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How did 9/11 change the way the world sees the United States? | History Today - 0 views

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  • ‘With Iraq in flames, America’s standing in the world was at rock bottom’ Fawaz Gerges, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and author of Making the Arab World (Princeton, 2018)
  • The morning after the terrorist attacks on the US, the French newspaper Le Monde ran a headline which summarised a widespread sentiment in Europe and the world at large: ‘We are all Americans.’
  • There was an outpouring of sympathy and solidarity with the US worldwide, including the Middle East. Even in Iran, which had been under punishing economic siege from the US for two decades, 60,000 spectators observed a minute’s silence during a football match in Azadi Stadium and hundreds of young Iranians held a candlelit vigil in Tehran. Iranian leaders sent sympathetic messages to their American counterparts, the first official contact between the two countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
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  • Instead of building on this goodwill and solidarity, the US launched a War on Terror, the greatest strategic disaster in its history. Thus, the US squandered an historic opportunity to undo the harm of its Cold War policies, which had led to the emergence of al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
  • In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States – victor of the Cold War and last superpower standing – suddenly looked vulnerable and sympathetic. Outsiders felt pity but also a sly hope that, after decades of running the world clumsily at arm’s length, the Americans might recalibrate and become a humbler nation.
  • The War on Terror was a war of choice, not necessity. What if the US had used 9/11 as a catalyst to bring about transformative change in its relations with the Arab and Muslim world, rather than doubling down by invading Afghanistan and Iraq? It could have used its soft and hard power to help resolve regional conflicts and invest in human development, making the world safer and more prosperous. 
  • ‘The world continues to get America wrong’ Tim Stanley, Historian, columnist and leader writer for the Daily Telegraph
  • The War on Terror was costly in blood and reputation. The so-called leader of the free world sanctioned torture and illegally invaded Iraq, destroying a state and creating a vacuum that allowed the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq and ISIS. With Iraq in flames, America’s standing in the world was at rock bottom.
  • The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq looked like repeats of Vietnam: enrolment in US history courses in the UK took off as students, like me, wanted to understand why America kept making the same mistakes.
  • The opposite was perceived to happen: America became more like itself, proud, unilateral, dispensing vigilante justice with a cowboy president (‘some folks look at me and see a certain swagger’, joked George W. Bush, ‘which in Texas is called walking’).
  • ‘That Southeast Asia became the “second front” in the War on Terror was a blunder based on bad intelligence’ Minh Bui Jones, Editor of Mekong Review
  • On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I found myself in Washington DC talking to a well-known author on the legacy of the terrorist attacks. At one point he asked me about Islamic terrorism in Cambodia, where I was living at the time. The question startled me. In the seven years I lived there, I never thought of Islam and terrorism together.
  • That author’s question tells you one thing about 9/11 in relation to Southeast Asia. Mostly, it is paranoia wrapped in ignorance. There are about 300,000 Muslims living in Cambodia today, a little more than one per cent of the population.
  • That this region became the ‘second front’ in George W. Bush’s great ‘War on Terror’ – his administration sent 660 troops to the Philippines in January 2002, following the capture of al-Qaeda operatives in Singapore and Malaysia – was a strategic blunder based on bad intelligence. Of course, Cambodians and their Vietnamese neighbours know all too well where those sorts of mistakes can lead and they would have felt a sense of déjà vu as they watched US bombs raining on Afghanistan and Iraq
  • Growing up in Vietnam in the 1970s, I had an image of the US as impregnable and I wasn’t alone. After 9/11, it looked vulnerable; I’m sure I’m not alone here either.
  • ‘As US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, history threatens to repeat itself’ Elisabeth Leake, Associate Professor of International History at the University of Leeds and author of Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2022)
  • In the aftermath of 9/11, the US led an ultimately failed invasion of Afghanistan that lacked a historical understanding of the state or its inhabitants. American policy planners and military officers seemed destined to repeat mistakes made by other foreign powers in the decades before them. This was not a case of the ‘graveyard of empires’ – itself an inappropriate moniker – striking again. Rather, it was a ready willingness to overlook Afghanistan’s complicated 20th-century history.
  • social scientists supported military personnel in comprehending supposedly incomprehensible Afghanistan. These policies fundamentally overlooked Afghanistan’s complex social and political relations and the dynamic ways Afghan elites and intellectuals had engaged with the international arena for decades. The US itself had fostered some of this modernisation in the era of Cold War competition, yet 21st-century narratives replaced a history of internationalism with a history of parochialism. 
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Why Hong Kong's "zero-covid" strategy could backfire | The Economist - 0 views

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  • And it is one of the few remaining places to have fended off the Delta variant, which in recent months has foiled the attempts of countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, to eradicate the virus.
  • The result is relative freedom for Hong Kongers at home, but strict immigration and quarantine rules which leave the territory isolated.
  • Carrie Lam, the chief executive, says she does not intend to learn to “live with” covid-19. And until the vaccination rate improves any breaches could be disastrous.
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  • vaccine hesitancy is high.
  • The Economist’s normalcy index finds life in Hong Kong to be more similar to pre-pandemic times than anywhere else in the world. But restrictions are starting to chafe.
  • The territory reacted quickly to the spread of covid-19. The government closed the border with mainland China in February last year and banned all non-residents from entering. Laws mandate mask-wearing, the use of contact-tracing apps and testing.
  • With the rest of the world slowly opening up, Hong Kong is stuck in isolation. The border with China is still closed, to the frustration of many families and businesses
  • Vaccination rates were boosted somewhat by incentives, including prize draws for flats and Rolex watches, and within younger groups around 70-80% have had a second dose. But among the vulnerable over-80s just 13% have had two shots, leaving them at risk when Delta does arrive.
  • Hong Kong has offered free shots for all since April but many people opted to wait and see. Some worry about side effects; others do not trust their government which has pushed a jab produced by Sinovac, a Chinese firm, despite questions over its efficacy (Pfizer’s vaccine is also available for free).
  • Since September Hong Kong has allowed 2,000 people from the mainland and Macau (Hong Kong’s tiny neighbour) to enter each day without quarantine. But the offer has not been reciprocated.
  • Hong Kong must go further: more vaccines, better testing and longer hospital stays for recovering patients.
  • Giving the government in Beijing access to its data will make many Hong Kongers uncomfortable, but the dismantling of the territory’s political opposition has intimidated many people, forcing them to swallow any such grievances.
  • The only clear way out is through vaccinations. Hong Kong could do more to encourage its citizens to get jabbed.
  • Some places offer more freedoms to vaccinated citizens. For example New South Wales, an Australian state, will allow them to use gyms and visit each other’s homes.
  • monetary incentives have been effective at encouraging vaccination. But spending vouchers distributed to Hong Kongers this year were not linked to vaccine status.
  • As most of the world accepts that covid-19 will become endemic, Hong Kong will be forced to close itself off even further.
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Why China Is the World's Last 'Zero Covid' Holdout - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Since then, China has locked down a city of 4 million, as well as several smaller cities and parts of Beijing, to contain a fresh outbreak that has infected more than 240 people in at least 11 provinces and regions. The authorities have shuttered schools and tourist sites. Government websites have detailed every movement of the unlucky couple and their sprawling web of contacts, including what time they checked into hotels and on which floors of restaurants they sat.
  • China has reported fewer than 5,000 deaths since the pandemic began
  • Its thriving exports have helped to keep the economy afloat. The ruling Communist Party’s tight grip on power enables lockdowns and testing to be carried out with astonishing efficiency. Beijing is set to host the Winter Olympics in February.
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  • But the policy has also, increasingly, made China an outlier. The rest of the world is reopening, including New Zealand and Australia, which also once embraced zero tolerance. China is now the only country still chasing full eradication of the virus.
  • Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has repeatedly pointed to the country’s success in containment as proof of the superiority of its governance model
  • China may find itself increasingly isolated, diplomatically and economically, at a time when global public opinion is hardening against it.
  • the Chinese Communist Party’s very hold on power seemed to hinge on its ability to control the virus. Its initial attempts to cover up the outbreak in Wuhan gave rise to a stunning outpouring of public anger. Images of overwhelmed hospitals and patients begging for help flooded the Chinese internet.
  • China’s strict lockdowns and mass testing campaigns, once criticized as heavy handed, became models for other countries.
  • When Zhang Wenhong, a prominent infectious disease expert from Shanghai, suggested this summer that China learn to live with the virus, he was attacked viciously online as a lackey of foreigners. A former Chinese health minister called such a mindset reckless.
  • Australia, which was home to the world’s longest lockdown, is scrapping quarantine requirements for vaccinated residents returning from overseas. New Zealand formally abandoned its quest for zero this month. Singapore is offering quarantine-free travel to vaccinated tourists from Germany, the United States, France and several other countries
  • There are also more practical reasons for China’s hesitation. Medical resources are highly concentrated in big cities, and more remote areas could quickly be overwhelmed by an uptick in cases, said Zhang Jun, an urban studies scholar at the City University of Hong Kong.
  • In addition, though China has achieved a relatively high full inoculation rate, at 75 percent of its population, questions have emerged about the efficacy of its homegrown vaccines.
  • And, at least for now, the elimination strategy appears to enjoy public support. While residents in locked-down areas have complained about seemingly arbitrary or overly harsh restrictions on social media, travel is relatively unconstrained in areas without cases. Wealthy consumers have poured money into luxury goods and fancy cars since they’re not spending on trips abroad.
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The Decision That Cost Hitler the War - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-simms-charlie-laderman.html japan hitler wwII US history
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  • He was also sure that the United States would enter the war against him sooner or later. He thought the only solution was pre-emptive: to get control of enough oil and food from the Soviet Union to enable Germany to hold its own against Anglo-America in a long war.
  • the only alternative he saw to immediate war on the United States was slow but certain strangulation at Anglo-American hands. With a nod to an epigram from A. J. P. Taylor, Simms and Laderman offer this summation: “Hitler committed suicide for fear of dying.”
  • Early December 1941 is the moment of the war in which plausible alternate scenarios seemed to loom the largest
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  • What if Vichy France and Fascist Italy had drawn closer together in a “Latin front,” as they were discussing at the time?
  • What if the Japanese had attacked the British in Malaya and Singapore but not attacked the United States?
  • What if the German who spied for the Soviet Union in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, had not supplied his masters with accurate information on Japanese plans, allowing Stalin to move 20 divisions from the east and redeploy them to Moscow for the shattering counterattack of Dec. 5?
  • The other thing the book does effectively is to pay careful attention to how the timing of events played out around the world, especially in the pattern of reactions to Pearl Harbor.
  • One of the last surprises in this book is how many world leaders saw accurately from that moment how the future would unfold.
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Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...omsday-prep-for-the-super-rich doomsday Collapse rich prepper history crisis Culture politics
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  • as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”
  • In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
  • Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”
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  • When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
  • Over the years, Huffman has become increasingly concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest. He said, “Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff.” (Prepper blogs call such a scenario W.R.O.L., “without rule of law.”) Huffman has come to believe that contemporary life rests on a fragile consensus. “I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work. While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”
  • Justin Kan heard the first inklings of survivalism among his peers. Kan co-founded Twitch, a gaming network that was later sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars. “Some of my friends were, like, ‘The breakdown of society is imminent. We should stockpile food,’ ” he said. “I tried to. But then we got a couple of bags of rice and five cans of tomatoes. We would have been dead if there was actually a real problem.” I asked Kan what his prepping friends had in common. “Lots of money and resources,” he said. “What are the other things I can worry about and prepare for? It’s like insurance.”
  • Long before the financial crisis became front-page news, early signs appeared in user comments on Reddit. “People were starting to whisper about mortgages. They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, ‘This is too good to be true. This doesn’t smell right.’ ” He added, “There’s probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we’re a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we’re talking about a faith-based collapse, you’re going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first.”
  • How did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon Valley, a place known, to the point of cliché, for unstinting confidence in its ability to change the world for the better?Those impulses are not as contradictory as they seem. Technology rewards the ability to imagine wildly different futures,
  • “When you do that, it’s pretty common that you take things ad infinitum, and that leads you to utopias and dystopias,” he said. It can inspire radical optimism—such as the cryonics movement, which calls for freezing bodies at death in the hope that science will one day revive them—or bleak scenarios.
  • In 2012, National Geographic Channel launched “Doomsday Preppers,” a reality show featuring a series of Americans bracing for what they called S.H.T.F. (when the “shit hits the fan”). The première drew more than four million viewers, and, by the end of the first season, it was the most popular show in the channel’s history.
  • A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k).
  • Johnson wishes that the wealthy would adopt a greater “spirit of stewardship,” an openness to policy change that could include, for instance, a more aggressive tax on inheritance. “Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” he said. “Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.”
  • In an e-mail, Wong told me, “Most people just assume improbable events don’t happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically.” He continued, “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
  • I asked Hoffman to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad. “I would guess fifty-plus per cent,” he said, “but that’s parallel with the decision to buy a vacation home. Human motivation is complex, and I think people can say, ‘I now have a safety blanket for this thing that scares me
  • In building Reddit, a community of thousands of discussion threads, into one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, Huffman has grown aware of the way that technology alters our relations with one another, for better and for worse. He has witnessed how social media can magnify public fear. “It’s easier for people to panic when they’re together,” he said, pointing out that “the Internet has made it easier for people to be together,” yet it also alerts people to emerging risks.
  • “I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of people,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”
  • The C.E.O. of another large tech company told me, “It’s still not at the point where industry insiders would turn to each other with a straight face and ask what their plans are for some apocalyptic event.” He went on, “But, having said that, I actually think it’s logically rational and appropriately conservative.”
  • “Our food supply is dependent on G.P.S., logistics, and weather forecasting,” he said, “and those systems are generally dependent on the Internet, and the Internet is dependent on D.N.S.”—the system that manages domain names. “Go risk factor by risk factor by risk factor, acknowledging that there are many you don’t even know about, and you ask, ‘What’s the chance of this breaking in the next decade?’ Or invert it: ‘What’s the chance that nothing breaks in fifty years?’ ”
  • “Anyone who’s in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution,” he told me recently.
  • “People know the only real answer is, Fix the problem,” he said. “It’s a reason most of them give a lot of money to good causes.” At the same time, though, they invest in the mechanics of escape. He recalled a dinner in New York City after 9/11 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble: “A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they’d do. Most said they’ll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries.”
  • By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, “I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”
  • many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth.
  • The gap is widening further. In December, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a new analysis, by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that half of American adults have been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s.” Approximately a hundred and seventeen million people earn, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one per cent has nearly tripled.
  • r the silo and finished construction in December, 2012, at a cost of nearly twenty million dollars. He created twelve private apartments: full-floor units were advertised at three million dollars; a half-floor was half the price. He has sold every unit, except one for himself, he said
  • Johnson said, “If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We’ve largely dismantled those things.”
  • “Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson asked. “What does that really tell us about our system?” He added, “It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”
  • The movement received another boost from the George W. Bush Administration’s mishandling of Hurricane Katrina. Neil Strauss, a former Times reporter, who chronicled his turn to prepping in his book “Emergency,” told me, “We see New Orleans, where our government knows a disaster is happening, and is powerless to save its own citizens.”
  • Tyler Allen, a real-estate developer in Lake Mary, Florida, who told me that he paid three million dollars for one of Hall’s condos. Allen said he worries that America faces a future of “social conflict” and government efforts to deceive the public. He suspects that the Ebola virus was allowed to enter the country in order to weaken the population. When I asked how friends usually respond to his ideas, he said, “The natural reaction that you get most of the time is for them to laugh, because it scares them.” But, he added, “my credibility has gone through the roof. Ten years ago, this just seemed crazy that all this was going to happen: the social unrest and the cultural divide in the country, the race-baiting and the hate-mongering.”
  • d G. Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who spent twelve years studying survivalism, said, “During the Reagan era, we heard, for the first time in my life, and I’m seventy-four years old, from the highest authorities in the land that government has failed you, the collective institutional ways of solving problems and understanding society are no good. People said, ‘O.K., it’s flawed. What do I do now?’ ”
  • That gap is comparable to the gap between average incomes in the U.S. and the Democratic Republic of Congo,
  • If a silo in Kansas is not remote or private enough, there is another option. In the first seven days after Donald Trump’s election, 13,401 Americans registered with New Zealand’s immigration authorities, the first official step toward seeking residency—more than seventeen times the usual rate. The New Zealand Herald reported the surge beneath the headline “Trump Apocalypse.”
  • In fact, the influx had begun well before Trump’s victory. In the first ten months of 2016, foreigners bought nearly fourteen hundred square miles of land in New Zealand, more than quadruple what they bought in the same period the previous year
  • Much as Switzerland once drew Americans with the promise of secrecy, and Uruguay tempted them with private banks, New Zealand offers security and distance. In the past six years, nearly a thousand foreigners have acquired residency there under programs that mandate certain types of investment of at least a million dollars.
  • The difference between New Zealand and the U.S., to a large extent, is that people who disagree with each other can still talk to each other about it here. It’s a tiny little place, and there’s no anonymity. People have to actually have a degree of civility.”
  • Jack Matthews, an American who is the chairman of MediaWorks, a large New Zealand broadcaster, told me, “I think, in the back of people’s minds, frankly, is that, if the world really goes to shit, New Zealand is a First World country, completely self-sufficient, if necessary—energy, water, food. Life would deteriorate, but it would not collapse.”
  • Top to bottom, the island chain runs roughly the distance between Maine and Florida, with half the population of New York City
  • In a recent World Bank report, New Zealand had supplanted Singapore as the best country in the world to do business.
  • “Kiwis used to talk about the ‘tyranny of distance,’ ” Wall said, as we crossed town in his Mercedes convertible. “Now the tyranny of distance is our greatest asset.”
  • American clients have also sought strategic advice. “They’re asking, ‘Where in New Zealand is not going to be long-term affected by rising sea levels?’ ”
  • In particular, the attention of American survivalists has generated resentment. In a discussion about New Zealand on the Modern Survivalist, a prepper Web site, a commentator wrote, “Yanks, get this in your heads. Aotearoa NZ is not your little last resort safe haven.”
  • An American hedge-fund manager in his forties—tall, tanned, athletic—recently bought two houses in New Zealand and acquired local residency. He agreed to tell me about his thinking, if I would not publish his name. Brought up on the East Coast, he said, over coffee, that he expects America to face at least a decade of political turmoil, including racial tension, polarization, and a rapidly aging population. “The country has turned into the New York area, the California area, and then everyone else is wildly different in the middle,” he said. He worries that the economy will suffer if Washington scrambles to fund Social Security and Medicare for people who need it. “Do you default on that obligation? Or do you print more money to give to them? What does that do to the value of the dollar? It’s not a next-year problem, but it’s not fifty years away, either.”
  • He said, “This is no longer about a handful of freaks worried about the world ending.” He laughed, and added, “Unless I’m one of those freaks.”
  • Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But élite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal.
  • Philanthropy in America is still three times as large, as a share of G.D.P., as philanthropy in the next closest country, the United Kingdom. But it is now accompanied by a gesture of surrender, a quiet disinvestment by some of America’s most successful and powerful people. Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the institutions and norms from which they have benefitted, some are permitting themselves to imagine failure. It is a gilded despair.
  • As Huffman, of Reddit, observed, our technologies have made us more alert to risk, but have also made us more panicky; they facilitate the tribal temptation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves from opponents, and to fortify ourselves against our fears, instead of attacking the sources of them. Justin Kan, the technology investor who had made a halfhearted effort to stock up on food, recalled a recent phone call from a friend at a hedge fund. “He was telling me we should buy land in New Zealand as a backup. He’s, like, ‘What’s the percentage chance that Trump is actually a fascist dictator? Maybe it’s low, but the expected value of having an escape hatch is pretty high.’ 
  • As Americans withdraw into smaller circles of experience, we jeopardize the “larger circle of empathy,” he said, the search for solutions to shared problems. “The easy question is, How do I protect me and mine? The more interesting question is, What if civilization actually manages continuity as well as it has managed it for the past few centuries? What do we do if it just keeps on chugging?”
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Opinion | I Studied Five Countries' Health Care Systems. We Need to Get More Creative W... - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 13 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • I’m convinced that the ability to get good, if not great, care in facilities that aren’t competing with one another is the main way that other countries obtain great outcomes for much less money. It also allows for more regulation and control to keep a lid on prices.
  • Because of government subsidies, most people spend less than 25 percent of their income on housing and can choose between buying new flats at highly subsidized prices or flats available for resale on an open market.
  • Other social determinants that matter include food security, access to education and even race. As part of New Zealand’s reforms, its Public Health Agency, which was established less than a year ago, specifically puts a “greater emphasis on equity and the wider determinants of health such as income, education and housing.” It also specifically seeks to address racism in health care, especially that which affects the Maori population.
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  • When I asked about Australia’s rather impressive health outcomes, he said that while “Australia’s mortality that is amenable to, or influenced by, the health care system specifically is good, it’s not fundamentally better than that seen in peer O.E.C.D. countries, the U.S. excepted. Rather, Australia’s public health, social policy and living standards are more responsible for outcomes.”
  • Addressing these issues in the United States would require significant investment, to the tune of hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars a year. That seems impossible until you remember that we spent more than $4.4 trillion on health care in 2022. We just don’t think of social policies like housing, food and education as health care.
  • Other countries, on the other hand, recognize that these issues are just as important, if not more so, than hospitals, drugs and doctors. Our narrow view too often defines health care as what you get when you’re sick, not what you might need to remain well.
  • When other countries choose to spend less on their health care systems (and it is a choice), they take the money they save and invest it in programs that benefit their citizens by improving social determinants of health
  • In the United States, conversely, we argue that the much less resourced programs we already have need to be cut further. The recent debt limit compromise reduces discretionary spending and makes it harder for people to access government programs like food stamps.
  • When I asked experts in each of these countries what might improve the areas where they are deficient (for instance, the N.H.S. has been struggling quite a bit as of late), they all replied the same way: more money. Some of them lack the political will to allocate those funds. Others can’t make major investments without drawing from other priorities.
  • Singapore will need to spend more, it’s very unlikely to go above the 8 percent to 10 percent of G.D.P. that pretty much all developed countries have historically spent.
  • That is, all of them except the United States. We currently spend about 18 percent of G.D.P. on health care. That’s almost $12,000 per American. It’s about twice what other countries currently spend.
  • We cannot seem to do what other countries think is easy, while we’ve happily decided to do what other countries think is impossible.But this is also what gives me hope. We’ve already decided to spend the money; we just need to spend it better.
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Opinion | The Last Thatcherite - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...z-truss-kwasi-kwarteng-uk.html politics history crisis economics policy culture uk
shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • The scientists at the bench discovered that the money markets would not only punish left-wing experiments in changing the balance between states and markets, but they were also sensitive to experiments that pushed too far to the right. A cowed Ms. Truss apologized, and Mr. Kwarteng’s successor has reversed almost all of the planned cuts and limited the term for energy supports.
  • The mini-budget subjected the entire economy to experimental treatment. This was put in explicit terms in a celebratory post by a Tory journalist and think tanker claiming that Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng had been “incubated” by the Institute of Economic Affairs in their early years and “Britain is now their laboratory.”
  • ince the 1970s, the world of think tanks had embraced a framing of the world in terms of discrete spaces that could become what they called laboratories for new policies
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  • the money markets were not waiting for an act of faith in Laffer Curve fundamentalism after all. This was “Reaganism without the dollar.” Without the confidence afforded to the global reserve currency, the pound went into free fall.
  • Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng seemed to have believed that by patching together all of the most radical policies of Thatcherism (while conveniently dropping the need for spending cuts), they would be incanting a kind of magic spell, an “Open sesame” for “global Britain.” This was their Reagan moment, their moment when, as their favorite metaphors put it, a primordial repressed force would be “unchained,” “unleashed” or “unshackled.”But as a leap of faith, it broke the diver’s neck.
  • As Thatcher herself put it, “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” Britain needed a leap of faith to restore itself.
  • While the Gen X Thatcherites didn’t scrimp on data, they also saw something ineffable at the root of British malaise. “Beyond the statistics and economic theories,” they wrote, “there remains a sense in which many of Britain’s problems lie in the sphere of cultural values and mind-set.”
  • “Britannia Unchained” expressed a desire to go back to the future by restoring Victorian values of hard work, self-improvement and bootstrapping.
  • They followed their idol not only in her antagonism to organized labor but also in her less-known fascination with Asian capitalism. In 2012’s “Britannia Unchained,” a book co-written by the group that remains a Rosetta Stone for the policy surprises of the last month, they slammed the Britons for their eroded work ethic and “culture of excuses” and the “cosseted” public sector unions. They praised China, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kon
  • Thatcherites, known collectively as the ultras, gained fresh blood in the 2010s as a group of Gen Xers too young to experience Thatcherism in its insurgent early years — including the former home secretary Priti Patel, the former foreign secretary Dominic Raab, the former minister of state for universities Chris Skidmore, Mr. Kwarteng and Ms. Truss — attempted to reboot her ideology for the new millennium.
  • Over the subsequent four decades, Thatcherites at think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies (which Margaret Thatcher helped set up) described the struggle against both the Labour Party and the broader persistence of Socialism in the Communist and non-Communist world as a “war of ideas.”
  • Thatcherism began in the 1970s. Defined early as the belief in “the free economy and the strong state,” Thatcherism condemned the postwar British welfare economy and sought to replace it with virtues of individual enterprise and religious morality.
  • There’s something tragicomic, if not tragic, about capitalist revolutionaries Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng laid low by the mechanisms of capitalism itself. Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng may be the last of the Thatcherites, defeated by the very system they believed they were acting in fidelity to.
  • The world has just witnessed one of the most extraordinary political immolations of recent times. Animated by faith in a fantasy version of the free market, Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain set off a sequence of events that has forced her to fire her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, and led her to the brink of being ousted by her own party.
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Inside the Struggle to Make Lab-Grown Meat - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...o-make-lab-grown-meat-12cf46ab meat alternative protein scaling challenge food
shared by Javier E on 07 May 23 - No Cached
  • “We can make it on small scales successfully,” said Josh Tetrick, chief executive officer of a rival food-technology company, Eat Just Inc.
  • What is uncertain is whether we and other companies will be able to produce this at the largest of scales, at the lowest of costs within the next decade.”
  • Mr. Tetrick said Eat Just’s Good Meat unit sells less than 5,000 pounds annually of its hybrid cultivated chicken in Singapore,
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  • Uma Valeti, the company’s CEO, said Upside has proven it can safely produce a delicious product. The company said that it has helped pioneer an industry and that it is making progress on growing larger quantities of meat, while bringing down its cost.
  • According to former employees, Upside has struggled to produce large quantities of meat. They said the company often scrambled to make enough for lab analysis and tastings. Upside for years worked to grow whole cuts of meat, which proved difficult in its bioreactors. It battled contamination in its labs. Traces of rodent DNA once tainted a chicken cell line, according to former employees, and confirmed by company executives.  
  • Today, the company is growing its marquee filet not in large bioreactors at its pilot plant but in two-liter plastic bottles akin to those used to grow cells for decades by pharmaceutical companies. 
  • “Roller bottles aren’t scalable. Too small, too labor-intensive,”
  • Upside’s pilot plant isn’t yet operating at the 50,000-pound annual capacity the company announced when it opened in 2021, according to company executives, much less its future target of 400,000 pounds. Production can accelerate once Upside receives USDA clearance, company executives said.
  • Industry champions said they are confident that steady scientific progress will help reduce production costs for cultivated meat, while climate change and global population growth will intensify the need for it.
  • “It turned out that tissue, or creating this whole-cut texture, was really challenging,” said Amy Chen, Upside’s chief operating officer
  • Upside also wrestled with problems common to other cultivated-meat makers, including a battle against bacteria, according to former employees.Growing meat requires meticulous sterilization because small quantities of bacteria can quickly overtake a bioreactor, ruining a batch.
  • The company said contamination can slow production, but doesn’t affect final cultivated products, unlike conventional meat. The company said that autoclaves sometimes require maintenance and that meat grown for consumers won’t be produced in the older building
  • Some industry officials think companies can surmount contamination problems, but that other hurdles will still abound, including those tied to growing the finicky cells and the high cost of supplies.  
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While China makes Pacific islands tour, US Coast Guard is already on patrol - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html CNN.com
shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • As China's foreign minister began a Pacific islands tour to promote economic and security cooperation with Beijing, the smallest of the US government's armed services was already on the scene, reinforcing Washington's longstanding commitment to the region.
  • The US cutter "helped to fill the operational presence needed by conducting maritime surveillance to deter illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in the northern Solomon Islands," a Coast Guard press release said.
  • China had proposed a sweeping regional security and economic agreement with a number of Pacific Island nations
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  • The pact, if accepted, would have marked a significant advance in Beijing's connection to the region, which holds geo-strategic importance in the Indo-Pacific.
  • "Don't be too anxious and don't be too nervous, because the common development and prosperity of China and all the other developing countries would only mean great harmony, greater justice and greater progress of the whole world," he said.
  • "We will expand US Coast Guard presence and cooperation in Southeast and South Asia and the Pacific Islands, with a focus on advising, training, deployment, and capacity-building," the strategy's action plan says.
  • The relationships the US Coast Guard has forged in the Pacific islands have deep roots, said Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
  • With fish as the main food source and key economic driver of the island nations, the Coast Guard says the emphasis of Operation Blue Pacific is to deter illegal and unregulated fishing.
  • "You cannot understate the Coast Guard's importance to ... relationships in the Central and Western Pacific," he said.
  • "It's difficult to imagine China having sufficient political capital to push for something analogous to what the US is currently doing," Koh said.
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Health Experts Warily Eye XBB.1.5, the Latest Omicron Subvariant - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ovid-omicron-variants-xbb.html pandemic policy history variants
shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • Most recombinant SARS-CoV-2 viruses have dwindled away in a matter of weeks or months, unable to outcompete other lineages. XBB, on the other hand, got a winning ticket in the genetic lottery.
  • From one parent, it gained a set of mutations that helped it evade antibodies from previous infections and vaccinations. From the other parent, it gained a separate set of mutations that made it even more evasive.
  • “XBB literally picked up the most possible mutations that it could possibly pick up from those two parents,” said Thomas Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London. The new combination made XBB one of the most evasive Omicron subvariants in existence last summer.
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  • Recent experiments suggest that XBB paid a steep price for its power to evade immunity. The mutations allow it to escape antibodies by altering the shape of the protein, called spike, that covers its surface. But some of those mutations also make it harder for XBB spike proteins to grab tightly to cells — the first step required for an infection.
  • That loose grip may have lessened XBB’s advantage against other forms of the virus. In late 2022, it jostled alongside a number of other Omicron subvariants. In Singapore, XBB caused a surge in October, for example, while remaining rare in many other parts of the world.
  • As XBB multiplied, it continued to mutate into new forms. The earliest samples of XBB.1.5 were isolated in October in New York. The new subvariant gained one crucial mutation, known as F486P.
  • Yunlong Cao of Peking University and his colleagues tested out XBB.1.5 in dishes of cells, comparing how it fared against earlier forms of XBB. The researchers found that the F486P mutation allowed XBB.1.5 to grab tightly to cells again. But the new subvariant could still evade antibodies as well as earlier forms of XBB.
  • In Connecticut, for example, Nathan Grubaugh at Yale University and his colleagues found that by mid-December, other Omicron subvariants were falling. Only XBB.1.5 cases were growing. Dr. Grubaugh estimates that it is about 20 percent more transmissible than BQ.1, which had been the dominant form.
  • How severe XBB.1.5 infections are compared with other forms of the coronavirus is not yet clear. “It’s serious,” Dr. Grubaugh said. “I just don’t necessarily know if it’s really more serious than some of the other Omicron lineages in terms of the overall impact.”
  • XBB.1.5 has already spread to other countries, and is growing rapidly in Germany, Denmark and elsewhere in Europe
  • Scientists are already scanning new sequences being uploaded to an international database called GISAID in the hopes of spotting an upgraded version of XBB.1.5. But their job is getting harder because governments are pulling back on sequencing efforts. “Worldwide, sequencing has taken a real hit,” Dr. Peacock said.
  • The United States, which once lagged behind other nations, has managed to maintain a fairly strong sequencing effort. Without it, Dr. Peacock said, XBB.1.5 might have stayed below the radar for much longer. If XBB.1.5’s next generation is evolving somewhere with little sequencing, it may go undetected for some time to come.
  • Dr. Lemieux said that paring back on sequencing was a mistake, given how many infections and deaths the virus is still causing. “This is a part of public health,” he said.
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China Feels Boxed In by the U.S. but Has Few Ways to Push Back - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-us-biden-japan.html china US foreign policy rivalry
shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • President Biden’s effort to build American security alliances in China’s backyard is likely to reinforce the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s view that Washington is leading an all-out campaign of “containment, encirclement and suppression” of his country. And there is not much Mr. Xi can do about it.
  • To China, Mr. Biden’s campaign looks nothing short of a reprise of the Cold War, when the world was split into opposing blocs. In this view, Beijing is being hemmed in by U.S. allies and partners, in a cordon stretching over the seas on China’s eastern coast from Japan to the Philippines, along its disputed Himalayan border with India, and even across the vast Pacific Ocean to a string of tiny, but strategic, island nations.
  • The summit ended with agreements to hold more naval and coast guard joint exercises, and pledges of new infrastructure investment and technology cooperation. It builds on a groundbreaking defense pact made at Camp David last August between Mr. Biden and the leaders of Japan and South Korea, as well as on plans unveiled last year to work with Australia and Britain to develop and deploy nuclear-powered attack submarines.
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  • “China is clearly alarmed by these developments,” said Jingdong Yuan, director of the China and Asia Security Program at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. “Chinese interpretations would be that the U.S. and its allies have clearly decided that China needs to be contained.”
  • aside from pointed words and the perfunctory maritime patrol, Beijing’s options to push back against U.S. pressure appear limited, analysts said, especially as China contends with slowing economic growth and mounting trade frictions.
  • Whether Mr. Biden’s strategy succeeds in deterring China in the long run remains to be seen. Nationalists in China view American alliances as fragile and subject to the whims of each U.S. presidential election. Then there’s Mr. Xi, who perceives the West to be in structural decline, and China’s ascendance as Asia’s dominant power to be inevitable.
  • “The Americans should not think so highly of themselves. They could not solve Afghanistan or Ukraine,” said Zheng Yongnian, an influential political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s campus in Shenzhen. He said that China still hoped to resolve its disputes peacefully. “The reason we are not touching the Philippines is not that we are afraid of the United States.”
  • Beijing’s room to maneuver against Washington is limited by its struggling economy, which has been hit by a property crisis and a cratering of foreign investment. China has been increasing exports, but that has already caused friction with countries concerned about a flood of cheap Chinese goods.
  • The broader American pressure campaign may also be nudging China to avoid escalating tensions further. Despite its differences with the United States, China is engaging in talks between the countries’ leaders and senior officials. Relations with some neighbors, such as Australia, are slowly thawing. Analysts have noted that Beijing has also avoided escalating its military presence around Taiwan in recent months, despite the island’s election of a leader the Communist Party loathes.
  • “They are definitely being more cautious and demonstrating a willingness to engage,” Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, said of Beijing. “They are realizing there are actual risks to letting frictions escalate. We just haven’t seen any substantive compromises yet.”
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The future belongs to Right-wing progressives - UnHerd - 0 views

unherd.com/...ngs-to-right-wing-progressives technopoly utopianism right-wing fascism progressive culture politics crisis UK US
shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • the only subset of Right-wing thought in the West today that doesn’t feel moribund is actively anti-conservative. The liveliest corner of the Anglophone Right is scornful of cultural conservatism and nostalgia, instead combining an optimistic view of technology with a qualified embrace of global migration and an uncompromising approach to public order.
  • in much the same way as the Western Left seized on Venezuela under Chávez as a totemic worked example of this vision, so too the radical Right today has its template for the future: El Salvador under Nayib Bukele
  • These moves have drastically reduced the murder rate in a previously notoriously dangerous country
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  • Since coming to power in 2019, Bukele has declared a still-to-be-rescinded state of exception, suspended the Salvadorean constitution, and locked up some 70,000 alleged gang members without due process.
  • Western critics, though, point to allegations that he has corrupted institutions by packing them with allies, not to mention, according to Amnesty International, “concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarised public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country”.
  • yet, Bukele’s strongman tactics have made him wildly popular with Salvadoreans, who doubtless enjoy a reported 70% reduction in the country’s previously extremely high murder rate. They have also made Bukele a rock star for the online Right. This group, fond of complaining about spineless leaders, fraying Western law and order, and the bleeding-away of political agency into international institutions and NGOs, regards the spectacle of a strongman leader with good social media game as something like a fantasy made flesh.
  • Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room
  • This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety
  • is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.
  • We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”
  • El Salvador is thus the most legible real-world instance of something like a Right-wing progressive programme in practice. And along with the tech enthusiasm and public-order toughness, the third distinctive feature of this programme can be gleaned: a desire not to end international migration, but to restrict it to elites.
  • For Right-wing progressives, polities are not necessarily premised on ethnic or cultural homogeneity — at least not for elites. Rather, this is a vision of statehood less based on affinity, history or even ethnicity, and more on a kind of opt-in, utility-maximisation model
  • As for those still wedded to the 20th-century idea that being Right-wing necessarily means ethnicity-based nationalism, they are likely to find this outlook bewildering.
  • Right-wing progressives generally accord greater political value to gifted, high-productivity foreigners than any slow-witted, unproductive coethnic: those within Right-wing progressive circles propose, and in some cases are already working on, opt-in startup cities and “network states” that would be, by definition, highly selective about membership.
  • As a worldview, it’s jarring to cultural conservatives, who generally value thick ties of shared history and affinity
  • Yet it’s still more heretical to egalitarian progressives, for whom making migration and belonging an elite privilege offends every premise of inclusion and social justice.
  • Right-wing progressives, by contrast, propose to learn from the immigration policies of polities such as Singapore and the Gulf states, and avert the political challenges posed by ethnic voting blocs by imposing tiered citizenship for low-skilled migrants, while courting the wealth and productivity of international elites
  • Bukele’s proposal suggests a pragmatic two-tier Right-wing progressive migration policy that courts rich, productive, geographically rootless international “Anywheres” of the kind long understood to have more affinity with one another than with less wealthy and more rooted “Somewheres” — but to do so while explicitly protecting cultural homogeneity on behalf of the less-mobile masses.
  • There are larger structural reasons for such pragmatism, not least that population growth is slowing or going into reverse across most of the planet.
  • At the same time, impelled by easier transportation, climate change, social-media promises of better lives elsewhere, and countless other reasons, people everywhere are on the move. As such, like a global game of musical chairs, a battle is now on for who ends up where, once the music stops — and on what terms.
  • How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask
  • Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion.
  • The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration — provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likeliho
  • od of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.
  • In Britain, meanwhile, whatever happens to the Tories, I suspect we’ll see more of the Right-wing progressives. I find many of their policies unnerving, especially on the biotech side; but theirs is a political subculture with optimism and a story about the future, two traits that go a long way in politics.
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