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katyshannon

Julian Assange says he'll surrender if U.N. rules against him - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...julian-assange-investigation

julian assange un court rules politics US crisis wikileaks

shared by katyshannon on 05 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may at last leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been holed up for three and a half years.
  • But even though he may leave with the support of a United Nations working group, he is still likely to be arrested in Britain on sex crime charges for alleged crimes in Sweden that date back several years.
  • Assange had said he would surrender to British police for arrest Friday if the U.N. group ruled he had not been unlawfully detained. However, any judgment by the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention would be only a "moral recommendation" and would not be legally binding.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The U.N. working group is believed to have decided that Assange is being unlawfully detained, according to the Press Association, a British news organization. The decision is scheduled to be published Friday.
  • Whatever the U.N. group decides, it won't affect how Swedish authorities look at Assange's case. Nor will it necessarily affect what police in London will do.
  • The Swedes issued an arrest warrant for Assange on sex crime allegations unrelated to WikiLeaks in 2010. Assange was in London at the time, and as he fought to have the warrant dismissed, Ecuador granted him political asylum. He's been living in the embassy since June 2012.
  • The Swedish prosecutors' statement noted a May 2015 court ruling that Assange "should still be detained" and that Ecuadorian officials haven't allowed Swedish authorities to interview him.
  • London police ended their 24-hour guard of the Ecuadorian Embassy in October, saying it was no longer "proportionate."
  • Assange said he submitted a complaint to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention about his case in 2014. Justice For Assange, a site set up to fight for his release, said the panel is expected to rule this week on whether Assange's detention arbitrarily deprived him of his liberty -- in other words, whether it is illegal.
  • But Assange added that if the panel ruled in his favor, "I expect the immediate return of my passport and the termination of further attempts to arrest me."The Australian has not been charged and has denied the rape claim. He says it is retaliation for WikiLeaks having released thousands of pages of government secrets.He has said he fears Sweden would extradite him to the United States, where he could face the death penalty if he is charged and convicted of publishing those documents.
  • In his appeal to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Assange said his confinement has deprived him of access to fresh air, sunlight and adequate medical care. He says he is subject to round-the-clock surveillance and remains in a constant state of insecurity.
  • In other instances of detention, the U.N. working group called for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar after years of house arrest. The group has also ruled for the release of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy, but he remains in prison.
Javier E

What Is "Legitimacy" Good For? - 0 views

mailchi.mp/...what-is-legitimacy-good-for

legitimacy government effects power

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • I want to say a word in favor of the idea of legitimacy.
  • The law almost always follows reality and public opinion. Laws that don't have the support of the governed get contested, ignored, or changed. This isn't a value judgment. It's just the truth. Deserve's got nothin' to do with it.
  • I think we undervalue the idea of legitimacy at our peril.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • My buddy Kevin Williamson had a line yesterday kind of poo-pooing the idea of legitimacy, saying “legitimacy” is magic.
  • Except that I think this is true. Legitimacy is magic.
  • "Smoke from the volcano, divine right of kings, democratic elections all come down to the same thing," Lockwood had said to Julian one night, out on the campaign trail. "One man gets anointed and everybody else says, 'Right! He's got the Magic.'" .
  • He made decisions and let Julian make sure that the cabinet and the rest of the hierarchy took care of the details. What was important in the presidency were the very things Julian dismissed as superfluous: ceremony, symbolism, tone, ritual appearance--in short, the Magic.
  • I think this is right. And the Magic is, like any other norm or tradition, so obvious that we can be fooled into thinking it doesn't matter. Right up until the moment it's broken, at which point we realize how important it was.
katherineharron

Julián Castro says he'll end presidential bid if he doesn't raise $800,000 by... - 0 views

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

election

shared by katherineharron on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Julián Castro announced Monday in an email to supporters that his presidential campaign needs to raise $800,000 by the end of October or he will end his 2020 bid.
  • The fundraising tactic is a last-ditch effort for a candidate who has struggled to raise money for much of his campaign; he entered the fourth quarter of 2019 with less than $700,000 in the bank. In the email, the former Housing and Urban Development secretary writes that the donations are needed to help him qualify for November's Democratic debate, something he has failed to do so far.
  • "I'm asking you to fight for me like never before," Castro says in the email. "If I don't meet this deadline, I won't have the resources to keep my campaign running. I'm counting on your $5 in this critical moment."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • He adds: "This isn't a fundraising gimmick — it's the transparency and honesty I have promised you since I entered this race. The truth is, for our campaign, these debates have offered our only guaranteed opportunity to share my vision with the American people. If I can't make the next debate stage, we cannot sustain a campaign that can make it to Iowa in February."
  • Castro actually has met the fundraising threshold to qualify for the fifth debate. However, he has failed to reach the polling threshold.
  • "Our campaign is facing its biggest challenge yet," campaign manager Maya Rupert said in a statement. "Secretary Castro has run a historic campaign that has changed the nature of the 2020 election and pushed the Democratic party on a number of big ideas. Unfortunately, we do not see a path to victory that doesn't include making the November debate stage—and without a significant uptick in our fundraising, we cannot make that debate."
abbykleman

WikiLeaks, D.N.C. Hacks and Julian Assange's Years-Old Vision - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sange-wikileaks-dnc-hacks.html

shared by abbykleman on 09 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 09 Jan 17
     
    But what's up with Mr. Assange, who seems equally comfortable being a hero of the American left as he is being one of the American right, or even of Russian Putinists? What does he want, anyway? The answer has been in front of us all along.
Javier E

How Trump got his party to love Russia - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...p-got-his-party-to-love-russia

trump russia foreign policy subversion conservative anti-Communist

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • In July 2014, four months after Putin annexed Crimea, only 10 percent of Republicans held a favorable opinion of Russia’s president, according to an Economist/YouGov poll. Today, that figure is 37 percent.
  • A recent poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that, while 65 percent of Americans support a congressional inquiry into Russian election interference, a narrow majority (51 percent ) of Republicans oppose it.
  • 82 percent of Hillary Clinton voters want to maintain sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to its meddling, while only 16 percent of Trump voters do.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Now that Russia has dropped its official atheism and anti-capitalism, claiming to be the protector of traditional values and Christendom, a growing number of American conservatives are receptive to Trump’s Russian rapprochement.
  • Though the opportunists outnumber the ideologues, it’s the true believers who could pose the greatest damage to U.S. foreign policy over the long term. Their proposed strategic realignment with Moscow, predicated upon shared opposition to vaguely defined “Islamic terrorism,” is seductive but wrong: Far from being a potential partner in the fight against Islamic terrorism, Russia does much to stoke it.
  • last summer, while rationalizing Trump’s unprecedented vow not to defend NATO allies unless they “pay us,” Gingrich said of tiny, vulnerable Estonia (one of the few NATO members to meet the alliance’s recommended defense budget threshold) that he was “not sure I would risk a nuclear war over some place which is the suburbs of St. Petersburg.
  • The need to defend Trump’s victory at any cost has induced conservatives to praise a virulently anti-American anarchist, who is probably in cahoots with Russian intelligence, and whose head they once called for.
  • Pro-Russian converts on the American right appear to take two forms. The opportunists simply want power and are willing to sacrifice principles in pursuit of it. The ideologues, meanwhile, see Russia as nothing worse than an occasional nuisance, if not a potential ally in the fight against Islamic extremism.
  • In an interview recorded more than 30 years ago, Russian defector Yuri Bezmenov revealed the KGB’s counterintuitive approach to recruiting. “This was my instruction: Try to get into large-circulation, established conservative media. Reach . . . cynical, egocentric people who can look into your eyes with angelic expression and tell you a lie. These are the most recruit-able people, people who lack moral principles, who are either too greedy or suffer from self-importance.” Say this for Bezmenov: He knew his mark.
Javier E

National Review - 0 views

link.nationalreview.com/...6af317aa

conservatism gop trump principles crisis

shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • There must have been some memo I didn’t get, announcing that Republicans don’t care about press conferences, tax returns, payments from foreign governments, financial disclosure, or Julian Assange leaking classified information anymore. Or some revision emphasizing that we only care about these things when Democrats are involved.
  • Javier E on 05 Jan 17
     
    I Guess We're Just Not Going to Make a Fuss About That!
Javier E

Can Jeremy Grantham Profit From Ecological Mayhem? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...it-from-ecological-mayhem.html

ecological prediction resources scarcity historical economic trends growth Malthus capitalism crisis investment

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Energy “will give us serious and sustained problems” over the next 50 years as we make the transition from hydrocarbons — oil, coal, gas — to solar, wind, nuclear and other sources, but we’ll muddle through to a solution to Peak Oil and related challenges. Peak Everything Else will prove more intractable for humanity. Metals, for instance, “are entropy at work . . . from wonderful metal ores to scattered waste,” and scarcity and higher prices “will slowly increase forever,” but if we scrimp and recycle, we can make do for another century before tight constraint kicks in.
  • Agriculture is more worrisome. Local water shortages will cause “persistent irritation” — wars, famines. Of the three essential macro nutrient fertilizers, nitrogen is relatively plentiful and recoverable, but we’re running out of potassium and phosphorus, finite mined resources that are “necessary for all life.” Canada has large reserves of potash (the source of potassium), which is good news for Americans, but 50 to 75 percent of the known reserves of phosphate (the source of phosphorus) are located in Morocco and the western Sahara. Assuming a 2 percent annual increase in phosphorus consumption, Grantham believes the rest of the world’s reserves won’t last more than 50 years, so he expects “gamesmanship” from the phosphate-rich.
  • he rates soil erosion as the biggest threat of all. The world’s population could reach 10 billion within half a century — perhaps twice as many human beings as the planet’s overtaxed resources can sustainably support, perhaps six times too many.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • most economists see global trade as a win-win proposition, but resource limitation turns it into a win-lose, zero-sum contest. “The faster China grows, the higher grain prices go, the more people in China or India who upgrade to meat, the higher the tendency for Africa to starve,” he said.
  • Grantham argues that the late-18th-century doomsayer Thomas Malthus pretty much got it right but just had the bad timing to make his predictions about unsustainable population growth on the eve of the hydrocarbon-fueled Industrial Revolution, which “partially removed the barriers to rapid population growth, wealth and scientific progress.” That put off the inevitable for a couple of centuries, but now, ready or not, the age of cheap hydrocarbons is ending. Grantham’s July letter concludes: “We humans have the brains and the means to reach real planetary sustainability. The problem is with us and our focus on short-term growth and profits, which is likely to cause suffering on a vast scale. With foresight and thoughtful planning, this suffering is completely avoidable.”
  • Grantham, the public face of a company that manages more than $100 billion in assets, the very embodiment of a high-finance insider in blue blazer and yellow tie, has serious doubts about capitalism’s ability to address the biggest problems facing humanity.
  • When he reminds us that modern capitalism isn’t equipped to handle long-range problems or tragedies of the commons (situations like overfishing or global warming, in which acting rationally in your own self-interest only deepens the harm to all), when he urges us to outgrow our touching faith in the efficiency of markets and boundless human ingenuity, and especially when he says that a wise investor can prosper in the coming hard times, his bad news and its silver lining come with a built-in answer to the skeptical question that Americans traditionally pose to egghead Cassandras: If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?
  • Grantham believes that the best approach may be to recast global warming, which depresses crop yields and worsens soil erosion, as a factor contributing to resource depletion. “People are naturally much more responsive to finite resources than they are to climate change,” he said. “Global warming is bad news. Finite resources is investment advice.”
  • “Americans are just about the worst at dealing with long-term problems, down there with Uzbekistan,” he said, “but they respond to a market signal better than almost anyone. They roll the dice bigger and quicker than most.”
  • “E.D.F. is educating people that dealing with climate change will be good for the economy and job creation. One of Jeremy’s insights is that we can make headway on the market side because higher commodity prices will enforce greater efficiency.”
  • Grantham says that corporations respond well to this message because they are “persuaded by data,” but American public opinion is harder to move, and contemporary American political culture is practically dataproof. “The politicians are the worst,” he said. “An Indian economist once said to me, ‘We have 28 political parties, and they all think climate change is important.’ ” Whatever the precise number of parties in India, and it depends on how you count, his point was that the U.S. has just two that matter, one that dismisses global warming as a hoax and one that now avoids the subject.
  • Grantham, who says that “this time it’s different are the four most dangerous words in the English language,” has become a connoisseur of bubbles. His historical study of more than 300 of them shows the same pattern occurring again and again. A bump in sales or some other impressive development causes people to get excited. When they do, the price of that asset class — South Sea company shares, dot-coms — goes up, and human nature and the financial industry conspire to push it higher. People want to hear good news; they tend to be bad with numbers and uncertainty, and to assume that present conditions will persist. In the financial industry, the imperative to minimize career risk produces herd behavior.
  • So it’s news when Grantham, who has built his career on the conviction that peaks and troughs will even out as prices inevitably revert to their historical mean, says that this time it really is different, and not in a good way. In his April letter, “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever,” he argued that “we are in the midst of one of the giant inflection points in economic history.” The market is “sending us the Mother of all price signals,” warning us that “if we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash.”
  • here’s the short version: “The prices of all important commodities except oil declined for 100 years until 2002, by an average of 70 percent. From 2002 until now, this entire decline was erased by a bigger price surge than occurred during World War II. Statistically, most commodities are now so far away from their former downward trend that it makes it very probable that the old trend has changed — that there is in fact a Paradigm Shift — perhaps the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution.”
  • When prices go up and stay up, it’s not a bubble. Prices may always revert to the mean, but the mean can change; that’s a paradigm shift. As Grantham tells it, oil went first. For a century it steadily returned to about $16 a barrel in today’s currency, then in 1974 the mean shifted to about $35, and Grantham believes it has recently doubled again. Metals and nearly everything else — coal, corn, palm oil, soybeans, sugar, cotton — appear to be following suit. “From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives,” he argues. “The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.”
  • Grantham is taking the Malthusian side in an ongoing debate about growth and commodity prices­. The argument often circles back to the bet made in 1980 between the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who foretold catastrophic scarcity caused by overpopulation, and the economist Julian Simon, who argued that any short-term increase in resource prices caused by population growth will stimulate inventors and entrepreneurs to find new ways to exploit those resources, lowering prices in the long run. The two men picked five commodities and wagered on whether their prices, taken as an indicator of scarcity, would be higher or lower in 1990. Simon won, 5-0, even though the world’s population grew by 800 million during that decade. Malthusians have been trying to live down that defeat ever since, but, as Grantham points out in his July letter, if we extend the original bet past its arbitrary 10-year limit to the present day, Ehrlich wins the five-commodity bet 4-1, and he wins big if the bet is further extended to all important commodities.
  • He’s an impassioned environmentalist not only for the usual reasons but also because he believes humanity’s vexed relationship with the planet is the great economic story of our time. “This commodities thing may turn out to be the most interesting call of my career,” he told me. “I have no doubt we’re going to have a bad hundred years. We have the resources to gracefully handle the transition, but we won’t. We apparently can’t.”
  • “Whether the stable population will be 1.5 billion or 5 billion,” he said to me, “the question is: How do we get there?”
Javier E

Opinion | It's Not the Collusion, It's the Corruption - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mueller-report-corruption.html

trump crisis threat democracy report governance politics

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • The Mueller report is like a legal version of a thriller movie in which three malevolent forces are attacking a city all at once. Everybody’s wondering if the three attackers are working together. The report concludes that they weren't, but that doesn’t make the situation any less scary or the threat any less real
  • The first force is Donald Trump, who represents a threat to the American systems of governance
  • I don’t know if his actions meet the legal standard of obstruction of justice, but they certainly meet the common-sense standard of interference with justice.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The second force is Russia. If Trump is a threat to the institutional infrastructure, the Russians are a threat to our informational infrastructure.
  • The third force is Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. They are a threat to our deliberative infrastructure. Any organization needs to be able to hold private conversations in order to deliberate
  • it shows that many of the Trumpists, the Russians and the WikiLeaks crowd all understood that they were somehow adjacent actors in the same project.
  • It’s easy to recognize when you are attacked head-on. But the U.S. is being attacked from below, at the level of the foundations we take for granted.
  • that’s the report’s central importance. We are being threatened in a very distinct way. The infrastructure of the society is under threat — the procedures that shape government, the credibility of information, the privacy rules that make deliberation possible.
  • These forces are motivated by self-interest, but their common feature is an operational nihilism. They are trying to sow disorder at the foundation of society. The goal is not really to convert anybody to a cause; it is to create cynicism and disruption that will open up the space to grab what you want to grab.
  • They rig the system and then tell everybody, “The system is rigged!” And therefore, all values are suspended. Everything is permitted.
  • today, across society, two things are happening: Referees are being undermined, and many are abandoning their own impartiality. (Think of the Wall Street regulators, the Supreme Court, the Senate committee chairmen, even many of us in the blessed media.)
  • The Mueller report indicates that Trump was not colluding with Russia. But it also shows that working relationships were beginning to be built
  • In all societies there are rules defining good conduct, and there are supposed to be impartial, honest referees that enforce those rules and make sure the game is fair.
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...ting-nikki-haley-1212661827918

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley
  • President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The planned sanctions were an attempt to punish Russia for its support of Syrian President Bashar Assad after a chemical weapons attack earlier this month. {"1222314563954":{"mpxId":"1222314563954","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Positive","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","description":"Daughter of former New York Gov. 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  • Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. 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  • ...1 more annotation...
  • North Korea to close down nuclear test site in May
Javier E

Don't fall for the doomsday predictions - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html

abundance index population prices carbon-pricing crisis

shared by Javier E on 26 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • few wrong ideas have been more persistent than the fear of too many people
  • In a famous 1980 wager, Simon bet an author of “The Population Bomb,” Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich, that resources would actually become more plentiful, not less, as the population grew
  • he won the bet: In a little more than 10 years, the price of a representative set of commodities fell by more than half — a clear signal that supply was outstripping demand.
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  • Gale L. Pooley and Marian L. Tupy extend the results of the bet a quarter-century to the latest data available, while offering a more sophisticated tool for measuring what they call the Simon Abundance Index.
  • In brief, they calculate the cost of commodities by how much time it takes a typical global worker to earn enough money to buy them. The index determines prosperity or shortage at ground level: in the lived experiences of actual human beings.
  • Measured by global average hourly income, the price of a representative basket of 50 key commodities — food, energy, minerals and so forth — fell by nearly two-thirds between when the bet was made and 2017
  • Measured by the time it takes to buy the basket, the Earth’s resources have become 380 percent more abundant as the human population grew by 69 percent.
  • resources grew “because” of the rise in population.
  • We think we know the limits of our resources until human brains discover ways to burst those limits.
  • Take, for example, the pressing issue of water supplies — a current concern of population catastrophists. In water-stressed places from Israel to Singapore to Las Vegas, human brains are deploying a wide variety of technologies to efficiently desalinate seawater or effectively recycle wastewater, thereby increasing the available resource
  • These advances don’t happen by magic. They happen through price signals. When a resource grows expensive, creative people figure out how to find more, create more or use less
  • Romer points us to the tremendous potential of a tax on carbon as the best available weapon against climate change. The tax — which could be refunded in the form of subsidies for green upgrades at home and work — is the necessary price signal to unleash the full creative powers of human ingenuity.
  • all around us, if we will look past fear to facts, we see evidence of abundance. And we can continue to have more of it for more people, if we treasure and nurture the most precious of our renewable resources: ourselves and our fellow human beings.
ecfruchtman

Trump adviser Roger Stone repeatedly claimed to know of forthcoming WikiLeaks dumps - 0 views

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

shared by ecfruchtman on 20 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 20 Apr 17
     
    In the final months of the 2016 campaign, longtime Donald Trump associate Roger Stone repeatedly discussed his backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and claimed knowledge of forthcoming leaks from the group, a CNN KFile review of his public statements shows.
anonymous

Chinese Ship Deployment Roils South China Sea : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ployment-roils-south-china-sea

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • China has provoked international alarm by massing ships in the South China Sea near a reef claimed by both China and the Philippines. This week, Manila formally protested what it called a violation of "its sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction." The United States and Western allies backed the Philippine call for China to immediately withdraw what appears to be a flotilla of fishing vessels.
  • Satellite imagery obtained by NPR from Maxar Technologies shows Chinese vessels moored in the crook of the boomerang-shaped coral bar known as Whitsun Reef — also called Julian Filipe Reef in the Philippines and Niu'e Jiao in China. It lies 175 nautical miles west of the western Philippine province of Palawan, well within the country's 200-mile exclusive economic zone.
  • The images show Chinese boats, some lashed 10 abreast together, lingering in the waters of the reef that lies just beneath the surface. The Philippine coast guard reported spotting 220 vessels on March 7
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • China claims much of the South China Sea for itself and has built several artificial islands, as have some of the other claimants to the contested waters. But the scale of China's building far exceeds that of other countries, and this latest move has drawn international concern. It's raised fears that China perhaps aims to occupy and reclaim Whitsun Reef while intimidating its regional rivals.
  • Gregory Poling says that's suspicious. Poling runs the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. He says the boats, tied up "with military precision" beside each other, "are not fishing," they're parked.
  • The reef where the Chinese ships are massed lies on the northern edge of a larger atoll known as Union Banks, inside the sprawling Spratly Islands chain, known for its disputed ownership. Historically Union Banks has been a fishing ground for Filipino fishermen.
  • Poling says Whitsun Reef lies within a mile of two of existing Chinese bases and four small Vietnamese outposts. "So, it's a pretty congested area," he says. "And for China, it seems like they are now using Whitsun Reef as an anchorage, a safe place to harbor around this bigger area called Union Banks."
  • The Chinese have denied they are up to anything unusual and said that its "fishing vessels" were merely sheltering from "rough seas." Batongbacal says there have been no "adverse weather conditions" in the area in the weeks the Chinese have been there.
  • Today the reef is China's biggest outpost in the South China Sea. Mischief sits on the eastern edge of the seven artificial islands China has built in the Spratly archipelago.
  • Batongbacal says back then, China said that it was using the reef to shelter fishermen. By 2015, he says the Chinese had built one of the world's largest artificial islands, which "now hosts a full-blown military base," all protected by "missile emplacements."
  • Whitsun is unlikely to become another artificial island, believes Poling. "China's goal is to control the water, the seabed, the airspace. And so they don't really need an eighth outpost to do that. What they need is an overwhelming dominance when it comes to the number of vessels in the Spratlys," he says.
  • Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also claim parts of the South China Sea. China's claims to nearly all of the waters were rejected by a ruling in a tribunal at the Hague in 2016.Poling says to assert its vast claim, Beijing increasingly uses its fishing fleet as a maritime militia.
  • A statement released Monday by Beijing's Embassy in Manila said, "There is no Chinese Maritime Militia as alleged. Any speculation in such helps nothing but causes unnecessary irritation."
  • Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has gone out of his way to not irritate Beijing, and Batongbacal says Duterte has been "very, very accommodating" to China in the South China Sea. "The Chinese are emboldened."
  • Indeed, Poling says China's maritime intimidation is discouraging oil and gas exploration, and jeopardizing fishermen. It's getting "harder and harder," he says, not to see this an "implicit threat" that carries the added risk of miscalculation.
  • This week, Philippine National Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana called the Chinese move a "clear provocative action" of "grave" concern. "We call on the Chinese to stop this incursion and immediately recall these boats violating our maritime rights and encroaching into our sovereign territory," his statement read.
  • Poling says the Chinese are not likely to disperse. "Once China moves in, it doesn't leave. It might decrease the number. It might play nice for a little while, maybe it ratchets down the tension for short term political gain, but it is unlikely to vacate this reef," he says.
  • In a statement, the U.S. embassy in the Philippines waded into the controversy: "The PRC uses maritime militia to intimidate, provoke, and threaten other nations," adding, "We stand with the Philippines, our oldest treaty ally in Asia." Japan, Australia, the U.K. and Canada expressed support for the Philippines as well, saying the Chinese flotilla was threatening regional security.
  • Poling says the unified call for China to withdraw shows "a realignment of international fears and anxieties about Beijing's maritime claims." He says that if the international community is going to draw a line in the sand, or try to "compel or cajole" China into compromise, "it has to do so now." The "space for compromise," Poling says, "is getting worrying small."
ethanshilling

The Trump Presidency Is History. They're Writing the First Draft. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...administration-historians.html

trump history

shared by ethanshilling on 23 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • From the day he took office, Donald J. Trump had America’s historians on high alert, as they took to news programs, Op-Ed pages and social media to help contextualize every norm-busting twist and turn (and tweet).
  • But last Friday, a group of 17 historians sat down for a calmer, more deliberate project: taking a first cut at writing a scholarly history of the administration.
  • And before the discussion began, Julian E. Zelizer, a professor at Princeton and the project’s organizer, laid out a basic difficulty.
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  • “The challenge with President Trump is understanding the foundational elements of his presidency as deeply rooted in basic features of American history,” he said
  • Four years ago, a similar group met at Princeton to prepare a volume about the Obama presidency (as one had for the Bush administration before it).
  • That this year’s gathering was happening virtually was a different reminder of the contingencies of history. Had it not been for the administration’s chaotic response to Covid-19, more than one participant speculated, Mr. Trump might well have handily triumphed in November — and this past-tense assessment wouldn’t be happening at all.
  • One thread running through the discussion was how to find the main narrative lines amid four years of near-constant chaos — including two impeachments — and parse out actual policies and on-the-ground impacts from the blizzard of President Trump’s words.
  • Merlin Chowkwanyun, a medical historian at Columbia University, said that reading Smith’s paper had left him “intrigued, and a little bit unnerved.”
  • But perhaps evaluating the Trump Covid-19 response through the usual lens of “efficacy and competence,” Chowkwanyun said, is “missing the point.”
  • Beverly Gage, a historian at Yale whose chapter was tentatively subtitled “How Trump Tried to Undermine the F.B.I. and Deconstruct the Administrative State,” noted the unexpected transformation of people like James B. Comey into liberal heroes.
  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a historian at Princeton who contributed a chapter on Black Lives matter, noted that the “first iteration” of the movement had participated in a government commission and made use of President Obama’s “open door” policy with activists.
  • In the end, the two days of discussion, not surprisingly, raised more questions than it definitively answered, including an unspoken one: Would the group be meeting to consider the Biden administration in the past tense in four years, or in eight?
  • “They don’t represent half the people,” she said. “There is going to be a lot of struggle in the years ahead for a more democratic view of America. I don’t think that chapter has been written yet.”
Javier E

A QAnon 'Digital Soldier' Marches On, Undeterred by Theory's Unraveling - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...qanon-meme-queen.html

QAnon conspiracy theory 2021 trump Politics Culture crisis history

shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Over a series of conversations, I learned that she had a longstanding suspicion of elites dating back to her Harvard days, when she felt out of place among people she considered snobby rich kids. As an adult, she joined the anti-establishment left, advocating animal rights and supporting the Standing Rock oil pipeline protests. She admired the hacktivist group Anonymous, and looked up to whistle-blowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. She was a registered Democrat for most of her life, but she voted for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, in the 2016 presidential election after deciding that both major parties were corrupt.
  • Ms. Gilbert used to get push notifications on her phone every time Q posted a new message. But Q, who once sent dozens of updates a day, has essentially vanished from the internet in recent weeks, posting only four times since the November election. The sudden disappearance has caused some believers to start asking questions. Chat rooms and Twitter threads have filled with impatient followers wondering when the mass arrests will begin, and if Q’s mantra — “trust the plan” — is just a stalling tactic.
  • Ms. Gilbert isn’t worried. For her, QAnon was always less about Q and more about the crowdsourced search for truth. She loves assembling her own reality in real time, patching together shards of information and connecting them to the core narrative.
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  • (She once spent several minutes explaining how a domino-shaped ornament on the White House Christmas tree proved that Mr. Trump was sending coded messages about QAnon, because the domino had 17 dots, and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet.)
  • When she solves a new piece of the puzzle, she posts it to Facebook, where her QAnon friends post heart emojis and congratulate her.
  • This collaborative element, which some have likened to a massively multiplayer online video game, is a big part of what drew Ms. Gilbert to QAnon and keeps her there now.
  • Believing in QAnon tends to clear one’s social calendar, and Ms. Gilbert is no exception. She cut ties with her closest friends years ago, after arguing with them about Pizzagate. She is estranged from her sister, who tried and failed to stage an intervention over her Facebook posts.
  • Ms. Gilbert insists that she’s a lone wolf by choice, but becoming a pariah has clearly taken a toll. She compares Manhattan to Nazi Germany, and speaks bitterly about the friends she has lost. (I talked to several of those former friends. They miss her, but can’t imagine reconciling with her in her current state.)
  • This week, when Mr. Biden becomes president and Mr. Trump leaves the White House, it will be a huge blow to QAnon’s core mythology, and it may force some believers to acknowledge that they’ve been lied to. Many will cope by spinning the development as a win, or saying it proves that Mr. Trump is playing the long game. Others will quietly ditch Q and transfer their enthusiasm to a new conspiracy theory. A few might be jolted back to reality.
  • But the meme queen is undeterred. She trusts Q’s plan, at least for a little while longer, and she wants them to trust it, too.“Be prepared, and stay cool,” Ms. Gilbert wrote to her Facebook friends recently. “Slow and steady wins the race. We’re in the home stretch now.”
delgadool

Opinion | Texas Is a Rich State in a Rich Country, and Look What Happened - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...texas-climate-change.html

politics history crisis

shared by delgadool on 25 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • We don’t realize how fragile the basic infrastructure of our civilization is.
  • What emerges is almost an apocalyptic form of poetry. One line, in particular, has rung in my head for months. “Climate-related risks will remain largely unhedgeable as long as systemwide action is not undertaken.”
  • Two facts from that crisis have gotten less attention than they deserve. First, the cold in Texas was not a generational climatic disaster. The problem, as Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental analyst at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote in his newsletter, is that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ worst-case scenario planning used a 2011 cold snap that was a one-in-10-year weather event.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Texas was “seconds and minutes” from complete energy system collapse — the kind where the system needs to be rebuilt, not just rebooted.
  • Climate change promises far more violent events to come. But this is what it looks like when we face a rare-but-predictable stretch of extreme weather, in a rich state in a rich country. The result was nearly 80 deaths — and counting — including an 11-year-old boy found frozen in his bed. I can barely stand to write those words.
  • The most common mistake in politics is to believe there is some level of suffering that will force responsible governance. There isn’t
  • Similarly, once climate change can no longer be ignored, Republicans may tighten their embrace of fossil fuels rather than admitting decades of policy error.
  • “When people are presented with a crisis like in Texas, they often grasp for stability,” Julian Brave NoiseCat, vice president of policy and strategy at Data for Progress, told me. “This is something the right is good at — they offer the security of tradition, of the familiar.”
  • Texas kept its grid disconnected from the regional grids so it didn’t have to follow federal regulations. In a world of aggressive climate action, it’s easy to imagine more states, and countries, receding from compacts and multilateral institutions because they don’t like the new rules, or the loss of sovereignty. Indeed, America just experienced this dance as President Donald Trump withdrew us from the climate accords, before President Biden signed us back up. A global crisis that demands cooperation and even sacrifice will be fertile soil for nationalists and demagogues.
brookegoodman

Joseph Stalin - Biography, World War II & Facts - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...joseph-stalin

history politics culture

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) was the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1929 to 1953. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was transformed from a peasant society into an industrial and military superpower. However, he ruled by terror, and millions of his own citizens died during his brutal reign. 
  • Joseph Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili on December 18, 1878, or December 6, 1878, according to the Old Style Julian calendar (although he later invented a new birth date for himself: December 21, 1879), in the small town of Gori, Georgia, then part of the Russian empire. When he was in his 30s, he took the name Stalin, from the Russian for “man of steel.”
  • Starting in the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin launched a series of five-year plans intended to transform the Soviet Union from a peasant society into an industrial superpower. His development plan was centered on government control of the economy and included the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, in which the government took control of farms. Millions of farmers refused to cooperate with Stalin’s orders and were shot or exiled as punishment. The forced collectivization also led to widespread famine across the Soviet Union that killed millions.
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  • In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Joseph Stalin and German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Stalin then proceeded to annex parts of Poland and Romania, as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He also launched an invasion of Finland. Then, in June 1941, Germany broke the Nazi-Soviet pact and invaded the USSR, making significant early inroads. (Stalin had ignored warnings from the Americans and the British, as well as his own intelligence agents, about a potential invasion, and the Soviets were not prepared for war.) 
  • Joseph Stalin did not mellow with age: He prosecuted a reign of terror, purges, executions, exiles to labor camps and persecution in the postwar USSR, suppressing all dissent and anything that smacked of foreign–especially Western–influence. He established communist governments throughout Eastern Europe, and in 1949 led the Soviets into the nuclear age by exploding an atomic bomb. In 1950, he gave North Korea’s communist leader Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) permission to invade United States-supported South Korea, an event that triggered the Korean War.
  • Stalin, who grew increasingly paranoid in his later years, died on March 5, 1953, at age 74, after suffering a stroke. His body was embalmed and preserved in Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square until 1961, when it was removed and buried near the Kremlin walls as part of the de-Stalinization process initiated by Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971).
Javier E

'Damn, that fool can write': how Martin Amis made everyone up their game | Martin Amis ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rature-crusader-peers-chutzpah

literature UK 1980s culture writing

shared by Javier E on 27 May 23 - No Cached
  • He will for ever be remembered as part of the “Class of 83”, the inaugural Granta Best of Young British novelists list that also included Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro.
  • “He has had a baleful influence on a whole generation,” bemoaned AS Byatt of Amis in 1993, as one of the Granta judges tasked with finding successors a decade later. Not because he was a bad writer but because so many had been foolish enough to try to emulate him
  • At an event in 2020 with Salman Rushdie, Rushdie asked him if, back in those heady days, he felt part of a gang. “That’s the way ‘movements’ start,” Amis replied. “Ambitious young drunks, late at night, saying, ‘We’re not going to do that any more. We’re going to do this instead.’” And with this “gang” – which also included his great friend, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, and Ian McEwan – the young drunks went on to became “the old devils”, to borrow a Kingsley Amis title, that pretty much comprised the literary establishment for years.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Of his instinct to shock, he observed: “Every novel worth reading is funny and serious. Anyone who’s any good is going to be funny. It’s the nature of life. Life is funny.”
  • “It seems to me a hilariously enjoyable way of spending one’s time,” he said. And so, at his daring comic best, he was great fun to read.
  • The insolence, the silliness, the seriousness, the grotesqueness, the erudition and audacity were all swept up in those inimitable sentences and corralled into order by his cleverness with form. As Enright summed up in her review: “Damn, that fool can write.
Javier E

Opinion | I Looked Behind the Curtain of American History, and This Is What I Found - T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ruse-zelizer-myth-history.html

revisionist history us politics culture

shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • In the realm of folklore and ancient traditions, myths are tales forever retold for their wisdom and underlying truths
  • In the worlds of journalism and history, however, myths are viewed as pernicious creatures that obscure more than they illuminate. They must be hunted and destroyed so that the real story can assume its proper perch
  • “Actually” becomes an honored adverb.
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  • as the editor of The Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section several years ago, I assigned and edited dozens of “5 Myths” articles
  • This regular exercise forced me to wrestle with the form’s basic challenges: How entrenched and widespread must a misconception be to count as an honest-to-badness myth? What is the difference between a conclusive debunking and a conflicting interpretation? And who is qualified to upend a myth or disqualified from doing so?
  • “Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past,” a collection published this month and edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, historians at Princeton
  • All of our national delusions should be exposed, but I’m not sure all should be excised. Do not some myths serve a valid purpose?
  • Several contributors to “Myth America” successfully eviscerate tired assumptions about their subjects.
  • the persistent notion of extensive voter fraud in U.S. election
  • “Efforts to reshape narratives about the U.S. past thus became a central theme of the conservative movement in general and the Trump administration in particular,”
  • that a civil-rights protest or movement sparked or fomented or provoked a white backlash, as if such a response is instinctive and unavoidable.
  • The collection raises worthy arguments about the use of history in the nation’s political discourse, foremost among them that the term “revisionist history” should not be a slur.
  • “All good historical work is at heart ‘revisionist’ in that it uses new findings from the archives or new perspectives from historians to improve, to perfect — and yes, to revise — our understanding of the past,”
  • this revisionist impulse at times makes the myths framework feel somewhat forced, an excuse to cover topics of interest to the authors.
  • the idea that the United States historically has lacked imperial ambitions
  • overwhelmingly, the myths covered in “Myth America” originate or live on the right
  • Do left-wing activists and politicians in the United States never construct and propagate their own self-affirming versions of the American story? If such liberal innocence is real, let’s hear more about it
  • the ur-myth of the nation: American exceptionalism
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