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proudsa

Hillary Clinton Attacks Donald Trump In Foreign Policy Speech - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...485273

shared by proudsa on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Contrasting her track record as secretary of state with Trump’s lack of foreign-policy experience, Clinton made the case that the presumptive Republican nominee is, above all, unqualified to be president.
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 03 Jun 16
       
      This seems to be the part that voters are regularly forgetting.
  • dangerously incoherent.
  • Her speech, delivered in San Diego, portrayed Trump, by turns, as menacing, reckless, comical, even p
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • athological.
  • But it remains unclear whether voters want a candidate, like Clinton, who can deploy careful, nuanced national-security arguments, or if they prefer a candidate, like Trump, whose approach to foreign policy frequently appears to be grounded in gut instinct.
  • divisive
  • alienates
  • It is unclear if Clinton’s arguments will resonate with Republican voters who have rallied around Trump’s brash promises to protect America, seemingly at any cost.
  • 56 percent of voters think Clinton would handle foreign policy better than Trum
  • It is impossible to predict exactly how Clinton or Trump would engage in diplomacy, or retreat from it, if elected president.
  • For his part, Trump can turn Clinton’s credentials to his advantage
  • In a general election that pits Clinton against Trump, voters may have to decide what they find more appealing: an established track record or a relatively unknown quantity who brings with him the promise of brute force.
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 03 Jun 16
       
      Like Mr. Ergueta was saying in MFW, whether you agree with him or not, Trump is a candidate unlike any we have ever seen before
Javier E

The Party Surrenders - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-party-surrenders.html

gop conservatism demagogue politics

shared by Javier E on 12 May 16 - No Cached
  • a wide array of figures whose own commitments seemed incompatible with Trumpism decided that he was worth defending and eventually supporting.
  • These figures, strikingly, came from both sides of the pre-existing civil war
  • Early in the campaign, when it seemed as if Jeb Bush had a chance to coast to the nomination as the standard-bearer of the establishment, it was mostly voices from the professional base — talk-radio voices, Fox News voices and for a time Cruz himself — who worked to build up Trump as a populist alternative
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Then as it became clear that the most establishment-friendly candidates (Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich, even the more right-wing Rubio) weren’t going to hack it, it was the establishmentarians and self-conscious moderates who decided that Trump was a man they could do business with, not like that crazy Tea Partier Senator Cruz.
  • Which is how Trump ended up as the candidate of Sean Hannity and John Boehner, Ann Coulter and Jon Huntsman, with Rush Limbaugh running interference for him with the grass roots, and various lobbyists doing the same on Capitol Hill.
  • The narcissism of small differences, in other words, led both the professional establishment and the professional base to surrender to a force that they had countless ideological and pragmatic reasons to oppose.
  • many were clearly motivated by grudges and fears instilled by the party’s civil war, and by a sense that even though Trump might represent a grave threat to their vision of Republicanism, it would still be better to serve under his rule for a season than to risk putting their hated intraparty rivals in the catbird seat.
  • So to catalog my wrongness: I overestimated the real commitment of both factions’ leaders to their stated principles and favored policies.
  • It is possible that a dishonorable, cowardly, unprincipled course will yield the result that many in both G.O.P. factions clearly crave: Trump defeated in the general election, his ideas left without a champion, and then a reversion to the party’s status quo
  • And yes, since to acquiesce to Donald Trump as the Republican nominee is to gamble recklessly with the party’s responsibilities to the republic, I overestimated their basic sense of honor.
  • it’s possible that the establishment and the Tea Party are more like Byzantium and Sassanid Persia in the seventh century A.D., and Trumpism is the Arab-Muslim invasion that put an end to their long-running rivalry, destroyed the Sassanid Dynasty outright, and ushered in a very different age. Write A Comment No doubt many thought at first that those invaders were a temporary problem, an alien force that would wreak havoc and then withdraw, dissolve, retreat.But a new religion had arrived to stay.
  • ) I overestimated their ability to put those principles ahead of personal resentments
  • Before Trump’s emergence, the Republican elite was in the midst of a long-running civil war, pitting the much-hated “establishment” against the much-feared “base,” the center-right against the Tea Party, the official party leadership against a congeries of activists, media personalities and up-and-coming right-wing politicians
  • But beneath the noise of battle, the establishment’s leaders and the base’s tribunes were often in near-agreement on policy (or, in some cases, on the absence thereof)
  • on many issues they were fighting about how to fight, as much as about what specifically to do.
  • Because of this underlying agreement, the G.O.P. elite’s civil war actually covered over many of the deeper ideological divisions within the party’s rank and file.
Javier E

A Playboy for President - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-playboy-for-president.html

sexual revolution trump religion culture war

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Trump and Hillary are both children of the ’60s — but of its opposite ends, the Brat Pack era in Trump’s case and the flowering of boomer liberalism in Hillary’s.
  • Much of what seems strange and reactionary about Trump is tied to what was normal to a certain kind of Sinatra and Mad Men-era man — the casual sexism, the odd mix of sleaziness and formality, even the insult-comic style.
  • The men’s sexual revolution, in which freedom meant freedom to take your pleasure while women took the pill, is still a potent force, and not only in the halls of Fox News.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • , it has persisted as a pervasive but unspoken philosophy in precincts officially committed to cultural liberalism and sexual equality.
  • It has also endured by going downmarket in the culture
  • Like Trumpism, Hefnerian values have prospered in the blue-collar vacuum created by religion’s retreat, community’s unraveling.
  • finally, among men who were promised pliant centerfolds and ended up single with only high-speed internet to comfort them, the men’s sexual revolution has curdled into a toxic subculture, resentful of female empowerment in all its forms.
  • the cultural conflict between these two post-revolutionary styles — between frat guys and feminist bluestockings, Gamergaters and the diversity police, alt-right provocateurs and “woke” dudebros, the mouthbreathers who poured hate on the all-female “Ghostbusters” and the tastemakers who pretended it was good — is likely here to stay.
  • With time and Christianity’s further decline, it could eclipse older culture war battles; in the pop culture landscape, it already does.
sarahbalick

Egypt protest after tea vendor 'killed by police' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-middle-east-36084846

egypt protest tea vendor killed police

shared by sarahbalick on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Egypt protest after tea vendor 'killed by police'
  • Hundreds of people have taken to the streets of Egypt's capital, Cairo, to protest after a tea vendor was allegedly shot dead by police.
  • he unrest erupted after a policeman allegedly killed the man and wounded two others during an argument over the price of a cup of tea.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The policeman has been arrested
  • "the police are thugs".
  • One policeman opened fire, killing the vendor and wounding two passersby, it added.
  • "Security forces brought in two riot police vehicles and an armoured truck and the victim's family is here and pelting them with rocks,"
  • "Security forces are retreating and promising justice but the crowd is demanding police hand over the killer."
  • There were also riots in Ismailia and the southern city of Luxor after at least three people died in police custody in a single week in November.
Javier E

A Trans-Atlantic Role Reversal - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ns-atlantic-role-reversal.html

history foreign policy European US war isolationism

shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • if nationalism is making Europeans more militaristic, in America it’s inclining us to lay down the burdens of empire, to retreat into a self-sufficient Arcadia all our own.
  • That’s a subtext of Trump’s rhetoric. Making America great again involves crushing ISIS, yes, but otherwise it seems to involve washing our hands of military commitments — ceding living space to Putin, letting Japan and South Korea go nuclear, calling NATO obsolete. And it’s simply the text of Bernie Sanders’ campaign. He’s running explicitly as the candidate of Venus (or Scandinavia, if you prefer), promising socialism at home and an end to military adventures abroad.
  • ut over the longer run, in a more fractured country and a more chaotic world, the desire for splendid isolation may only increase. There’s no mass constituency for liberal hawkishness in the Democratic Party anymore. The ease with which Trump dispatched Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio suggests that neoconservatism, too, is vulnerable to a “come home, America” message
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • What’s interesting, and somewhat in tension with Kagan’s original argument, is that all of this is happening without a major change in the relative power of the United States and Europe. We’re still the only hyperpower; they’re still militarily wea
  • This unstable combination suggests that the trans-Atlantic relationship may be headed for a strange inflection point, a kind of through-the-looking-glass version of the Iraq debate.
  • The time is the late 2020s, let’s say, and the French and Germans and Poles demand that the United States lend our still-unparalleled military strength to a conflict that seems essential to European security — toppling a nascent caliphate in North Africa, or recovering W.M.D. from a collapsing post-Putin Russia
  • And a Socialist administration in Washington, backed by more than a few Trumpian Nationalists in Congress, looks across the ocean at Europe’s wars and whispers, “not this time.”
rachelramirez

Charles Koch thinks Hillary Clinton might be a better president than the Republican candidates - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...hillary-clinton-koch-support

clinton politics US policy culture Koch

shared by rachelramirez on 26 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Charles Koch thinks Hillary Clinton might be a better president than the Republican candidates
  • billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, arguably two of the United States's most influential big-money donors in conservative politics, have kept quiet this presidential cycle.
  • They unveiled a budget of up to $900 million for the 2016 presidential election cycle at their donors' retreat in January.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • , Koch said, "it's possible" that a Clinton presidency would be better than anyone currently in the Republican nomination race
  • As a result, in the past months, Clinton has shifted some positions to the left, including endorsing the $15 federal minimum wage during the Democratic debate in New York.
Javier E

How Donald Trump Could Build an Autocracy in the U.S. - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513872

autocracy trump politics

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.
  • What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.
  • the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency.
  • ...51 more annotations...
  • The president of the United States, on the other hand, is restrained first and foremost by his own ethics and public spirit. What happens if somebody comes to the high office lacking those qualities?
  • Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.
  • As politics has become polarized, Congress has increasingly become a check only on presidents of the opposite party. Recent presidents enjoying a same-party majority in Congress—Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, George W. Bush from 2003 through 2006—usually got their way.
  • Trump has scant interest in congressional Republicans’ ideas, does not share their ideology, and cares little for their fate. He can—and would—break faith with them in an instant to further his own interests. Yet here they are, on the verge of achieving everything they have hoped to achieve for years, if not decades. They owe this chance solely to Trump’s ability to deliver a crucial margin of votes in a handful of states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—which has provided a party that cannot win the national popular vote a fleeting opportunity to act as a decisive national majority.
  • What excites Trump is his approval rating, his wealth, his power. The day could come when those ends would be better served by jettisoning the institutional Republican Party in favor of an ad hoc populist coalition, joining nationalism to generous social spending—a mix that’s worked well for authoritarians in places like Poland.
  • A scandal involving the president could likewise wreck everything that Republican congressional leaders have waited years to accomplish. However deftly they manage everything else, they cannot prevent such a scandal. But there is one thing they can do: their utmost not to find out about it.
  • Ryan has learned his prudence the hard way. Following the airing of Trump’s past comments, caught on tape, about his forceful sexual advances on women, Ryan said he’d no longer campaign for Trump. Ryan’s net favorability rating among Republicans dropped by 28 points in less than 10 days. Once unassailable in the party, he suddenly found himself disliked by 45 percent of Republicans.
  • Ambition will counteract ambition only until ambition discovers that conformity serves its goals better. At that time, Congress, the body expected to check presidential power, may become the president’s most potent enabler.
  • Discipline within the congressional ranks will be strictly enforced not only by the party leadership and party donors, but also by the overwhelming influence of Fox News.
  • Fox learned its lesson: Trump sells; critical coverage does not. Since the election, the network has awarded Kelly’s former 9 p.m. time slot to Tucker Carlson, who is positioning himself as a Trump enthusiast in the Hannity mold.
  • Gingrich said: The president “has, frankly, the power of the pardon. It is a totally open power, and he could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period.’ And technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”
  • In 2009, in the run-up to the Tea Party insurgency, South Carolina’s Bob Inglis crossed Fox, criticizing Glenn Beck and telling people at a town-hall meeting that they should turn his show off. He was drowned out by booing, and the following year, he lost his primary with only 29 percent of the vote, a crushing repudiation for an incumbent untouched by any scandal.
  • Fox is reinforced by a carrier fleet of supplementary institutions: super pacs, think tanks, and conservative web and social-media presences, which now include such former pariahs as Breitbart and Alex Jones. So long as the carrier fleet coheres—and unless public opinion turns sharply against the president—oversight of Trump by the Republican congressional majority will very likely be cautious, conditional, and limited.
  • His immediate priority seems likely to be to use the presidency to enrich himself. But as he does so, he will need to protect himself from legal risk. Being Trump, he will also inevitably wish to inflict payback on his critics. Construction of an apparatus of impunity and revenge will begin haphazardly and opportunistically. But it will accelerate. It will have to.
  • By filling the media space with bizarre inventions and brazen denials, purveyors of fake news hope to mobilize potential supporters with righteous wrath—and to demoralize potential opponents by nurturing the idea that everybody lies and nothing matters
  • The United States may be a nation of laws, but the proper functioning of the law depends upon the competence and integrity of those charged with executing it. A president determined to thwart the law in order to protect himself and those in his circle has many means to do so.
  • The powers of appointment and removal are another. The president appoints and can remove the commissioner of the IRS. He appoints and can remove the inspectors general who oversee the internal workings of the Cabinet departments and major agencies. He appoints and can remove the 93 U.S. attorneys, who have the power to initiate and to end federal prosecutions. He appoints and can remove the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice.
  • Republicans in Congress have long advocated reforms to expedite the firing of underperforming civil servants. In the abstract, there’s much to recommend this idea. If reform is dramatic and happens in the next two years, however, the balance of power between the political and the professional elements of the federal government will shift, decisively, at precisely the moment when the political elements are most aggressive. The intelligence agencies in particular would likely find themselves exposed to retribution from a president enraged at them for reporting on Russia’s aid to his election campaign.
  • The McDonnells had been convicted on a combined 20 counts.
  • The Supreme Court objected, however, that the lower courts had interpreted federal anticorruption law too broadly. The relevant statute applied only to “official acts.” The Court defined such acts very strictly, and held that “setting up a meeting, talking to another official, or organizing an event—without more—does not fit that definition of an ‘official act.’ ”
  • Trump is poised to mingle business and government with an audacity and on a scale more reminiscent of a leader in a post-Soviet republic than anything ever before seen in the United States.
  • Trump will try hard during his presidency to create an atmosphere of personal munificence, in which graft does not matter, because rules and institutions do not matter. He will want to associate economic benefit with personal favor. He will create personal constituencies, and implicate other people in his corruption.
  • You would never know from Trump’s words that the average number of felonious killings of police during the Obama administration’s tenure was almost one-third lower than it was in the early 1990s, a decline that tracked with the general fall in violent crime that has so blessed American society. There had been a rise in killings of police in 2014 and 2015 from the all-time low in 2013—but only back to the 2012 level. Not every year will be the best on record.
  • A mistaken belief that crime is spiraling out of control—that terrorists roam at large in America and that police are regularly gunned down—represents a considerable political asset for Donald Trump. Seventy-eight percent of Trump voters believed that crime had worsened during the Obama years.
  • From the point of view of the typical Republican member of Congress, Fox remains all-powerful: the single most important source of visibility and affirmation with the voters whom a Republican politician cares about
  • Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency. It will be a resource. Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it—and the conservative entertainment-outrage complex will eagerly assist him
  • Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing antipolice slogans—these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see. The more offensively the protesters behave, the more pleased Trump will be.
  • If there is harsh law enforcement by the Trump administration, it will benefit the president not to the extent that it quashes unrest, but to the extent that it enflames more of it, ratifying the apocalyptic vision that haunted his speech at the convention.
  • In the early days of the Trump transition, Nic Dawes, a journalist who has worked in South Africa, delivered an ominous warning to the American media about what to expect. “Get used to being stigmatized as ‘opposition,’ ” he wrote. “The basic idea is simple: to delegitimize accountability journalism by framing it as partisan.”
  • Mostly, however, modern strongmen seek merely to discredit journalism as an institution, by denying that such a thing as independent judgment can exist. All reporting serves an agenda. There is no truth, only competing attempts to grab power.
  • In true police states, surveillance and repression sustain the power of the authorities. But that’s not how power is gained and sustained in backsliding democracies. Polarization, not persecution, enables the modern illiberal regime.
  • A would-be kleptocrat is actually better served by spreading cynicism than by deceiving followers with false beliefs: Believers can be disillusioned; people who expect to hear only lies can hardly complain when a lie is exposed.
  • The inculcation of cynicism breaks down the distinction between those forms of media that try their imperfect best to report the truth, and those that purvey falsehoods for reasons of profit or ideology. The New York Times becomes the equivalent of Russia’s RT; The Washington Post of Breitbart; NPR of Infowars.
  • Trump had not a smidgen of evidence beyond his own bruised feelings and internet flotsam from flagrantly unreliable sources. Yet once the president-elect lent his prestige to the crazy claim, it became fact for many people. A survey by YouGov found that by December 1, 43 percent of Republicans accepted the claim that millions of people had voted illegally in 2016.
  • A clear untruth had suddenly become a contested possibility. When CNN’s Jeff Zeleny correctly reported on November 28 that Trump’s tweet was baseless, Fox’s Sean Hannity accused Zeleny of media bias—and then proceeded to urge the incoming Trump administration to take a new tack with the White House press corps, and to punish reporters like Zeleny.
  • the whipping-up of potentially violent Twitter mobs against media critics is already a standard method of Trump’s governance.
  • I’ve talked with well-funded Trump supporters who speak of recruiting a troll army explicitly modeled on those used by Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russia’s Putin to take control of the social-media space, intimidating some critics and overwhelming others through a blizzard of doubt-casting and misinformation.
  • he and his team are serving notice that a new era in government-media relations is coming, an era in which all criticism is by definition oppositional—and all critics are to be treated as enemies.
  • “Lying is the message,” she wrote. “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”
  • lurid mass movements of the 20th century—communist, fascist, and other—have bequeathed to our imaginations an outdated image of what 21st-century authoritarianism might look like.
  • In a society where few people walk to work, why mobilize young men in matching shirts to command the streets? If you’re seeking to domineer and bully, you want your storm troopers to go online, where the more important traffic is. Demagogues need no longer stand erect for hours orating into a radio microphone. Tweet lies from a smartphone instead.
  • “Populist-fueled democratic backsliding is difficult to counter,” wrote the political scientists Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz late last year. “Because it is subtle and incremental, there is no single moment that triggers widespread resistance or creates a focal point around which an opposition can coalesce … Piecemeal democratic erosion, therefore, typically provokes only fragmented resistance.”
  • If people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism becomes endemic, the corruption will slowly become more brazen, the intimidation of opponents stronger. Laws intended to ensure accountability or prevent graft or protect civil liberties will be weakened.
  • If the president uses his office to grab billions for himself and his family, his supporters will feel empowered to take millions. If he successfully exerts power to punish enemies, his successors will emulate his methods.
  • If citizens learn that success in business or in public service depends on the favor of the president and his ruling clique, then it’s not only American politics that will change. The economy will be corrupted too, and with it the larger cultur
  • A culture that has accepted that graft is the norm, that rules don’t matter as much as relationships with those in power, and that people can be punished for speech and acts that remain theoretically legal—such a culture is not easily reoriented back to constitutionalism, freedom, and public integrity.
  • The oft-debated question “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” is not easy to answer. There are certainly fascistic elements to him: the subdivision of society into categories of friend and foe; the boastful virility and the delight in violence; the vision of life as a struggle for dominance that only some can win, and that others must lose.
  • He is so pathetically needy, so shamelessly self-interested, so fitful and distracted. Fascism fetishizes hardihood, sacrifice, and struggle—concepts not often associated with Trump.
  • Perhaps the better question about Trump is not “What is he?” but “What will he do to us?”
  • By all early indications, the Trump presidency will corrode public integrity and the rule of law—and also do untold damage to American global leadership, the Western alliance, and democratic norms around the world
  • The damage has already begun, and it will not be soon or easily undone. Yet exactly how much damage is allowed to be done is an open question—the most important near-term question in American politics. It is also an intensely personal one, for its answer will be determined by the answer to another question: What will you do?
Javier E

Steve Bannon: 'We're going to war in the South China Sea ... no doubt' | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...p-war-south-china-sea-no-doubt

china islam foreign policy war

shared by Javier E on 02 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The United States and China will fight a war within the next 10 years over islands in the South China Sea, and “there’s no doubt about that”.
  • At the same time, the US will be in another “major” war in the Middle East.
  • Those are the views – nine months ago at least – of one of the most powerful men in Donald Trump’s administration, Steve Bannon,
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • in radio shows Bannon hosted for Breitbart he makes plain the two largest threats to America: China and Islam.
  • Bannon’s sentiments and his position in Trump’s inner circle add to fears of a military confrontation with China, after secretary of state Rex Tillerson said that the US would deny China access to the seven artificial islands. Experts warned any blockade would lead to war.
  • “You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China. Right? They are motivated. They’re arrogant. They’re on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian west is on the retreat,” Bannon said during a February 2016 radio show.
  • China’s military warned that war between the two countries was a real possibility. “A ‘war within the president’s term’ or ‘war breaking out tonight’ are not just slogans, they are becoming a practical reality,” an official wrote on the website of the People’s Liberation Army.
  • Bannon focused heavily on China’s oppression of Christian groups. “The one thing the Chinese fear more than America … they fear Christianity more than anything,” he said.
  • “Some of these situations may get a little unpleasant,” Bannon said in November 2015. “But you know what, we’re in a war. We’re clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East again.”
ecfruchtman

Why Netanyahu must stand up to Israel's right - 0 views

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

shared by ecfruchtman on 04 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 04 Mar 17
     
    Israel is at a crossroads: two states or not two states. Of course, the world does not expect a deal to be made tomorrow -- or even soon. But it does want to hear from Israel that there has been no paradigm shift, no retreat to the old dream of a Greater Israel by annexation, and no abandonment of the commitment to Palestinian statehood.
Javier E

Incredible Shrinking Country - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...redible-shrinking-country.html

Japan values trends economy

shared by Javier E on 29 Apr 12 - Cached
  • In Japan, birthrates are now so low and life expectancy so great that the nation will soon have a demographic profile that matches that of the American retirement community of Palm Springs
  • the overall Japanese population is likely to decline by 20 percent, with grim consequences for an already-stagnant economy and an already-strained safety net.
  • . Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world, and there were rashes of Internet-enabled group suicides in the last decade.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The younger generation includes millions of so-called “parasite singles” who still live with (and off) their parents, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of the “hikikomori”—“young adults,” Eberstadt writes, “who shut themselves off almost entirely by retreating into a friendless life of video games, the Internet and manga (comics) in their parents’ home.”
Javier E

The Austerity Agenda - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gman-the-austerity-agenda.html

austerity deficit recession crisis rationale metaphor economics

shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 12 - Cached
  • why is Britain doing exactly what it shouldn’t? Unlike the governments of, say, Spain or California, the British government can borrow freely, at historically low interest rates. So why is that government sharply reducing investment and eliminating hundreds of thousands of public-sector jobs, rather than waiting until the economy is stronger
  • I’ve posed that question to a number of supporters of the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, sometimes in private, sometimes on TV. And all these conversations followed the same arc: They began with a bad metaphor and ended with the revelation of ulterior motives.
  • The bad metaphor — which you’ve surely heard many times — equates the debt problems of a national economy with the debt problems of an individual family. A family that has run up too much debt, the story goes, must tighten its belt. So if Britain, as a whole, has run up too much debt — which it has, although it’s mostly private rather than public debt — shouldn’t it do the same? What’s wrong with this comparison?
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The answer is that an economy is not like an indebted family. Our debt is mostly money we owe to each other; even more important, our income mostly comes from selling things to each other. Your spending is my income, and my spending is your income.
  • So what happens if everyone simultaneously slashes spending in an attempt to pay down debt? The answer is that everyone’s income falls — my income falls because you’re spending less, and your income falls because I’m spending less. And, as our incomes plunge, our debt problem gets worse, not better.
  • these assertions often go along with claims that the economic crisis itself demonstrates the need to shrink government. But that’s manifestly not true. Look at the countries in Europe that have weathered the storm best, and near the top of the list you’ll find big-government nations like Sweden and Austria.
  • there’s a clear moral to this story: When the private sector is frantically trying to pay down debt, the public sector should do the opposite, spending when the private sector can’t or won’t. By all means, let’s balance our budget once the economy has recovered — but not now. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.
  • when you push “austerians” on the badness of their metaphor, they almost always retreat to assertions along the lines of: “But it’s essential that we shrink the size of the state.”
  • The great American economist Irving Fisher explained it all the way back in 1933, summarizing what he called “debt deflation” with the pithy slogan “the more the debtors pay, the more they owe.
  • So the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.
  • The big question here is whether the evident failure of austerity to produce an economic recovery will lead to a “Plan B.” Maybe. But my guess is that even if such a plan is announced, it won’t amount to much. For economic recovery was never the point; the drive for austerity was about using the crisis, not solving it. And it still is.
Javier E

How the Mormons Make Money - Businessweek - 0 views

www.businessweek.com/...how-the-mormons-make-money

mormon business theology

shared by Javier E on 22 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • “The Mormon Church is very different than any other church. … Traditional Christianity and Judaism make a clear distinction between what is spiritual and what is temporal, while Mormon theology specifically denies that there is such a distinction.”
  • To Latter-day Saints, opening megamalls, operating a billion-dollar media and insurance conglomerate, and running a Polynesian theme park are all part of doing God’s work. Says Quinn: “In the Mormon [leadership’s] worldview, it’s as spiritual to give alms to the poor, as the old phrase goes in the Biblical sense, as it is to make a million dollars.”
  • “There are religious groups that own radio stations, but they don’t also own cattle ranches. There are religious groups that own retreats, but they don’t also own insurance companies,” says Ryan Cragun, a sociology professor at the University of Tampa and co-author of the recently published book Could I Vote for a Mormon for President? “Given their array of corporate interests, it would probably make more sense to refer to them as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Holdings Inc.”
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  • As a religious organization, the LDS Church enjoys several tax advantages. Like other churches, it is often exempt from paying taxes on the real estate properties it leases out, even to commercial entities, says tax lawyer David Miller, who is not Mormon. The church also doesn’t pay taxes on donated funds and holdings.
  • Under U.S. law, churches can legally turn around and sell donated stock without paying capital-gains taxes, a clear advantage for both donor and receiver.
  • According to U.S. law, religions have no obligation to open their books to the public, and the LDS Church officially stopped reporting any finances in the early 1960s. In 1997 an investigation by Time used cross-religious comparisons and internal information to estimate the church’s total value at $30 billion. The magazine also produced an estimate that $5 billion worth of tithing flows into the church annually, and that it owned at least $6 billion in stocks and bonds.
  • a recent investigation by Reuters in collaboration with sociology professor Cragun estimates that the LDS Church is likely worth $40 billion today and collects up to $8 billion in tithing each year.
  • Several high-ranking church insiders told him that the church’s finances are so compartmentalized that no single person, not even the president, knows the entirety of its holdings
  • it’s important to start at the very top: The Mormon Church is owned and run by what is called the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This entity is a “corporation sole,” which is an obscure legal body owned entirely by one person. In the case of the Mormon Church, that person is Monson, the prophet.
  • McMullin says the Mormon Church has “two or three or four for-profit entities under the Presiding Bishopric,” and names DMC, AgReserves, and Suburban Land Reserve. He says DMC has about “2,000 to 3,000 employees.” He also confirms Hoover’s estimate that DMC has annual revenue of roughly $1.2 billion
  • The Mormon belief in the spiritual value of financial success goes back to 1830, when the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, announced to his followers that God had told him the following: “Verily I say unto you, that all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal.” In other words, historian Quinn translates, “whether it’s investing in a merchandising store, or tannery, or a lumber mill, or a hotel, or a bank—all of which occurred under Joseph Smith’s leadership—according to that 1830 revelation, it’s all spiritual.”
  • In its early days, the church’s entrepreneurial rigor was fueled by necessity. Mormons, who clashed with neighbors and government authorities over practices such as polygamy, often had to fend for themselves. The group also espoused separatist financial goals of “erecting and maintaining an improved economic system for its members,” according to historian Leonard J. Arrington, who points out that 88 of Smith’s 112 revelations deal directly or indirectly with economic matters.
  • When Mormons arrived in Utah in 1847 it was a barren territory, still under Mexican jurisdiction. To settle the land, Arrington writes, over a 15-year period in the late 1800s, “Mormons constructed 200 miles of territorial railroad, a $300,000 woolen mill, a large cotton factory, a wholesale-retail concern with sales of $6,000,000 a year, more than 150 local general stores, and at least 500 local cooperative manufacturing and service enterprises.”
  • oday, Temple Square is filled with statues glorifying the industry of those pioneers. The state emblem is a beehive, in honor of diligent work, and the term “deseret,” used in the titles of many Latter-day enterprises, derived from the Book of Mormon, means “honeybee.”
  • Until the 1990s, wards—the Mormon equivalent of parishes—kept some donated member money locally to distribute for aid and activities as they saw fit. Today all money is wired directly to Salt Lake City. McMullin insists that not one penny of tithing goes to the church’s for-profit endeavors, but it’s impossible for church members to know for sure. Although the Mormon Doctrine and Covenants says “all things shall be done by common consent in the church,” members are not provided with any financial accounting.
  • the Mormon Church donates only about 0.7 percent of its annual income to charity; the United Methodist Church gives about 29 percent.
  • “Though the church’s monetary donations are significant, much of the ‘value’ of our service is not monetary, but in the hundreds of thousands of hours of service and the talent and expertise given by church members to help others around the world.”
  • The LDS Church’s legions of missionaries and volunteers don’t merely spread the Mormon message around the world; they’re also vital to the church’s businesses. According to McMullin, DMC alone employs 1,400 “people who are volunteering their time and their services—some are part-time and some are volunteer.” Many of these members being asked to serve full- or part-time are retirees.
julia rhodes

An extraordinary turn against military intervention - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...ainstmilitaryintervention.html

US history politics crisis policy syria war 20th century liberal realism

shared by julia rhodes on 10 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • julia rhodes on 10 Sep 13
     
    An extraordinary turn against military intervention | Al Jazeera America The negative reaction in Congress and among the American people to President Obama's proposal of military intervention has been sharp U.S. receptiveness to Russia's proposal to sequester Syria's chemical weapons shows how eager Washington is to avoid a military response. It would, however, be something extraordinary - even historic. It would suggest that a substantial percentage of Americans believe that a proposed war is a bad idea. In the context of American history, this is almost unthinkable. War is woven into the fabric of American life, and Americans usually embrace it. "All the great masterful races have been fighting races," Roosevelt declared Advances in the technology of destruction and killing made it difficult to sustain belief in war's beauty or nobility. Because the U.S. possesses such overwhelming military force, it naturally seeks to use that force. This has led inexorably to the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. American leaders have always acted on the assumption that in the end, they have recourse to all the coercive power they need to achieve any geopolitical goal. They assumed, however, that whatever problems arose, the power of the United States was so overwhelming that it would be able to resolve them. This conviction now seems to be slipping away. Public opinion surveys show scant support for bombing. Never in modern history have Americans been so doubtful about the wisdom of bombing, invading or occupying another country. American reluctance to intervene in a faraway land suggests a retreat from hubris toward reality - a creeping fear that the United States, powerful as it is, may not be able to control the effects of its foreign adventures. Generations of Americans once grew up believing not only that their country was omnipotent, but that it was an essential force for good in the world. This is an e
Javier E

Parental Pity Party - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uthat-parental-pity-party.html

parenting social obligation commitment family cultural

shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Jennifer Senior’s new book, “All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood,” is an excellent primer on possible explanations for the great parental pity party. It ranges across the problems with family policy in the United States (basically, we don’t have one), the changing role of children (who went, she notes, “from being our employees to our bosses”), the unsettling of gender roles, the “having it all” stresses inherent in the maternal quest for work-life balance, and the way economic uncertainty and technological change make it hard for parents to figure out what kind of world they’re supposed to be preparing their children for.
  • parenthood is “the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all.” In this sense, it isn’t necessarily that family life has changed that dramatically in the last few generations. Rather, it’s stayed the same in crucial ways — because babies still need what babies need — while outside the domestic sphere there’s been an expansion of opportunities, a proliferation of choices and entertainments and immediately available gratifications, that make child rearing seem much more burdensome by comparison.
  • In an earlier column, I described this retreat from childbearing as (in part) a symptom of cultural decadence, in which modern comforts crowd out intergenerational obligations.
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  • I think it’s actually the unacknowledged worldview behind a lot of the parental griping you find online and elsewhere: The “look how impossible my life has become since I had kids” genre is a way of passing judgment, not all that subtly, on people who have opted out of the parental mission altogether.
julia rhodes

Other Nations Offer a Lesson to Egypt's Military Leaders - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...o-egypts-military-leaders.html

military leaders egypt nytimes atatuk turkey middle east crisis policy history

shared by julia rhodes on 26 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Is the era of the military big man back?
  • The turmoil highlights the central role of the military in some postcolonial Muslim countries, where at least in the fitful early stages of democracy, it forcefully imposes itself as the self-appointed arbiter of power and the guardian of national identity.
  • But a look at other Muslim countries that have struggled with democratic transitions, including two other polestars of the Muslim world, Pakistan and Turkey, should provide a kind of warning to General Sisi.
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  • In Turkey, a court recently imprisoned dozens of senior military officers on charges of plotting to overthrow the government, a punitive reminder to a military once accustomed to reasserting its authority through coups.
  • Though General Sisi is riding a wave of popularity among some Egyptians and neighboring countries, notably Saudi Arabia and Israel, for cracking down on Islamists, the events in Turkey and Pakistan have shown the limits of military power.
  • Military and civilian leaders have been competing for power in Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt for decades. The military has exercised muscular influence in all three countries, openly or behind the scenes, because of weak civilian rule that can be traced to the foundation of the states — in some cases, in a bid to circumscribe Islamist influence.
  • Egypt’s generals ousted the monarchy and established a republic in 1952. Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a military revolutionary, led a fierce secularization drive in the 1920s.
  • Pakistani, Turkish and Egyptian generals profess to love democracy, but they practice it with varying degrees of reluctance.
  • Instead, the military has deeply embedded itself in each state’s DNA, winning privileges and lucrative jobs for its officers, all the while controlling politics in blunt fashion. Pakistan’s generals have mounted four coups over the past 55 years; Turkey has had three. In both Pakistan and Egypt, analysts describe the military as the core of the “deep state.”
  • In all three countries, Islam is often seen as the boogeyman of democracy, Dr. Nasr said. “But that is wrong. The real struggle in the Middle East is between civilian rule and the military.”
  • For years, Turkey was the model of progress for many Muslim countries. But the military’s retreat has been driven, in part, by the country’s desire to join the European Union. And the gloss of civilian rule vanished in June when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan violently suppressed a protest movement in central Istanbul, suggesting that one authoritarianism was being replaced with another. This month’s treason trial brought out sharp divisions between secularists and Islamists, underscoring how Turkey’s nation-building model remains a work in progress.
  • Yet as all three countries climb the ladder toward functioning democracies, the effort is complicated by outside pressure, which often favors the military.
  • His support from Egyptian civic society could evaporate as revulsion grows at the bloodshed against Islamists and the military’s crackdown on other dissenters. If he alienates Western support, financing from the Middle East cannot sustain his country for very long. And, as events in Turkey and Pakistan have shown, the military’s eminence can endure only by strategically ceding space to civilian players — or the use of violent repression.
Javier E

The Illusion of "Natural" - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...380836

purity toxic vaccine

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot.
  • Filth theory was eventually replaced by germ theory, a superior understanding of the nature of contagion, but filth theory was not entirely wrong or useless.
  • The idea that “toxins,” rather than filth or germs, are the root cause of most maladies is a popular theory of disease among people like me. The toxins that concern us range from particle residue to high-fructose corn syrup, and particularly suspect substances include the bisphenol A lining our tin cans, the phthalates in our shampoos, and the chlorinated Tris in our couches and mattresses.
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  • Many vaccines contain traces of the formaldehyde used to inactivate viruses, and this can be alarming to those of us who associate formaldehyde with dead frogs in glass jars. Large concentrations are indeed toxic, but formaldehyde is a product of our bodies, essential to our metabolism, and the amount of formaldehyde already circulating in our systems is considerably greater than the amount we receive through vaccination.
  • As for mercury, a child will almost certainly get more mercury exposure from her immediate environment than from vaccination. This is true, too, of the aluminum that is often used as an adjuvant in vaccines to intensify the immune response.
  • Our breast milk, it turns out, is as polluted as our environment at large. Laboratory analysis of breast milk has detected paint thinners, dry-cleaning fluids, flame retardants, pesticides, and rocket fuel. “Most of these chemicals are found in microscopic amounts,” the journalist Florence Williams notes, “but if human milk were sold at the local Piggly Wiggly, some stock would exceed federal food-safety levels for DDT residues and PCBs.”
  • fear of toxicity strikes me as an old anxiety with a new name. Where the word filth once suggested, with its moralist air, the evils of the flesh, the word toxic now condemns the chemical evils of our industrial world.
  • like filth theory, toxicity theory is anchored in legitimate dangers
  • the way we think about toxicity bears some resemblance to the way we once thought about filth. Both theories allow their subscribers to maintain a sense of control over their own health by pursuing personal purity. For the filth theorist, this means a retreat into the home, where heavy curtains and shutters might seal out the smell of the poor and their problems. Our version of this shuttering is now achieved through the purchase of purified water, air purifiers, and food produced with the promise of purity.
  • Purity, especially bodily purity, is the seemingly innocent concept behind a number of the most sinister social actions of the past century.
Javier E

Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ker-jail-financial-crisis.html

financial crisis prosecution enforcement law

shared by Javier E on 05 May 14 - No Cached
  • Over the past year, I’ve interviewed Wall Street traders, bank executives, defense lawyers and dozens of current and former prosecutors to understand why the largest man-made economic catastrophe since the Depression resulted in the jailing of a single investment banker
  • Many assume that the federal authorities simply lacked the guts to go after powerful Wall Street bankers, but that obscures a far more complicated dynamic. During the past decade, the Justice Department suffered a series of corporate prosecutorial fiascos, which led to critical changes in how it approached white-collar crime. The department began to focus on reaching settlements rather than seeking prison sentences, which over time unintentionally deprived its ranks of the experience needed to win trials against the most formidable law firms. By the time Serageldin committed his crime, Justice Department leadership, as well as prosecutors in integral United States attorney’s offices, were de-emphasizing complicated financial cases — even neglecting clues
  • The Andersen case was supposed to embolden the Justice Department, but it quickly backfired. Chertoff’s chutzpah shocked much of the corporate world and even many prosecutors, who thought the department had abused its powers at the cost of thousands of innocent workers. Almost immediately, the Andersen verdict resulted not in more boldness but in more caution on the part of federal prosecutors
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  • Chertoff told Biern, according to attendees, that if the Justice Department “can’t bring these cases because it may bring harm, then maybe these banks are too big.” In the end, though, Chertoff and the Justice Department blinked.
  • From 2004 to 2012, the Justice Department reached 242 deferred and nonprosecution agreements with corporations, compared with 26 in the previous 12 years, according to a study by David M. Uhlmann, a former prosecutor and law professor at the University of Michigan. And while companies paid large sums in the settlements — the days of $7 million cost-of-doing-business fees were over — several veteran Justice Department officials told me that these settlements emboldened defense lawyers.
  • Indeed, the department now effectively outsources many of its investigations of corporate executives to outside firms, which invariably produce reports that exculpate those at the top.
  • Over the years, the KPMG debacle and the corporate revolt would lead the Justice Department to roll back the Thompson memo to nearly the point of reversal. Today prosecutors are prohibited from even asking companies to waive their attorney-client privilege. They are also prohibited from pushing a company to cut off the legal fees for indicted executives or pressuring it to forgo joint defense agreements.
  • In the decade since, the courts dulled other prosecutorial tools.
  • Breuer may have come with the right pedigree, but he now faced troubles that hurt as much as the debacles of Arthur Andersen and KPMG, or the retreat from the Thompson memo: austerity. The department faced periodic hiring freezes. The F.B.I., which assigned dozens of agents to Enron, had shifted resources to terrorism. The Postal Service wound down an elite unit that had specialized in complex financial investigations. President Obama’s Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, which was designed to give hundreds of millions to prosecute financial criminals, was able to deliver only $65 million in 2010 and 2011. Prosecutors reporting to Breuer proposed setting up a mortgage-fraud initiative, a “Prosecutorial Strike Force,” as one July 2009 memo put it, but the Justice Department dithered. Finally it set up the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, an enormous coordinating committee with essentially no investigative operation.
Javier E

College, the Great Unequalizer - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ege-the-great-unequalizer.html

class university Greek system fraternity culture education

shared by Javier E on 06 May 14 - No Cached
  • a team of researchers embedded themselves in a freshman dormitory at an unnamed high-profile Midwestern state school and then kept up with a group of female students through college and into graduate or professional life.
  • the authors discovered were the many ways in which collegiate social life, as embraced by students and blessed by the university, works to disadvantage young women (and no doubt young men, too) who need their education to be something other than a four-year-long spree.
  • the American way of college rewards those who come not just academically but socially prepared, while treating working-class students more cruelly, and often leaving them adrift.
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  • Much of this treatment is meted out through the power of the campus party scene, the boozy, hook-up-happy world of Greek life. This “party pathway,” the authors write, is “a main artery through the university,”
  • Such party-pathway students aren’t particularly motivated academically, but because they have well-off parents and clear-enough career goals they don’t necessarily need to be, and because they don’t require much financial aid they’re crucial to the university’s bottom line.
  • The party pathway’s influence, though, is potentially devastating for less well-heeled students.
  • The party pathway is designed for the daughters of both the 1 percent and of what Piketty calls the “petits rentiers” — families that are affluent but not exorbitantly rich.
  • “Paying for the Party” is also a story about the socioeconomic consequences of cultural permissiveness — about what happens, who wins and who loses, when a youth culture in which the only (official) moral rule is consent meets a corporate-academic university establishment that has deliberately retreated from any moralistic, disciplinary role.
  • The losers are students ill equipped for the experiments in youthful dissipation that are now accepted as every well-educated millennial’s natural birthright.
  • The winners, meanwhile, are living proof of how a certain kind of libertinism can be not only an expression of class privilege, but even a weapon of class warfare.
Javier E

The New York Times > Magazine > In the Magazine: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...17BUSH.html

Bush presidency faith certainty openness crisis culture policy

shared by Javier E on 11 May 14 - No Cached
  • The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.''
  • What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?
  • That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.
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  • This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker.
  • has spent a lot of time trying to size up the president. ''Most successful people are good at identifying, very early, their strengths and weaknesses, at knowing themselves,'' he told me not long ago. ''For most of us average Joes, that meant we've relied on strengths but had to work on our weakness -- to lift them to adequacy -- otherwise they might bring us down. I don't think the president really had to do that, because he always had someone there -- his family or friends -- to bail him out. I don't think, on balance, that has served him well for the moment he's in now as president. He never seems to have worked on his weaknesses.''
  • Details vary, but here's the gist of what I understand took place. George W., drunk at a party, crudely insulted a friend of his mother's. George senior and Barbara blew up. Words were exchanged along the lines of something having to be done. George senior, then the vice president, dialed up his friend, Billy Graham, who came to the compound and spent several days with George W. in probing exchanges and walks on the beach. George W. was soon born again. He stopped drinking, attended Bible study and wrestled with issues of fervent faith. A man who was lost was saved.
  • Rubenstein described that time to a convention of pension managers in Los Angeles last year, recalling that Malek approached him and said: ''There is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. . . . Needs some board positions.'' Though Rubenstein didn't think George W. Bush, then in his mid-40's, ''added much value,'' he put him on the Caterair board. ''Came to all the meetings,'' Rubenstein told the conventioneers. ''Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years: 'You know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.' He said: 'Well, I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.' And I said thanks. Didn't think I'd ever see him again.''
  • challenges -- from either Powell or his opposite number as the top official in domestic policy, Paul O'Neill -- were trials that Bush had less and less patience for as the months passed. He made that clear to his top lieutenants. Gradually, Bush lost what Richard Perle, who would later head a largely private-sector group under Bush called the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had described as his open posture during foreign-policy tutorials prior to the 2000 campaign. (''He had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much,'' Perle said.) By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted quality.
  • Top officials, from cabinet members on down, were often told when they would speak in Bush's presence, for how long and on what topic. The president would listen without betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-discussions -- Powell and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly parrying on an issue -- but the president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed questions.
  • A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush's White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners.
  • By summer's end that first year, Vice President Dick Cheney had stopped talking in meetings he attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at their weekly lunch. The president was spending a lot of time outside the White House, often at the ranch, in the presence of only the most trustworthy confidants.
  • ''When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking,'' Wallis says now. ''What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year -- a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't want to hear from anyone who doubts him.''
  • , I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
  • The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
  • ''If you operate in a certain way -- by saying this is how I want to justify what I've already decided to do, and I don't care how you pull it off -- you guarantee that you'll get faulty, one-sided information,'' Paul O'Neill, who was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when we had dinner a few weeks ago. ''You don't have to issue an edict, or twist arms, or be overt.''
  • George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles -- character, certainty, fortitude and godliness -- rather than on what he says or does.
Javier E

Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans From Polar Melt - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-has-begun-scientists-say.html

climate change Antarctica ice glacier melt

shared by Javier E on 14 May 14 - No Cached
  • A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable,
  • a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.
  • The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Both groups of scientists found that West Antarctic glaciers had retreated far enough to set off an inherent instability in the ice sheet, one that experts have feared for decades.
  • Those six glaciers alone could cause the ocean to rise four feet as they disappear, Dr. Rignot said, possibly within a couple of centuries. He added that their disappearance will most likely destabilize other sectors of the ice sheet, so the ultimate rise could be triple that.
  • The new finding appears to be the fulfillment of a prediction made in 1978 by an eminent glaciologist, John H. Mercer of the Ohio State University. He outlined the vulnerable nature of the West Antarctic ice sheet and warned that the rapid human-driven release of greenhouse gases posed “a threat of disaster.” He was assailed at the time, but in recent years, scientists have been watching with growing concern as events have unfolded in much the way Dr. Mercer predicted
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