Time: Russia Has Launched a Fake News War on Europe. Now Germany Is Fighting Back

Her concern is not just the Russian media outlets that spread disinformation, Hegelich says. It is also the automated algorithms, known as bots, that help false reports go viral much faster than politicians or fact-checkers can debunk them. When American voters were shown a series of such stories from the U.S. elections, about 15% reported seeing them during the race; 8% said they believed them, according to a study published this spring by Stanford University. In June, when researchers in Germany asked a similar set of questions, 59% of Germans reported seeing fake news online; 61% said that it poses a threat to democracy.

So Merkel’s government is preparing for a siege. Her coalition in parliament passed a law at the end of June that will impose fines worth upwards of $50 million on Facebook and other social media companies that do not promptly remove “illegal content,” a term that Merkel’s government has used to target everything from hate speech and pornography to malicious propaganda. “False news is a threat to our culture of debate,” the official behind the law, Justice Minister Heiko Maas, told the German weekly Welt am Sonntag in January. Two months later, when he presented a draft of the Network Enforcement Act to reporters in Berlin, Maas made clear that the government aimed to regulate social media with an unprecedented rigor. “There should be just as little tolerance for criminal rabble rousing on social networks as on the street,” he said. [...]

As part of their cooperation, Facebook has agreed to reach into the news feeds of its users and put a warning label next to the disputed posts. The idea is not to censor or delete the content but to make readers think twice about its sources while offering them a way to double check its claims. “We’re not the ones doing the fact checking,” says Allan. “The healthy ecosystem is one in which expert fact checkers are doing their job, and they can reach people through Facebook.” [...]

What makes News Front stand out from its allies is that it rarely even pretends to uphold traditional journalistic standards. Its website refers to the agency’s staff as “voluntary fighters of the information war,” whose mission is to “defend the interests of Russian civilization and to show the true face of the enemies of the Russian world.” Sputnik and RT, Russian outlets with overt funding from the state, try to act like professional media companies, presenting a Russian twist on world events usually without resorting to outright jingoism and fabrication. Their Crimean cousin, by contrast, acts more like a scrappy paramilitary unit, pushing the same goals and ideology more aggressively, free of direct links to the Kremlin. The site’s contributors in Europe often publish their work anonymously, providing a layer of protection from the authorities that Russia’s official outlets do not enjoy. The main stringer for News Front in Germany, for instance, uses online aliases, and Knyrik declines to provide his real name. “I worry about him and our other volunteers. They could be arrested,” he says, as though his reporters in Europe are soldiers behind enemy lines. [...]

The better approach, he says, might be introduce a fact-checking curriculum in schools and make students more aware of their sources of information. But that educational approach will take years to have an impact, and in the meantime fake news technology will continue to advance. In a study published in July, academics at the University of Washington created software to “synthesize” a video of Barack Obama delivering lines he had never actually spoken.

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Vox: North Korea is more rational than you think

But when I spoke to scholars and historians of North Korea, they uniformly rejected the idea that Kim is a lunatic. His ruthlessness and fierce rhetoric should not be confused with irrationality, they explained. Instead, he should be understood as extremely calculating and disciplined when it comes to maintaining his grip on power — just as his predecessors (his father, Kim Jong Il, and his grandfather and the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung) were. [...]

The term “rational” here means that a country’s government is capable of making logical calculations about its goals and interests and determining how to achieve them based on the resources — economic, military, diplomatic, etc. — at its disposal. [...]

In an interview in May, Person said that Pyongyang “carefully studies” US responses to all its actions and has learned that it can often get the US to yield when it carries out some of its edgier provocations. [...]

The US’s decision to not retaliate after both of these high-profile provocations underscores something crucial to understanding why war hasn’t broken out on the Korean Peninsula since the end of the first war in 1953: Both North Korea and its opponents are deeply afraid of setting off a broader war that would wreak havoc across the region. The smallness of the peninsula has a way of clarifying the high stakes of any war: Millions of people are vulnerable to being massacred by either side. [...]

Person says the fact that the Trump administration has threatened to tear up the Iran nuclear deal — in which Iran agreed to restrict many of its sensitive nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of sanctions — only makes North Korea more resolute about clinging to its weapons. “It sends the signal to them, you may get an agreement today — but then the next president may not agree with it,” Person said.

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The New York Review of Books: Fools, Cowards, or Criminals?

Near the beginning of The Memory of Justice, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin declares that the barbarism of Nazi Germany can only be seen as a universal moral catastrophe: “I proceed from the assumption that every human being is guilty.” The fact that it happened in Germany, he says, doesn’t mean that it cannot happen elsewhere. This statement comes just after we have seen the Nazi leaders, one after the other, declare their innocence in the Nuremberg courtroom.

We also hear a former French paratrooper recall how the French in Algeria systematically tortured and murdered men, women, and children. There are gruesome images of the Vietnam War. And Telford Taylor, US counsel for the prosecution at Nuremberg, wonders how any of us would cope with the “degeneration of standards under pressures.” Later in the film, Taylor says that his views on Americans and American history have changed more than his views on the Germans whom he once judged.

Such juxtapositions are enough to send some people into a fury. The art critic Harold Rosenberg accused Ophuls in these pages of being “lured…into a near-nihilistic bog in which no one is guilty, because all are guilty and there is no one who is morally qualified to judge.”1 Ophuls, according to Rosenberg, “trivialized” the Nazi crimes and “diluted” the moral awfulness of the death camps. [...]

Ophuls does not dilute the monstrosity of Nazi crimes at all. But he refuses to simply regard the perpetrators as monsters. “Belief in the Nazis as monsters,” he once said, “is a form of complacency.” This reminds me of something the controversial German novelist Martin Walser once said about the Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt in the 1960s. He wasn’t against them. But he argued that the daily horror stories in the popular German press about the grotesque tortures inflicted by Nazi butchers made it easier for ordinary Germans to distance themselves from these crimes and the regime that made them happen. Who could possibly identify with such brutes? If only monsters were responsible for the Holocaust and other mass murders, there would never be any need for the rest of us to look in the mirror. [...]

Ophuls said in an interview that it was easy to like Speer. But there is no suggestion that this mitigated his guilt. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also interviewed Speer at length, called him “the true criminal of Nazi Germany,” precisely because he was clearly not a sadistic brute but a highly educated, well-mannered, “normal” human being who should have known better than to be part of a murderous regime. This is perhaps the main point of Ophuls’s film as well: there was nothing special about the Germans that predisposed them to become killers or, more often, to look away when the killings were done. There is no such thing as a criminal people. A quiet-spoken young architect can end up with more blood on his hands than a Jew-baiting thug. This, I think, is what Yehudi Menuhin meant by his warning that it could happen anywhere.

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The Guardian: Childless: why is society so frightened of women without children?

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: What Happens If We Throw an Elephant From a Skyscraper? Life & Size 1

The Atlantic: Why China Isn't Doing More to Stop North Korea

China has, in fact, proposed a plan for solving the North Korea problem. As part of an approach that it calls “suspension for suspension,” the Chinese government has offered to broker a deal in which North Korea suspends its rapidly advancing nuclear and missile programs in exchange for the United States suspending its regular military exercises with South Korea, as a prelude to negotiations to eventually rid the North of nuclear weapons. [...]

Whereas U.S. officials want North Korea to renounce nuclear weapons—or at least take steps toward “denuclearization”—as a precondition for talks, Chinese officials consider denuclearization an end goal of negotiations, not a starting point. Whereas U.S. officials see North Korean militancy as the sole threat to security on the Korean peninsula, Chinese officials perceive North Korean and American provocations as twin threats—“two accelerating trains coming toward each other” and refusing “to give way,” in the words of China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi. Whereas U.S. officials identify China as the central actor in the peninsular drama, holding the fate of North Korea in its hands, Chinese officials place their country just off-stage, merely directing feuding parties toward peace. While U.S. officials experiment with ways to exert pressure on North Korea, Chinese officials seek out pressure-relief valves. U.S. officials worry that nuclear negotiations with North Korea, which have backfired in the past, are a trap; Chinese officials claim dialogue is the only way out of the crisis. (Chinese embassy officials declined to comment on the record for this story.) [...]

The main form of pressure under discussion is economic. Trump’s Treasury Department recently imposed sanctions on a Chinese bank for allegedly laundering money for North Korea, and the administration is mulling further “secondary sanctions” on Chinese companies that do business with the North Korean government. It has also floated a range of punitive trade policies, from a tariff on steel imports to retaliation against Chinese intellectual-property violations. U.S. officials have long avoided such actions out of concern that punishing China would make it less cooperative, not more, on North Korea. But Anthony Ruggiero, a sanctions expert and former Treasury Department official, argues that this analysis misses the way that targeted financial measures work. Beyond drying up funding for North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, he has written, economic penalties could, for instance, “drive a wedge between Chinese banks that covet their access to the U.S. financial system and Chinese leaders who indulge North Korea. If the banks fear they will be the next target of U.S. sanctions, they will pressure political leaders to change course.” (There’s recent precedent for this: The U.S. sanctions campaign to contain the Iranian nuclear program coerced China into reducing its trade and financial ties with Iran.) [...]

Even if Trump were to go all in on pressuring China, it’s far from clear that doing so would achieve the desired result: the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program. That’s in part because of an additional disconnect in how China and America assess and rank the threats posed by North Korea. As Jennifer Lind of Dartmouth College has pointed out, North Korea is presently a national-security priority for U.S. officials because Kim Jong Un is building missiles that could carry a nuclear device to the United States, but Chinese officials don’t share that sense of urgency. North Korea has possessed nuclear weapons and shorter-range missiles that can hit China for years now. And while China opposes North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, its top security concern with regard to North Korea is something different: the collapse of Kim Jong Un’s government creating chaos in the North, which in turn could produce a refugee crisis, loose nukes, and an opportunity for the U.S. military presence in the region to expand right up to China’s borders. The Chinese government is therefore unlikely to crack down on North Korea to the extent the Trump administration wants, no matter how much pressure the United States applies, since that could lead to Kim’s downfall. Why would the Chinese fulfill America’s dreams only to usher in China’s nightmares?

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The Atlantic: The Moral History of Air-Conditioning

Despite the shadow of immorality, breakthroughs in air-conditioning developed out of desperation. Doctors scrambling to heal the sick took particular interest. In 1851, a Florida doctor named John Gorrie received a patent for the first ice machine. According to Salvatore Basile, the author of Cool: How Air-Conditioning Changed Everything, Gorrie hadn’t initially sought to invent such an apparatus. He’d been trying to alleviate high fevers in malaria patients with cooled air. To this end, he designed an engine that could pull in air, compress it, then run it through pipes, allowing the air to cool as it expanded. [...]

Two decades after Garfield’s death, Willis Carrier coined the term “air-conditioning.” Although it wasn’t an overnight sensation, Carrier’s breakthrough came in July 1902, when he designed his Apparatus for Treating Air, first installed in the Sackett Williams Publishing building in Brooklyn, New York. The device blew air over tubes containing a coolant. Its purpose was to reduce humidity more than to reduce air temperature; excess water in the air warped the publishing house’s paper. [...]

Air-conditioning’s major public debut was at the 1939 World’s Fair. Carrier hosted the Carrier Igloo of Tomorrow expo, where 65,000 visitors would experience air-conditioning for the first time, boosting consumer interest. Over the next decade, as the air conditioner shrank in size, advertisements for the machine shifted their appeals from men in the workplace to women at home. In some early ads the air conditioner sits in the window among a proud family admiring their machine like a spacecraft that had landed in the living room. [...]

Even though refrigerants have been modified to use fluorine instead of chlorine, and thereby to avoid impacting ozone, air-conditioning still exerts enormous environmental impact. According to Daniel Morrison, the acting deputy director of communications at the U.S. Department of Energy, residential and commercial buildings used more than 500 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity for air-conditioning in 2015 alone. That’s almost 20 percent of the total electricity used in buildings, amounting to $60 billion in electricity costs annually. Air-conditioning is also one of the main contributors to peak electric power demand, one symptom of which is rolling summer blackouts.

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Political Critique: The Balkans can no longer be considered non-European

Insisting on the view that the Balkans is non-European because it is not part of the EU isn’t going to help anyone interested in the future of the region. I oppose the view that it doesn’t have a future outside the EU, precisely because it is part of Europe. Europe, or more precisely the EU, shouldn’t see its role as a transforming power in the Balkans or a key actor responsible for political change in the region. Instead, it needs to offer a partnership on an equal basis, starting with trade and connectivity and expanding into other priority areas for a European future.

Europe sees its future in trade and economy, investing in knowledge by supporting research – such as Horizon 2020 – and influencing the world order by being the largest development and humanitarian aid donor. It is also firm on investing in stability and security to keep the EU border regions peaceful, an action that has immediate implications for the Balkans. This is not unusual given that of the 25 most peaceful countries in the world, two thirds are European. [...]

Despite many worries, Brexit could prove a useful opportunity for the Balkans in case of a continued sluggish EU accession. The EU is in the process of developing a framework and negotiating extramarital ties with the UK, particularly around the single market and free flow of labour and similar model could work for the Balkans too. A unique market system and business ties were already a basis for considering Yugoslavian integration with the EEC more than 30 years ago and we need to think how to develop and bring this up to date. The Berlin Process is an existing framework that enables this, which not only supports EU accession but, more importantly, brings the Western Balkan countries closer to each other by strengthening regional cooperation, human connectivity, fighting against extremism and organised crime and dealing with irregular migration. This opens a door for the Balkans to act as a gatekeeper of Europe, as it has been many times in history.

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Vox: No, city pledges to get 100% renewable energy are not misleading

There are complexities and complications aplenty for cities that have taken on this ambitious goal. It begins with clearly distinguishing between renewable electricity and renewable energy. (The former is a small subset; the latter also includes transportation and heat energy from liquid fossil fuels.) Another is establishing a system of tracking energy that does not “double count” electrons, so that two different entities can’t claim to be consuming the same clean energy. Another is whether to involve utilities in these city efforts, or whether cities should try to bypass them. [...]

The way the market works is (longer description here): When an individual or city contributes to the generation of renewable energy, it gets credit for that renewable energy. If it buys enough renewable energy to cover its consumption, it can claim to be “consuming 100 percent renewable energy.”[...]

It is not the most elegant solution, of course. In an actual market economy, consumers would choose their own electricity sources directly; that would make tracking easy. But the utility sector is not a market economy; it’s a quasi-socialist, semi-monopolistic Rube Goldberg contraption. [...]

Flexibility will come, in the near term, from natural gas. In the longer term, it will come from dispatchable renewable sources (geothermal, small-run hydro, possibly some biomass), storage, load shifting, efficiency, and conservation. To get to 100 percent carbon-free electricity, we might need some nuclear power (especially the small modular kind). We might need carbon capture and sequestration, most likely attached to biomass and maybe natural gas.

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