Group items tagged

Climate change isn’t the only problem. Cocoa crops in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where 60 percent of the world’s cocoa come from, may already be in “structural decline,” Debenham said, citing disease, aging cocoa trees, and illegal gold mining on farmland.

ore important, the farmers who tend to the crops can’t afford to invest in their farms to increase their yields and bolster resilience against climate change. The bleak outlook for cocoa farmers threatens to doom cocoa-growing in the region altogether. In Ghana, the average cocoa farmer is close to 50 years old. A new generation of farmers is needed to maintain the cocoa supply, but young people may just walk away from the industry.

Newer chocolate alternatives may provide more satisfying counterfeits. Win-Win isn’t the only start-up producing cocoa-free chocolate, which is similar in concept to animal-free meat. The company uses plant ingredients to emulate the flavor and texture of chocolate—as do its competitors Foreverland and Voyage Foods. Another firm, California Cultured, grows actual cacao cells in giant steel tanks.

Cocoa shortages will affect all kinds of chocolate, but mass-produced sweets may change beyond just the prices. The erratic temperatures brought about by climate change could change the flavor of beans, depending on where they are grown

Variability is a concern for commercial chocolate makers, who need to maintain consistent flavors across their products. They may counteract discrepancies among different batches of beans by combining them, then roasting them at a higher temperature,

Commercial chocolate makers may also tweak their recipes to amp up or mimic chocolate flavors without using more cocoa. These candies contain relatively little cacao to begin with; only 10 percent of a product’s weight must be cocoa in order to qualify as chocolate in the eyes of the FDA.

No matter how you look at it, the future of cocoa doesn’t look good. With less cocoa available all around, chocolate may become more expensive. For high-end chocolate brands, whose products use lots of cocoa, the recent price hikes are reportedly an existential threat.

So much of the appeal of cheap chocolate is that it’s always been there—whether in the form of a Hershey’s Kiss, Oreo cookies, a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, or the shell of a fondant-filled egg. “You grow up with those tastes. It’s hard to fathom how pervasive it has been,” Carodenuto said. Chocolate lovers have weathered minor tweaks to these candies over the years, but the shifts happening today may be less tolerable—or at the very least more noticeable. The change that has been hardest to ignore is that cheap chocolate is no longer that cheap.

it turns out that the way we move largely determines the way we live.

gadgets cumulatively contribute only a fraction of what we save by living in a walkable neighborhood. It turns out that trading all of your incandescent lightbulbs for energy savers conserves as much carbon per year as living in a walkable neighborhood does each week.

“gizmo green”; the obsession with “sustainable” products that often have a statistically insignificant impact on the carbon footprint when compared to our location. And, as already suggested, our location’s greatest impact on our carbon footprint comes from how much it makes us drive.

study made it clear that, while every factor counts, none counts more than walkability. Specifically, it showed how, in drivable locations, transportation energy use consistently tops household energy use, in some cases by more than 2.4 to 1. As a result, the most green home (with Prius) in sprawl still loses out to the least green home in a walkable neighborhood.

because it’s better than nothing, LEED — like the Prius — is a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows us to avoid thinking more deeply about our larger footprint. For most organizations and agencies, it is enough. Unfortunately, as the transportation planner Dan Malouff puts it, “LEED architecture without good urban design is like cutting down the rainforest using hybrid-powered bulldozers.”

10 to 20 units per acre is the density at which drivable suburbanism transitions into walkable urbanism.

“We are a destructive species, and if you love nature, stay away from it. The best means of protecting the environment is to

The average New Yorker consumes roughly one-third the electricity of the average Dallas resident, and ultimately generates less than one-third the greenhouse gases of the average American.

the American anti-urban ethos remained intact as everything else changed. The desire to be isolated in nature, adopted en masse, led to the quantities and qualities we now call “sprawl,” which somehow mostly manages to combine the traffic congestion of the city with the intellectual culture of the countryside.

New York consumes half the gasoline of Atlanta (326 versus 782 gallons per person per year). But Toronto cuts that number in half, as does Sydney — and most European cities use only half as much as those places. Cut Europe’s number in half, and you end up with Hong Kong

Paris is one place that has determined that its future depends on reducing its auto dependence. The city has recently decided to create 25 miles of dedicated busways, introduced 20,000 shared city bikes in 1,450 locations, and committed to removing 55,000 parking spaces from the city every year for the next 20 years. These changes sound pretty radical, but they are supported by 80 percent of the population.

increasing density from two units per acre to 20 units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from 20 to 200.

New York is our densest big city and, not coincidentally, the one with the best transit service. All the other subway stations in America put together would not outnumber the 468 stops of the MTA. In terms of resource efficiency, it’s the best we’ve got.

most communities with these densities are also organized as traditional mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, the sort of accommodating environment that entices people out of their cars. Everything above that is icing on the cake.

unless we hit a national crisis of unprecedented severity, it is hard to imagine any argument framed in the language of sustainability causing many people to modify their behavior. So what will?

The gold standard of quality-of-life rankings is the Mercer Survey, which carefully compares global cities in the 10 categories of political stability, economics, social quality, health and sanitation, education, public services, recreation, consumer goods, housing, and climate.

the top 10 cities always seem to include a bunch of places where they speak German (Vienna, Zurich, Dusseldorf, etc.), along with Vancouver, Auckland, and Sydney. These are all places with compact settlement patterns, good transit, and principally walkable neighborhoods. Indeed, there isn’t a single auto-oriented city in the top 50. The highest-rated American cities in 2010, which don’t appear until No. 31, are Honolulu, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Washington, New York, and Seattle.

Our cities, which are twice as efficient as our suburbs, burn twice the fuel of these European, Canadian, and Aussie/Kiwi places. Yet the quality of life in these foreign cities is deemed higher than ours by a long shot.

if we pollute so much because we are throwing away our time, money, and lives on the highway, then both problems would seem to share a single solution, and that solution is to make our cities more walkable. Doing so is not easy, but it can be done, it has been done,

In his 2013 paper, Burkhauser and his two co-authors have completely upended the thrust of Figures 1 and 2.

Burkhauser’s 2011 methodology worked to make the pattern appear far less extreme, as illustrated by Figure 2:

First, take a look at Figure 1, a 2011 Congressional Budget Office chart showing significant inequality in the distribution of income gains from 1979 to 2007. Many on the left consider work done by the C.B.O. to be the gold standard of inequality measurement:

If — a virtually impossible if — the economic and policy-making community were to reach even a rough consensus in support of Burkhauser’s 2013 analysis, the victory for the right would be hard to overestimate.

If Burkhauser’s approach was accepted, it would render moot the basic political and philosophical tenets of the Obama presidency

Not only would Burkhauser lay waste to a core liberal argument — inequality is worsening — but his claim that a declining share of income is going to the wealthy could be used to justify further tax cuts for the affluent in order to foster top-down investment and growt

Burkhauser et al. achieve their reversal of past income distribution data by amending the definition of income developed in their 2012 paper — “post-tax, post-transfer, size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits” — to incorporate another accounting tool: “yearly-accrued capital gains to measure yearly changes in wealth.”

it is a game changer.

Burkhauser attempts to measure the year-to-year increase in taxpayers’ assets — stocks and bonds, housing and privately held businesses – and to count those annual increases as income. Increases in the value of such assets do not show up in tax data because they are taxed by the federal government only when the asset in question is sold and the increased value is realized as taxable gains.

The Burkhauser approach does a number of things. First, it spreads and flattens income from capital gains over the duration of ownership. For a wealthy individual who makes a huge killing selling stock or a businesses, his or her income does not spike in the year of the sale, but emerges instead as a series of yearly incremental gains.

For assets that have been held for a long time, the Burkhauser system effectively backdates much of currently realized capital gains onto earlier years. This is especially significant in calculating income gains from the current sale of assets purchased in the 1980s and 1990s, since much of the added value was acquired in those earlier decades.

I raised the following question: Is it a fair measure of a person’s well-being to include unrealized capital gains? Their house or other assets may have increased in value, but their standard of living has not changed.

The unfairness of Burkhauser’s approach is clearly acute at the bottom and middle of income distribution. The most common large asset for those on the bottom rungs is a house. Burkhauser would increase the income of those below the median lucky enough to own a home by the annual appreciation in the value of the home through 2007. For many of these families, however, selling their home is not an option. In Burkhauser’s view, their income goes up even if their living conditions remain unchanged.

Burkhauser is respected by his peers; his critics, including some friends, do not accuse him of ideological bias. In addition to A.E.I, he has received support from such center-left institutions as the Pew Foundation, Brookings Institution and the Russell Sage Foundation.

the “problem is that in such things, especially when it is a difficult task based on lots of new data sources, the devil is in the details. It’s pretty hard to judge those details without doing a substantial amount of work.” Acemoglu’s conclusion: “Bottom line: conceptually there is a valid point here, and this is a serious paper. The rest is to be determined.”

“Rich Burkhauser’s work is really the state of the art — the most important research on inequality being done, in my view,” Scott Winship, of the Brookings Institution, e-mailed me. Winship voiced some concern over the reliability of the statistical data used by Burkhauser, but concluded:All that said, I think Rich’s paper is incredibly disruptive for many fields of research in labor economics and other social sciences, and potentially it could change our entire view about rising inequality over the past few decades.

Burtless continued:The problem with the authors’ estimates of accruing capital gains is that those numbers are wholly made up based on a prediction that everyone is equally successful in finding homes, stocks, bonds and other assets to invest in.  But they’re not:  Some people are wildly successful, and get into the 1%; others are horribly unsuccessful and become paupers (or receive foreclosure papers); and most earn mediocre returns that are — surprise! — a bit lower than the economy-wide average.

Burkhauser et al. measure the period from 1989 to 2007 because those are both peak years in the business cycle. This timing results in a failure to account for the consequences of the 2008-9 financial crisis and the subsequent struggle toward recovery accompanied by persistent high levels of unemployment.

During the post-crisis years 2009-11, according to the Pew Center, the wealthiest mean of the nation saw the value of their assets grow by 28 percent, to $3.17 million from $2.48 million, while the bottom 93 percent saw their net worth drop by 4 percent, to $133,816 from $139,896.

Wealth trends since the 2008 crash, shown in Figure 5, demonstrate an extraordinary growth in inequality, suggesting that Burkhauser’s findings — restricted to his carefully tailored definition of income — are fatally flawed as an instrument to assess the current real-world position of the poor and middle class compared with the very rich:

A key purpose in measuring both wealth and income is to determine what kind of standard of living is possible for those at the top, the middle and the bottom. Do individuals, families and households have enough to provide for themselves, perhaps most importantly for their children? Do they have the financial resources to enter the highly competitive global marketplace?On that score, Burkhauser’s use of “yearly accrued capital gains” fails the test of measuring what is most significant to know in policy making and in assessing the true quality of life in America.

the Republican Party and the conservative establishment is institutionally stronger than the Democratic Party, with an infrastructure that served as a bulwark through the 1960s and 70s

The right wing of the Republican Party has more disruptive potential than the left wing of the Democratic Party because it is more willing to go to extremes:

While, the rapid growth of well-financed and autonomous competitors threatens all existing power structures, the bulk of the costs are likely to fall on the Republican Party.

Republicans, in contrast to Democrats, prefer hierarchical, well-ordered organizations, and are much more willing to cede authority to those in power.

The Republican establishment has a full arsenal of weapons at its disposal, including endorsements, favored speaking engagements at key party gatherings, leverage over top consultants and a signaling process to show who has been anointed from on high.

The most powerful weapon of all was always the oversight exercised by party leaders over the flow of money to candidates

Unleashed by Citizens United, a handful of renegade billionaires made life miserable for Mitt Romney, the establishment candidate. More importantly, it only took four men — Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas and Macao casino mogul; Harold Simmons, a Dallas-based leveraged buyout specialist; Foster Friess, a conservative Christian and a successful investor; and William Dore, a Louisiana energy company C.E.O. – to stun traditional party power brokers during the first four months of 2012.

turned the primary process into an open contest, giving full voice to the more extreme wings dominated by the Tea Party and the evangelical right.

The newly empowered billionaires are positioned to challenge the Republican Party at its point of greatest vulnerability, during the primaries.

These new players, along with their super PACs, undermine the influence of the parties in another crucial way. Before Citizens United, the three major Republican Party committees exerted power because their financial preeminence gave them the final word on the award of contracts to pollsters, direct mail, voter contact, and media consultants – very few of whom were willing to alienate a key source of cash.

The ascendance of super PACs creates a separate and totally independent source of contracts for the community of political professionals. Super PACs and other independent groups already raise more than any of the political party committees and almost as much as either the Republican or Democratic Party committees raise in toto.

“Who is the Republican Party in the Citizens United age? If you had to point to the ‘Republican Party’ would you be more likely to point to Reince Preibus (and implicitly the R.N.C.) or Karl Rove (and Crossroads G.P.S.)? I think candidates might consider Rove more important.”

the diminishment of the parties means that the institutions with the single-minded goal of winning a majority will be weakened. When parties are influential, they can help keep some candidates and office holders from going off the ideological deep end. The emergence of independently financed super PACs give voice to those with the most extreme views.

If the parties are eviscerated, the political system could adjust itself and regain vitality. But I doubt it. For all their flaws, strong political parties are important to a healthy political system. The displacement of the parties by super rich men determined to flex their financial muscles is another giant step away from democracy.

there are no psychologists who specialize in exposure and response prevention, the specific kind of therapy she and many others with OCD require in order to break their crippling thought cycles.

At its worst, OCD can compel people to spend hours each day rehearsing an intricate mental dance they feel powerless to end.

Along with medication, exposure and response prevention, or ERP, therapy is the gold-standard treatment for people with OCD. It is radically different from more traditional talk therapy, which excavates patients’ childhoods or past relationships for clues to their present-day problems.

a person is forced to confront their obsessive thoughts relentlessly. The goal is to make the sufferer so accustomed to their obsessions that they no longer feel tempted to engage in soothing compulsions.

Because the symptoms can be entirely mental, it can take years for either patients or therapists to recognize OCD for what it is.

ERP teaches people, “these thoughts are meaningless, you need to learn to ignore them.”

some studies estimate it takes OCD sufferers 17 years to find proper treatment from the onset of symptoms. Seeking certain forms of talk therapy can make them worse, not better. In the meantime, some experience symptoms so debilitating they are confined to their homes.

Most moderate OCD cases get at least partly better if the patient receives two or three months of ERP.

There is no mandatory number of hours that psychologists must spend training in either cognitive-behavioral therapy or ERP, said Lynn Bufka, a psychologist with the American Psychological Association. Bufka did not know what percentage of psychotherapists provide ERP, but she suspects it’s “small.”

Between 3 and 7 million Americans suffer from OCD at some point—a substantial number, but still far fewer than the vast multitudes who seek therapy for anxiety and depression.

People obsessed with not offending God might hold a satanic ritual. Those assailed by persistent (and baseless) fears they will molest their siblings might read the incest tome Flowers in the Attic.

Access to ERP therapists is compounded by the already profound shortage of psychotherapists in rural areas. More than half of U.S. counties have no mental-health professionals at all.

ERP specialists might feel no need to take insurance, since they are so rare they often have no shortage of clients, Szymanski, of the International OCD Foundation, pointed out.

But the treatment was so expensive it contributed to the family’s decision to sell their house.

The angry white working class men who voted in such strength for Trump do not live in an emotional vacuum. They are loved by white working class women – their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers, who participate in their remaindered pain. It is everywhere in the interviews. “My dad lost his business”, “My husband hasn’t been the same since his job at the factory went away”.

Trump’s reality show crassness was another blind spot with elite liberals covering the election and running Hillary’s campaign. At every moment when the Trump tribe streamed behind him on to the convention stage or the tarmac, America saw images of a Kardashian Camelot: a phalanx of GQ men and leggy, gorgeous women following the heavy set guy who had a private 757 plane and a gold tower with his name on it.

While commentators sniggered, millions saw the all-American success they dreamed of. They rooted for the guy who had it but was despised by the elites for having it

What’s less discussed is the polarization of culture, and the new echo chambers within which we hear about and experience today’s cultural hits

There’s just about nothing as popular today as old sitcoms were; the only bits of shared culture that come close are periodic sporting events, viral videos, memes and occasional paroxysms of political outrage (see Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes speech and the aftermath).

we’re returning to the cultural era that predated radio and TV, an era in which entertainment was fragmented and bespoke, and satisfying a niche was a greater economic imperative than entertaining the mainstream.

“We’re back to normal, in a way, because before there was broadcasting, there wasn’t much of a shared culture,

Because it featured little choice, TV offered something else: the raw material for a shared culture. Television was the thing just about everyone else was watching at the same time as you. In its enforced similitude, it became a kind of social glue, stitching together a new national identity across a vast, growing and otherwise diverse nation.

“For most of the history of civilization, there was nothing like TV. It was a really odd moment in history to have so many people watching the same thing at the same time.”

As the broadcast era morphed into one of cable and then streaming, TV was transformed from a wasteland into a bubbling sea of creativity. But it has become a sea in which everyone swims in smaller schools.

Only around 12 percent of television households, or about 14 million to 15 million people, regularly tuned into “NCIS” and “The Big Bang Theory,” the two most popular network shows of the 2015-16 season, according to Nielsen. Before 2000, those ratings would not even have qualified them as Top 10 shows

HBO’s “Game of Thrones” is the biggest prestige drama on cable, but its record-breaking finale drew only around nine million viewers

Netflix’s biggest original drama last year, “Stranger Things,” was seen by about 14 million adults in the month after it first aired. “Fuller House,” Netflix’s reboot of the broadcast sitcom “Full House,” attracted an audience of nearly 16 million. (These numbers are for the entire season, not for single episodes.)

For perspective, during much of the 1980s, a broadcast show that attracted 14 million to 16 million would have been in danger of cancellation.

As people pull back from broadcast and cable TV and jump deeper into streaming, we’re bound to see more shows with smaller audiences.

It’s possible we’re not at the end of the story. Some youngsters might argue that the internet has produced its own kind of culture, one that will become a fount of shared references for years to come. What if “Chewbacca Mom” and the blue and black/white and gold dress that broke the internet one day become part of our library of globally recognized references

In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself.

All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.

Long before the Watergate break-in, gumshoeing, burglary, wiretapping and political sabotage had become a way of life in the Nixon White House.

What was Watergate? It was Nixon’s five wars.

In 1970, he approved the top-secret Huston Plan, authorizing the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of individuals identified as “domestic security threats.” The plan called for, among other things, intercepting mail and lifting restrictions on “surreptitious entry” — that is, break-ins or “black bag jobs.”

On June 17, 1971 — exactly one year before the Watergate break-in — Nixon met in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, and national security adviser Henry Kissinger. At issue was a file about former president Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the 1968 bombing halt in Vietnam.

“You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing,” Haldeman said, according to the tape of the meeting. “Yeah,” Kissinger said, “but Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together for three years.” They wanted the complete story of Johnson’s actions.

“Huston swears to God there’s a file on it at Brookings,” Haldeman said. “Bob,” Nixon said, “now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it. . . . I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. God damn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

Though Ellsberg was already under indictment and charged with espionage, the team headed by Hunt and Liddy broke into the office of his psychiatrist, seeking information that might smear Ellsberg and undermine his credibility in the antiwar movement.

“You can’t drop it, Bob,” Nixon told Haldeman on June 29, 1971. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand?”

In a July 3, 1971, conversation with Haldeman, he said: “The government is full of Jews. Second, most Jews are disloyal. You know what I mean? You have a Garment [White House counsel Leonard Garment] and a Kissinger and, frankly, a Safire [presidential speechwriter William Safire], and, by God, they’re exceptions. But Bob, generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.”

In a tape from the Oval Office on Feb. 22, 1971, Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.”

John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager and confidante, met with Liddy at the Justice Department in early 1972, when Mitchell was attorney general. Liddy presented a $1 million plan, code-named “Gemstone,” for spying and sabotage during the upcoming presidential campaign.

In Nixon’s third war, he took the weapons in place — the Plumbers, wiretapping and burglary — and deployed them against the Democrats challenging his reelection.

Operation Diamond would neutralize antiwar protesters with mugging squads and kidnapping teams; Operation Coal would funnel cash to Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a black congresswoman from Brooklyn seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, in an effort to sow racial and gender discord in the party;

Operation Opal would use electronic surveillance against various targets, including the headquarters of Democratic presidential candidates Edmund Muskie and George McGovern; Operation Sapphire would station prostitutes on a yacht, wired for sound, off Miami Beach during the Democratic National Convention.

Mitchell approved a $250,000 version, according to Jeb Magruder, the deputy campaign manager. It included intelligence-gathering on the Democrats through wiretaps and burglaries.

They discussed a secret $350,000 stash of cash kept in the White House, the possibility of using priests to help hide payments to the burglars, “washing” the money though Las Vegas or New York bookmakers, and empaneling a new grand jury so everyone could plead the Fifth Amendment or claim memory failure. Finally, they decided to send Mitchell on an emergency fundraising mission.

On Oct. 10, 1972, we wrote a story in The Post outlining the extensive sabotage and spying operations of the Nixon campaign and White House, particularly against Muskie, and stating that the Watergate burglary was not an isolated event. The story said that at least 50 operatives had been involved in the espionage and sabotage, many of them under the direction of a young California lawyer named Donald Segretti; several days later, we reported that Segretti had been hired by Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary. (The Senate Watergate committee later found more than 50 saboteurs, including 22 who were paid by Segretti.)

A favored dirty trick that caused havoc at campaign stops involved sweeping up the shoes that Muskie aides left in hotel hallways to be polished, and then depositing them in a dumpster.

In a memo to Haldeman and Mitchell dated April 12, 1972, Patrick Buchanan and another Nixon aide wrote: “Our primary objective, to prevent Senator Muskie from sweeping the early primaries, locking up the convention in April, and uniting the Democratic Party behind him for the fall, has been achieved.”

“I’d really like to get Kennedy taped,” Nixon told Haldeman in April 1971. According to Haldeman’s 1994 book, “The Haldeman Diaries,” the president also wanted to have Kennedy photographed in compromising situations and leak the images to the press.

On Sept. 8, 1971, Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to direct the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the tax returns of all the likely Democratic presidential candidates, as well as Kennedy. “Are we going after their tax returns?” Nixon asked. “You know what I mean? There’s a lot of gold in them thar hills.”

The arrest of the Watergate burglars set in motion Nixon’s fourth war, against the American system of justice. It was a war of lies and hush money, a conspiracy that became necessary to conceal the roles of top officials and to hide the president’s campaign of illegal espionage and political sabotage, including the covert operations that Mitchell described as “the White House horrors” during the Watergate hearings: the Huston Plan, the Plumbers, the Ellsberg break-in, Liddy’s Gemstone plan and the proposed break-in at Brookings.

In a June 23, 1972, tape recording, six days after the arrests at the Watergate, Haldeman warned Nixon that “on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back in the problem area, because the FBI is not under control . . . their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been able to trace the money.”

Haldeman said Mitchell had come up with a plan for the CIA to claim that national security secrets would be compromised if the FBI did not halt its Watergate investigation.

Nixon approved the scheme and ordered Haldeman to call in CIA Director Richard Helms and his deputy Vernon Walters. “Play it tough,” the president directed. “That’s the way they play it, and that’s the way we are going to play it.”

On March 21, 1973, in one of the most memorable Watergate exchanges caught on tape, Nixon met with his counsel, John W. Dean, who since the break-in had been tasked with coordinating the coverup. “We’re being blackmailed” by Hunt and the burglars, Dean reported, and more people “are going to start perjuring themselves.” “How much money do you need?” Nixon asked.

“I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years,” Dean replied. “And you could get it in cash,” the president said. “I, I know where it could be gotten. I mean, it’s not easy, but it could be done.”

Mitchell later denied approving the plan. He testified that he told Magruder: “We don’t need this. I’m tired of hearing it.” By his own account, he did not object on the grounds that the plan was illegal.

Nixon’s final war, waged even to this day by some former aides and historical revisionists, aims to play down the significance of Watergate and present it as a blip on the president’s record. Nixon lived for 20 years after his resignation and worked tirelessly to minimize the scandal.

In his 1978 memoir “RN,” Nixon addressed his role in Watergate: “My actions and omissions, while regrettable and possibly indefensible, were not impeachable.” Twelve years later, in his book “In the Arena,” he decried a dozen “myths” about Watergate and claimed that he was innocent of many of the charges made against him. One myth, he said, was that he ordered the payment of hush money to Hunt and others. Yet, the March 21, 1973, tape shows that he ordered Dean to get the money 12 times.

Even now, there are old Nixon hands and defenders who dismiss the importance of Watergate or claim that key questions remain unanswered.

By August, Nixon’s impending impeachment in the House was a certainty, and a group of Republicans led by Sen. Barry Goldwater banded together to declare his presidency over. “Too many lies, too many crimes,” Goldwater said. On Aug. 7, the group visited Nixon at the White House. How many votes would he have in a Senate trial? the president asked. “I took kind of a nose count today,” Goldwater replied, “and I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them.”

In his last remarks about Watergate as a senator, 77-year-old Sam Ervin, a revered constitutionalist respected by both parties, posed a final question: “Why was Watergate?” The president and his aides, Ervin answered, had “a lust for political power.” That lust, he explained, “blinded them to ethical considerations and legal requirements; to Aristotle’s aphorism that the good of man must be the end of politics.”

Nixon had lost his moral authority as president. His secret tapes — and what they reveal — will probably be his most lasting legacy. On them, he is heard talking almost endlessly about what would be good for him, his place in history and, above all, his grudges, animosities and schemes for revenge. The dog that never seems to bark is any discussion of what is good and necessary for the well-being of the nation.

By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise.

“Always remember,” he said, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” His hatred had brought about his downfall. Nixon apparently grasped this insight, but it was too late. He had already destroyed himself.

At Stanford more than elsewhere, the university and business forge a borderless community in which making money is considered virtuous and where participants profess a sometimes inflated belief that their work is changing the world for the better

Faculty members commonly invest in start-ups launched by their students or colleagues. There are probably more faculty millionaires at Stanford than at any other university in the world.

In his twelve years as president, Stanford’s endowment has grown to nearly seventeen billion dollars. In each of the past seven years, Stanford has raised more money than any other American university.

But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a gold-rush mentality and where the distinction between faculty and student may blur as, together, they seek both invention and fortune.

A quarter of all undergraduates and more than fifty per cent of graduate students are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are four and ten per cent; at Yale, they’re five and eight per cent.

many students uncritically incorporate the excesses of Silicon Valley, and that there are not nearly enough students devoted to the liberal arts and to the idea of pure learning. “The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” he says. “It’s in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.”

Stanford is not the only university to adopt this approach to learning—M.I.T., among others, does, too. But Kelley’s effort is widely believed to be the most audacious. His classes stress collaboration across disciplines and revolve around projects to advance social progress. The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world; sustainability; health and wellness; and K-12 education.

Feeling dejected or unhappy in a place like Stanford causes one to feel abnormal and out-of-place, so we may tend to internalize and brood over this lack of happiness instead of productively addressing the situatio

his principal academic legacy may be the growth of what’s called “interdisciplinary education.” This is the philosophy now promoted at the various schools at Stanford—engineering, business, medicine, science, design—which encourages students from diverse majors to come together to solve real or abstract problems. The goal is to have them become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines. Stanford hopes that the students can also develop the social skills to collaborate with people outside their areas of expertise. “Ten years ago, ‘interdisciplinary’ was a code word for something soft,” Jeff Koseff says. “John changed that.”

Among the bolder initiatives to create T-students is the Institute of Design at Stanford, or the d.school, which was founded seven years ago and is housed in the mechanical-engineering department.

Distance learning threatens one day to disrupt higher education by reducing the cost of college and by offering the convenience of a stay-at-home, do-it-on-your-own-time education. “Part of our challenge is that right now we have more questions than we have answers,” Hennessy says, of online education. “We know this is going to be important and, in the long term, transformative to education. We don’t really understand how yet.”

financial aid has produced a campus of diverse students who are unburdened by student debt—and who thus don’t have to spend the first five years of their career earning as much money as they can.

“The kinds of project we put in front of our students don’t have right and wrong answers,” Greenberg says. “They have good, better, and really, really better.”

he was impressed by “the bias toward action” at the d.school. Newspapers have bureaucracy, committees, hierarchies, and few engineers, he said. At the Post, “diversity” was defined by ethnicity and race. At the d.school, diversity is defined by majors—by people who think different.

Byers has kept in touch with Systrom and Krieger and remembers them as “quiet and quite humble,” by which he means that they were outstanding human beings who could get others to follow them. They were, in short, T-students.

The United States has “two types of college education that are in conflict with each other,” he said. One is “the classic liberal-arts model—four years of relative tranquility in which students are free to roam through disciplines, great thoughts, and great works with endless options and not much of a rationale.” The second is more utilitarian: “A college degree is expected to lead to a job, or at least to admission to a graduate or professional school.” The best colleges divide the first two years into introductory courses and the last two into the study of a major, all the while trying to expose students to “a broad range of disciplines and modes of thought.” Students, he declared, are not broadly educated, not sufficiently challenged to “search to know.” Instead, universities ask them to serve “the public, to work directly on solutions in a multidisciplinary way.” The danger, he went on, is “that academic researchers will not only embrace particular solutions but will fight for them in the political arena.” A university should keep to “its most fundamental purpose,” which is “the disinterested pursuit of truth.

Stanford, along with its peers, is now justifying its existence mostly in terms of what it can do for humanity and improve the world,” he answered. “I am concerned that a research-intense university will become too result-oriented,” a development that risks politicizing the university. And it also risks draining more resources from liberal arts

students spent too much time networking and strategizing and becoming “slaves to the dictates of a hoped-for future,” and too little time being spontaneous. “Stanford students are superb consequentialists—that is, we tend to measure the goodness of actions by their eventual results,

We excel at making rational calculations of expected returns to labor and investment, which is probably why so many of us will take the exhortation to occupy Wall Street quite literally after graduation. So before making any decision, we ask one, very simple question: What will I get out of it?”

“At most great universities, humanities feel like stepchildren,”

The long-term value of an education is to be found not merely in the accumulation of knowledge or skills but in the capacity to forge fresh connections between them, to integrate different elements from one’s education and experience and bring them to bear on new challenges and problems. . . . Yet we were struck by how little attention most departments and programs have given to cultivating this essential capacity. We were also surprised, and somewhat chagrined, to discover how infrequently some of our students exercise it. For all their extraordinary energy and range, many of the students we encountered lead curiously compartmentalized lives, with little integration between the different spheres of their experience.

Instead of erecting buildings, Andreessen says, Stanford should invest even more of its resources in distance learning: “We’re on the cusp of an opportunity to deliver a state-of-the-art, Stanford-calibre education to every single kid around the world. And the idea that we were going to build a physical campus to reach a tiny fraction of those kids was, to me, tragically undershooting our potential.”

In late January, a popular d.school class, Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, taught by James M. Patell, a business-school professor, consisted of thirty-seven graduate and three undergraduate students from thirteen departments, including engineering, political science, business, medicine, biology, and education. It was early in the quarter, and Patell offered the students a choice of initial projects. One was to create a monitoring system to help the police locate lost children. Another was to design a bicycle-storage system.

The “key question,” he says, is: “How can we increase efficiency without decreasing quality?”

online education might also disrupt everything that distinguishes Stanford. Could a student on a video prompter have coffee with a venture capitalist? Could one become a T-student through Web chat? Stanford has been aligned with Silicon Valley and its culture of disruption. Now Hennessy and Stanford have to seriously contemplate whether more efficiency is synonymous with a better education.

the Republican Party is dominated by doctrines formerly on the political fringe. Friedman called for monetary flexibility; today, much of the G.O.P. is fanatically devoted to the gold standard. N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University, a Romney economic adviser, once dismissed those claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves as “charlatans and cranks”; today, that notion is very close to being official Republican doctrine.

the euro zone is about to repeat history. In the absence of sufficient resources for the new federal model, the new rules about budgets (and bank capital) are going to lead to pro-cyclical fiscal and monetary policies, deepening rather than alleviating the economic contraction we are witnessing.

if David Cameron can succeed in isolating Britain from the disaster that is unfolding on the continent, he deserves only our praise.

Last month I warned that the disintegration of the European Union was more likely than the death of the euro. You now see what I meant. The course on which the continent has now embarked means not just the creation of a federal Europe, but a chronically depressed federal Europe. The Eurocrats have exchanged a Stability and Growth Pact—which was honored only in the breach—for an Austerity and Contraction Pact they intend to stick to. The United Kingdom has no option but to dissociate itself from this collective suicide pact, even if it strongly increases the probability that we shall end up outside the EU altogether.

Both Monsanto’s Vistive Gold soybeans and DuPont Pioneer’s Plenish soybeans are engineered to silence the gene for an enzyme that converts oleic fatty acid into linoleic acid. The resulting oil has very low levels of linoleic and linolenic acids, which are polyunsaturated and responsible for soybean oil’s short shelf life. By contrast, about 75 percent is oleic acid, three times the level in a conventional soybean. Oleic acid is a monounsaturated fatty acid that is the main component of olive oil.

Every sensible person, most Republican politicians included, could recognize that the shutdown fever would blow up in the party’s face. Even the shutdown’s ardent champions never advanced a remotely compelling story for how it would deliver its objectives. And everything that’s transpired since, from the party’s polling nose dive to the frantic efforts to save face, was entirely predictable in advance.

just because the Republican strategy has been irrational doesn’t make it inexplicable. The trends that brought us to this point are clear enough: the discrediting of the Republican establishment during the Bush era; the rise of a populist right that often sees opposition as an end unto itself; the willingness of too many media figures, activists and politicians to stoke that wing’s worst impulses; and the current Republican leadership’s desire both to prevent an intraparty civil war and avoid a true national disaster like default.

His campaign presents him with a cudgel to enforce tighter control over an institution that some say has drifted from the party leadership’s orbit even as it remains a bulwark of one-party rule.

Mr. Xi, unlike his immediate predecessors, took over the military and the party at the same time — in November 2012 — and brought strong P.L.A. ties. After university, he served as an aide to a top military official. His father was a revolutionary guerrilla commander. His wife is a singer in the P.L.A.'s song-and-dance troupe. Gen. Liu Yuan, the political commissar of the logistics department who is credited with helping to initiate the anticorruption drive, is among his oldest comrades.

“In a period where the whole Middle East is moving in the direction of chaos, having one area where the parties are trying to further stabilize their relationship is a positive development,” said Dore Gold, a longtime Israeli diplomat and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. “The fact that they continue to talk means these are serious discussions. Where this goes, what’s the likely outcome, I think it’s really way too early to predict.”

In contrast to previous rounds of Israeli-Palestinian talks, little has leaked from the negotiating room.

Palestinians are split, with 47 percent supporting the resumption of negotiations and 49 percent opposed, according to a September survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research; 70 percent think they will not lead to an agreement. Sixty-one percent of Israeli Jews back the talks, according to the Israel Democracy Institute’s Peace Index published this month, but 81 percent see no real chance of a deal.

“For both sides the current situation is very, very comfortable,” Mr. Beilin said. “All of us are playing the game. Many meetings, very serious, good relationship, all issues are on the agenda, fighting the lunatics on both sides, and it’s beautiful. The only problem is that there will be an end to it in the coming months, and the admission of failure might be devastating.”

“You cannot compare the present army with the army of yesterday,”

The fighting in eastern Congo is one of the world’s most intractable, prolonged and deadly conflicts, claiming millions of lives over a decade and a half. The region is rich in gold and diamonds, and minerals like coltan and cassiterite, but instead of making its people wealthy they have only tempted invaders and local warlords. Goma, a bustling commercial hub on the Rwandan border, has been plagued by violence and poverty.

Last November, hundreds of rebels, machine guns on their backs, marched into Goma, setting off a national crisis. As Congolese soldiers retreated, they raped more than 102 women and 33 girls, some as young as 6, according to United Nations investigators. Riots erupted across Congo, even in the capital, Kinshasa, a thousand miles away, threatening the government of President Joseph Kabila.

But not until the Spanish conquest of Peru was the conquest of the Aztecs matched in scope by the victory over the Inca empire in 1532.

A second (and permanent) settlement was established in 1580 by Juan de Garay, who arrived by sailing down the Paraná River from Asunción (now the capital of Paraguay). He dubbed the settlement "Santísima Trinidad" and its port became "Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires." The city came to be the head of the Governorate of the Río de la Plata and in 1776 elevated to be the capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.

Spain's administration of its colonies in the Americas was divided into the Viceroyalty of New Spain 1535 (capital, México City), and the Viceroyalty of Peru 1542 (capital, Lima). In the 18th century the additional Viceroyalty of New Granada 1717 (capital, Bogotá), and Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata 1776 (capital, Buenos Aires) were established from portions of the Viceroyalty of Peru.

During the Napoleonic Peninsular War in Europe between France and Spain, assemblies called juntas were established to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII of Spain

The Libertadores (Spanish and Portuguese for "Liberators") were the principal leaders of the Spanish American wars of independence. They were predominantly criollos (Americas-born people of European ancestry, mostly Spanish or Portuguese), bourgeois and influenced by liberalism and in some cases with military training in the mother country.

These began a movement for colonial independence that spread to Spain's other colonies in the Americas. The ideas from the French and the American Revolution influenced the efforts. All of the colonies, except Cuba and Puerto Rico, attained independence by the 1820s

In 1898, the United States won victory in the Spanish–American War from Spain, ending the Spanish colonial era

It has been estimated that in the 16th century about 240,000 Spaniards emigrated to the Americas, and in the 17th century about 500,000, predominantly to Mexico and Peru.

The population of the Native Amerindian population in Mexico declined by an estimated 90% (reduced to 1–2.5 million people) by the early 17th century. In Peru the indigenous Amerindian pre-contact population of around 6.5 million declined to 1 million by the early 17th century.[citation needed] The overwhelming cause of decline in both Mexico and Peru was infectious diseases.

The Spaniards were committed, by Royal decree, to convert their New World indigenous subjects to Catholicism. However, often initial efforts were questionably successful, as the indigenous people added Catholicism into their longstanding traditional ceremonies and beliefs. The many native expressions, forms, practices, and items of art could be considered idolatry and prohibited or destroyed by Spanish missionaries, military and civilians. This included religious items, sculptures and jewelry made of gold or silver, which were melted down before shipment to Spain.