Group items tagged

Kerry’s first foreign-policy speech as secretary, an hour-long defense of diplomacy and foreign aid, was a flop.

The nearly universal expectation was that Kerry’s tenure would be overshadowed by his predecessor’s, for a long list of reasons.

arriving in Foggy Bottom when the country seemed to be withdrawing from the world. Exhausted by two long wars, Americans were wary of ambitious new foreign engagements—certainly of military ones, but of entangling diplomatic ones, too

For many years, Rosen has been a leading critic of what he calls The View From Nowhere, or the conceit that journalists bring no prior commitments to their work. On his long-running blog, PressThink, he's advocated for "The View From Somewhere"—an effort by journalists to be transparent about their priors, whether ideological or otherwise.  Rosen is just one of several voices who'll shape NewCo. Still, the new venture may well be a practical test of his View from Somewhere theory of journalism. I chatted with Rosen about some questions he'll face. 

The View from Nowhere won’t be a requirement for our journalists. Nor will a single ideology prevail. NewCo itself will have a view of the world: Accountability journalism, exposing abuses of power, revealing injustices will no doubt be part of it. Under that banner many “views from somewhere” can fit.

The way "objectivity" evolves historically is out of something much more defensible and interesting, which is in that phrase "Of No Party or Clique." That's the founders of The Atlantic saying they want to be independent of party politics. They don't claim to have no politics, do they? They simply say: We're not the voice of an existing faction or coalition. But they're also not the Voice of God.

The US National Security Agency has spied on French diplomats in Washington and at the UN, according to the latest claims in Le Monde newspaper.

US spies allegedly hacked foreign networks, introducing the spyware into the software, routers and firewalls of millions of machines.

NSA tapped millions of phones in France.

Migrant crisis: EU ministers attempt to resolve quota row

European Union ministers are meeting to try to resolve a dispute over how to relocate 120,000 asylum seekers who have recently arrived in Europe.

Who are the 120,000?

we Americans are waddling toward the moment when calorie counts like the ones at Lenny’s are posted in every chain restaurant across the nation.

As part of the Affordable Care Act, any restaurant in America with at least 20 locations must follow

the American Medical Association voted to classify obesity as a disease

According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the pullback in spending by Washington — it declined in 2013 for an extraordinary second year in a row — together with higher taxes will cause the economy to grow by 1.5 percentage points less this year than it would have if the deficit had remained constant

that’s the equivalent of 1.5 million fewer jobs.

the lack of a thoughtful budgeting process in Congress has shifted priorities in unfortunate ways.

There are lots of ways water in the West is being mismanaged: farming subsidies for water-intensive crops; arcane laws encouraging waste; leaky infrastructure. But none may be more significant than refusing to accept the fact that the West’s water resources are interconnected.

Willingly overlooking that fact amounts to a fundamental failure of water management that has left states more vulnerable to drought and less prepared to adapt to the effects of climate change. Moreover, it has left them blind to an honest accounting of their total supply. How can anyone plan for the future if there isn’t agreement about something as basic as how much water there actually is?

In much of California and Arizona — two of the states with arguably the most severe water crises and water management challenges in the nation — state and local authorities continue to count the sources of water as if they were entirely separate, two distinct bank accounts.

Turks head to the polls on June 7, as the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) hope to achieve enough seats to implement a new constitution that would increase the powers of the Turkish president.

e most likely scenario appears to be a narrow majority (at least 276 parliamentary seats) for the AKP, enough to form a government but not enough to proceed unilaterally with constitutional changes. A 330-seat majority, which would allow the AKP to push a new constitution through parliament and take it to a popular referendum, is considered less likely

e most likely scenario appears to be a narrow majority (

Ukraine’s president has warned his army to be ready to repel a “full scale” Russian invasion, as fears mount of a return to all out warfare in eastern Ukraine.

At least 26 people were killed and dozens wounded on Wednesday when Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatists fought a fierce battle on the outskirts of the separatist stronghold of Donetsk on Wednesday, in the most serious bout of fighting since a haphazardly observed ceasefire came into force in February.

Mr Poroshenko claimed there were already 9,000 Russian troops in separatist-held territory inside Ukraine, and said their was a “colossal threat” that Russian-backed forces would launch large scale operations in the near future. Russia denies deploying troops to east Ukraine.

A major battle has erupted on the western edge of the main separatist rebel stronghold in eastern Ukraine, leaving more than a dozen people dead and threatening to tip the country back into full-blown war.

Implementation of the ceasefire sealed in Belarus in February has foundered amid a proliferation of low-intensity battles that have now been overshadowed by developments in Marinka.

Yatsenyuk urged the leaders’ meeting at the G7 summit in Germany this weekend to condemn Russia. “The international community must come up with a correct and appropriate response to Russian aggression,” Yatsenyuk said.

In early 2009, the United States was engaged in an intense public debate over a proposed $800 billion stimulus bill designed to boost economic activity through government borrowing and spending. James Buchanan, Edward Prescott, Vernon Smith, and Gary Becker, all Nobel laureates in economics, argued that while the stimulus might be an important emergency measure, it would fail to improve economic performance. Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, on the other hand, argued that the stimulus would improve the economy and indeed that it should be bigger. Fierce debates can be found in frontier areas of all the sciences, of course, but this was as if, on the night before the Apollo moon launch, half of the world’s Nobel laureates in physics were asserting that rockets couldn’t reach the moon and the other half were saying that they could. Prior to the launch of the stimulus program, the only thing that anyone could conclude with high confidence was that several Nobelists would be wrong about it.

we have no reliable way to measure counterfactuals—that is, to know what would have happened had we not executed some policy—because so many other factors influence the outcome. This seemingly narrow problem is central to our continuing inability to transform social sciences into actual sciences. Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study—that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs.

recognition of our ignorance should lead us to two important, though tentative and imprecise, conclusions. First, we should treat anybody who states definitively that the result of stimulus policy X will be economic outcome Y with extreme skepticism. And weaseling about the magnitude of the predicted impact such that all outcomes within the purported range of uncertainty still magically lead to the same policy conclusion doesn’t count; we should recognize that we don’t even know at the most basic level whether stimulus works or not. Second, “boldness” in the face of ignorance should not be seen in heroic terms. It is a desperate move taken only when other options are exhausted, and with our eyes open to the fact that we are taking a wild risk. Actual science can allow us to act on counterintuitive predictions with confidence--who would think intuitively that it’s a smart idea to get into a heavy metal tube and then go 30,000 feet up into the air? But we don’t have this kind of knowledge about a stimulus policy. We are walking into a casino and putting $800 billion dollars down on a single bet in a game where we don’t even know the rules. In general, in the face of this kind of uncertainty, we ought to seek policy interventions that are as narrowly targeted as is consistent with addressing the problem; tested prior to implementation to whatever extent possible; hedged on multiple dimensions; and designed to be as reversible as is practicable. What I am trying to describe here is not a policy per se, but an attitude of epistemic humility.

That we all agreed about the moral ugliness of the bailouts should have led us to implementing new and powerful regulatory mechanisms.  The financial overhaul bill that passed congress in July certainly fell well short of what would be necessary to head-off the next crisis.  Clearly, political deal-making and the influence of Wall Street over our politicians is part of the explanation for this failure; but the failure also expressed continuing disagreement about the nature of the free market.  In pondering this issue I want to, again, draw on the resources of Georg W.F. Hegel

the primary topic of his practical philosophy was analyzing the exact point where modern individualism and the essential institutions of modern life meet. 

The “Phenomenology” is a philosophical portrait gallery that presents depictions, one after another, of different, fundamental ways in which individuals and societies have understood themselves.  Each self-understanding has two parts: an account of how a particular kind of self understands itself and, then, an account of the world that the self considers its natural counterpart.  Hegel narrates how each formation of self and world collapses because of a mismatch between self-conception and how that self conceives of the larger world.  Hegel thinks we can see how history has been driven by misshapen forms of life in which the self-understanding of agents and the worldly practices they participate in fail to correspond. 

A catastrophic risk, in the policy-relevant sense, is a very low (or unknown but believed to be low) probability of a very large loss. If the probability of loss is high, strenuous efforts will be made to avert it or mitigate its consequences. But if the probability is believed to be very low, the proper course to take will be difficult, both as a matter of sound policy and as a political matter (to which I return in the last paragraph of this comment), to determine and implement. The relevant cost is the catastrophic loss if it occurs discounted (multiplied) by the probability of its occurring. If that probability is believed to be very low, the expected cost may be reckoned to be low even if, should the loss occur, it would be catastrophic. And if the expected cost is low but the cost of prevention is high, then doing nothing to prevent the risk from materializing may be the optimal course of (in)action.

Politicians have limited time horizons. If the annual probability of some catastrophe is 1 percent, and a politician’s horizon is 5 years, he will be reluctant to support significant expenditures to reduce the likelihood or magnitude of the catastrophe, because to do so would involve supporting either higher taxes or a reallocation of government expenditures from services that provide immediate benefits to constituents.

Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.

“The deal became largely worthless within months of its creation,” The Journal added. “As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits.”

the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case demanded that the S.E.C. explain how such serious securities fraud could end with the defendant neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing

As the economic slump that began in 2007 persists, the question on everyone’s minds is obvious: Why? Unless we have a better understanding of the causes of the crisis, we can’t implement an effective recovery strategy. And, so far, we have neither.

To understand what needs to be done, we have to understand the economy’s problems before the crisis hit.

America and the world were victims of their own success. Rapid productivity increases in manufacturing had outpaced growth in demand, which meant that manufacturing employment decreased. Labor had to shift to services.

“It became very clear to me that I could use Uber and have the kind of life I wanted,” he said. “I feel like I found a way to take the best parts of my New York lifestyle, and incorporate them in L.A.”

Mr. O’Connell is part of a growing contingent of urbanites who have made Ubering (it’s as much a verb as “Googling”) an indispensable part of their day and especially their night life. Untethered from their vehicles, Angelenos are suddenly free to drink, party and walk places.

Taxis here were often unreliable, he added, but ride shares are always just a swipe away.

As a historian, I was influenced by E. H. Carr’s thinking about the past and present as part of a continuum that stretches into the future. In What is History? (1961), Carr argued that concern with the future is what really motivates the study of the past. As a teacher and political activist, I also strongly believe that schools should promote active citizenship as essential for maintaining a democratic society.

in an effort to survive, the NCSS has largely abandoned its commitment to these ideas, twisting itself into a pretzel to adapt to national Common Core standards and to satisfy influential conservative organizations that they are not radical, or even liberal. I suspect, but cannot document, that the organization’s membership has precipitously declined during the past two decades and it has increasingly depended financial support for its conferences and publications from deep-pocketed traditional and rightwing groups who advertise and have display booths.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Since the introduction of NCLB, there has been a steady reduction in the amount of time spent in the teaching of social studies, with the most profound decline noticed in the elementary grades.”

The bill's impact dramatically affects the fundamental regulatory process, so that nearly every type of protective regulation is vulnerable. As a result, the RAA is opposed by groups who advocate on a variety of issues, ranging from consumer safety and financial reform to food safety and worker rights.

Years pass between the time a rule is proposed and its implementation.

You might want to call this the first in what we expect to be a long list of "zombie bills" — retreads of bills which failed to become law in previous years, but have been resurrected one more time. These legislative proposals harm science-informed policy, jeopardizing public health, safety and the environment.

America and the Torture Debate

history shows that governments tend to overreact or act badly when they are attacked or threatened

It kept citizens perpetually in fear of known and unknown threats, and so in blind awe of the ever-expanding security state within a state.