The Guardian: Psychedelic drugs: Michael Pollan on the history, science and experience of taking them – books podcast

On this week’s show, we’re talking to Michael Pollan. You may know him from his food writing - books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, or Cooked, which is also now a Netflix show. His latest focus, however, is something quite different – still something consumable – it’s psychedelic drugs.

Famous for being a very hands-on journalist, Michael tried psychedelics himself, including LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca and the venom of the Sonoran desert toad, resulting in a truly astonishing book: How to Change Your Mind, The New Science of Psychedelics.

When he came into the studio, he spoke to Sian about the early groundbreaking medical experiments performed in the 1950s to treat conditions like depression, addiction and PTSD, how that progress was almost killed by political pressure in the 1970s, and the struggle to convey his own experiences on the drugs in writing, when ineffability is a common trait of tripping.  

listen to the podcast

The New York Times: The Tragedy of Angela Merkel

The West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, told his countrymen the soothing fairy tale that reunification would not cost as much as they feared. “We’ll pay these expenses out of our pocket change,” he promised them. And like a profane messiah, he promised East Germans “blossoming landscapes.” Quite a while later, Kohl’s promises have proved at least to be half-true: The West was not bankrupted by the $2 trillion it spent to rebuild the East. And in eastern Germany, some cities and landscapes are blossoming more beautifully than many cities and communities in the west of our country. [...]

For me, a traumatized child of the world, in the heart of Europe, it is clear — and I’ve learned this truth firsthand — that the most imperfect democracy is better than the best dictatorship. Three years ago, in an emergency situation, Ms. Merkel chose not to use barbed wire, clubs, water guns, machine guns and tanks to chase away thousands of desperate refugees on the German border, not to chase them back to Austria, Hungary, Greece, Turkey and possibly back to the war in Syria or Afghanistan. Yes, yes, it was a mistake. But it was the smaller, better mistake. The “right” mistake. [...]

At this time, Ms. Merkel is trying to persuade the more advanced of the European states, if not all of them, to uphold the politics of a liberal Europe. Toward that end, she has convened a meeting of the European Union’s top politicians this week. The question on the agenda: How can the European states come to an agreement on securing their external borders without abandoning the notion of a humane asylum policy? In Europe, we are arguing over the question of how to distribute the refugees fairly. If this question should trip Ms. Merkel up, it would be a mere setback for this strong chancellor; for Europe, however, it would be a disaster.

read the article

Haaretz: Angela Merkel Is Losing to the Orban-Trump-Netanyahu Camp

It was a showdown that Merkel, backed up by Germany’s economic might and a near consensus among EU leaders, was winning. In early 2015, she visited Budapest and forced Orban to cancel a tax his government had levied on German companies. But two weeks later, the Russian president visited Budapest as well, and Merkel should have read the signs. She was about to make a series of decisions that would lead to her current predicament.

Throughout 2015, she led the EU’s tough line against the cash-strapped Syriza government in Greece. Merkel insisted on severe austerity measures in return for a bailout. She broke Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, despite the referendum in which a large majority of Greek voters rejected the EU’s terms. The price was bolstering her domineering and coercive image, and that of the EU. A year later, things would end very differently in another referendum. [...]

In 2016, in a series of meetings with British Prime Minister David Cameron, Merkel refused to grant any concessions on the EU’s freedom-of-movement principle for immigrants. Without her support, Cameron had no chance with the EU, and though he continued to support remaining in the union, immigration was to become a main issue used by Brexit-supporters, motivating 52 percent of British voters to support leaving on June 23. [...]

In three years, Merkel has gone from leader of Europe to being almost isolated. Even French President Emmanuel Macron, nominally her ally, has been discreetly distancing himself. The photograph of Merkel at this month’s G-7 summit confronting Trump made liberal hearts soar across the Western world, but it also underlined how the West is now divided into two camps. And the Orban-Trump-Netanyahu camp is swiftly gaining ground.

read the article

SciShow: What Do 'Natural' and 'Artificial' Flavors Really Mean?

What does it actually mean when your snack cake has "naturally flavored" on the package?

SciShow: The Baffling Viruses That Infect... Other Viruses

SciShow Psych: Does LSD Really Have A Medical Use?

PolyMatter: The Grand Theory of Amazon

statista: The ten countries where it's worst to be female

A new study from the Thomson Reuters Foundation has found that India is the most dangerous country in the world for women. The research was based on a survey of 550 experts on women's issues and criteria included healthcare, discrimination, cultural traditions, sexual/non-sexual violence and human trafficking.

Ending violence against women in India was made into a national priority after a student was raped and murdered on a bus in Delhi five years ago. Experts have now said that the country is not moving fast enough to eradicate danger to women with rape, sexual harassment/harassment and female infanticide still continuing at alarming levels.

The war-ravaged countries of Afghanistan and Syria came second and third in the study while number 10 is certainly a surprising addition. According to experts, the United States makes the top-10 list of the most dangerous countries for women due to the #MeToo and Time's Up campaigns dominating newspaper headlines and media coverage for months. 

see the post

Haaretz: Zionism's Terrorist Heritage

Two weeks ago outside a courtroom in the mixed Jewish-Arab town of Lod, some 20 young Jews danced and chanted in celebration of the grisly 2015 fire-bombing murder of an 18-month-old Palestinian baby, Ali Dawabshe, killed in his bed in the West Bank village of Duma. [...]

"Where is Ali? Dead! Burned! There is no Ali!" they jeered at the grandfather, who has raised the four-year-old Ahmed and seen him through the grueling healing process since the attack. "Ali is on fire! Ali is on the grill!"

Apart from the question of how the police would have reacted had the demonstrators been Palestinians and the victim a Jewish child – recent experience leaves little doubt that the result would have been beatings, injuries and arrests – it is worth paying attention to the response of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, who are consistent and immediate in strafing social media after every event involving Palestinian terrorism: Silence. [...]

"The terror attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was in its day the equivalent of the Twin Towers," wrote historian Tom Segev in 2006, after Benjamin Netanyahu had taken center stage at a commemoration celebrating the 60th anniversary of the attack. Years later, Segev would call it, "at the time the most lethal terrorist attack in history."

The blast, which levelled six floors of a wing of the hotel with 350 kilograms of explosive, killed 91 people, all but 16 of them civilians. Most of the dead were British government staffers or hotel employees. There were 41 Arabs, 28 British citizens, 17 Jews, two Armenians, one Russian, one Greek and one Egyptian. 

read the article

Politico: Italy’s post-fact immigration debate

Ask an average Italian what percentage of the country’s population was born abroad and the answer you’ll get — according to the research firm Ipsos Mori — is 26 percent. The actual number is 9.5 percent.   

Similarly, 11 months after a sudden, lasting drop in irregular sea arrivals to Italy, 51 percent of Italians still believe the number of migrants arriving in Italian ports is “similar or higher” than before, according to a recent survey published by the newspaper Corriere della Sera. The truth: Arrivals are almost 80 percent lower than they were nearly a year ago.

The problem is not unique to Italy. Across Europe, and indeed the world, the dominant political discourse has become increasingly dissociated from reality. The Ipsos Mori survey found similarly inflated perceptions about the foreign-born population in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. And, according to another recent study, Germans estimate the unemployment rate among immigrants at 40 percent. The true figure is less than 8 percent. [...]

But while funds for securing the EU’s external borders will nearly quadruple (from €5.6 to €21.3 billion), money devoted to integration — an area that experts agree is essential for the long-term management of immigrants — will most likely remain at current levels. This is a direct reflection of pressure created by politicians who have zeroed in on closing the bloc’s external borders, despite the fact that new arrivals are down and a long-term solution requires attention to integrating those who stay.

read the article

The Atlantic: There Is No Immigration Crisis

I think this argument is wrong. It’s wrong because it conflates good politics with good policy. It may be true that Democrats would benefit politically by taking a harder line on illegal immigration, as Bill Clinton benefitted in the 1990s by taking a harder line on welfare and crime. I’m not sure. The contention is plausible but difficult to prove. Regardless, family detention is a terrible response to a largely fictitious crisis. It would be lovely if shrewd politics and sound policy always went hand in hand. But it’s important for commentators to acknowledge that, often, they don’t. [...]

There’s some truth to this. As the Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner has shown, using data from the American National Election Study, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney among voters with negative views of undocumented immigrants. And, crucially, he did no worse among voters with positive views. In Klinkner’s words, “Trump won in 2016 by mobilizing the minority of Americans with anti-immigration views—but only because he avoided an offsetting counter-mobilization by the majority of Americans with pro-immigration views.” [...]

Frum, Sullivan, and Zakaria think Democrats need a middle path. They should oppose Trump’s most brutal policies while more clearly acknowledging public anxiety about illegal immigration and endorsing measures to stop it. The theory, presumably, is that such a strategy could lure back some white voters who flipped from Obama to Trump over immigration without depressing turnout among the Democrats’ pro-immigrant, young, progressive, and minority base. In the hands of a gifted candidate, this might work. Bill Clinton appeased white voters in 1992 and 1996 with his punitive stances on welfare and crime while still galvanizing a large liberal and African American turnout. Barack Obama took a harder rhetorical line against illegal immigration in 2012 than Hillary Clinton took in 2016 yet won a larger share of the Latino vote. As I’ve noted previously, Democrats might benefit from emphasizing the virtues of assimilation, and focusing on helping immigrants learning English, thus counteracting Trump’s claim that immigration undermines national unity. [...]

This is misleading. Over the last decade, illegal immigration has been going down. Between 1983 and 2006, according to the Border Patrol, the United States apprehended roughly one million—and sometimes as many as 1.5 million—undocumented immigrants per year along America’s southwest border (where the vast majority of undocumented migrants cross). That number steadily dwindled during Obama’s presidency. In fiscal year 2016 (which began in October 2015 and ended in September 2016), it was 408,000—less than half the number in 2009.  [...]

But the evidence for this argument is weak. In a 2007 study of undocumented Mexican migrants, Wayne A. Cornelius of the University of California at San Diego and Idean Salehyan of the University of North Texas found that “tougher border controls have had remarkably little influence on the propensity to migrate illegally to the USA.” Surveying the academic literature for The Washington Post this March, Anna Oltman of the University of Wisconsin at Madison noted that, “researchers increasingly find that deterrence has only a weak effect on reducing unauthorized immigration.” A weak effect isn’t no effect. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies probably contributed to the drop in border crossings last year. Yet those numbers are now returning to their pre-Trump levels. In early April, in an effort to push them back down, the Trump administration announced that it would separate parents and children. Yet the number of apprehensions in both April and May was almost identical to the number in March.

read the article

Vox: America’s racial future is California’s present

America is changing, and it’s changing fast. People feel that. And everything we know about identity and politics suggests this kind of transition will push America into a fragile and even dangerous place. Look at Donald Trump and the ideas that powered his rise — this transition has already pushed America into a fragile and even dangerous place. “Slowing massive demographic change is not fascist; it’s conservative,” warns Andrew Sullivan. [...]

Eric Garcetti is the mayor of LA. He’s its first Jewish mayor and its second Mexican-American mayor. He was reelected in 2017 with a stunning 81 percent of the vote. I’ve always found him to be unusually thoughtful on questions of diversity and national identity, perhaps because of the place he lives and works, and perhaps because of how many of those questions are bound up in his own biography. [...]

I think Democrats are very good at speaking about the discomfort of what it means to be a person of color, of having a different relationship with the police department. But on the other side of it, Democrats have lost the more national vision of a national identity. We run away from too often just embracing patriotism, of speaking about the United States as a great nation and a great people and a great country.  

read the article

Bloomberg: The Millennial Crown Prince Running Saudi Arabia

Known as Mr. Everything for his deep influence in all aspects of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is radically changing his country before he even takes his seat on the throne. Bloomberg’s Profiles takes a closer look the most powerful young man in the region.

Quartz: Happiness doesn’t change much in long marriages. But something else does

To answer that question, sociologists Paul Amato from Pennsylvania State University and Spencer James of Brigham Young University examined data from 1,617 participants in the Marital Instability over the Life Course survey, a longitudinal study of marriage in the US conducted from 1980 to 2000. All respondents were married at the start of the survey; by the end, about half of them still were, the rest having divorced (19%), become widowed (5%), or dropped out of the study. [...]

In couples headed for divorce, reported happiness declined continuously and precipitously until the marriage’s end. Couples that stayed together saw a moderate decrease in happiness through the first decades of their partnership as well, with a slight uptick around the 30-year mark. [...]

Conflict, for instance, declined dramatically and continuously over the course of a life together. After a dip in the first decades when work and family obligations consume a couple’s time, the frequency of shared activities increased. By the fourth decade of marriage, couples reported spending as much time dining, socializing, and having fun together as they did when they were newlyweds. [...]

Divorced women reported more unhappiness, fewer shared activities, and more conflict than their former husbands did. Women in long-term marriages reported less happiness and more conflict at the start of the marriage, though eventually their views of marital conflict converged with their spouse’s.

read the article

Vintage Everyday: 6 Racist, Sexist and Dishonest Vintage Advertisements That Seem Shocking Today (March 04, 2018)

These vintage advertisements are from Beyond Belief, a book by art collector and former advertising executive Charles Saatchi, which brings together the most shocking advertising campaigns of the last century. From racism and sexism to dodgy health claims, nothing was out of bounds for the real-life Mad Men.

“In the middle of the last century, marketing men had few qualms about creating brutally offensive advertisements...It proved a grimly amusing task to find so many examples that I could collect together; they provide a clear insight into the world of the ‘Mad Men’ generation and the consumers they were addressing. Although many of the advertisements selected are alarming they present an important portrait of society in the 1940s and ‘50s.” - Charles Saatchi.

Misogynistic, racist, unscientific, dishonest and just plain bizarre, these ads demonstrate how our attitudes towards women, race, tobacco, personal hygiene and drugs have changed over the years. 

see the photos

The Guardian: Blame for the ‘migrant crisis’ lies with national politicians, not the EU

To be sure, the EU failed to anticipate the scope of the 2015 migration crisis. But today’s dismal turn of events has more to do with how national politicians have behaved than with the European project itself. Politicians should explain the complexities of migration rather than pander to anxieties and alarm citizens. Throughout history, Europe’s very fabric was born of age-old movements of entire populations. With so many desperate people on the move today, seeking safety or simply a better life for themselves, migration cannot simply be stopped. Instead it must be managed.

But there’s an obvious discrepancy between what the EU commission is proposing and what national governments are ready to do. For instance, Brussels institutions have published a plan for Africa, calling for spending of €32bn (£28bn) over six years and focusing particularly on infrastructure. Will the leaders of EU states accept it, even though it’s a bare minimum? Or will they try to take the easier route of building walls and barriers in order to allay the very fears some of them have fanned?  

Look at the facts: the number of migrants arriving in Europe by sea has dropped spectacularly – in Italy, by over 70% compared to last year. But that reality has gone almost unnoticed. There is no large-scale migration crisis in Europe now. Instead, what we’re seeing are domestic political crises in which the theme of migration is exploited by demagogues. [...]

The dominance of the nation state also goes some way to explaining why the needs of citizens – in terms of jobs and social policies – are paid insufficient attention. Take the Maastricht treaty. It has been essentially used in the name of economic and fiscal rigour – a topic dear to the heart of the conservative European People’s party, which has long acted as the de facto ruler in Brussels. That is largely what has turned the eurozone into a bogeyman for people who care about social justice. But here’s the thing: only the budget deficit and GDP parameters of the Maastricht treaty were enacted. The parts that pointed to social policies have been left to languish. Who is aware today that the Lisbon treaty, in article 3, talks of goals relating to social progress and economic growth, and that it even mentions full employment?

read the article

Haaretz: Lesbian Love Out, Prostitution In: How Israel Censored Erotic Literature in the 1960s

“The phenomenon reflects the crisis of values in Israeli society at that time and the moral panic accompanying it,” observes Prof. Oded Heilbronner, a historian at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan. [...]

Archival documents from this era show that national institutions held contradictory and confusing positions about the subject question – ranging from the desire to allow a degree of freedom and avoid inessential prohibitions, to the fear of the undesirable moral influence of pornographic literature and the damage it was liable cause. [...]

But when Prof. Heilbronner examined the list of books the committee reviewed, he had trouble discerning any consistent logic behind its decisions and found that it had actually approved many pornographic books for publication. In part, this was because alongside the pornography they depicted messages in the content that “suited the views of some of parts of the establishment,” he notes.  [...]

The Committee to Combat Obscene Literature was dissolved in 1967, and a year later the Committee on the Matter of Pornographic Publications was created under the aegis of the Justice Ministry. It took a relatively liberal approach to the phenomenon, and even ruled that it is impossible to prove the claim that pornography has a negative influence or to discern any connection between exposure to lewd materials and corruption of public morals. Moreover, it wrote that psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have found that pornographic literature “has a positive role in relieving urges that otherwise could have led to perverted and even criminal activity.”

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: The End of Armenia’s Old Regime

With a population of a little under 3 million and an economy entirely reliant on favorable trade with its larger neighbors and remittances from abroad, Armenia has been incredibly vulnerable to the shifting winds of the global economy. With the arrival of the worldwide recession in 2008, the country was hit exceptionally hard. On paper, the recovery began two years later, with GDP growth back in the black by 2010 and further growth from then on (reaching a high of 7.5 percent for 2017). But this “recovery” was not felt by the vast majority of Armenian people. Unemployment actually increased from 16 percent to 17 percent during the last decade and roughly one-third of the population remains below the poverty line. [...]

The revolt that came to engulf Armenia in 2018 was born from the ripples of the bloody consolidation of Republican Party rule in 2008. That year, the country’s opposition — a loose coalition of middle-class urbanites, a handful of oligarchs, and members of the ruling elite that had been deposed in 1998 — coalesced around the controversial figure of Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Armenia’s first postcommunist president. Likely inspired by Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Ter-Petrosyan ran for president and when, as expected, he was defeated in a blatantly rigged election, he called on his supporters to come out into the streets. But his daring attempt to repeat history was met with overwhelming state force. When the dust settled, eight protesters and two police officers were dead, Ter-Petrosyan was under house arrest, and the Republican Party was unquestionably the only dominant political force in the country — having crushed or co-opted any formerly disloyal elites. Yet this victory came at a cost. The fratricidal bloodshed and the ensuing financial crisis meant that the HHK came to rule through managed coercion mixed with societal apathy, while outside the halls of power a new extra-parliamentary opposition began to develop. [...]

The first successful civic initiative was small. Led by a group of young environmentalists in 2012, it was organized around an occupation — a couple hundred strong at its peak — that successfully blocked the slated conversion of a major park in central Yerevan into a trade zone for shops. The following year an even bigger mobilization, organized by a coalition of groups, arose in response to the Yerevan municipality declaring a 50 percent increase in public transport fares. This time thousands of Yerevan’s citizens joined the protest and the attendant fare boycott, refusing to pay anything above the standard price. And once again, the government backed down. [...]

While the attempts to bar government buildings met with near universal failure — security forces were always nearby — the road blocks were another story. The choice of roads to be blocked was not planned in advance and was up to protesters’ self-organization, which added an element of unpredictability and surprise for which the authorities had not prepared. Security forces, likely with previous occupation-style protests in mind, had hunkered down, setting up barricades lined with phalanxes of riot police, barbed wire, and water cannons in the city’s key locations. They had prepared for a siege, a frontal assault, a proverbial storming of the Bastille. Instead, they found themselves forced to play authoritarian whack-a-mole, furtively trying to find and dismantle dozens of tiny, shifting, yet effective roadblocks throughout the city center.    

read the article

The Atlantic: The Supreme Court’s Green Light to Discriminate

Roberts’s approach to the question of prejudice was perhaps best articulated in his 2007 opinion striking down school-desegregation plans that consider race, in which he wrote that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” As long as there is no clear evidence of an intent to discriminate, Roberts argued, discrimination has not taken place, no matter how obvious the impact. But if you acknowledge that a group is being discriminated against and extend it protections or benefits in the process of trying to address that discrimination, that is the real racism. Roberts’s jurisprudence puts into the polite language of the law the belief that accusations of prejudice are worse than prejudice itself.

That philosophy, that addressing bigotry is worse than bigotry, has reached its natural conclusion in Roberts’s opinion upholding President Trump’s travel ban targeting travelers from several mostly Muslim countries. As Roberts acknowledges in his opinion, Trump made no secret of his animus towards Muslims during the campaign, including vowing to ban Muslims from the country entirely, saying “Islam hates us,” and that America has problems “with Muslims coming into the country.” Nevertheless, Roberts argues, because the order itself doesn’t mention Islam, the president’s remarks about the travel ban, and his express intent in imposing it, can be safely ignored. [...]

Roberts’s logic is baffling. The chief justice argues that since it discriminates against some Muslims, rather than against every Muslim, the order is not motivated by hostility against Muslims. But the order was expressly motivated by anti-Muslim prejudice, and so it enshrines in law official disapproval of a particular religion. Like all other discriminatory policies, once implemented, it directly affects a fraction of the group it targets, while adopting official condemnation of that group. And few deliberately racist policies in American history have lacked for an explanation of why such laws were in the public interest, and many were said to be necessary for public safety.

read the article

Social Europe: Austria’s Right-Wing Government At Six Months: What’s The Record So Far?

Last year, not only the FPÖ, but also the ÖVP put restrictive positions on immigration and integration at the centre of its electoral campaign. The parties of the left proved unable to respond effectively – the Social Democrats (SPÖ) lost the chancellorship, while the Greens were voted out of parliament completely. The ÖVP and FPÖ agreed on a coalition agreement that focuses on liberal economic policies and measures to reduce immigration. The two parties did not have a tough time finding common ground – quite different from some other recent instances of government formation in Western Europe. [...]

As expected, both parties continued to keep the issues of immigration and integration salient. In some instances, this focus was directly linked to welfare state measures. For example, the coalition agreed to lower minimal social security for individuals with limited or no German language skills. Moreover, parents who work in Austria will soon receive family allowances that are dependent on the living costs in their children’s places of residence. For many Eastern European citizens working in Austria this will lead to a substantial decrease in their disposable income. The government also reduced funding for integration measures. In addition, the ÖVP and FPÖ decided to shut down seven mosques which were accused of being close to ‘radical’ political Islam, and announced plans to ban children from wearing head scarves in kindergarten and elementary school.

Beyond immigration and integration, the ratification of CETA, an economic agreement between the EU and Canada, has been a surprisingly salient issue in Austrian politics. Even though the FPÖ had vehemently opposed the treaty while in opposition, in government the party voted in favour of ratification. What the FPÖ could push through instead was a stop to a smoking ban in restaurants, which had already been agreed on by the previous SPÖ/ÖVP coalition. The government also, at least temporarily, stopped a programme targeting the long-term unemployed above the age of 50. The coalition also agreed on an expansion of the state’s capacity for online surveillance – even though months before the last election, the FPÖ had compared similar proposals to Erich Mielke’s Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, in the German Democratic Republic. [...]

After six months in charge, poll numbers indicate stability for the new government. Currently, Austria’s three biggest parties remain close to their election results from last year. The ÖVP is ahead, with more than 30 percent, while the SPÖ and FPÖ are close to each other, in most survey clearly below 30 percent. The individual politician who enjoys the greatest public trust is chancellor Kurz.

read the article

Spiegel: 'The Very People Who Voted for Trump Will Suffer'

Summers: The president is certainly not right in the way he is doing it. There is not much in the historical records to suggest that these kinds of bluster and threats will be effective. It is an extraordinarily negative achievement of our economic diplomacy that we have our traditional allies being more sympathetic to China than to us because we are sanctioning them.  

DER SPIEGEL: China holds U.S. treasury bills, notes and bonds that are worth more than a trillion dollars. Is that a weapon Beijing will use for retaliatory measures?

Summers: Never say never. But taking steps that would drive the value of the dollar down would be enormously costly for the Chinese, given their large external position in dollar assets. The result would be perhaps a more competitive dollar relative to the euro, which many in the U.S. would see as an advantage. Therefore, I do not expect China to sell dollar assets as a source of leverage. [...]

Summers: Many corporations in America are appalled by some aspects of the administration's policy. It is quite extraordinary for CEOs like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan or Satya Nadella of Microsoft to speak out with respect to our migration policy. The president lacks a reservoir of credibility with major business leaders. President Trump's business advisory council had to disband because of the resignation of CEOs. It is unprecedented. Business leaders fear that this blundering approach will lead to retaliation against them and favoritism by China toward its European and Japanese competitors. And no one is looking to have its input prices substantially increased as it will be done by steel and aluminum tariffs. [...]

Summers: The route forward toward increased integration may not proceed rapidly and there surely will be hiccups and crises, but the EU will be intact. The whole question of immigration is extremely vexed. If the idea of more European integration is taken to be synonymous with very weak national border controls, it is not likely to be politically acceptable in many countries. In general, the prospect of the EU staying together looks better than it did a year ago. The lack of U.S. leadership raises the pressure on the Europeans to cooperate, and that keeps the union going.

read the article

The Atlantic: Uneasy Riders: Trump’s War on Harley

A year later, the realities of global economics and the president’s trade policies have resulted in a very different message from Trump. Three of his five trade-related tweets Tuesday morning mentioned Harley. But the company’s announcement, which was made Monday in a regulatory filing, was partly due to the trade dispute Trump himself sparked earlier this month. When the Trump administration announced levies on European steel and aluminum imports, the European Union responded with retaliatory measures—in Harley’s case, the company said EU tariffs would add more than $2,000, on average, to the cost of each a motorcycle exported to Europe. And yet the deeper reason for Harley’s decision is that, despite the presidential imprimatur of a storied “Aura” about the brand, Harley, and indeed most other motorcycle makers, have seen steadily declining sales. Europe had offered Harley a rare bit of good news.  

Until the tariffs. The EU’s retaliatory tariffs, which are worth $3.2 billion, specifically targeted bourbon, peanut butter, and Harley’s motorcycles, among other things—items that are, not coincidentally, made in Republican-controlled districts of the United States. Making its motorcycles in Europe would allow Harley to avoid the tariffs incurred through export and keep the profit it earns on each motorcycle sold. But tariffs aside, there are deeper forces driving Harley’s long term reorientation, one chief among them: evolving consumer tastes.  [...]

All of this, however, doesn’t change a larger truth about Harley-Davidson, in general, and the motorcycle industry, in particular. Young people are simply not buying motorcycles the way Baby Boomers did. Plenty of reasons have been cited for this, including rising student debt and the loss of motorcycling’s allure, but the development, and Trump’s response to it, is part of a broader pattern. The president sees the offshoring of jobs as having resulted in the hollowing out of the American middle class, and blames unfair trade for what has befallen the American worker. But he’s using trade tools to respond to trends that may actually have little to do with trade at all.

read the article

Quartz: Brits who hate London are nearly twice as likely to oppose multiculturalism

That’s according to a recent survey by pollster YouGov, which showed that those with unfavorable views of Britain’s capital are almost twice as likely to believe multiculturalism has had a negative impact on the UK. The survey found this to be true across the country and with the sentiment being especially strong among anti-Londoners who live in the city.

Overall, 45% of Brits have a favorable view of London, while 28% have an unfavorable view of the capital. The further north you go in the UK, the more unfavorable the views are of the capital city. Tyne and Wear, Scotland, and South Yorkshire really dislike London. Perhaps unsurprisingly, along with London itself, the areas closest to the capital, such as the Surrey and East Anglia, had the most favorable views.

Living in London boosted people’s opinions of the city. While 43% of pro-Londoners lived in the city at some point, only 23% of anti-Londoners have ever resided in the capital.

read the article

Quartz: We may have answered the Fermi Paradox: We are alone in the universe

In a paper submitted to the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (it appeared online this month on the pre-publication site arXiv), the researchers write that there is “a substantial ex ante probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe,” and we shouldn’t be surprised if we fail to detect any signs of it. In other words, there is no need to speculate about the fate of aliens. It’s likely they’ve never existed, they assert in the paper, titled “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox.” [...]

When they did, the researchers found that the possibility we’re alone in the galaxy is far higher than presumed given the truly gargantuan number of possible home planets. The authors assert that the chance humanity stands alone among intelligent civilizations in our galaxy is 53%–99.6%, and across the observable universe is 39%–85%.

Since the Fermi “paradox” exists only if we are confident alien civilizations are out there, this uncertainty suggests we may just be the lucky ones—thus, there is no such paradox. “We should not actually be all that surprised to see an empty galaxy,” the authors write. But don’t give up entirely. The Drake equation, at best, merely gives us a way to formalize what is still unknowable. It’s a big universe.

read the article

Deutsche Welle: Turks in Germany praise 'our leader' after two-thirds vote for Erdogan

Nearly two-thirds of votes cast by the Turkish community in Germany went to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Sunday's election, far more than the support he averaged in Turkey, according to initial results. [...]

"Let's face it: The celebrating German-Turkish Erdogan supporters not only celebrate their autocrat, but also express their rejection of our liberal democracy. Like the AfD. We must worry about this," he wrote on Twitter, referring to the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD). [...]

Erdogan had 65.7 percent of the vote in Germany with 80 percent of votes counted, compared to a projected 52.6 percent in Turkey.

Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) had 56.3 support among the Turkish community in Germany, versus 42.5 percent in Turkey.

read the article and see the photos

BBC4 Thinking Allowed: China today

Will China rule the world? Laurie Taylor talks to Yuen Yuen Ang, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, and author of a study which explores China's unusual route out of poverty. They're joined by David Tyfield, Co-Director of the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University, and author of new book examining the prospects for an alternative global power regime. 

listen to the podcast

The Atlantic: Jared Kushner’s Middle East Fantasy

The first fantasy is the notion that the obstruction of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas—who refused to meet with Kushner on his latest trip—can be countered by taking the peace plan “directly to the Palestinian people.” Kushner suggests that Abbas is avoiding him because he’s “scared we will release our peace plan and that the Palestinian people will actually like it.” That’s not likely. Abbas is indeed unpopular with most Palestinians—his approval rating hovers just above 30 percent—but it’s hardly because he’s too hardline on Israel. In our own extensive discussions with Abbas and his negotiating team as White House Middle East advisers during the Obama administration, we found them deterred most of all by the fear they could not sell further concessions to their people, who were seething about years of continued Israeli settlement expansion, land confiscation, and increased limits on Palestinian movement. And that problem is even greater today. In fact, more Palestinians now oppose a two-state solution than support one, and a majority—57 percent—say that such a solution is no longer practical because of Israeli settlement expansion, which now extends deep into the West Bank. Over 35 percent of Palestinians now support a one-state solution—in other words, a single country with an Arab majority and equal rights for all—a solution increasingly appealing to Palestinians under the age of 30. [...]

But Trump has abandoned even the veneer of objectivity. Just last month, he unilaterally gave Israel one of its most coveted prizes in negotiations, recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, without getting anything in return. To make it worse, he then celebrated the unilateral move of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem—a move opposed by 128 countries at the United Nations—with a big ceremony organized just one day before Palestinians observe the nakba, the catastrophe of their expulsion in 1948. The embassy ceremony was attended by dozens of Republican-only members of Congress and included speeches by evangelical pastors known primarily for bigoted remarks against Mormons, Jews, and Muslims, suggesting the whole thing was more about domestic politics than Middle East peace.

While dozens of Palestinians in Gaza were killed in clashes with the Israeli Defense Forces, the Trump administration chose neither to express sympathy for the Palestinians killed nor to join international calls for Israeli restraint. Trump has, on the other hand, cut financial assistance for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) out of pique that the Palestinians have not given him the requisite “appreciation or respect,” as if humanitarian aid, even when it serves U.S. national interests, should be awarded in return for flattery. His administration has offered unconstrained support for settlements, with an ambassador who has fought against use of the word “occupation” and refers to “Judea and Samaria,” as favored by Israeli settlers, instead of traditional U.S. references to the West Bank. It is no surprise, therefore, that the Palestinians stopped talking to the administration. It is hard to see how the United States under Trump will ever be seen as an honest broker, or be able to go around Abbas, when two-thirds of Palestinians oppose the resumption of contacts with U.S. negotiators and 88 percent view the United States as biased in favor of Israel. [...]

Finally, there is the problem that Israelis under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will almost certainly never agree to the sort of deal that would be necessary to make Palestinian or Arab acceptance even remotely feasible. In the past few years, Netanyahu has stopped even talking about support for the two-state solution, which he first accepted in a highly caveated way in a 2009 speech at Bar Ilan University. A majority of members of the current Israeli cabinet do not even support the creation of a Palestinian state, much less the concessions Israel would need to make to achieve it. And with Netanyahu and his wife the subject of several serious corruption inquiries, the prime minister likely sees his only hope as to keeping that hardline cabinet together to stave off or delay potential indictments. It is far from clear that the Israeli people themselves are prepared to make the major compromises required for peace, including the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of settlers from the West Bank. But it is quite clear that the current Israeli government is not ready to do so. In his interview, Kushner questions whether Abbas has the ability or the willingness to “lean into finishing a deal.” But neither does Netanyahu, and the fact that Kushner only calls out one side is telling. It is itself part of the problem.

read the article

openDemocracy: Why Brexit won’t work: the EU is about regulation not sovereignty

I stumbled across its significance of regulation and am only beginning to get a measure of it. Denunciation of the EU’s over-regulation was the starting point of the long campaign against British membership. Now, a revealing analysis in openDemocracy reports staggeringly high rates of popular support in the UK for European levels of regulation. They run at between 70-80% - incorporating large majorities of those who voted to Leave. While the big boys bang on about sovereignty, regular people, women somewhat more than men, prefer regulation. Brexit has a weird, old-fashioned veneer because it is so male-dominated and self-important, giving the issue its end of epoch feel. The campaign against it risks being drawn into similar routines and perhaps recognising the centrality of regulation can help prevent this. [...]

By regulation I don’t just mean high profile financial regulation. I mean its ongoing, background role in ensuring the quality of the air we breathe, the medicines we take, the food we consume and the safety of the flights we board. You could undertake the enormous costs of building custom checks for goods going between the UK from the EU. But what is the point, if you then have to recreate and duplicate inside the UK the entire apparatus of regulations, with their ongoing autonomy from parliamentary 'sovereignty'? The idea that once the UK left the EU Britain could ‘do away’ with regulation from Brussels, because it is mostly unnecessary, has proven to be an utter fantasy. Britain’s wannabe Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, told the BBC, “we will finish up perhaps in an even worse place than we are now because we won’t be free to de-regulate”. But no modern democracy would wish to deregulate. It is not the road to freedom. And as the UK government is learning, public opinion will not let it deregulate. This is a fundamental lesson of Brexit. [...]

If you embrace the Hobbesian, Westminster notion of the state, as Brexiteers do, then power is zero-sum. Either one has it or the other does. In contrast, the powers of regulation are an exercise in mutual collaboration with the aim of collective gain. The process is win-win not win-loose. For for the Anglo-British this cannot define the nature of power, for sovereignty cannot be shared it can only be singular. There are endless examples of this taken-for-granted assumption across the commentariat, both Remainers and Leavers. To take an example at random, Oliver Wiseman, the editor of CapX website, says he prefers "the return of powers from an undemocratic supranational organisation to a democratic national government”. The assumption: that power is something you have or do not have and can be returned. But in many fields there is no such possibility. The power of regulation resides in relationships that are negotiated. The process needs to be democratised but it can't be 'returned'. The underlying premise of Brexit is that sovereignty is simple. It is not. If it ever was, it isn't simple now. It is complex, multi-layered and in the age of corporations no longer something nation states can monopolise over their territory. Hence Brexit cannot be 'Brexit', as in Boris Johnson's call for a "full British Brexit". Sovereignty is no longer a meal we can eat alone. [...]

It seems that the EU has in this way developed over 11,000 regulations, set over 60,000 standards and its different agencies have taken over 18,000 decisions on interpreting regulations and laws. Forrester notes that it could take ten years to incorporate them into British law, if each is accorded scrutiny. This alone shows that a process has been taking place that is beyond the reach and capacity of traditional legislatures. The result was acknowledged by the prime minister in her Mansion House speech in March when she finally set out ambitions for Brexit, “the UK will need to make a strong commitment that its regulatory standards will remain as high as the EU’s”. [...]

The defining ideologist of Brexit is the Daily Mail. It describes the main motive for leaving the EU as, “a deep-seated human yearning to recover our national identity and independence”. Must it be the case, then, that those of us who voted Remain are indifferent to, or have no yearning for, national identity and independence? I think not. I claim that we are more free in a fundamental way as persons - as English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and British persons - inside the EU. Our liberty is enhanced within it, for all the dangers. You could answer that it is a false binary: that we can enjoy both patriotism and partnership, national identity and international regulation. Indeed, but such an answer takes a side. The spirit of Brexit insists on a single priority. For the Daily Mail our national identity and independence are being lost and must be “recovered”. It sees mass migration and the European Court of Justice and as invaders that have penetrated our national space. It demands they be repelled to save our country and its great institutions. If judges show themselves to be “enemies of the people” and peers of the realm have become “traitors in ermine” they merely confirm how far subversion has reached.

read the article

VisualPolitik: POLAND, how is it getting RICH?

Poland was the country that suffered the most from Second World War. However, today things have changed. Poland has been growing uninterruptedly for 25 years and not even the great crises of 2008 and 2009 managed to stop them.

Haaretz: Erdogan Just Became Turkey's New Founding Father

But with Sunday’s victory in both the presidential and parliamentary elections, Erdogan has now arguably achieved the same degree of control and power as Atatürk managed nearly a century ago – especially with the reform that turns Turkey into a presidential system now taking effect.

In March, Erdogan overtook Atatürk as Turkey’s longest-serving leader (the latter died on his 5,492nd day in office). The president’s supporters already worship him like a god. Moreover, he has been shaping Turkish society over the past 16 years in a way like no other Turkish leader since Atatürk’s reign ended in 1938. [...]

It is no wonder, then, that for the past decade, Erdogan has been obsessed with the year 2023, when Turkey celebrates 100 years since the establishment of the Republic. His rhetoric about a “New Turkey” – by which he means an economically successful state that has broken free of what he sees as the shackles of repressive secularism – has the centenary as its symbolic target. And, of course, Erdogan has long coveted reaching the year 2023 in power, thus presenting himself as the “founding father” of the “New Turkey” while the country is celebrating Atatürk, the hero of the Turkish War of Independence.  [...]

Erdogan later called the coup “a gift from God” – a comment that observers understood to refer to the opportunity it gave him to go after members of Gülen’s movement. But Erdogan likely also saw it as a chance to boost his historical standing. This explains why the narrative of the “second war of independence,” of the victory against “foreign, occupying forces” during the night of the coup was quickly promoted by the government and its obliging press. On the coup’s first anniversary, the state offered hundreds of overseas journalists luxury trips to Turkey to hear the story firsthand. 

read the article

Politico: ‘He does not understand what the role of an ambassador should be’

Liebich was far from alone in his assessment of Grenell’s first few weeks on the job. Martin Schulz, the former chancellor candidate and leader of the center-left Social Democrats, said Grenell sounded more “like a far-right colonial officer” than a diplomat in his Breitbart interview; Sahra Wagenknecht, leader of Liebich’s Die Linke, called for Grenell’s expulsion from Germany. Things started off rocky behind closed doors, too, as Grenell clashed with top Foreign Office officials in his first days in the job. The ambassador is, however, reportedly willing to learn from his mistakes and has since worked to tone down his Trumpian rhetoric: He apologized for the Breitbart controversy in a meeting with officials from the Foreign Office, according to someone with knowledge of the encounter, and has kept a lower profile in the weeks since the controversy. Even his Twitter feed has, it seems, been tamer in recent weeks. But here in Berlin, Germans are still watching him very closely [...]

What Germans resented even more, it turns out, was an interview with the alt-right Breitbart published a few weeks later. When Grenell said in the multi-installment interview that it is his goal to “empower” conservatives across Europe, Berlin political types took those comments to refer to far-right populist parties like the Alternative for Germany. In the same interview, Grenell issued strong praise for Austria’s Kurz, whose hard-line immigration policies often put him at odds with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Germany’s Foreign Office soon asked for “clarification” from Grenell, and German politicians began crying foul, calling the interview at best undiplomatic and at worst a fireable offense. Grenell later said his comments had been misconstrued: “The idea that I’d endorse candidates/parties is ridiculous,” he wrote on Twitter. “I stand by my comments that we are experiencing an awakening from the silent majority — those who reject the elites & their bubble.” (The State Department also came to Grenell’s defense, with spokeswoman Heather Nauert saying, “Don’t we as Americans have the right to free speech?”) But even the choice of outlet — Breitbart has made no secret of its admiration for far-right populist parties across Europe — sent a clear message about the kind of audience Grenell seemed to want to reach in his new role. [...]

Since the furor over his Breitbart interview, Grenell has kept a somewhat lower profile, prompting those in Berlin who have met with him since to say he truly seems interested in learning from his early mistakes. Another meeting with Michaelis and others at the Foreign Office earlier this month, shortly after the Breitbart interview came out, was ultimately quite amicable, according to the Foreign Office official. Grenell apologized for the interview, the official said, and explained that he had not intended to cause such a stir. Peter Beyer, a member of Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats and the transatlantic coordinator in parliament, described the atmosphere at the meeting as “friendly and constructive,” but added that it included its fair share of “contentious issues.” What’s most important, Beyer says, is sitting down and discussing things face-to-face: “For me, speaking with each other instead of tweeting at each other is the right way to work together in partnership.”

read the article

Politico: What populists get right

But first, what exactly is a populist? So far, there hasn’t really been a single, agreed-upon definition. Pundits have defined it variously as nativism (Viktor Orbán in Hungary), majoritarianism (Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland), anti-elitism (Beppe Grillo in Italy), economic surrealism (Alexis Tsipras in Greece), and of course good-old demagoguery (Donald Trump).

Nor do populists necessarily agree on policy. Some are anti-austerity leftists, others are anti-immigration right-wingers. Take Kaczyński and the Dutch firebrand Geert Wilders. Both are populist politicians who oppose immigration and rail against the EU, but they hold diametrically opposed views on gay rights. [...]

What unites Europe’s populist movements is their refusal to play by the rules of conventional politics. This is more a matter of style than anything else — they are essentially disruptive parties and like to put on a good show — but the idea clearly appeals to a growing number of voters and could lead to concrete changes in our political system of representation. [...]

Populist parties have also made reforming the political system a key part of their agenda, claiming to want to reduce the power of parties, cut down the size of parliaments and curtail lobbyism. Controversially, Poland and Hungary have introduced reforms to reduce the power of elites while tightening their grip on power. Many populists promote direct democracy, such as referenda and citizen’s initiatives. It’s telling that the European Parliament group that unites Italy’s 5Star Movement, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, the far-right Sweden Democrats and Euroskeptic UKIP calls itself “Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy.”

read the article

Politico: Commission pushes Council to revise migration plan

Commission Secretary-General Martin Selmayr, acting on behalf of President Jean-Claude Juncker, stirred controversy last week by proposing a draft leaders’ statement for the mini summit that was clearly intended for the same purpose: to supplant the draft conclusions on migration issued to national capitals just a day earlier by Council President Donald Tusk.

The move infuriated the Italian government, which was angered at the content of the text, as well as Council officials, who were annoyed by the substance of the statement but also the incursion onto their turf. The Commission text was torpedoed at the behest of German Chancellor Angela Merkel after Italian Prime Minster Giuseppe Conte threatened to boycott the mini summit. [...]

Among the tasty morsels: a pledge of an additional €500 million for the EU’s Africa Trust Fund, money for the next tranche in the €3-billion facility for refugees in Turkey, and a plan for “reception,” or “welcome,” or “disembarkation” centers outside the EU for processing migrants who are rescued or intercepted at sea. [...]

And, in an added bit of grandstanding, the Commission also proposed setting an ambitious target for increasing the numbers of returned illegal migrants: “The European Council calls on the member states to take immediate action to achieve an EU return rate of at least 70 percent by the end of 2019.”

read the article

Independent: I work in Brussels alongside the EU Brexit negotiators and I find it incredible how little the UK government understands

Everyone I meet, wherever I am these days, asks me the same thing: “What are the Brits doing?” Even Brits ask me what we’re doing. And I wish I knew what we were doing, I really do. The trouble is that all we’ve received from the British government in the last year and a half has been overused slogans, half-baked threats and undercooked plans. Just one thing has been resoundingly clear from the government: Brexit means Brexit. [...]

As a third country, it has been confirmed by EU negotiator Michel Barnier that the UK will not be in the EU’s crime-fighting intelligence agency Europol or the EU’s satellite project Galileo. It’s not a matter of money – no amount of cash is going to allow Britain to continue being in Europol or Galileo. It’s about trust.

Nick Gutteridge, a journalist in Brussels, recently tweeted a comment from an unnamed EU official who summarised the third country conundrum perfectly. I will quote the entire thing because it is really quite brilliant: “There is not an issue of general distrust towards the UK. That’s not the issue, but the EU is a rules-based system. Why is that? It’s because 28 member states do not trust each other spontaneously; they trust each other because they work on the basis of agreed common rules with common enforcement, common supervision and under a European court that will make sure they all apply the same rules in the same manner. They trust each other because there are remedies available. If you don’t have these remedies, you’re a third country.”

read the article

The Guardian: Too smart, too successful: Mongolia’s superwomen struggle to find husbands

Over the past few decades, Mongolian families have been investing in their daughters by sending them to school and university in the capital. Some parents believe daughters will take better care of them in their old age. Others think women need to learn other skills as herding livestock is work reserved for men – the boys are kept at home to tend the animals. This trend has given rise to what is known as Mongolia’s “reverse gender gap”. Now women are more educated than men. They are less likely to be unemployed. They also live longer – by a decade on average.

But by outpacing men, Mongolian women in the city, many of whom stayed on after university to work, struggle to find partners the way their parents did. The marriage rate in Ulaanbaatar has fallen to 8.9 per 1,000 people in 2016, from 22.9 in 2007, according to the country’s statistics office.

Women in the city complain that there is a shortage of eligible men. In a way they are right. Home to half of the country’s three million people, the city has about 60,000 more women then men. At universities and in the workplace there are often far more women than men. These men are more likely to be taken: almost 40% of men in urban areas over the age of 15 are married, compared with only 32% of women. [...]

They also face a relatively conservative dating culture. Rather than meet in bars or clubs, single Mongolians often find each other on Facebook or Instagram, chatting over private message, away from the public eye. “For flirting Instagram is effective, but for talking Facebook is better,” says Tsogtbal. Clubs and bars in Ulaanbaatar have begun holding speed-dating events, but people are sometimes embarrassed to attend, says Bat-Ulzii Altantsetseg, head of an events group called UB Nights. Now, instead of singles nights, they hold partner parties where men and women are assigned random pairs of numbers. He says usually 60% of attendees are women.

read the article

The Atlantic: Evangelical Fear Elected Trump

Despite all these scriptural passages, it is still possible to write an entire history of American evangelicalism as the story of a people failing miserably at overcoming fear with hope, trust, and faith in their God. But it is also possible to find evangelicals, drawing deeply from Christian theological resources, who sought to forge an alternative history. [...]

Our history of evangelical fear might also include a chapter on the early 19th-century Protestants who feared the arrival of massive numbers of Catholic immigrants to American shores. They translated their panic into political organizations such as the nativist Know-Nothing Party and religious tracts cautioning fellow believers of the threat that such “popery” posed to their Christian nation.  [...]

Jedidiah Morse, a Massachusetts minister and the author of geography textbooks, worried that the Bavarian Illuminati, a German anti-Christian secret society, had infiltrated America to “abjure Christianity, justify suicide, advocate sensual pleasures agreeable to Epicurean philosophy, decry marriage, and advocate a promiscuous intercourse among the sexes.” [...]

Evangelicals are not supposed to hate. But many hate Hillary Clinton. The history of that antipathy is long, reaching back at least to Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992. But it was solidified among white evangelical baby boomers when revelations of her husband’s marital infidelities surfaced in 1998. Conservatives who challenged Bill Clinton’s character were outraged when Hillary attacked her husband’s accusers and went on The Today Show and claimed that the impeachment charges against her husband were part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

read the article

AJ+: Who Is Trying To Kill The Iran Deal?

The Iran Deal was a diplomatic breakthrough for the international community, but three years after the deal happened the U.S. violated it. How did this happen? And who were the forces that tanked the deal? 

The Guardian: Persecution of the Roma brings shame on Europe

The Roma are Europe’s most unwanted people. Some 10 to 12 million Roma live across the continent. They have been here for more than a millennium – and have been ostracised and suppressed throughout that time. One in four Roma is thought to have perished in the Holocaust. [...]

In most European countries, Roma are the most despised social group. France is often criticised for its antipathy towards Islam. But whereas less than a third of the French population dislike Muslims, almost two-thirds have an unfavourable view of the Roma. So do four in five Italians, two-thirds of Greeks and Hungarians and almost half of Spaniards and Britons.

The Roma may be Europe’s largest minority group, but they are socially isolated and have no powerful figures to lobby on their behalf. That makes them easy scapegoats. It also makes it easy to ignore the hostility towards them. The silence is as shameful as the bigotry.

read the article

The Daily Beast: Thank God Donald Trump Is So Incompetent—Imagine if He Weren’t

Trump’s preference for ostentatious display is generally applauded by the more nationalistic elements of Trump’s base. But in the long run, stealthy execution would be much scarier than this ham-fisted display of power.

A truly shrewd immigration restrictionist regime would let the seedy underbelly of border enforcement remain seedy and under the belly. Not Trump, who, like a professional wrestler, cares more about today’s show than he does about its outcome. [...]

When handed a situation fraught with difficulty, Donald Trump orchestrated an unmitigated disaster. His instincts always lean toward the authoritarian and austere, and his team prefers a sledgehammer to a scalpel. The good news is that Trumpian incompetence drags his worst impulses (kicking and screaming) into the light. Technology and the media magnify this exposure. The proliferation of video, audio, and photographs are definite game changers.

read the article

Vox: Sarah Sanders is upset a restaurant wouldn’t serve her. She’s OK with it happening to gays.

 happen to believe that food establishments should offer their goods to anyone willing to pay for them. Sanders does not. She thinks it’s okay, for example, for a business to hang a sign in their window saying they won’t serve gay couples. This is why, on one level, her very public dig at the owner of the Red Hen, which set off a torrent of hate tweets and threats her way, is ridiculous. It’s hypocrisy. [...]

The irony of restaurant-gate is that Sanders supports the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Jack Phillips, who refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple in Colorado. The owner of the Red Hen, Stephanie Wilkinson, told the Washington Post one reason she asked Sanders to leave was because of Sanders’s stances on gay rights. The staff includes several gay workers. The staff was also deeply upset about Sanders’s defense of Trump’s family separation policy, she said. [...]

Sanders sees a constitutional right under the First Amendment to chose who to serve and not serve in a business. But on Friday, she made no mention of this context. She made no attempt to distinguish the two. Instead, she took an opportunity to fan divisions between the White House’s base and everyone else.

read the article

Political Critique: Can cities become the space for a new idea of transnational solidarity?

Gesine Schwan: I think this trend for renationalisation is one type of fragmentation, and it’s due to several causes. One cause is the whole tendency of cultural neoliberalism, which we saw at work in the Treaty of Maastricht, in the form of competition between states as places for capitalist investment. This means that in addition to traditional conflict, which characterizes European history, there is now economic conflict, caused by competition for capital investment. This is certainly one tendency, in line with the idea that, in general, the market is the main actor, not the state or common goods policies, and I see this idea as the basis for fragmentation. But another source of this fragmentation is the tendency of the market to ignore people’s needs for self-determination and participation, and this was underestimated and negated. So I think that part of this need for autonomy, which leads to fragmentation, is actually part of this people’s will to participate and control their environment. The third point is also related to the main economic thinking, which increasingly underestimates solidarity. In the German discussion, very often in the context of neoliberalism, solidarity was understood as ‘self-responsibility’, which is undermining. The term ‘self-responsibility’ by definition undermines the concept of solidarity, because responsibility normally means that I’m responsible for myself, but ‘self-responsibility’ means that one should no longer expect solidarity from the state or from others, that one should act in one’s own name, and this means undermining solidarity. So there are several cultural points that come together. But indeed, I think that preaching the moral of solidarity is certainly necessary but not really effective. I think solidarity is possible if you know these ‘others’ and have this proximity with others that allows to understand their situation. And this, I believe, is behind the trend for smaller entities of political life and also of daily life and of self determination. [...]

Gesine Schwan:  It was very frightening to see the lack of solidarity in the welcoming of refugees. Not only solidarity with the refugees, but also solidarity between nation states; caused by mechanism and dynamics which distracted politicians from finding solutions. So my proposal was to create a European fund that municipalities could benefit from, in order to welcome refugees, a way to finance integration, but also a way to access additional funding for their own development. Today we are witnessing a bad kind of competition between the poor living in cities who don’t have houses etc., and the poor who arrive to the city. So, because we need investment without corruption, I see the possibility of strengthening municipalities, by creating multistakeholder groups organizing civil society, which is already much more organised and committed at the city level, in order to plan strategies for the development of the city combined  with strategies for the integration of refugees. These groups would apply for European funding. This model would also mean more participation on the part of citizens taking part in such committees, and at the same time a more direct involvement in the European Union, that already gives a lot of money to cohesion funds, although people don’t perceive this because they are not involved in the decision making processes. If this money were to be given directly to the municipalities, people could actually see that they have the opportunity to develop their cities and do this in a participatory way. What is also evident today is that we have no networks connecting cities and towns, which could, on the contrary, help each other and share experiences of integration of refugees. During this process of integration, in fact, municipalities gain a firsthand experience of – for example – the African community fleeing from war: in this sense such initiatives are able to combine the local and the global level, providing experiences and knowledge, and this would be very helpful. [...]

Gesine Schwan: Yes exactly, and when you say ‘creative’ it is exactly what I expect from cities, to be creative. Today, from the legal point of view, it is the national  government that has to decide whether refugees are allowed to enter the nation state or not. We have to put political pressure on the nation state to give some of this legal competences also to municipal bodies, or at least allow them to take in refugees voluntarily. This would also help the national governments, because at present they are not willing to welcome refugees, they are afraid of doing so, but if they allowed  municipalities to decide voluntarily, this would create a form of support that would work in the long term, at a national level. The fact is, governments have problems with this “long term thinking”, something that is absolutely necessary and is also expressed by the very common term ‘sustainability’, used in all fields today – think of the sustainability goals the UN have agreed to in 2015. This line of reasoning points in the right direction, and we need to put political public pressure on national governments, so they may understand that it is in their own interest.  

read the article

Jacobin Magazine: Sadr, Sectarianism, and a Popular Alternative

The victory of Sadr’s “March for Reforms” alliance should be read in two ways. First, Iraqis have expressed their disgust at the country’s sectarian political system, social inequalities, and decrepit public services. According to the Iraqi government, absolute poverty levels reached 22.5 percent of the total population in 2014. Other estimates put the number even higher: some claim that nearly 10 million Iraqis, or well over a quarter of the country, live in abject poverty.

The second major reason for Sairoun’s first-place finish is discontent with the sectarian ruling class, an outgrowth of the US and British-led invasion. The sectarian ruling class is composed of all the various heads of ethnic or sectarian-based political movements in the country. The Shi’a fraction of the political and economic elite has been by far the dominating actor since 2003, gaining nearly absolute control over the state’s institutions and resources. This isn’t to say that Iraqi Shi’a are a privileged community — the vast majority have not benefited economically from their leaders’ political dominance and have suffered from the corruption and dysfunction of the state public services. [...]

Still, an electoral alliance between the various protest camps wasn’t a forgone conclusion. Iraqi Communist Party secretary-general Raid Jahid Fahmi said that in preparation for the elections, his party and the Sadrists agreed to focus on the issues that unite them — fighting unemployment and corruption, opposing foreign influences in Iraq — rather than those that don’t: namely, women’s rights and secularism. The Sadrists, for example, have not mobilized against the “Jaafari law,” which would have allowed women as young as nine to marry. [...]

In its election program, Sairoun emphasized anti-terrorism, anti-corruption, national reconciliation and unity, a new electoral law, improved governance, and guaranteed access to human and social rights (education, social security, decent living standards, and housing). The program was short on specifics, remaining vague about how to fight corruption or political sectarianism, the militarization of society, or regressive economic policies.

read the article

BBC4 Analysis: Death Is a Bore

Most of us are resigned to the fact that we won't escape death in the end. But there are people who have dedicated their entire lives to conquering death. This relatively new movement of 'transhumanists' believes that science is close to finding a cure for aging and that immortality may be just around the corner. Chloe Hadjimatheou asks whether it's really possible to live forever and whether it's actually desirable.

listen to the podcast

The New York Review of Books: Roman Holidays

Alto and Lauro were hardly the first to profit from selling mass-produced prints to tourists: in the 1530s, a Rome-based Spanish publisher and bookseller, Antonio Salamanca, had already begun to publish folio engravings of Roman monuments, both ancient and modern. Copyright as we know it was still an unknown luxury, so when a French publisher, Antoine Lafréry, moved to Rome and started to produce pirate versions of Salamanca’s prints in the 1540s, the Spaniard responded not with a lawsuit but an offer of collaboration. The two men officially joined forces in 1553. Salamanca would not regret his decision; Lafréry may have been a pirate, but he was also an excellent businessman. [...]

The Norwegian art historian Victor Plahte Tschudi began investigating Giacomo Lauro’s devious career when he was a graduate student on a fellowship in Rome. He discovered how cleverly the printmaker had pirated engravings of Roman monuments, altering a few details to avoid breaking the letter, not to mention the spirit, of emerging copyright laws. Strictly speaking, Lauro could argue that his slightly and deliberately altered copies were not really copies—never mind that the alterations he made to his images also turned them into less accurate, or flat-out inaccurate, representations of the monuments they depicted. Most of Lauro’s customers would never have noticed in any case, nor, for that matter, would most Romans; what counted above all to the collectors of these engravings was the suggestive idea, or the memory, of sights like the Colosseum or the temples of the Roman Forum. Lauro was no Piranesi, tormented by magnificent visions. He scratched out his engravings to make a living, not to court immortality. [...]

The earliest surviving guidebooks to Rome—twelfth-century pilgrim handbooks like Record of the Golden City of Rome (Graphia Aureae Urbis Romae, circa 1130) and the best-selling Wonders of the City of Rome (Mirabilia Urbis Romae, circa 1143)—served up generous doses of fiction to compensate for their lack of concrete information about the ruins of the ancient city. Noah had settled in Rome just after the Flood, long before a pair of baby boys named Romulus and Remus were ever suckled by a kindly she-wolf in a swamp that would one day become the Circus Maximus. A dragon lived in the Forum, not far from the place called “Inferno” because there the fires of Hell had once burst forth from the center of the earth. [...]

Tschudi suggests that, in addition to these time-honored sources of information about Rome—the literary legacy of ancient authors and the physical legacy of the monuments—sixteenth-century printmakers relied to an even greater extent on a third source: other prints. By examining (or simply copying) the work of his predecessors, Giacomo Lauro could concoct his own reconstruction of an ancient building without ever having to step outside his studio. In effect, he and his colleagues created what Baroque Antiquity terms an “archaeology of prints,” and indeed the word “archaeology,” with a meaning roughly equivalent to “ancient history,” appears for the first time in 1607, precisely when Giacomo Lauro was perfecting his Splendor of the Ancient City.

read the article

Vox: Hungary just passed a “Stop Soros” law that makes it illegal to help undocumented migrants

This week, Hungary passed what the government dubbed the “Stop Soros” law, named after Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. The new law, drafted by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, creates a new category of crime, called “promoting and supporting illegal migration” — essentially, banning individuals and organizations from providing any kind of assistance to undocumented immigrants. This is so broadly worded that, in theory, the government could arrest someone who provides food to an undocumented migrant on the street or attends a political rally in favor of their rights. [...]

“We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world,” Orban said in a characteristic anti-Soros tirade in March.  [...]

There’s still a lot of opposition to Orbán’s policies in Hungary, particularly in the capital city of Budapest. But Orbán is popular with a pretty significant chunk of Hungarian society. In the April 2018 parliamentary elections, the Fidesz party won a little under 50 percent of the vote. The next-closest party, the even-more right-wing Jobbik, won 19 percent. [...]

Soros’s aim, according to Orbán, is to undermine the soul of European Christian society — to hollow out the West from the inside out. Soros’s humanitarian activity is supposedly secretly indoctrinating Hungarians in a bid to let them acquiesce to mass migration. Once Soros and his allies succeed in opening the borders, Orbán warns, Muslim refugees will flood into Hungary and the rest of Europe — and soon the continent will become unrecognizable.

read the article