immigration and favor law-and-order states. But the Nordic rightists’ experiences in office pushed them to adapt to mainstream norms and policy options. (The Sweden Democrats are currently an informal supporter of the Swedish ruling coalition; the Finns are a coalition member in Finland; and the DPP acted as a support party to a conservative Danish government between 2001 and 2011, as well as from 2015 to 2019.)
  • The radicalized AfD, Jungar said, in contrast to these parties, actively courts militants, trades in antisemitic tropes, and toys with the proposition of Germany exiting NATO and the European Union
  • Moreover, AfD politicians have stood against adoption rights for same-sex couples, the inclusion of disabled kids in schools, and the legality of abortion. “These positions simply wouldn’t stand a chance in Sweden,”
  • “The FPO under Kickl has moved further to the right. It is now indistinguishable from the right-wingers in the AfD,” he argued. “They want people who they think don’t belong here out of Austria. They don’t want to gas them yet, but they want to strip people of their citizenship. They want to cut people’s social benefits to such an extent that their livelihoods are destroyed. That is essentially the program of parties like the AfD and the FPO. They harbor fantasies ranging from populist to fascist.
  • “By stacking the courts and clamping down on opposition forces, these parties gradually undermined the democratic order,” Opratko said. “This is the AfD’s model. It’s what they want to do.”
Javier E

Opinion | A.I. Is Endangering Our History - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Fortunately, there are numerous reasons for optimism about society’s ability to identify fake media and maintain a shared understanding of current events
  • While we have reason to believe the future may be safe, we worry that the past is not.
  • History can be a powerful tool for manipulation and malfeasance. The same generative A.I. that can fake current events can also fake past ones
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  • there is a world of content out there that has not been watermarked, which is done by adding imperceptible information to a digital file so that its provenance can be traced. Once watermarking at creation becomes widespread, and people adapt to distrust content that is not watermarked, then everything produced before that point in time can be much more easily called into question.
  • countering them is much harder when the cost of creating near-perfect fakes has been radically reduced.
  • There are many examples of how economic and political powers manipulated the historical record to their own ends. Stalin purged disloyal comrades from history by executing them — and then altering photographic records to make it appear as if they never existed
  • Slovenia, upon becoming an independent country in 1992, “erased” over 18,000 people from the registry of residents — mainly members of the Roma minority and other ethnic non-Slovenes. In many cases, the government destroyed their physical records, leading to their loss of homes, pensions, and access to other services, according to a 2003 report by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.
  • The infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in a Russian newspaper in 1903, purported to be meeting minutes from a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. First discredited in August 1921, as a forgery plagiarized from multiple unrelated sources, the Protocols featured prominently in Nazi propaganda, and have long been used to justify antisemitic violence, including a citation in Article 32 of Hamas’s 1988 founding Covenant.
  • In 1924, the Zinoviev Letter, said to be a secret communiqué from the head of the Communist International in Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain to mobilize support for normalizing relations with the Soviet Union, was published by The Daily Mail four days before a general election. The resulting scandal may have cost Labour the election.
  • Decades later Operation Infektion — a Soviet disinformation campaign — used forged documents to spread the idea that the United States had invented H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, as a biological weapon.
  • As it becomes easier to generate historical disinformation, and as the sheer volume of digital fakes explodes, the opportunity will become available to reshape history, or at least to call our current understanding of it into question.
  • Fortunately, a path forward has been laid by the same companies that created the risk.
  • In indexing a large share of the world’s digital media to train their models, the A.I. companies have effectively created systems and databases that will soon contain all of humankind’s digitally recorded content, or at least a meaningful approximation of it.
  • They could start work today to record watermarked versions of these primary documents, which include newspaper archives and a wide range of other sources, so that subsequent forgeries are instantly detectable.
  • many of the intellectual property concerns around providing a searchable online archive do not apply to creating watermarked and time-stamped versions of documents, because those versions need not be made publicly available to serve their purpose. One can compare a claimed document to the recorded archive by using a mathematical transformation of the document known as a “hash,” the same technique the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, uses to help companies screen for known terrorist content.
  • creating verified records of historical documents can be valuable for the large A.I. companies. New research suggests that when A.I. models are trained on A.I.-generated data, their performance quickly degrades. Thus separating what is actually part of the historical record from newly created “facts” may be critical.
  • Preserving the past will also mean preserving the training data, the associated tools that operate on it and even the environment that the tools were run in.
  • Such a vellum will be a powerful tool. It can help companies to build better models, by enabling them to analyze what data to include to get the best content, and help regulators to audit bias and harmful content in the models
Javier E

Silicon Valley's Trillion-Dollar Leap of Faith - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Tech companies like to make two grand pronouncements about the future of artificial intelligence. First, the technology is going to usher in a revolution akin to the advent of fire, nuclear weapons, and the internet.
  • And second, it is going to cost almost unfathomable sums of money.
  • Silicon Valley has already triggered tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on AI, and companies only want to spend more.
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  • Their reasoning is straightforward: These companies have decided that the best way to make generative AI better is to build bigger AI models. And that is really, really expensive, requiring resources on the scale of moon missions and the interstate-highway system to fund the data centers and related infrastructure that generative AI depends on
  • “If we’re going to justify a trillion or more dollars of investment, [AI] needs to solve complex problems and enable us to do things we haven’t been able to do before.” Today’s flagship AI models, he said, largely cannot.
  • Now a number of voices in the finance world are beginning to ask whether all of this investment can pay off. OpenAI, for its part, may lose up to $5 billion this year, almost 10 times more than what the company lost in 2022,
  • Over the past few weeks, analysts and investors at some of the world’s most influential financial institutions—including Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, Moody’s, and Barclays—have issued reports that raise doubts about whether the enormous investments in generative AI will be profitable.
  • Dario Amodei, the CEO of the rival start-up Anthropic, has predicted that a single AI model (such as, say, GPT-6) could cost $100 billion to train by 2027. The global data-center buildup over the next few years could require trillions of dollars from tech companies, utilities, and other industries, according to a July report from Moody’s Ratings.
  • generative AI has already done extraordinary things, of course—advancing drug development, solving challenging math problems, generating stunning video clips. But exactly what uses of the technology can actually make money remains unclear
  • At present, AI is generally good at doing existing tasks—writing blog posts, coding, translating—faster and cheaper than humans can. But efficiency gains can provide only so much value, boosting the current economy but not creating a new one.
  • Right now, Silicon Valley might just functionally be replacing some jobs, such as customer service and form-processing work, with historically expensive software, which is not a recipe for widespread economic transformation.
  • McKinsey has estimated that generative AI could eventually add almost $8 trillion to the global economy every year
  • “Here, we can manufacture intelligence.”
  • Tony Kim, the head of technology investment at BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, told me he believes that AI will trigger one of the most significant technological upheavals ever. “Prior industrial revolutions were never about intelligence,”
  • this future is not guaranteed. Many of the productivity gains expected from AI could be both greatly overestimated and very premature, Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, has found
  • AI products’ key flaws, such as a tendency to invent false information, could make them unusable, or deployable only under strict human oversight, in certain settings—courts, hospitals, government agencies, schools
  • AI as a truly epoch-shifting technology, it may well be more akin to blockchain, a very expensive tool destined to fall short of promises to fundamentally transform society and the economy.
  • Researchers at Barclays recently calculated that tech companies are collectively paying for enough AI-computing infrastructure to eventually power 12,000 different ChatGPTs. Silicon Valley could very well produce a whole host of hit generative-AI products like ChatGPT, “but probably not 12,000 of them,
  • even if it did, there would be nowhere enough demand to use all those apps and actually turn a profit.
  • Some of the largest tech companies’ current spending on AI data centers will require roughly $600 billion of annual revenue to break even, of which they are currently about $500 billion short.
  • Tech proponents have responded to the criticism that the industry is spending too much, too fast, with something like religious dogma. “I don’t care” how much we spend, Altman has said. “I genuinely don’t.
  • the industry is asking the world to engage in something like a trillion-dollar tautology: AI’s world-transformative potential justifies spending any amount of resources, because its evangelists will spend any amount to make AI transform the world.
  • in the AI era in particular, a lack of clear evidence for a healthy return on investment may not even matter. Unlike the companies that went bust in the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s, Big Tech can spend exorbitant sums of money and be largely fine
  • perhaps even more important in Silicon Valley than a messianic belief in AI is a terrible fear of missing out. “In the tech industry, what drives part of this is nobody wants to be left behind. Nobody wants to be seen as lagging,
  • Go all in on AI, the thinking goes, or someone else will. Their actions evince “a sense of desperation,” Cahn writes. “If you do not move now, you will never get another chance.” Enormous sums of money are likely to continue flowing into AI for the foreseeable future, driven by a mix of unshakable confidence and all-consuming fear.
Javier E

Can This Party Be Saved? Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

  • I agree with Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein that the current nihilist extremism of the current Republican Party is “the central problem in American life.”
  • And yet I find the chances of getting reform from within close to impossible, given how far they’ve now gone over the edge. And this is a tragedy not just for America, but for the GOP itself.
  • Here, for example, was a man whose family life would make him a cult hero if he were a Republican, but who has been demonized as an alien threat to America from the get-go. Here’s a Democrat who adopted Heritage Foundation ideas for healthcare exchanges. Here’s a Democrat who has actually cut Medicare. His stimulus was one-third tax cuts. Domestic energy production has soared under Obama, even as record numbers of illegal immigrants have been deported. There were and are so many ways in which the GOP could have used Obama for their own advantage – both strategically and culturally. But they refused to, opting instead for visceral, dumb, self-defeating short-term tactical political advantage. All tactics and emotion; no strategy and reason.
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  • The greatest failure of the GOP is not realizing that Obama is a president they could have worked with on policy grounds, and whose relationship with them could have actually defused some of the very traits that suburban voters and most generations under 40 still find so disturbing in the GOP base.
  • Reform conservatives believe that the GOP should put forward serious and credible policies that directly address the issue of family formation and breakdown. It will be good for the economy, good for people, and is a prerequisite to shrinking government over the long term since voters will not acquiesce to shrinking public handouts if they do not feel that they have private safety nets available, first among which is the family
  • The alternative scenario would go something like this: Don’t address middle income voters’ day-to-day concerns seriously, don’t make family formation more affordable -> concede the field to Democrats -> increase economic and social insecurity -> increase demand for government -> lose elections -> government grows bigger -> social pathologies get worse -> keep conceding the field -> increase demand for government -> etc. 2012 was Act I of that nightmare scenario.
  • I endorsed Ross’ and Reihan’s book, but took longer than they did to let go of my libertarian instincts in the face of yawning social inequality. It’s only been since the impact of the Great Recession sank in that I have truly come to terms with the fact that, say, flat taxes are irrelevant right now to our major problems, or that publicly subsidized private health insurance is an important response to a middle class facing an epic (if much predicted) employment and economic crisis.
  • there’s a core agreement: the times demand a different response than that imprinted on so many of us under Reagan-Thatcher; and encouraging self-government is the best way to keep big government at bay. If the GOP were to accept the principles of Romneycare/Obamacare, for example, they could then help reform the architecture to control costs better, empower individual choices more, and win people like me back.
Javier E

Boehner, American Hero - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The Republicans’ current position makes things harder still, because Boehner’s party has much more power in Washington than it has support in the nation as a whole. Republicans are a minority party nationally, but thanks to redistricting they control the House despite Democrats’ 2012 successes. This mismatch leaves the base spoiling for fights that can’t actually be won: House Republicans have just enough real power to raise conservative expectations but not nearly enough to bend a liberal president and a Democratic Senate to their will.
  • You might say that this is no way to run a government. I’d agree. But the nation’s polarization and his party’s dysfunction are beyond a speaker’s ability to undo. As Democrats learned across the 1970s and ’80s, the House is a poor base from which to rebuild a national party. Nobody blames Tip O’Neill or Jim Wright for failing to do what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ultimately achieved.
  • the way out of our predicament is through the ballot box, not the speaker’s office. Either Democrats need to consolidate their advantages and win back the House or Republicans need to find a way to start winning national elections again, at which point the current impasse will be broken and policy will tilt more clearly toward the left or right.
Javier E

A Second G.O.P. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Change is hard because people don’t only think on the surface level. Deep down people have mental maps of reality — embedded sets of assumptions, narratives and terms that organize thinking
  • Since Barry Goldwater, the central Republican narrative has been what you might call the Encroachment Story: the core problem of American life is that voracious government has been steadily encroaching upon individuals and local communities. The core American conflict, in this view, is between Big Government and Personal Freedom.
  • if opposing government is your primary objective, it’s hard to have a positive governing program.
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  • it makes it hard for Republicans to analyze social and economic problems that don’t flow directly from big government.
  • America is being hit simultaneously by two crises, which you might call the Mancur Olson crisis and the Charles Murray crisis.
  • Can current Republicans change their underlying mentality to adapt to these realities? Intellectual history says no. People almost never change their underlying narratives or unconscious frameworks. Moreover, in the South and rural West, where most Republicans are from, the Encroachment Story has deep historic and psychological roots. Anti-Washington, anti-urban sentiment has characterized those cultures for decades.
  • Olson argued that nations decline because their aging institutions get bloated and sclerotic and retard national dynamism.
  • Murray argues that America is coming apart, dividing into two nations — one with high education levels, stable families and good opportunities and the other with low education levels, unstable families and bad opportunities.
  • The second G.O.P. would tackle both problems at once. It would be filled with people who recoiled at President Obama’s second Inaugural Address because of its excessive faith in centralized power, but who don’t share the absolute antigovernment story of the current G.O.P.
Javier E

Gun Violence in America: The 13 Key Questions (With 13 Concise Answers) - Jonathan Stra... - 0 views

  • There were 8,583 homicides by firearms in 2011, out of 12,664 homicides total, according to the FBI. This means that more than two-thirds of homicides involve a firearm
  • Gun violence also affects more than its victims. In areas where it is prevalent, just the threat of violence makes neighborhoods poorer. It's very difficult to quantify the total harm caused by gun violence, but by asking many people how much they would pay to avoid this threat -- a technique called contingent valuation -- researchers have estimated a cost to American society of $100 billion dollars.
  • 19,392 of 38,264 suicides in 2010 involved a gun (50%), according to the CDC.
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  • There were 606 firearm-related accidents in the same year -- about 5% of the number of intentional gun deaths.
  • There are about 310 million guns in the country. About 40% of households have them, a fraction that has been slowly declining over the last few decades, down from about 50% in the 1960s.
  • gun ownership has gotten much more concentrated among fewer households: if you own one gun, you probably own several
  • The most comprehensive public list of U.S. mass shootings is the spreadsheet of 62 incidents from 1982-2012, compiled by Mother Jones. Their list shows:
  • Mass shootings happen all over the country. Killers used a semi-automatic handgun in 75% of incidents, which is about the same percentage as the 72% in overall gun violence. Killers used an assault weapon in 40% of incidents. This is much higher than overall assault weapon use in crimes, estimated at less than 2%. The guns were obtained legally in 79% of mass shootings. Many of the shooters showed signs of mental illness, but in only two cases was there a prior diagnosis. There were no cases where an armed civilian fired back.
  • they account for only a small fraction of gun violence in the United States.
  • It's also possible that gun ownership is a deterrent to crime, because criminals must consider the possibility that their intended victim is armed.
  • . In 2010, different researchers re-examined Lott's work, the NRC report, and additional data up through 2006, and reaffirmed that there is no evidence that right-to-carry laws reduce crime.
  • The most comprehensive estimate is that a 10% reduction in U.S. households with guns would result in a 3% reduction in homicides.
  • current federal gun regulation (see above) contains an enormous loophole: While businesses that deal in guns are required to keep records and run background checks, guns can be transferred between private citizens without any record. This makes straw purchases easy.
  • There's abundant evidence that under the current system, guns flow easily between legal and illegal markets.
  • guns are used to commit a crime about 10 times as often as they are used for self-defense.
  • Won't criminals kill with other weapons if they don't have guns? The crux of this question is whether most homicides are planned, or whether killers more often confront their victims with no clear intention. In the second case, adding a gun could result in a fatal shooting that would otherwise have been avoided.
  • In 1968, Franklin Zimring examined cases of knife assaults versus gun assaults in Chicago. The gun attacks were five times more deadly
  • Here are some approaches that don't seem to work, at least not by themselves, or in the ways they've been tried so far: Stiffer prison sentences for gun crimes. Gun buy-backs: In a country with one gun per person, getting a few thousand guns off the street in each city may not mean very much. Safe storage laws and public safety campaigns.
  • We don't really have good enough evidence to evaluate these strategies: Background checks, such as the Brady Act requires. Bans on specific weapons types, such as the expired 1994 assault weapons ban or the handgun bans in various cities.
  • These policies do actually seem to reduce gun violence, at least somewhat or in some cases: More intensive probation strategies: increased contact with police, probation officers and social workers. Changes in policing strategies, such increased patrols in hot spots. Programs featuring cooperation between law enforcement, community leaders, and researchers, such as Project Safe Neighborhoods.
  • Removing legal restrictions that prevent the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies from tracking and researching gun violence is also a sensible idea, and follows a long history of calls from scientists (see: what don't we know).
  • We lack some of the most basic information we need to have a sensible gun policy debate, partially because researchers have been prevented by law from collecting it. The 2004 National Research Council report discussed above identified several key types of missing data: systematic reporting of individual gun incidents and injuries, gun ownership at the local level, and detailed information on the operation of firearms markets. We don't even have reliable data on the number of homicides in each county.
  • Centers for Disease Control, the main U.S. agency that tracks and studies American injuries and death, has been effectively prevented from studying gun violence, due to a law passed by Congress in 1996.
  • anonymized hospital reporting systems are the main ways we know about many other types of injuries, but the Affordable Care Act prevents doctors from gathering information about their patients' gun use. A 2011 law restricts gun violence research at the National Institutes of Health. The legal language prevents these agencies from using any money "to advocate or promote gun control."
Javier E

Do We Really Need to Sleep 7 Hours a Night? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • By some estimates, Americans sleep two to three hours fewer today than they did before the industrial revolution.
  • now a new study is challenging that notion. It found that Americans on average sleep as much as people in three different hunter-gatherer societies where there is no electricity and the lifestyles have remained largely the same for thousands of years.
  • Dr. Siegel said he worried that putting a number on the amount of sleep people require could push those who get less to resort to using sleeping pills, which carry severe side effects. About 5 percent of Americans take sleeping pills, a percentage that has doubled in the past two decades.
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  • their daily energy expenditure is about the same as most Americans, suggesting physical activity is not the reason for their relative good health.
  • The prevailing notion in sleep medicine is that humans evolved to go to bed when the sun goes down, and that by and large we stay up much later than we should because we are flooded with artificial light
  • Dr. Siegel and his colleagues found no evidence of this. The hunter-gatherer groups they studied, which slept outside or in crude huts, did not go to sleep when the sun went down. Usually they stayed awake three to four hours past sunset, with no light exposure other than the faint glow of a small fire that would keep animals away and provide a bit of warmth in the winter. Most days they would wake up about an hour before sunrise.
  • In a typical night, they slept just six and a half hours — slightly less than the average American
  • “I think this paper is going to transform the field of sleep,” said John Peever, a sleep expert at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the new research. “It’s difficult to envision how we can claim that Western society is highly sleep deprived if these groups that live without all these modern distractions and pressing schedules sleep less or about the same amount
  • in the new study, the hunter-gatherer societies were found to have a sleep period — meaning the time they were actually in bed — of roughly seven to eight and a half hours, which he said was consistent with his group’s recommendations.
  • the question of how much sleep people require was a delicate one. “Really it’s just the amount that allows people to wake up feeling refreshed and alert,
  • Yet the hunter-gatherers included in the new study, which was published in Current Biology, were relatively fit and healthy despite regularly sleeping amounts that are near the low end of those in industrialized societies.
  • called the new study “excellent and very timely,” and he said it suggests that sleep quality is much more important than quantity.
  • Some historians have also argued that it is not natural for people to sleep straight through the night. They say that before the introduction of artificial light it was normal for people to sleep in two intervals separated by an hour of wakefulness, a phenomenon known as segmented sleep, or “first” and “second” sleep.
  • But Dr. Siegel said he always questioned those assertions because there were no rigorous studies of sleep behaviors back then. He and his colleagues decided that one way to get some insight was to study cultures relatively unaffected by artificial light.
  • Among those they chose to follow were the Hadza people, who spend their days hunting and foraging in northern Tanzania, much as their ancestors have for tens of thousands of years; the San of Namibia, who have lived as hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari for at least 20,000 years; and the Tsimané, a seminomadic group that lives in the Andean foothills of Bolivia, near the farthest reaches of the human migration out of Africa.
  • The researchers found that in addition to sleeping roughly similar amounts each night, the three groups rarely took naps during the day and did not sleep in two separate intervals at night.
  • “The Hadza and the San live in the area where we know humans evolved, and then the Tsimané live in some sense at the end of the human migration,” he said. “The fact that we see very similar sleep times gives me great confidence that this is how all of our ancestors slept.”
  • Their sleep did not seem to be problematic. Chronic insomnia, which affects 20 percent to 30 percent of Americans, occurred in just 2 percent of the hunter-gatherers. The San and the Tsimané did not even have a word for it in their languages.
  • ambient temperature may be a major factor. The groups did not go sleep at sunset and they did not wake up at sunrise, suggesting that light exposure did not have much influence on their sleep patterns. But they almost always fell asleep as temperatures began to fall at night, and they would wake up right as the temperatures were rising again.
  • This suggests that humans may have evolved to sleep during the coldest hours of the day, perhaps as a way to conserve energy
  • “Today we sleep in environments with fixed temperatures, but none of our ancestors did,” Dr. Siegel said. “We evolved to sleep in a natural environment where the temperature falls at night. Whether we can treat insomnia by putting people in an environment where the temperature is modulated in this way is something to be studied in the future.
nataliedepaulo1

Mosul battle: IS 'loses hundreds of fighters' - US generals - BBC News - 0 views

  • Hundreds of Islamic State militants are thought to have been killed since Iraqi forces launched an offensive to retake Mosul last week, the US military says.
  • "This relentless campaign of strikes has removed hundreds of fighters, weapons, and key leaders from the battlefield in front of the Iraqi advance," he added.
  • IS has previously used chemical weapons in attacks on Iraqi and coalition forces, and there are fears that it might do so again inside Mosul, where more than a million civilians live.
  •  
    This article details the current situation with ISIS in Mosul.
nataliedepaulo1

The ugliness of Trump vs. Clinton flatters Obama's legacy - CNN.com - 0 views

  • The ugliness of Trump vs. Clinton flatters Obama's legacy
  • Barack Obama will probably leave office on a high. His weekly average approval rating now stands at 54%. Given the state of the economy and America's troubles overseas, the likely explanation is that voters are contrasting him favorably with the election candidates
  • One legacy of Donald Trump might be to give Obama a better legacy -- a reminder of the calmer, simpler time that we all lived in 18 months ago.
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  • Trump often asserts that he'll win because polls show that folks don't approve of the direction of the country. What he fails to realize is that voters aren't only registering dissatisfaction with Obama's record -- they are also disgusted with this campaign. As we slouch toward November 8, the President's approval rating may rise even further. Contrasted with his potential replacements he sounds ... well, presidential.
  •  
    This article shows how the current political situation changes how we view Obama, and the mistakes Trump has made.
nataliedepaulo1

Which Republicans Are Against Donald Trump? A Cheat Sheet - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Which Republicans Oppose Donald Trump? A Cheat Sheet
  • When the emails leaked in September, it seemed like a moment of reckoning for someone like Powell. Did he speak out and endorse Clinton, who he thought would be better qualified but with whom he had some real gripes?
  • How do you solve a problem like The Donald? For Republicans and conservatives, the time for hoping Trump would simply burn himself out, collapse, and go away is over. Now they have to figure out what they’ll do: Sign up with Trump in the name of party unity, and distaste for Hillary Clinton? Or risk alienating the Republican nominee and reject him?
  •  
    This article talks about how Republicans are responding to the current political situation.
nataliedepaulo1

Fox News Poll: Clinton leads Trump by three points | Fox News - 0 views

  • With less than two weeks to go, the race for the White House has narrowed as Hillary Clinton now has a three-point advantage over Donald Trump.
  • Compared to 2008, this is a more character driven election.  At that time, voters said issues were more important than personal qualities by a 71-14 percent margin.  
  • The Fox News Poll is based on landline and cellphone interviews with 1,309 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from October 22-25, 2016.  The survey includes results among 1,221 likely voters.  The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points for results among both registered and likely voters.
  •  
    With the election nearing, this is an important article that gives current statistics and situation. It also is a good source because it tells you where the poll numbers come from.
katieb0305

Justice Dept. Strongly Discouraged Comey on Move in Clinton Email Case - The New York T... - 0 views

  • The day before the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, sent a letter to Congress announcing that new evidence had been discovered that may be related to the completed Hillary Clinton email investigation, the Justice Department strongly discouraged the step and told him that he would be breaking with longstanding policy, three law enforcement officials said on Saturday.
  • Senior Justice Department officials did not move to stop him from sending the letter, officials said, but they did everything short of it, pointing to policies against talking about current criminal investigations or being seen as meddling in elections.
  • Justice Department officials were particularly puzzled about why Mr. Comey had alerted Congress — and by extension, the public — before agents even began reading the newly discovered emails to determine whether they contained classified information or added new facts to the case.
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  • but there is no chance that the review will be completed before Election Day, several law enforcement officials said.
  • disgraced former congressman Anthony D. Weiner — opened Mr. Comey up to fierce criticism not only from Democrats but also from current and former officials at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, including Republicans.
  • The letter is also the latest example of an at-times strained relationship between the Justice Department and Mr. Comey, who technically answers to the attorney general but who — on issues of race, encryption, policing and, most notably, the Clinton investigation — has branded himself as someone who operates outside Washington’s typical chain of command.
  • about the new emails far outweighed concerns about the department guidelines, one senior law enforcement official said.
  • Under Justice Department policy, restated each election cycle, politics should play no role in any investigative decisions.
  • Mr. Weiner had sent illicit text messages to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, top prosecutors in Charlotte and Manhattan jockeyed for the case
  • F.B.I.’s New York field office understood that the Weiner investigation could possibly turn up additional emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s private server, according to a senior federal law enforcement official. Mr. Weiner’s estranged wife, Huma Abedin, is a top adviser to Mrs. Clinton.
  • During the course of searching the seized devices, the F.B.I. discovered thousands of emails, according to senior law enforcement officials, some of them sent between Ms. Abedin and other Clinton aides.
  • The government has not yet concluded that the new emails contain classified information, but investigators felt obligated to look.
  • which said emails had surfaced in a case unrelated to the Clinton case. Mr. Comey said that the F.B.I. would review the emails to determine if they improperly contained classified information, adding that the emails “appear to be pertinent.”
  • They charged that just 11 days before an election, he was unnecessarily inserting himself into politics.
johnsonma23

Donald Trump would speak with North Korea's Kim Jong Un - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • Donald Trump would speak with North Korea's Kim Jong Un
  • Donald Trump says he'd be willing to speak with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un -- a sharp departure from current U.S. policy toward the reclusive Asian nation.
  • that he would pressure China to put more pressure on North Korea to change its ways.
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  • "At the same time I would put a lot of pressure on China because economically we have tremendous power over China," he said in the wide-ranging interview.
  • The comments represent a sharp turn from the way the U.S. currently approaches Pyongyang. The U.S. has no formal diplomatic relations with the country and engages through the Swedish embassy when necessary.
  • The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.
  • "One of the things I think Donald Trump understands is power and opportunity,"
  • "I believe there's nobody that's run for president in years who understands how to negotiate more effectively than Donald Trump
  • Though there have been talks between North Korea and five other major world and Asian powers about the nuclear program for years, they have never risen to the presidential level and have not resulted in much success.
Javier E

After Trump, conservatives should stop longing for the past - and learn a little humili... - 0 views

  • He explains the illusory appeal of nostalgia-driven politics in the United States, the kind that Trump stokes in coarse, simplistic terms.
  • he offers a path forward for the American right after this campaign, whether it is adjusting to life in Trump’s America or coping again with another electoral setback.
  • Levin wants a humbler, more local conservatism, one less concerned with tearing down Washington or promoting hyper-individualism than with creating space for America’s “mediating institutions” of family and community to blossom
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  • This vision involves “a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them,” Levin writes, “and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life.”
  • Levin understands the allure of nostalgia; indeed, he believes that almost all contemporary politics is based on it
  • These competing nostalgias, though more sophisticated than Trump’s, are no less misguided, and lead to bad politics and policy.
  • Sure, there is plenty to long for, Levin says. In the early decades of the post-World War II era, the United States enjoyed “relative cultural cohesion, low economic inequality, high confidence in national institutions, and widespread optimism about the nation’s prospects” (especially if you were white and male). But that was a unique pivot point in U.S. history, a time when the country was straddling two opposing forces that would define the American century: consolidation and diffusion.
  • The first half of the 20th century, Levin contends, was an age of consolidation, with a peerless industrial economy, a strong centralized government and a relatively uniform cultural identity shaped by a powerful mass media.
  • In the century’s second half, by contrast, the U.S. economy became more diversified and deregulated, while cultural conformity broke down in favor of individualism and the politics of personal identity.
  • for a fleeting moment at midcentury, it enjoyed the best of both. “The social, political, and economic forms of American life at midcentury made possible a degree of prosperity and cohesion that in turn enabled many Americans to flourish,”
  • “Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern,”
  • Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us.”
  • This stale — and stalemated — debate leaves people discouraged with politicians who don’t seem engaged with their current struggles. “In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration,”
  • the nostalgia of the traditional political class is also pernicious and “blinding,” Levin argues, because it keeps us from grappling with the real problems assaulting us in the age of diffusion
  • “In liberating many individuals from oppressive social constraints, we have also estranged many from their families and unmoored them from their communities, work, and faith,”
  • “Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative.” Their incessant focus on religious liberty, for example, while important, may be counterproductive, “a fundamentally plaintive and inward-looking minority asking to protect what it has and in essence to be left alone,”
  • In unleashing markets to meet the needs and wants of consumers, we have freed them also to treat workers as dispensable and interchangeable.
  • In pursuing meritocracy, we have magnified inequality.”
  • The result is a bifurcated America, torn between wealth and poverty, order and disorder. “Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions — family, community, church, unions, and others — fade and falter.”
  • he worries that the price of this new freedom has been high. “We have set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation that we are still afraid to acknowledge as the distinct social dysfunction of our age of individualism, just as crushing conformity was the characteristic scourge of an era of cohesion and national unity,”
  • The answer to all this is the pursuit of what Levin describes as a “modernized politics of subsidiarity — that is, of putting power, authority and significance as close to the level of interpersonal community as reasonably possible.”
  • He is most concerned with the thicket of institutions in the middle — families, schools, religious organizations, all the things usually lumped together as civil society.
  • “we should see it as an effort to open up the space between them — the space where a free society can genuinely thrive.” Our objective should be to “channel power and resources to the mediating institutions of society and allow for bottom-up problem solving that takes a variety of specialized, adapted forms.”
  • It is a very Tocquevillian vision, with a dash of Catholic social teaching thrown in. No doubt, to yearn for the renewal of these traditional institutions is its own kind of nostalgia.
  • So how do we go about strengthening families, religious organizations, schools and all those mediating institutions?
  • He calls for a “mobility agenda,” with economic growth spurred by tax and regulatory reform
  • a more competitive and low-cost health-care system, lower budget deficits — all part of a standard conservative recipe.
  • He proposes education reform that includes more professional certificates, apprenticeships “and other ways of gaining the skills for well-paid employment that do not require a college degree.”
  • Levin’s intention here is less to offer detailed proposals than to shift the locus of policymaking itself — and to infuse it with greater humility. “There is not much that public policy can do,” he admits, “to create communities that do a better job of encouraging constructive behavior: it could, however, do less harm, and it could leave room for such communities to form, and protect the space in which they take root and grow.”
  • “In loosening the reins of cultural conformity and national identity we have weakened the roots of mutual trust.
  • Instead, social and religious conservatives should “assert themselves by offering living models of their alternative to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age.”
  • In other words, less hectoring and lecturing, less trying to remake the culture at large, and more strengthening one’s “near-at-hand community,” Levin writes. He calls this approach “subcultural traditionalism
  • he sees it in “civic groups that channel their energies into making neighborhoods safe and attractive, or into helping the poor, or protecting the vulnerable, or assimilating immigrants, or helping fight addiction
  • in schools that build character and inculcate the values parents think are most important; in religious congregations that mold themselves into living communities of like-minded families, and that turn their faiths into works to improve the lives of others;
  • in the work of teachers and students who are committed to liberal learning and engagement with the deepest questions.”
  • Such a localized focus, Levin maintains, is not “an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.”
  • I suspect the fulfillment of Levin’s vision would require a party and a movement that grasp the exhaustion of their current approach. A November defeat, especially a landslide, might accomplish that
ethanmoser

Ex-minister Jeremic says he will seek Serbian presidency | Fox News - 0 views

  • Ex-minister Jeremic says he will seek Serbian presidency
  • The upcoming presidential vote is viewed as an important test of popular support for the current populist government, which formally seeks closer ties with the European Union but increasingly has been turning toward traditional ally Russia.
  • Current pro-Russia President Tomislav Nikolic has suggested he might seek a second term.
Javier E

Slacktivism for everyone: How keyboard activism is affecting social movements - Salon.com - 1 views

  • Social movement scholars have known for decades that most people, even if they agree with an idea, don’t take action to support it. For most people upset by a policy decision or a disturbing news event, the default is not to protest in the streets, but rather to watch others as they do. Getting to the point where someone acts as part of a group is a milestone in itself.
  • Decades of research show that people will be more willing to engage in activism that is easy, and less costly – emotionally, physically, or financially. For example, more than a million people used social media to “check in” at the Standing Rock Reservation, center of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Far fewer people – just a few thousand – have traveled to the North Dakota camps to brave the arriving winter weather and risk arrest.
  • Once people are primed to act, it’s important not to discourage them from taking that step, however small. Preliminary findings from my team’s current research suggest that people just beginning to explore activism can be disheartened by bring criticized for doing something wrong.
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  • Shaming them for making “small change” is a way to reduce numbers of protesters, not to increase them. Shaming can also create a legacy of political inactivity: Turning kids off from involvement now could encourage decades of disengagement.
  • “Flash activism,” the label I prefer for online protest forms such as online petition, can be effective at influencing targets in specific circumstances
  • Numbers matter. Whether you are a high school coach, Bank of America, the Obama administration or a local council member, an overwhelming flood of signatures, emails and phone calls can be quite persuasive
  • Online protest is easy, nearly cost-free in democratic nations, and can help drive positive social change. In addition, flash activism can help build stronger movements in the future. If current activists view online support as an asset, rather than with resentment because it is different from “traditional” methods, they can mobilize vast numbers of people.
  • People who participate in one online action may join future efforts, or even broaden their involvement in activism. For example, kids who engage in politics online often do other political activities as well.
  • Critics often worry that valuing flash activism will “water down” the meaning of activism. But that misses the point and is counterproductive. The goal of activism is social change, not nostalgia or activism for activism’s sake. Most people who participate in flash activism would not have done more – rather, they would have done nothing at all.
  • Scholars and advocates alike should stop asking if flash activism matters. We should also stop assuming that offline protest always succeeds. Instead, we should seek out the best ways to achieve specific goals. Sometimes the answer will be an online petition, sometimes it will be civil disobedience and sometimes it will be both – or something else entirely.
  • The real key for grassroots social change is to engage as many people as possible. That will require flexibility on how engagement occurs. If people want larger and more effective social movements, they should be working to find ways to include everyone who will do anything, not upholding an artificial standard of who is a “real activist” and who is not.
horowitzza

There Never Was a Two-State Solution; It's Time to Move On | Jewish & Israel News Algem... - 0 views

  • The answer to the question of how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been to partition “Palestine” into two states. This assumes, however, that the parties only have a dispute over land; but that has never been the case. The conflict has always had political, religious, historical, geographical and psychological dimensions. The international community’s unwillingness to accept this reality has led to the continued fantasy that a two-state solution is possible.
  • The Palestinians have never been prepared to share any part of the land they claim as their own.
  • Jews have no place in the Islamic world — except as second-class citizens (dhimmis) under Muslim rule
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  • it is time acknowledge that the two-state idea, as presently conceived, is dead.
  • Today, there is little enthusiasm for territorial concessions to the Palestinians. Even those who believe that Israel should withdraw from the West Bank do not believe that it can be done so long as there is no evidence the Palestinians are interested in peace.
  • For some time, I believed that the Palestinian people wanted peace but were denied the opportunity by their leaders. But decades of incitement and educational brainwashing regarding the evils of Jews and Israel have had an impact, and now poll after poll has found opposition to peace among Palestinians
  • radical Muslims will not rest until the descendants of apes and pigs are driven from holy Islamic soil
  • the same week John Kerry was extolling the virtues of the two-state solution and skewering Israel for allegedly creating obstacles to peace through settlement construction, the ruling Fatah party celebrated the 20 most outstanding terrorist operations of all time
  • Why Kerry or anyone else would expect Israelis to make concessions to people who commemorate the murder of Jews is a psychiatric rather than a political question.
  • One problem is that the Palestinians will continue their delegitimization campaign aimed at turning Israel into a pariah, and convincing the international community to dismantle the Jewish State.
  • Another concern with the status quo is that Palestinian terrorism fueled by hopelessness, incitement and radical Islam.
  • Put simply, the majority of Palestinians have no interest in peace with Israel under any circumstances. This view is reinforced daily by their leaders’ pronouncements, the incessant terror and incitement, and an education system that teaches intolerance, denies the Jewish connection to the land of Israel and extols the virtue of martyrdom.
  • Even when Israel agreed to Obama’s demand for a 10-month settlement freeze and the Palestinians responded by refusing to negotiate, Obama did not change his view. I’m not sure whether to call that naiveté or just stupidity
  • Today’s Palestinians are no more interested in compromise than their predecessors. As the poll data above indicates, the only acceptable solution is to have one state called Palestine that encompasses the West Bank, Gaza and what is currently known as Israel.
  • A wholesale change in attitudes and leadership will have to occur if there is to be any prospect of negotiating a peace agreement. Even then, it is difficult to imagine a reversal of the Islamization of the conflict — and there can be no compromise with jihadists.
  • Despite the ease with which it is possible to prove that settlements are not the obstacle to peace (e.g., did the Arabs agree to peace during the 19 years Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt occupied Gaza and not a single Jewish settlement existed?), President Obama never figured this out; but he is not alone. The obsession with settlements will not go away.
  • For the last eight years, the Palestinians have refused to negotiate altogether, and their position has not changed in 80 years
  • , his failure to learn anything in eight years was apparent in his last minute UN tantrum
  • the incoming Trump officials seem to understand reality and are prepared to act accordingly by rejecting the specious notion that settlements, rather than Palestinian implacability, are the obstacle to peace.
  • Israel has evacuated approximately 94% of the territory it captured in 1967, which, it could be argued, has already satisfied UN Security Council Resolution 242’s expectation that Israel withdraw from territory
  • Most people, including all Arab leaders, ignore that resolution 242 also required that the Arab states guarantee the peace and security of Israel in exchange for withdrawal
  • ank and 100% of Gaza, and this did not bring peace; it brought more terror and should have forever buried the myth that if Israel cedes land, it will receive peace in return
  • If a Palestinian Zionist emerges tomorrow, it will still be risky for Israel to make a deal because 5, 10, or 20 years down the road, a radical Islamist or other hostile leader may emerge.
  • Advocates of the two-state solution on the Israeli side talk about a demilitarized Palestinian state, but this is not acceptable to the Palestinians because it would be a significant limitation on their sovereignty. This is another reason why the “solution” is flawed.
  • While the international community insists the settlements are an obstacle to peace, they actually can serve as a catalyst for peace.
  • to defeat the Palestinians Israel would have to apply the Powell Doctrine, which says that “every resource and tool should be used to achieve decisive force against the enemy…and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the weaker force to capitulate.”
  • Israel would have to be prepared to kill every terrorist with little regard for collateral damage; the Air Force would have to bomb refugee camps and other targets that would result in thousands of casualties rather than hundreds.
  • The United States did not flinch from killing tens of thousands of Iraqis to defeat Saddam Hussein and is unapologetic when bystanders are killed in drone strikes (never mind examples such as the Allied bombing of Dresden or the US use of the atomic bomb). Israel would have to be equally callous to “defeat” the Palestinians.
  • Israel has been unwilling to follow Powell’s guidance because the public would see the action as disproportionate and immoral, the international community would condemn Israel and the United States would force Israel to cease military operations before total victory out of moral indignation and fear of Arab/Muslim reaction.
  • Israel has learned the hard way in battles with the Palestinians and Hezbollah that it does not have the same freedom as a superpower to use decisive force, and therefore cannot militarily defeat the Palestinians.
  • The reason that none of these men annexed the West Bank is well known: Israel cannot remain a democratic, Jewish state if it assimilates 2.7 million Palestinians
  • Meanwhile, the Jewish birthrate has increased, Aliyah will accelerate as global antisemitism worsens and the Palestinians will not become a majority in Greater Israel
  • Hamas is also allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, and this would strengthen the Islamist threat to the government, which would not be in Israel’s interest.
  • “The Palestinians now realize,” Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij said in 1991, “that time is now on the side of Israel, which can build settlements and create facts, and that the only way out of this dilemma is face-to-face negotiations.”
  • The Palestinians continued to talk until President Obama took office, and gave them the false impression that he would force Israel to stop building settlements without their having to make any concessions in return
  • Obama’s refusal to veto the latest Security Council Resolution calling settlements illegal and labeling Judaism’s holiest places in Jerusalem “occupied territory” kept Abbas’ strategy in play, but the election of Donald Trump should derail this approach for at least the next four years.
  • the Palestinians will not accept any compromise that involves coexisting with a Jewish state
  • The current leadership will remain obstinate and continue to seek international help in destroying Israel.
  • President Trump can make an important contribution to disabusing the Palestinians of the idea that Israel can be forced to capitulate to their demands by fulfilling the promise to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US embassy.
  • This would send a clear message that the Palestinians have no legitimate claim to the city and will never have a capital in Eastern Jerusalem.
  • To further hammer home the point that Jerusalem will not be divided, Israel should complete the long-delayed E1 project to connect Ma’ale Adumim with the capital.
  • The aim of this step would be to force the world to accept the reality that Israel will never relinquish these areas, and to increase pressure on the Palestinians to negotiate.
  • If the Palestinians refuse to talk or recognize the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their homeland, Israel should formally annex the Jordan Valley
  • The world may blame Israel for the growth of settlements, but the real culprits are Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.
  • Settlements have grown because of Palestinian rejectionism — and the situation will only get worse for them.
  • Ironically, the Palestinians could have two states instead of the one foreseen by proponents of the two-state solution. In the unlikely event of Palestinian reconciliation, a corridor could be created between Gaza and the West Bank as envisioned in the Clinton parameters.
  • Unless Palestinians radically change their attitudes, they will reject any proposal that requires coexisting with Israel. This will leave them with a shrunken Palestinian state with limited power and the possibility for a larger state permanently closed off.
  • It may be difficult to accomplish in the next four years, but Israel’s best chance of achieving this “solution” is to take advantage of having a friend in the White House.
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