Close to the north pole of the moon lies the crater Anaxagoras, named for a Greek philosopher who lived in the fifth century B.C.
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An Ancient Greek Philosopher Was Exiled for Claiming the Moon Was a Rock, Not a God | S... - 0 views
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Anaxagoras, who died around the time Plato was born, had a knack for astronomy, an area of study that requires careful observational and calculation to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
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Modern scholars have only “fragments” to describe the life of Anaxagoras—brief quotes from his teachings and short summaries of his ideas, cited within the works of scholars from later generations, such as Plato and Aristotle.
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Anaxagoras came to believe that the moon was a rock, not totally unlike the Earth, and he even described mountains on the lunar surface.
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While Anaxagoras was not the first to realize that moonlight is reflected light from the sun, he was able to use this concept to correctly explain additional natural phenomena, such as eclipses and lunar phases.
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Although many Greek philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. believed in one or a few fundamental elements—such as water, air, fire and earth—Anaxagoras thought there must be an infinite number of elements.
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He noted that when the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth than the sun, the full face is illuminated, “[producing] a model of the heavens that predicts not only phases of the moon, but how eclipses are possible.”
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he philosopher also realized that the occasional darkening of the moon must result from the moon, sun and Earth lining up such that the moon passes into the Earth’s shadow—a lunar eclipse.
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Anaxagoras also wrestled with the origins and formation of the moon, a mystery that still challenges scientists today.
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Though his life was spared, the philosopher who questioned the divinity of the moon found himself in exile in Lampsacus at the edge of the Hellespont. But his ideas regarding eclipses and lunar phases would live on to this day, and for his recognition of the true nature of the moon, a lunar crater, visited by orbiting spacecraft some 2,400 years later, bears the name Anaxagoras.
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The Worst Time in History to Be Alive, According to Science - HISTORY - 0 views
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The ninth plague of Egypt was complete darkness that lasted for three days. But in 536 A.D., much of the world went dark for a full 18 months, as a mysterious fog rolled over Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia. The fog blocked the sun during the day, causing temperatures to drop, crops to fail and people to die. It was, you might say, the literal Dark Age.
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What exactly did the first 18 months of darkness look like? The Byzantine historian Procopius wrote that “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year.” He also wrote that it seemed like the sun was constantly in eclipse; and that during this time, “men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.”
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“It was a pretty drastic change; it happened overnight,” McCormick says. “The ancient witnesses really were onto something. They were not being hysterical or imagining the end of the world.”
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The effects of the 536 eruption were compounded by eruptions in 540 and 547, and it took a long time for the Northern Hemisphere to recover. “The Late Antique Little Ice Age that began in the spring of 536 lasted in western Europe until about 660, and it lasted until about 680 in Central Asia,” McCormick says.
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This period of cold and starvation caused economic stagnation in Europe that intensified in 541 when the first bubonic plague broke out. The plague killed between one-third and one-half of the population in the Byzantine Empire, or Eastern Roman Empire.
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The Conservative Mind - David Brooks-NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...oks-the-conservative-mind.html
conservativism Republicans history order tradition capitalism liberty economic
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The two conservative tendencies lived in tension. But together they embodied a truth that was put into words by the child psychologist John Bowlby, that life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.
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the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government.
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They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, fi
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This conservative believes in prudence on the grounds that society is complicated and it’s generally best to reform it steadily but cautiously.
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economic conservatives. These were people that anybody following contemporary Republican politics would be familiar with. They spent a lot of time worrying about the way government intrudes upon economic liberty. They upheld freedom as their highest political value. They admired risk-takers. They worried that excessive government would create a sclerotic nation with a dependent populace.
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In the polarized political conflict with liberalism, shrinking government has become the organizing conservative principle. Economic conservatives have the money and the institutions. They have taken control. Traditional conservatism has gone into eclipse.
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It’s not so much that today’s Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don’t even know it exists. There are few people on the conservative side who’d be willing to raise taxes on the affluent to fund mobility programs for the working class. There are very few willing to use government to actively intervene in chaotic neighborhoods, even when 40 percent of American kids are born out of wedlock. There are very few Republicans who protest against a House Republican budget proposal that cuts domestic discretionary spending to absurdly low levels.
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Republicans repeat formulas — government support equals dependency — that make sense according to free-market ideology, but oversimplify the real world. Republicans like Romney often rely on an economic language that seems corporate and alien to people who do not define themselves in economic terms.
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Conservatism has lost the balance between economic and traditional conservatism. The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens.
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A Playboy for President - The New York Times - 0 views
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Trump and Hillary are both children of the ’60s — but of its opposite ends, the Brat Pack era in Trump’s case and the flowering of boomer liberalism in Hillary’s.
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Much of what seems strange and reactionary about Trump is tied to what was normal to a certain kind of Sinatra and Mad Men-era man — the casual sexism, the odd mix of sleaziness and formality, even the insult-comic style.
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The men’s sexual revolution, in which freedom meant freedom to take your pleasure while women took the pill, is still a potent force, and not only in the halls of Fox News.
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, it has persisted as a pervasive but unspoken philosophy in precincts officially committed to cultural liberalism and sexual equality.
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Like Trumpism, Hefnerian values have prospered in the blue-collar vacuum created by religion’s retreat, community’s unraveling.
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finally, among men who were promised pliant centerfolds and ended up single with only high-speed internet to comfort them, the men’s sexual revolution has curdled into a toxic subculture, resentful of female empowerment in all its forms.
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the cultural conflict between these two post-revolutionary styles — between frat guys and feminist bluestockings, Gamergaters and the diversity police, alt-right provocateurs and “woke” dudebros, the mouthbreathers who poured hate on the all-female “Ghostbusters” and the tastemakers who pretended it was good — is likely here to stay.
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With time and Christianity’s further decline, it could eclipse older culture war battles; in the pop culture landscape, it already does.
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With Fears About Safety, Football Faces Uncertain Evolution - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw said he believed that concern over head injuries would cause football to be eclipsed in popularity by soccer and other sports within 10 years.
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“Football is really on the verge of a turning point here. We may see it in 15 years in pretty much the same place as boxing or ultimate fighting.” In other words, less a lucrative American colossus and more a niche sport beloved for its brutality.
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there is a growing sentiment among those who love the sport and those who loathe it that football has come to a critical juncture.
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“Football is resting on this foundation of parental and cultural and masculinity-issued support that could be pushed to the background once people start to realize that taking the chance of brain damage isn’t worth proving that you’re a particular kind of man,” Coakley said. “We’re beginning to see the erosion of that support.”
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He also advocated flag football as a worthy substitute for young players, who can learn rules and fundamentals in a controlled environment where the risk of head injury would be significantly diminished. He deflected the concern that children who start playing late are at a disadvantage, saying that talent is the ultimate determining factor.
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“There’s plenty of ways to get exercise without risking not only head injuries, but the accompanying orthopedic problems that come with playing football.”
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“It’s really a serious discussion and a secret fear that I think all of us feel. We’ve accepted the knees and the other ailments, but we really never thought about the deterioration of your brains as a result of concussions in football.”
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If the suit goes to trial, he predicted, data that would be made public would prompt some parents to not allow their children to play football.
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Entities from Pop Warner to high school could require parents to sign waivers preventing officials or the league itself from being sued.
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Barons of Broadband - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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There used to be a bipartisan consensus in favor of tough antitrust enforcement. During the Reagan years, however, antitrust policy went into eclipse, and ever since measures of monopoly power, like the extent to which sales in any given industry are concentrated in the hands of a few big companies, have been rising fast.
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, it became common to assert that the world had changed in ways that made all those old-fashioned concerns about monopoly irrelevant. Aren’t we living in an era of global competition? Doesn’t the creative destruction of new technology constantly tear down old industry giants and create new ones?
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The truth, however, is that many goods and especially services aren’t subject to international competition: New Jersey families can’t subscribe to Korean broadband.
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creative destruction has been oversold: Microsoft may be an empire in decline, but it’s still enormously profitable thanks to the monopoly position it established decades ago.
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there’s good reason to believe that monopoly is itself a barrier to innovation. Ms. Crawford argues persuasively that the unchecked power of telecom giants has removed incentives for progress: why upgrade your network or provide better services when your customers have nowhere to go?
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The Legacy of Greco-Roman Mapmaking - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“Geography is not just maps,” said the guest curator, Roberta Casagrande-Kim, a scholar of classical concepts of the underworld that go back well before Dante took his journey through the nine circles of hell. “There is also the cognitive side underlying mapping,” she said.
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An early advance in Greek thinking was Aristotle’s discovery, in the latter half of the fourth century B.C., that the world must be spherical. He based this on observations of lunar eclipses, ships disappearing hull first on the horizon, and the changing field of stars observed as one travels north and south.
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Then Eratosthenes, a librarian at Alexandria in the third century B.C., employed the new geometry to measure the world’s size with simultaneous angles of the sun’s shadow taken at widely distant sites in Egypt. That yielded a remarkably accurate measure of Earth’s circumference:
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From north to south, both the Greeks and the Romans identified the frigid Arctic Circle, the northern temperate hemisphere, the torrid Tropic of Cancer, the southern temperate zone and the South Pole. The two temperate zones were believed to be the only habitable regions, but contact between the two was thought unlikely.
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the Greeks and the Romans did well in preparing the way to geographic knowledge of worlds known and unknown, real and imaginary. They anticipated modern concepts of mapmaking: anything that can be spatially conceived can be mapped.
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The map, probably created in the early fourth century A.D., may have been intended to impress the emperor’s subjects and notable guests, Dr. Talbert has concluded. It was oriented with the capital at its center, showing that all roads indeed led to Rome.
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Geographers then were less committed to drawing maps than to narrative wayfinding. Distances had priority over orientations; getting from here to there was more important than the lay of the land.
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Even Ptolemy’s errors were influential. Instead of sticking to Eratosthenes’ more accurate estimate of Earth’s size, Ptolemy handed down a serious underestimate that later apparently emboldened Columbus to think he could sail west to reach China or Japan.
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Influx of South Americans Drives Miami's Reinvention - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the Miami-Fort Lauderdale region eclipsed Los Angeles in 2012 as the major metropolitan area with the largest share — 45 percent — of immigrant business owners
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Colombians, who first began to settle here in the 1980s, are the largest group of South Americans. They now make up nearly 5 percent of Miami-Dade’s population. They are joined by Argentines, Peruvians and a growing number of Venezuelans. Brazilians, relative newcomers to Miami’s Hispanic hodgepodge, are now a distinct presence as well. The Venezuelan population jumped 117 percent over 10 years, a number that does not capture the surge in recent arrivals. Over half of Miami’s residents are foreign born, and 63 percent speak Spanish at home.
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he latest surge of South Americans was turning the city into a year-round destination and luring more entrepreneurs and international businesses. Latin American banks have proliferated as they follow their customers here.
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they are snapping up real estate in Miami, Miami Beach and Key Biscayne, a wealthy island two bridges away from Miami.
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“South Americans are the game changers — they are the ones that allowed the housing market to bounce back,”
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The South American infatuation with urban living has led to the explosion of lavish new condominium towers,
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Cubans still dominate Miami, making up just over half the number of Hispanics and a third of the total population, and Central Americans have flocked here for decades. But in an area where Hispanics have gone from 23 percent of the population in 1970 to 65 percent now, what is most striking is the deepening influence of South Americans.
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But the latest wave of South Americans adds a new twist. It includes many nonimmigrants — investors on the lookout for businesses and properties, including second homes in Miami and Miami Beach. For them, Miami is an increasingly alluring place to safely keep money and stay for extended periods.
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Spanish, which has long been the common language in much of Miami, now dominates even broader sections of the city. In stores, banks, gyms and even boardrooms in much of Miami, Spanish is the default language.“You can come here as a businessman, a professional, and make five phone calls, all in Spanish, to set up the infrastructure for your business,”
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Many came here to flee a political crisis, as the Venezuelans did after the presidential election of Hugo Chávez in 1998 and then his protégé, Nicolás Maduro, or to escape turbulent economies, as the Argentines and Colombians did more than a decade ago.
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A Miami Downtown Development Authority study found that more than 90 percent of the demand for new downtown and Brickell residential units came from foreign buyers; 65 percent were from South America.
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the South American influx has not translated into widespread electoral success. South Americans lag far behind Cuban-Americans in political power, in part because their citizenship rate is lower.
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Hope for the best, pre-empt the worst in Middle East - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
www.aljazeera.com/...ddle-east-150603111154290.html
middle east crisis politics US obama culture policy
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We are "winning", he said. The strategy is "working" against ISIL in Syria and Iraq, "politically and militarily". Therefore, the US is going to double its efforts; it will send more arms to the Iran-supported Haider al-Abbadi government and launch more air strikes.
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The regimes' repression - bloody and sectarian - has created the conditions that nurture, motivate and strengthen extremist groups like ISIL, and pave the way towards uniting the two into one bloody and protracted "civil war" in the whole of Mesopotamia.
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ISIL is benefiting from the break-up of fragile states, the breakdown of their bankrupt regimes, and the implosion of their societies.
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ISIL has also benefited from violence becoming the new norm in the Middle East. After millions of casualties, the toll is rising exponentially as countless more meet similar fate, alas.
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Once it eclipsed al-Qaeda and established itself as the new caliphate with a fixed address at the cradle of the world's civilisation, ISIL became the new magnate for religious extremism.
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In a region of instability, uncertainty and chaos, ISIL is unmistakably steadfast and clear. It espouses clarity of doctrine (terribly violent jihad), mission (fighting infidels, heretics, and apostates), and clarity of goal (establishment of the caliphate throughout the Muslim world)
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For all these reasons, I don't share the Obama administration's optimism. In these dark times, optimism entails a large dose of myopia, naivete or cynicism.
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Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace - The New York Times - 0 views
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At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)
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The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,”
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his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
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Last month, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country, with a market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the fifth-wealthiest person on earth.
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Others who cycled in and out of the company said that what they learned in their brief stints helped their careers take off. And more than a few who fled said they later realized they had become addicted to Amazon’s way of working.
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Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.
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“Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,”
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At its best, some employees said, Amazon can feel like the Bezos vision come to life, a place willing to embrace risk and strengthen ideas by stress test. Employees often say their co-workers are the sharpest, most committed colleagues they have ever met, taking to heart instructions in the leadership principles like “never settle” and “no task is beneath them.”
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In contrast to companies where declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes, Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime
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“You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” Mr. Bezos wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders
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As the company has grown, Mr. Bezos has become more committed to his original ideas, viewing them in almost moral terms, those who have worked closely with him say. “My main job today: I work hard at helping to maintain the culture,”
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perhaps the most distinctive is his belief that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to “disagree and commit” (
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According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.
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Every aspect of the Amazon system amplifies the others to motivate and discipline the company’s marketers, engineers and finance specialists: the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing feedback on performance; and the competition among peers who fear missing a potential problem or improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else.
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But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. “The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer.
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As the newcomers acclimate, they often feel dazzled, flattered and intimidated by how much responsibility the company puts on their shoulders and how directly Amazon links their performance to the success of their assigned projects
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Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.
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many others said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster.
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A 2013 survey by PayScale, a salary analysis firm, put the median employee tenure at one year, among the briefest in the Fortune 500
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To prod employees, Amazon has a powerful lever: more data than any retail operation in history. Its perpetual flow of real-time, ultradetailed metrics allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers do:
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Amazon employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called business reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or two before the meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50 or 60 pages long, several workers said. At the reviews, employees are cold-called and pop-quizzed on any one of those thousands of numbers.
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Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.
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many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue
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The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat
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Resources are sometimes hoarded. That includes promising job candidates, who are especially precious at a company with a high number of open positions. To get new team members, one veteran said, sometimes “you drown someone in the deep end of the pool,” then take his or her subordinates. Ideas are critiqued so harshly in meetings at times that some workers fear speaking up.
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David Loftesness, a senior developer, said he admired the customer focus but could not tolerate the hostile language used in many meetings, a comment echoed by many others.
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Each year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinates’ rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall. In recent years, other large companies, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have dropped the practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” — in part because it can force managers to get rid of valuable talent just to meet quotas.
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Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him and never returned to Amazon.
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“When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.
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A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”
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A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.
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Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years.
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In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. A
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“One time I didn’t sleep for four days straight,” said Dina Vaccari, who joined in 2008 to sell Amazon gift cards to other companies and once used her own money, without asking for approval, to pay a freelancer in India to enter data so she could get more done. “These businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful.”
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Recruiters, though, also say that other businesses are sometimes cautious about bringing in Amazon workers, because they have been trained to be so combative. The derisive local nickname for Amazon employees is “Amholes” — pugnacious and work-obsessed.
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By the time the dust settles in three years, Amazon will have enough space for 50,000 employees or so, more than triple what it had as recently as 2013.
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just as Jeff Bezos was able to see the future of e-commerce before anyone else, she added, he was able to envision a new kind of workplace: fluid but tough, with employees staying only a short time and employers demanding the maximum.
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“Amazon is driven by data,” said Ms. Pearce, who now runs her own Seattle software company, which is well stocked with ex-Amazonians. “It will only change if the data says it must — when the entire way of hiring and working and firing stops making economic sense.”
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Turkey's Elections Will Test Power of the President - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 14
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What Do These Midterms Mean? « The Dish - 0 views
dish.andrewsullivan.com/...what-do-these-midterms-mean
politics Obama election history crisis narrative economics foreign policy
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these midterms mean nothing? That can’t be right either. They seem to me to be reflecting at the very least a sour and dyspeptic mood in the country at large, a well of deepening discontent and concern, and a national funk that remains very potent as a narrative, even if it has become, in my view, close to circular and more than a little hysterical.
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Even though the economic signals in the US are stronger than anywhere else in the developed world, even as unemployment has fallen, and as energy independence has come closer than anyone recently expected, the underlying structure of the economy remains punishing for the middle class. This, in some ways, can be just as dispiriting as lower levels of growth – because it appears that even when we have a recovery, it will not make things any better for most people.
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This shoe falling in the public psyche – a sense that we are in a deep structural impasse for the middle class, rather than a temporary recessionary hit – means a profound disillusionment with the future. And the fact that neither party seems to have a workable answer to this problem intensifies the sense of drift.
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The emergence of ISIS has dimmed that hope as well. It does two things at once: it calls into question whether our departure from Iraq can be sustained, and it presents the threat of Jihadist terror as once again real and imminent. So ISIS is a reminder of the worst of 9/11 and the worst of Iraq.
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The last great triumph of the US – the end of the Cold War, the liberation of Central Europe, the emergence of a democratic Russia – is now revealed as something more complicated. If Americans thought that the days were long gone that they had to worry about Russian military power, they’ve been disabused of that fact this past year.
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the other recent success: getting out of Iraq and defeating al Qaeda. For many of us, this was one of Obama’s greatest achievements: to cauterize the catastrophe of the Iraq War, to decimate al Qaeda’s forces in Af-Pak, and to enable us to move forward toward a more normal world.
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So the core narrative of the Obama presidency – rescuing us from a second Great Depression and extricating us from a doomed strategy in response to Jihadism – has been eclipsed by events. And that’s why Obama has lost the thread. He has lost the clear story-line that defined his presidency.
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You can argue, and I would, that Obama is not really responsible for the events behind this narrative-collapse.
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But most Americans are not going to parse these trends and events and come to some nuanced view. They see the economy as still punishing, Jihadist terror just as frightening, and they are increasingly unable to avoid the fact that we lost – repeat, lost – the Iraq War. They’re also aware that the US, after Iraq, simply has historically low leverage and power in the world at large, as the near-uselessness of our massive military in shaping the world as we would like has been exposed in the deserts of Iraq and mountains of Afghanistan. Now throw in a big bucket of Ebola, and what on earth is there to be cheerful about?
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They want to create a Carter-like narrative that can bring down the Democrats and turn the Obama presidency into an asterisk. But the difference between now and the late 1970s is that Obama is not a Carter and the GOP have no Reagan, or, more importantly, no persuasive critique of Obama that is supplemented by a viable alternative policy agenda that isn’t just a warmed-over version of the 1980s.
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The future as yet seems to contain no new or rallying figure to chart a different course. Ever-greater gridlock seems the likeliest result of the mid-terms; polarization continues to deepen geographically and on-line
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the Democrats have only an exhausted, conventional dynasty to offer in 2016; and the Republicans either have dangerous demagogues, like Christie or Cruz, or lightweights, like Walker or Rubio or Paul, or, even another fricking Bush.
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it is not too late for Obama to lead the way, to construct a new narrative that is as honest and as realist as it is, beneath it all, optimistic. It’s a hard task – but since his likeliest successors are failing to do so, he has as good a shot as any. In these circumstances, treating the last two years of a presidency as irrelevant could not be more wrong. They could, with the right policies and the right message, be the most relevant of them all.
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shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 14
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Death by Data - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...avid-brooks-death-by-data.html
data politics imagination vision quantification agenda issues demographics individual Obama
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data-driven style of politics is built on a questionable philosophy and a set of dubious assumptions. Data-driven politics is built on a philosophy you might call Impersonalism. This is the belief that what matters in politics is the reaction of populations and not the idiosyncratic judgment, moral character or creativity of individuals.
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Data-driven politics assumes that demography is destiny, that the electorate is not best seen as a group of free-thinking citizens but as a collection of demographic slices.
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This method puts the spotlight on the reactions of voting blocs and takes the spotlight off the individual qualities of candidates. It puts the spotlight on messaging and takes the spotlight off product: actual policies.
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This method assumes that mobilization is more important than persuasion; that it is more important to target your likely supporters than to try to reframe debates or persuade the whole country.
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Obviously demography matters a lot. But, at heart, politics is a personal enterprise. Voters are looking for quality of leadership, character, vision and solidarity that defies quantification. Candidates like Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Jerry Brown can arouse great loyalty in ways that are impossible to predict.
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Another victim was President Obama. His 2012 campaign was legendary from an analytic point of view, and, of course, it was victorious. But it lacked a policy agenda and produced no mandate. Without a compelling agenda, the administration has projected an image of reactive drift and lost public confidence.
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It puts the spotlight on slight differences across the socio-economic spectrum and takes the spotlight off the power of events to reframe the whole mood and landscape.
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other victims include the Democratic senators in red states. Winning in a state that the other party dominates is a personal enterprise. It requires an ineffable individual connection with voters. It requires an idiosyncratic approach to issues. By eclipsing individual quirks with generic messages, the data-driven style deprives outnumbered candidates of precisely what they need to survive.
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In the midst of this scuffling economy, voters are thinking as Americans and not as members of a niche. They’re asking: What can be done to kick-start America? They’re not asking: How can I guarantee affordable contraception?
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The more you look at political history, the more you see that political imagination is the rarest and most valuable of qualities. Voters don’t always know what they want, but they look to leaders to jump ahead of the current moment and provide visions they haven’t thought of.
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Some politicians, like F.D.R. or Ronald Reagan, can reframe debates and envision coalitions that don’t exist. Their visions emerge out of unique life experiences, which are unusual but have broad appeal. They build trust not through a few targeted messages but by fully embodying a moment and a people. They often don’t pander to existing identities but arouse different identities.
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Data-driven candidates sacrifice their own souls. Instead of being inner-directed leaders driven by their own beliefs, they become outer-directed pleasers driven by incomplete numbers.
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Google, Mighty Now, but Not Forever - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Old kingpins like Digital Equipment and Wang didn’t disappear overnight. They sank slowly, burdened by maintenance of the products that made them rich and unable to match the pace of technological change around them. The same is happening now at Hewlett-Packard, which is splitting in two. Even Microsoft — the once unbeatable, declared monopolist of personal computing software — has struggled to stay relevant
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“I’m not saying that Google is going to go away, just as Microsoft didn’t go away,” said Ben Thompson, a tech analyst who writes the blog Stratechery. “It’s just that Google will miss out on what’s next.”
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The company’s financial results have failed to meet consensus analysts’ expectations for five straight quarters. And its stock price has fallen 8 percent over the last year.
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At first glance, the Mountain View, Calif., company looks plenty healthy. It generated $14.4 billion in profits in 2014 and revenue was up 19 percent from the year before. Google accounts for three-quarters of the world’s web searches, and the company also controls Android, by far the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, and YouTube, the world’s most popular video site.
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as smartphones eclipse laptop and desktop computers to become the planet’s most important computing devices, the digital ad business is rapidly changing. Facebook, Google’s archrival for advertising dollars, has been quick to profit from the shift.
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Google’s enormous search haul is only a slice of the $550 billion global advertising market, according to the research firm eMarketer. As Mr. Thompson pointed out, most of that money is not in direct response ads like Google’s.Instead, the bulk of the ad industry is devoted to something called brand ads. These are the ads you see on television and print magazines. They work on your emotions in the belief that, in time, your dollars will follow.
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This gets to the crux of Mr. Thompson’s argument that Google has peaked. The future of online advertising looks increasingly like the business of television. It is likely to be dominated by services like Facebook, Snapchat or Pinterest that keep people engaged for long periods of time.
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“Google doesn’t create immersive experiences that you get lost in,” Mr. Thompson said. “Google creates transactional services. You go to Google to search, or for maps, or with something else in mind. And those are the types of ads they have. But brand advertising isn’t about that kind of destination. It’s about an experience.”
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“To me the Microsoft comparison can’t be more clear,” he said. “This is the price of being so successful — what you’re seeing is that when a company becomes dominant, its dominance precludes it from dominating the next thing. It’s almost like a natural law of business.”
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shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 16
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How Both Parties Lost the White Middle Class - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...st-the-white-middle-class.html
white class marginalization middle-class politics Crisis
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the real cleavage is not interracial, but intra-racial: The populism we’re seeing stems entirely from the collision of whites who flourish in the global economy — and amid the cultural changes of the last 50 years — with those who don’t.
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while we’ve heard a lot about the economic decline of the middle class, the cultural decline of the white middle class isn’t discussed nearly as often. It should be.
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First, there are the consequences of the great success of the upper middle class, which today lives in a separate world of well-manicured neighborhoods with good schools, intact families and cultural confidence.
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We compliment ourselves that a generally meritocratic system is open to far more people than was true 50 years ago. And it has been — but the resulting culture of ambition paradoxically erodes middle-class confidence. Today, the vast middle of the middle fears that unless you’re on the way up, you’re on the way down.
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in the 1970s, drug use was already undermining the white middle class. Since then marriage rates among high school-educated whites have declined and illegitimacy has increased.
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Cultural instability compounds economic instability. A person near the median in our society is on shaky ground. He feels that what was once reliable is now eroding. This is as much a source of today’s middle-class anxiety as stagnant household incomes.
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The intelligentsia on the left rarely lets a moment pass without reminding us of the demographic eclipse of white middle-class voters. Sometimes, those voters are described as racists, or derided as dull suburbanites who lack the élan of the new urban “creative class.”
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Conservatives are no less harsh. Pundits ominously predict that the “innovators” are about to be overwhelmed by a locust blight of “takers.” The message: If it weren’t for successful people like us, middle-class people like you would be doomed. And if you’re not an entrepreneurial “producer,” you’re in the way.
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Our political history since the end of World War II has turned on the willingness of white middle-class voters to rally behind great causes in league with the wealthy and political elite
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Today, white middle-class voters want to be reassured that they can play an active role in politics. They want someone to appeal to their sense of political self-worth, not just their interests.
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voters who feel disempowered and marginalized latch on to this promise. They want to be partners with the rich and powerful in defining our future as a country, not recipients of their benevolent ministrations, which explains why they’re untroubled by Mr. Trump’s great wealth.
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Mr. Sanders also appeals to the strong desire that the white middle class has to recover its central role in the national project. While he attracts support from a wealthier stratum of the middle class than Mr. Trump, the appeal is the same. He asks them to join him in fundamentally remaking our political economy.
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If these candidates have traction, it’s because over the last two decades our political elites, themselves almost entirely white, have decided, for different reasons, that the white middle class has no role to play in the multicultural, globalized future they envision, a future that they believe they will run
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More Gun Deaths Than Traffic Fatalities in 21 States - The Atlantic - 0 views
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New data shows traffic deaths jumped by more than 9 percent during the first nine months of 2015, the most recent period for which information is available.
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The NHSTA says it’s too soon to speculate on factors contributing to the “significantly higher” traffic fatality rates last year.
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Lower gas prices are one possible reason. When gasoline is cheaper, people drive more—and more time on the road translates into more fatal accidents.
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For instance, the increase in traffic deaths exceeded 20 percent in the region that includes Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana, but only went up by about 3 percent in the region that includes California, Arizona, Hawaii, and other Pacific territories.
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But while car-safety technology has improved dramatically in recent decades, handguns have barely changed in a century.
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Gun deaths surpassed motor-vehicle deaths in 21 states plus the District of Columbia in 2014, according to analysis by the Violence Policy Center.
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shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 18
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Book Review - To End All Wars - By Adam Hochschild - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...l-wars-by-adam-hochschild.html
pacifism wwi historiography counterfactual anti-war
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“A peace to end peace,” commented Sir Alfred Milner, that powerhouse of the British war cabinet, as he surveyed the terms of the Versailles treaty that supposedly brought the combat to a close
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Increasingly, modern historians have come to regard that bleak November “armistice” as a mere truce in a long, terrible conflict that almost sent civilization into total eclipse and that did not really terminate until the peaceful and democratic reunification of Germany after November 1989.
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Even that might be an optimistic reading: the post-1918 frontiers of the former Ottoman Empire (one of the four great thrones that did not outlast the “First” World War) are still a suppurating source of violence and embitterment.
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his main setting is England and his chief concern the Western Front. In this hecatomb along the minor rivers of Flanders and Picardy, the British people lost the cream of their working class and the flower of their aristocracy
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Ruthless as they were in the killing of others, the generals were also shockingly profligate and callous when it came to their “own.” In some especially revolting passages, we find Gen. Sir Douglas Haig and his arrogant subordinate Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson actually complaining when British casualties were too low, and exulting — presumably because enemy losses were deemed comparable — when they moved into the tens of thousands
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We read these stirring yet wrenching accounts, of soldiers setting off to battle accompanied by cheers, and shudder because we know what they do not. We know what is coming, in other words. And coming not only to them. What is really coming, stepping jackbooted over the poisoned ruins of civilized Europe, is the pornographic figure of the Nazi
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he approaches a truly arresting realization: Nazism can perhaps be avoided, but only on condition that German militarism is not too heavily defeated on the battlefield.
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This highly unsettling reflection is important above all for American readers. If General Pershing’s fresh and plucky troops had not reached the scene in the closing stages of the bloodbath, universal exhaustion would almost certainly have compelled an earlier armistice, on less savage terms. Without President Wilson’s intervention, the incensed and traumatized French would never have been able to impose terms of humiliation on Germany; the very terms that Hitler was to reverse, by such relentless means, a matter of two decades later
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In this light, the great American socialist Eugene V. Debs, who publicly opposed the war and was kept in prison by a vindictive Wilson until long after its ending, looks like a prescient hero. Indeed, so do many of the antiwar militants to whose often-buried record Hochschild has done honor
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shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 17
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This Is What the Trump Abyss Looks Like - 0 views
nymag.com/...he-trump-abyss-looks-like.html
trump demagogue politics Culture authoritarian mob Democratic party
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there is a credible argument that, given soaring inequality, and globalization’s disproportionate impact on the middle classes and working poor, tax relief for many in the lower half of the earning population is a good idea. I agree. So why not give it to them, rather than the obscenely wealthy? And why not make it revenue-neutral or even debt-reducing as well as helpful to social stability?
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You could indeed pay for big middle class tax cuts or an increase in tax credits for the working poor if you doubled the estate tax, or adding a new tax bracket - say, 45 percent - for those earning over $1 million a year. This would be a political master-stroke for the Trump administration (which is why Steve Bannon was rumored to favor something on these lines). It would instantly rebrand the GOP. It might even get buy-in from the Democrats. It could pass without using reconciliation rules in the Senate, thus helping entrench it in the system. It would help defuse our dangerous tribalism. It would do a lot to restore generational fairness, and counter the emergence of a rich caste of people who are fabulously wealthy for doing nothing. It would support work rather than privilege, a meritocracy rather than an oligarchy.
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If the Democrats were smart, they would propose something like this themselves - and get ahead of the GOP, using it as a platform for 2018. And if the Republicans could abandon zombie Reaganism, they could rescue themselves from the electoral oblivion they so richly deserve. There’s a win-win here for both parties and the country.
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The key is to sustain a sense of the urgency of the moment, a resolute refusal to accept this descent into an illiberal authoritarianism, and a decision to put all our differences aside for a year in order to mobilize a turnout next year that eclipses Obama’s. We have to turn the mid-terms into a presidential election. Sane Republicans need to vote for the Democrat. Leftists have to put aside their divisive identity politics. Liberals need to coalesce around a simple strategy - not impeaching but checking Trump decisively.
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the only reliable and sane solution is a massive mobilization of the anti-Trump majority at the polls next year. The huge Democratic fundraising advantage is encouraging; as are the new grass roots organizations that are going in strength. Maybe an unexpected leader from the left or center might emerge. Maybe a strong Democratic message that can somehow keep its minority edge and simultaneously re-engage the white Obama-Trump voters in the midwest.
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He is the total master of an enormous mob that, so far, has completely overcome the elites. He achieves this mastery through incendiary oratory, hourly provocations, and relentless propaganda. His rallies are events of mass hysteria and rage. His propaganda machines - Fox News, Limbaugh, Breitbart, Drudge - rarely crack
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And there is no one in our political life capable of matching this power. Name one, if you can. And when you look at the Democratic field of 2020, no one seems up to it at all. Among the few responsible Republicans left, what we see is either utter cowardice in the face of an enraged base, or the kind of courage that manifests itself too late to make a difference, which is to say no real courage at all.
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this base support is unshakable. It is not susceptible to reason. No scandal, however great, will dislodge it - because he has invaded his followers’ minds and psyches as profoundly as he has the rest of ours. He is fused with them more deeply now, a single raging id, a force that helps us understand better how civilized countries can descend so quickly into barbarism.
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In a country led by a swirling void, all sorts of inhibitions slowly slip away. Nativism, racism, nationalism: these are very potent catalysts of human darkness
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by far the most important development in all this, the single essential rampart, is how, through all this, Trump has tightened his grip on 35 percent of the country. He has done this when he has succeeded but also critically when he has failed, because he has brilliantly turned his incapacity to be president into an asset with his base. No wall? Congress’ fault. Obamacare in place? The GOP’s fault. No tax cut? Ditto. The only way forward? A deeper and deeper trust in him. Only he can fix the Congress by purging it. Only he can fix the Courts through nominees who will never stand up to him.
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And we know something after a year of this. It will go on. This is not a function of strategy or what we might ordinarily describe as will. It is because this president is so psychologically disordered he cannot behave in any other way. His emotions control his mind; his narcissism overwhelms even basic self-interest, let alone the interest of the country as a whole. He cannot unite the country, even if, somewhere in his fathomless vanity, he wants to. And he cannot stop this manic defense of ego because if he did, his very self would collapse.
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This is why he lies and why he cannot admit a single one of them. He is psychologically incapable of accepting that he could be wrong and someone else could be right. His impulse - which he cannot control - is simply to assault the person who points out the error, or blame someone else for it.
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Yes, the forms of the Constitution remain largely intact after nine months. But the norms that make the Constitution work are crumbling. The structure looks the same, but Trump has relentlessly attacked their foundations