Group items tagged

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

The National Climate Assessment’s publication marks the government’s fourth comprehensive look at climate-change impacts on the United States since 2000. The last came in 2014. Produced by 13 federal departments and agencies and overseen by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the report stretches well over 1,000 pages and draws more definitive, and in some cases more startling, conclusions than earlier versions.

The authors argue that global warming “is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us.” And they conclude that humans must act aggressively to adapt to current impacts and mitigate future catastrophes “to avoid substantial damages to the U.S. economy, environment, and human health and well-being over the coming decades.”

“The impacts we’ve seen the last 15 years have continued to get stronger, and that will only continue,” said Gary Yohe, a professor of economics and environmental studies at Wesleyan University who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the report. “We have wasted 15 years of response time. If we waste another five years of response time, the story gets worse. The longer you wait, the faster you have to respond and the more expensive it will be.”

The last time venture capitalists invested heavily in environmentally focused technology during the so-called clean-tech boom of the 2000s, they lost a lot of money. Getting one of these companies off the ground can be expensive

“Sitting on your pile of money while the oceans are rising may not help you stay dry,”

It is common wisdom in the tech industry that it is much easier to raise money for a software company than it is for a start-up that wants to work in biotechnology or energy

these are just data points. But taken together with so many indicators of an altered atmosphere and rising temperatures, they blend into the unmistakable portrait of human-induced climate change.

Near the entrance to the Arctic Ocean in northwest Russia, the temperature surged to 84 degrees Fahrenheit (29 Celsius). Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eclipsed 415 parts per million for the first time in human history.

In Koynas, a rural area to the east of Arkhangelsk, it was even hotter on Sunday, soaring to 87 degrees (31 Celsius). Many locations in Russia, from the Kazakhstan border to the White Sea, set record-high temperatures over the weekend, some 30 to 40 degrees (around 20 Celsius) above average.

“The emotional reaction of my kids was severe,” she told NBC News. “There was a lot of crying. They told me, 'We know what’s coming, and it’s going to be really rough.’

is taking a toll on mental health, especially among young people, who are increasingly losing hope for their future. Experts call it “climate grief,” depression, anxiety and mourning over climate change.

The U.N. report said the worst effects — such as the flooding of coastal areas caused by rising sea levels, drought, food shortages and more frequent and severe natural disasters — could arrive as soon as 2040

Every other rich country also needs to make similar cuts, immediately. The developed nations with large emissions (Saudi Arabia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Britain and others) can afford their own Green New Deals; perhaps they can be persuaded to do their parts, if we do.

developing nations — such as India, Pakistan, Ecuador and Malaysia — aren’t going to unilaterally constrain their own economies. If carbon-based energy sources help them compete in the global marketplace, that’s what they’ll use — unless, economists say, they get financial help to develop sustainably, with industrialization powered by renewable energy instead of oil, gas and coal. And there’s only one place they can get that help: from wealthy countries like ours. Giving them cash needs to be part of any Green New Deal.

In the poorest developing countries, where many people live without electricity or other basic necessities, it is unrealistic to expect emissions to drop from their already low rates in the next decade. Some of these countries, including India, Indonesia and the Philippines, are very populous, and their industrialization could cause emissions to skyrocket.

Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with the climate crisis and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right

An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II.

Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and complain that Green New Deal proponents confound the fight to preserve the planet, to which all right-minded individuals should agree, with a more controversial agenda for societal transformation. On both accounts the critics are wrong.

It was the sort of campaign appearance that Mette Frederiksen, leader of the left-leaning Social Democrats, would have ordinarily considered friendly terrain — a gathering of environmentally minded students in her hometown, Aalborg, in Denmark. Except the students demanded whether Ms. Frederiksen knew the carbon footprint of the red roses her party gave away at campaign stops.She didn’t. And the students — who also criticized her climate policy for failing to mention the Paris accord — didn’t let her forget it.

“We want action. Something must happen,” said Mathilde Christiansen, a senior.

Four years ago, climate change barely registered as an election concern in Denmark. But in a nation that juts into the North and Baltic Seas, polls now show that 46 percent of voters rank climate change as their top concern, compared to 27 percent in 2017.

n theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans.

But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.

Amazon’s success has pushed retailers such as Walmart and Target to carry even more stuff—especially online—and to get that stuff to shoppers even faster

n a year that began with President Donald Trump threatening to use his nuclear button against Kim Jong Un, the historic peace deal announced Friday between North and South Korea is all the more extraordinary.

There will also be an unprecedented summit between Trump and Kim, who has previously threatened to destroy both the U.S and South Kore

Kim could demand a reduced American presence, an end to joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises or a change to the terms of their alliance. “That is something that Trump is unlikely to be able to offer,” Dall said

What is “grand strategy” as opposed to simple strategy?

It denotes encompassing all the resources that a state can focus — military, economic, political and cultural — to further its own interests in a global landscape.

wars — or rather how not to lose them — are the general theme of his often didactic book.

What impact has the modern media environment had on the 2016 campaign?

modern media realities make everything intellectually thinner, shallower. Everything moves fast; we talk not of the scandal of the day but the scandal of the hour, reducing a great event, a presidential campaign, into an endless river of gaffes.

This year I am seeing something, especially among the young of politics and journalism. They have received most of what they know about political history through screens.

For at least 1500 years, the nation of Tibet has had a complex relationship with its large and powerful neighbor to the east, China. The political history of Tibet and China reveals that the relationship has not always been as one-sided as it now appears.

Indeed, as with China’s relations with the Mongols and the Japanese, the balance of power between China and Tibet has shifted back and forth over the centuries.

The first known interaction between the two states came in 640 A.D., when the Tibetan King Songtsan Gampo married the Princess Wencheng, a niece of the Tang Emperor Taizong. He also married a Nepalese princess.

The return of a “hard” border might threaten to undermine the Good Friday agreement that has reduced sectarian conflict in the North. And that is exactly what some fear Brexit will do, unless Britain remains part of the European Union’s single market and a customs union — an option that Mrs. May ruled out at the beginning of the withdrawal process.

European officials say they are putting into legal language a document, agreed to by Britain in December, that laid out three options. Britain’s preferred one is for an overall Brexit trade agreement that would solve the problem, but talks on that have not even formally begun. The second was for Britain to propose “specific solutions” such as the use of technology to avoid a hard border. No detailed plans have been put forward, and many are so skeptical of this idea that critics call it the “Narnia solution.”

Speaking in Parliament, Mrs. May described the proposals as a threat to her country’s “constitutional integrity,” while one of her former ministers, David Jones, told the BBC that the European Union was using the Brexit talks to try to “annex” Northern Ireland.They worry that if Northern Ireland stays largely within the European Union’s customs union and single market while mainland Britain quits them, a new economic frontier will be created down the middle of the Irish Sea.

China had long been the only superpower in the region, secure in the knowledge that it was the Middle Kingdom around which the rest of the world pivoted. Japan, cushioned by stormy seas, held itself apart from its Asian neighbors much of the time and had developed a unique and inward-looking culture.

both Qing China and Tokugawa Japan faced a new threat: imperial expansion by the European powers and later the United States.

Both countries responded with growing nationalism, but their versions of nationalism had different focuses and outcomes.

Several different Western European powers established colonies in Asia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each of the imperial powers had its own style of administration, and colonial officers from the different nations also displayed various attitudes towards their imperial subjects.

Nonetheless, British colonials held themselves apart from local people more than other Europeans did, hiring locals as domestic help, but rarely intermarrying with them. In part, this may have been due to a transfer of British ideas about the separation of classes to their overseas colonies.

to Christianize and civilize the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the New World

The Tang Dynasty, following the Sui and preceding the Song Dynasty, was a golden age that lasted from A.D. 618–907. It is considered the high point in Chinese civilization.

Under the rule of the Sui Empire, the people suffered wars, forced labor for massive government construction projects, and high taxes. They eventually rebelled, and the Sui dynasty fell in the year 618.

a powerful general named Li Yuan defeated his rivals; captured the capital city, Chang’an (modern-day Xi'an); and named himself emperor of the Tang Dynasty empire. He created an efficient bureaucracy

Throughout history, few names have inspired such terror as "Tamerlane." That was not the Central Asian conqueror's actual name, though. More properly, he is known as Timur, from the Turkic word for "iron."

vicious conqueror, who razed ancient cities to the ground and put entire populations to the sword. On the other hand, he is also known as a great patron of the arts, literature, and architecture.

The child's father, Taragay, was the chief of the Barlas tribe. The Barlas were of mixed Mongolian and Turkic ancestry, descended from the hordes of Genghis Khan

In 1859, more than 400 enslaved people – men, women and 30 babies – from the Butler plantation estates of the Georgia Sea islands were sold on the auction block in Savannah, Georgia.

Slave auctions were long a part of the fabric of American life, but on the eve of the Civil War, this unprecedented sale was noteworthy not only for its size but because of the fact that the Butler slaves had generally not been sold on the open market.

Auctions like these took place all across the South and brought out a cast of characters: the auctioneer, “Negro buyers,” “Negro speculators,” slave traders all mixing with genteel Southern gentlemen. As many as 1.2 million slaves were sold in this domestic trade from the 1760s to 1860s.  New Orleans was a major locus but so was Savannah on the fateful days of March 2 and 3, 1859.