The blog will resume on the 20th September 2018
25 August 2018
Spiegel: Berlin Softens Tone on Turkey
The looming collapse of the Turkish economy is a genuine dilemma for the German government. It doesn't want the Turkish economy to fall deeper into crisis, no matter what. "If Turkey becomes unstable, we'll have a huge problem in Europe," claim sources close to Merkel. They are worried about potential consequences for the eurozone and the German economy, about the 3 million Turks living in Germany and about the possible unraveling of the deal with Ankara that is preventing more refugees from making their way to Europe. [...]
When Andrea Nahles, the head of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), raised the possibility of German aid for Turkey, it was followed by a prompt denial from the government. German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz of the SPD also had little enthusiasm for the idea. [...]
At the same time, the German government set in motion an unprecedented round of phone calls and visits. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz demonstratively invited his Turkish counterpart and Erdogan's son-in-law Berat Albayrak to Berlin. Even before President Erdogan embarks on his visit with full military honors to Berlin in four weeks, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) will travel to Ankara. He will meet with his Turkish counterpart Melvüt Cavusoglu and Parliamentary President Binali Yildirim and possibly even Erdogan himself. Economics Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU) is planning a visit to Turkey a few weeks later. [...]
But the German government also wants something back in return for its support. It has communicated to Ankara in various ways that the seven Germans still being held in Turkey for political reasons, partly without charges, must be freed. The lifting of the ban on Turkish-German journalist Mesale Tolu leaving Turkey on Monday is being viewed as an early sign of compromise by the German government, and as an indication that further decisions in this vein can be expected in the near future. If that happens, German government sources say, it is also feasible that Germany would stop blocking negotiations in the EU for a customs union with Turkey.
The Atlantic: The Awkward Alliance Between Democrats and Jeff Sessions
Senate Democrats were aghast when Donald Trump, then the president-elect, named one of his staunchest campaign supporters to lead the Justice Department a few weeks after his surprise election victory. They viewed Sessions as a virulently anti-immigrant legislator with a racist past, and as a Trump loyalist who would do the president’s bidding as attorney general while blocking criminal-justice reform and taking a buzz saw to civil and voting rights. All but one Democrat—Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia—voted against Sessions’s confirmation. And Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts fought so strenuously to defeat him that Senate Republicans used an obscure parliamentary rule to silence her.
As attorney general, Sessions has confirmed many of Democrats’ worst fears when it comes to policy, and in the early months of the Trump administration, a number of them called on him to resign over one controversy or another. But after the president’s latest round of attacks on his attorney general, and new comments from Republicans suggesting that he might be fired, Democrats now find themselves in the uncomfortable position of wanting Sessions to stay for one simple reason: He’s one of the only people standing between Trump and an abrupt end to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion and obstruction of justice. [...]
Senate Republicans have generally tried to protect their former colleague , warning Trump that it would be all but impossible to confirm a successor if Sessions was fired. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley even said at one point in 2017 that he would have no time to hold confirmation hearings on a replacement. But in recent days, that wall of support appears to have weakened a bit.[...]
Jeffries acknowledged that the calculus might change if Democrats win at least the House majority in November, giving them more power to protect Mueller on their own and making Sessions expendable. Winning the Senate would mean they could block confirmation of a new attorney general without help from Republicans.
openDemocracy: Flesh of my flesh: democracy and totalitarianism
One problem with this narrative is that it conveniently leaves out a number of totalitarian regimes across the world, which not only cannot be meaningfully grouped with the “great totalitarianisms”, but which flourished with the full support of western democratic states: Pinochet’s Chile, Pahlavi’s Iran, Suharto’s Indonesia, Batista’s Cuba, Mobutu’s Congo/Zaire, all these atrocious regimes fade out of a picture painted in the stark contrast of “Democracy versus Totalitarianism”, peripheral events of little significance in the great conflict, plain accidents of history. [...]
The fact that the 2009 resolution omits individual mentions of a number of twentieth century totalitarian regimes in Europe – such as those in Spain, Portugal and Greece – but finds it pertinent to specifically reference the Ukrainian famine and the Srebrenica massacre, is telling in this respect, as is the fact that the precursors of these resolutions were spearheaded by former Eastern Block countries.[2] Still, the problem with Liberal Democracy as a timeless foe of Totalitarianism is much deeper than the questions raised by the realignment of global alliances in the beginning of the twenty-first century. [...]
The quintessential ancestral moment of the concentration camp is to be found in the quintessentially experimental democracy: the United States step up their “removal policies” of Native Americans after the 1830s, and establish a number of “reservations” in the following decades. It is undoubtedly significant that the oldest liberal democracy is territorially consolidated not just through genocide, but through genocide that is organised along a classification procedure, a spatial plan, a topological management. Concentration camps are refined in a colonialist/imperialist context through their use by the Spanish in Cuba, the US in the Philippines, and especially the British in the Second Boer War. But it is in Europe that the concentration camp will acquire its definitional character as a place of selection, as the locality where the redefinition of inside and outside reaches its terminal point. It is embraced especially by the German Social-Democrats, who use it to intern refugees after World War I, but also communists and socialists after the Spartacist Uprising of 1919.
Aeon: The future was now at the 1939 World’s Fair – and it is still awesome
From the perspective of the 21st century, it’s hard to imagine what a marvel the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair would have been to its visitors. Still living in the heavy shadow of the stock market crash of 1929, the many people who flocked to the big exhibition found not only bounteous luxuries such as free Coca-Cola, but the unveiling of unthinkable new technologies that promised that a better world lay ahead. Using sparkling, rare, colour film footage – itself a brand-new technology at the time – the US director Amanda Murray mines the memories of several people who attended the New York World’s Fair in 1939.
Politico: Pope’s faded star power in Ireland
In our lifetimes, revelations surfaced of decades-long sexual, physical and emotional abuse carried out by the clergy. The outcomes of three government-initiated investigations detailed systemic, institutional abuse that was intentionally covered up by the Irish Catholic hierarchy. The depth of the victims’ suffering is nearly impossible to imagine. Children were beaten, sexually abused, humiliated. Separately, it also emerged that women were thrown into so-called Magdalene Laundries — Dickensian institutions for the unmarried who became pregnant or were seen as promiscuous. All the while, the Irish state — once almost indistinguishable from the church itself — turned a blind eye. The government has yet to set up an independent investigation focused on the laundries.
But the fawning Ireland of 1979 is no more. Pope Francis will have to contend with protests, such as the one organized by abuse survivor and Amnesty Ireland executive Colm O’Gorman. Former President Mary McAleese has called the Catholic event a “right-wing rally,” and Ireland’s paper of record, the Irish Times, is running articles with titles such as “Can’t pope, won’t pope? Seven ways to avoid the papal visit.”
So what does a changed Ireland expect from this visit? At the very least that the pope gives survivors of abuse what they say they need. He would do well to individually apologize to the victims of abuse and to release the so-called secret files relating to cases dating as far back as 1962 — when the Vatican told Catholic bishops all over the world to cover up abuse cases under threat of excommunication.
Politico: Merkel changes target in quest for German EU dominance
“It’s certainly plausible that Germany has an interest because it has not held the Commission president post since Walter Hallstein in 1967,” said Elmar Brok, a veteran center-right MEP who also sits on the executive committee of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU). [...]
Merkel’s preference would be to nominate her economy minister, Peter Altmaier, for the post. A longtime Merkel confidante who served as her chief of staff until last year, Altmaier, 60, worked for the Commission early in his career and speaks several European languages. [...]
Merkel’s rethink was spurred by the likely resistance her preferred ECB candidate, Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann, would face elsewhere in the eurozone. A monetary hawk deeply skeptical of some of the moves current ECB President Mario Draghi has taken to combat the euro crisis, Weidmann has earned a reputation as a hard-liner. [...]
Another question is whether Merkel would succeed in convincing the rest of the European People’s Party to support her candidate. Doing so could mean shoving aside Manfred Weber, the German leader of the EPP’s parliamentary group.
Quartz: Air pollution is costing Indians 1.5 years of their lives
Air pollution caused by PM of a diameter under 2.5 micrometres (PM2.5) reduces the average life expectancy of Indians by 1.53 years, according to a paper published in the journal Environment Science and Technology Letters. The impact of PM2.5 is particularly high in south Asia, where it decreases life expectancy by 1.56 years, far above the global average of 1.03 years, the paper says. [...]
The researchers estimated the cost of air pollution in terms of life years by modeling the data on deaths from diseases for which air pollution is a risk factor, including heart disease, strokes, and lung cancer. They then compared this data to each country’s baseline life expectancy.
To put their findings in context, they compared these figures with the estimated decrease in life expectancy caused by other risk factors, such as tobacco consumption and cancer. In south Asia, tobacco smoking caused a decrease of 1.51 years and cancer 1.26 years, both slightly less than the impact of PM 2.5.
The Atlantic: The one thing that could drive evangelical Christians away from Trump
Yet Republican strategists believe that the president’s base of loyal supporters is standing by him, and they plan to use Trump to campaign heavily ahead of the midterms to maintain control of Congress. That base has included most of America’s evangelical Christians, who back a man who does not appear to share their core beliefs: He is on his third marriage, has bragged about sexually assaulting women, is accused by nearly 20 women of sexual misconduct, and has a history of lying and failing to pay his bills. [...]
Trump’s foreign policy, and particularly the relocation of the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, appeals to a powerful group of fundamentalist Christians who believe the move may trigger the apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. His administration has supported religious beliefs over civil liberties, backed Christians who refuse to serve gay-wedding parties or fund birth control for employees, and pushed policies that would cut off federal funding for clinics that provide abortions.[...]
“Would a revelation like Trump paid for an abortion of his own child and is unrepentant about it, like he is everything else, cause some substantial slippage?” Deace asked. “Yes.”
Trump’s stance on abortion has shifted radically over the years, from “pro-choice to pro-prison,” as the BBC put it. In 1999, he described himself on NBC News’ Meet the Press as “very pro-choice.” On the 2016 campaign trial, he said there should be “some sort of punishment” for women who had had abortions.
The New York Times: I Stood Up in Mass and Confronted My Priest. You Should, Too.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, I naturally turned to the church for solace. But on the following Sunday, to my surprise, none of the church leaders at Mass acknowledged what had just happened. I was deflated and left feeling empty. Soon after, the sexual abuse scandal erupted. [...]
It was the church’s own teachings that made me stand up on Sunday and question the priest. Catholics are taught that it’s imperative to help others. We are told to protect the innocent. The church has profoundly failed to abide by these basic principles by allowing the sins of sexual abuse to continue. [...]
Catholics cannot keep on filling the pews every Sunday. It is wrong to support the church.
At the end of last Sunday’s service, before the recessional, the priest stopped us and kindly told my son that he had a good dad. Then the father looked at me and said the most honest thing I’ve ever heard in a church: “You and I have no influence.”
He was right. And if congregants like me have no influence, and if parents like me no longer feel safe and comfortable bringing our sons and daughters to make Communion, then the Catholic Church is beyond redemption.
24 August 2018
Nautilus Magazine: The Reinvention of Black
Black is technically an absence: the visual experience of a lack of light. A perfect black dye absorbs all of the light that impinges on it, leaving nothing behind. This ideal is remarkably difficult to manufacture. The industrialization of the 18th and 19th centuries made it easier, providing chemists and paint-makers with a growing palette of black—and altering the subjects that the color would come to represent. “These things are intimately connected,” says science writer Philip Ball, author of Bright Earth: The Invention of Color. The reinvention of black, in other words, went far beyond the color. [...]
Black also developed a second identity around this time representing the asceticism favored by monks, as noted by the French historian Michel Pastoureau. By the 15th century, black garb had become a fixture of regal courts in Europe, connoting power and privilege. Soon after, the growing middle class also adopted black garments to represent their growing wealth, as well as their piety. [...]
In the 1840s, August Hofmann extracted aniline (a benzene ring connected to a nitrogen-containing amine group) from coal tar. Then in 1856, William Perkin, a student of Hofmann’s, oxidized aniline to create a deep purple dye, subsequently called mauve. This marked the birth of a completely new industry: synthetic dyes. By 1860, other researchers had found that oxidizing aniline under different conditions, using sulfuric acid and potassium dichromate, created a new black pigment: aniline black. The reaction fuses together 11 aniline molecules to make a complex chain of benzene rings connected by nitrogen atoms. Mixed in paint or ink, it produces a neutral, matte black also known as Pigment Black 1. [...]
The starting pistol for this movement was Black Square by Polish-Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, first exhibited in 1915. A very early example of abstract painting, it is simply a square of canvas covered in black paint. Malevich called his style “Suprematist.” Relying on simple shapes and a limited palette, it marked an absolute rejection of the depiction of objects in favor of pure expression. Tellingly, the painting was mounted high in the corner of the room, where Russian Orthodox icons would traditionally have been placed—a rejection of religion in favor of the secular. “It symbolized the collapse of traditional values and social structure,” says Belgian artist Frederik De Wilde—processes that had been hastened by the industrial revolution and its creation of new socioeconomic classes.
Longreads: The Rub of Rough Sex
When I read Mayer and Farrow’s New Yorker article, I was struck by their use of the phrase “nonconsensual physical violence” to refer to Schneiderman’s alleged acts. Unlike BDSM, which means so many things that it means almost nothing, “nonconsensual physical violence” is chillingly pure — it means that one person hurt another person’s body without permission. But the phrase also interests me because it holds the implication that physical violence can be consensual. Sometimes, the phrase “nonconsensual physical violence” allows, you and your partner can agree that pain, whether received or inflicted, is pleasurable. This discomfiting idea of pain is, as consent is, woven into the fabric of BDSM; it’s often the BDSM aspect (other than its black leather and chrome aesthetic) that alienates people who don’t dabble in rough sex; and it’s the aspect that’s most volatile, slipping from delight into agony with ease. [...]
What strikes me, however, is this: While feminists, sociologists, and human behaviorists question women’s choice of the submissive role almost ad nauseam, the idea that kinky (cis-het) men are somehow naturally dominant goes without interrogation. Of course, culture murmurs, men want to be dominant — why would they want to give up their power? Men who want to be doms fit into the mystique of the “alpha male,” our culture’s idea that manly men get what they want by taking charge, spanking ass, and calling names — and, certainly, this masculine swagger has appealed to me. Much to my intellect’s shame, I have thrilled to hearing “good girl” growled in my ear. [...]
But maybe — just maybe — these men’s dominant kink is a cover for their misogyny and their anger. It’s easy for men to mistake their private motives when society already gives hypermasculinity a big blank check. It’s even easier if those men — perhaps including Schneiderman — strive to perform flawless feminist progressive politics in a culture that demeans caring men, in a society that tells women every day that their experiences don’t matter, and in a world where masculinity wafts with a toxic fug. [...]
These two “woke” guys publicly performed a feminist sensibility while privately assuming a bad-boy, sexy, naughty BDSM identity. But the feminism was fake, while their rage — at women, at themselves, at their families, at society, at whatever it is that angers white men with advanced degrees — was real. These men appeared to embody the fascinating dichotomy of enlightened politics and raw male sexual magnetism, and this bifurcated appearance was as important to them as it was to me. For as much as these guys’ façades and naughty underbellies fed their egos (and got them sex), together they also formed a shield. After all, you can’t possibly be a misogynist when you’re a feminist, right?
Foreign Affairs: Sanctions on Russia Are Working
This was also a landmark in sanctions history. No economy as big as Russia’s has been subject to major sanctions in recent times. Only the restrictions imposed by the League of Nations on Italy, and by the United States on Japan, before World War II bear comparison. But unlike Italy and Japan back then, Russia is a key supplier of oil and gas to the rest of the world. An embargo on its major exports—a traditional sanctions tool—is all but unthinkable. Designing effective sanctions against such a hard target was a new challenge.
How have the sanctions fared? Russia has not returned Crimea or withdrawn from Ukraine. Nor has its economy collapsed. But sanctions were never intended to achieve those things. Rather, they were designed for three goals: first, to deter Russia from escalating military aggression; second, to reaffirm international norms and condemn their violation; and third, to encourage Russia to reach a political settlement—specifically, to fully implement the Minsk agreements, which oblige it to observe a cease-fire, withdraw military equipment, and allow Ukraine to restore control over its borders—by increasing the costs of not doing so. [...]
Sanctions have failed only in their most ambitious goal, to nudge Russia toward fulfillment of the Minsk agreements. Russia’s routine violations of the agreements and its other actions, such as its recognition of identity documents issued by the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics within Ukraine, make reaching this goal less likely than ever. Russia is prepared to incur large costs to maintain its influence in Ukraine. [...]
If a critical mass of oligarchs feels its core interests are harmed by Western responses to the Kremlin’s behavior, it may begin to view Putin in a different light. The interests of political power and wealth in Russia will become less aligned than at any time since Putin asserted dominance over oligarchs in his first term, from 2000 to 2004. This will not lead to change today or tomorrow. But as the “2024 question” looms—will Putin leave office as the constitution mandates, and if so, who will succeed him?—tensions between power and money could create an important new force for change, not only on Russia’s actions but also on its governance.
Crooked Media Wilderness: The Blob
How can Democrats avoid conventional thinking on foreign policy? A discussion about what a new era of American leadership might look like.
The Atlantic: My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes
When his father died, Charlie Tyrell realized he knew next to nothing about him. Tyrell and his reticent father hadn’t been close; as a young adult, Tyrell had been waiting for “the strange distance he felt between them to close,” as he describes it in his short documentary, My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes. Now, he wouldn’t have the chance.
Still, Tyrell thought that there must be some skeleton key to his late father’s experience of the world. Greg Tyrell had been something of a modest hoarder—what if, like a mosaic of memory, Charlie could piece together who Greg was through the “weird stuff he had left behind?” “I had this lingering impulse to make a film about him that looked at our relationship. Then, I found [his] porno tapes,” Tyrell told The Atlantic. “I thought it would be an absurd and funny way to approach the subject. It's hard to talk about a deceased loved one without sucking all of the air out of the room. So, by approaching it with a sense of humor, I found a way to invite people into the story in a less weighty way.”
Told through a mixed-media style that combines scrapbook animation, narration performed by David Wain, interviews with Tyrell’s family, and footage of places that were meaningful to Greg, My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes is a spirited cinematic elegy. Through the process of making the film, Tyrell would indeed discover who his father was—particularly, the tragic family history that had caused Greg to behave in a way that seemed impenetrable to his children. What begins as a story about what Tyrell describes as “some of the tackiest video pornography the 1980s had to offer” becomes the story of the courage to extricate oneself from a vicious cycle of abuse.
“It was emotionally draining at times,” Tyrell said. “This was me exposing mine and my family's relationship with our dad. But the process of looking at our relationship and shaping it into a story for a film allowed me to articulate my thoughts and feelings in a way that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.”
The New York Review of Books: The Priesthood of The Big Crazy
A wise man once told me that we humans are all at one time or another a little crazy on the subject of sex. A little crazy, yes. But Catholic priests are charged with maintaining The Big Crazy on sex all the time. These functionaries of the church are formally supposed to believe and preach sexual sillinesses, from gross denial to outright absurdity, on the broadest range of issues—masturbation, artificial insemination, contraception, sex before marriage, oral sex, vasectomy, homosexuality, gender choice, abortion, divorce, priestly celibacy, male-only priests—and uphold the church’s “doctrines,” no matter how demented.
Some priests are humane or common-sensible enough to ignore some parts of this impossibly severe set of rules, which gives them reason to be selective about sexual matters. Since scripture says nothing about most of these subjects, popes have claimed a power to define “natural law.” But the nineteenth-century English theologian John Henry Newman was right when he said, “The Pope, who comes of Revelation, has no jurisdiction over Nature.” That would be true even if the natural law being invoked had some philosophical depth, but Catholics are asked to accept childish versions of “natural law.” For instance, since the “natural” use of sex is to beget children, any use apart from that is sinful, and mortally sinful. Masturbate and you go to hell (unless, of course, you confess the sin to a priest, which gives an ordained predator the chance to be “comforting” about masturbation).
Contraception prevents the “natural” begetting? Condoms are a ticket to damnation. Homosexuality gives no “natural” progeny? Straight to hell! This is like saying that the “natural” aim of eating is for maintenance of life, so any eating that is not necessary for bodily preservation is a sin. Toast someone with champagne and you go to hell. “The church” adopted this simpleton’s view of natural law only after it had to abandon an equally childish argument from scripture. Pope Pius XI in his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii noted that Onan was condemned to death for coitus interruptus with his brother’s widow, when “he spilled it [his seed] on the ground” (Genesis 38: 9-10). Dorothy Parker said she called her parrot Onan because it certainly spilled its seed on the ground. When Bible scholars pointed out that the Genesis passage concerned levirate marriage, later popes had to invent a lame natural law argument to replace the lame scriptural argument. [...]
Many victims of abuse by priests have made the mistake of reporting their charges to a bishop. They should have gone straight to a secular authority. To expect from the celibate clergy either candor or good sense on sexual matters is a fool’s game. The Vatican II Council proclaimed that the church is the people of God, not their rulers. The hierarchy, when it opposes the laity, makes itself the enemy of the church, not its embodiment. There are no priests in the Gospels (except Jewish priests at the Temple). Peter and Paul never called themselves or anyone else a priest. Jesus is not called a priest in the New Testament apart from a goofy claim in the late and suspect “Letter to the Hebrews,” in which Jesus is said to be a priest not in any Jewish line, but in that of a non-Jewish, so-called priest named Melchizedek, who can never die.
The Atlantic: Mike Pence’s Outer-Space Gospel
This kind of language, the invocation of past conquests to promote future ones, persists to this day, and the current White House has described the aspirations of the American space program in similar terms. But it has added an extra layer to the rhetoric, courtesy of the vice president. Since the Trump administration was sworn in, Mike Pence has been the unofficial spokesperson for the U.S. space program, touring nasa centers and delivering remarks about the country’s ambitions on behalf of the president. Even now that nasa finally has an administrator—it took nearly 15 months after the inauguration to get a Donald Trump nominee into the job—Pence remains the headliner at space-related events. [...]
No leader before Pence has injected this much religious rhetoric into speeches about the space program, according to space historians. Which makes sense, since Pence is an Irish Catholic turned evangelical Christian, and outspokenly so. Pence has a long record of presenting his political beliefs in the context of his religious ones; even before he was elected to any office, Pence liked to say he was “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” As a congressman, he cited scripture to explain his votes and prayed with his staffers. [...]
In his famous speech, Kennedy had asked for God’s blessing: “As we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” Buzz Aldrin, who followed him, brought a small plastic container of wine and a piece of bread, and actually took Communion on the moon. The stunning success of the landing strengthened the notion that the United States was favored by God over other would-be spacefaring nations, Weibel says.
Jacobin Magazine: Voting With Their Feet
The citizens in the frontline were not, as some officials claimed, hooligans picking a fight with the forces of order. But the protests did soon turn ugly. After some people began to lob stones, eggs, and bottles at the riot police, the gendarmes panicked and responded with tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannon. Peaceful protesters were hit with clubs, women with their children were tear-gassed and intimidated, random passers-by were brutally beaten, and journalists were shoved because they were filming the abuse. 455 people needed medical attention. [...]
It is unsurprising that corruption is at the heart of the current protests. This plague is rooted in the early 1990s, and Romania’s transition from the old one-party Communist regime to democracy. Many “smart guys” who had held key positions during the Communist era remained in power and took over the private businesses which now absorbed public funds. The disarray in the transition period, plus the lack of democratic institutions and civil society, allowed corruption to flourish. [...]
Almost four million Romanians — close to a quarter of the population — work abroad in all kinds of jobs, from doctors and engineers to cleaners and strawberry pickers. Romania’s 2007 entry into the European Union allowed its citizens far greater opportunities to make their way elsewhere — an opening many of them took. According to a recent UN Report, Romania in fact had the world’s second-highest increase in its diaspora between 2007 and 2015. With an average 7.3 percent annual growth rate in the number of citizens living abroad, Romania came behind only war-torn Syria (with an annual increase of 13.1 percent). [...]
In the wake of this campaign, the issue of the authorities’ disrespect for the law was again at the center of the next wave of protests. On October 30, 2015, sixty-four people were killed, and hundreds burned and injured, after a fire broke out at a Bucharest nightclub. The next day, the press reported that mayor Cristian Popescu Piedone had granted the club an operating license without the legally required permit from the fire department.
Haaretz: The Aramco Flop: Beginning of the End for the New Saudi Arabia
Aramco is the world’s largest oil producer, and heir apparent Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, or MBS, the man leading the reform drive, was confident it was worth $2 trillion, twice Apple’s valuation. The IPO would be the biggest in history and the world’s leading stock exchanges were competing for the privilege of the listing. [...]
But MBS has two problems. The short-term one is that he is trying to finance this transition at a time when oil prices are low, which has left the country’s running huge budget deficits (this year something like 7% of GDP). The Aramco IPO was supposed to help pay some of Vision 2030’s bills. Running deficits would be okay as an investment in the future if Vision 2030 was going to work, but the odds are stacked against it. [...]
Yes, MBS is letting women drive for the first time and has made some other gentle social reforms. But the modus operandi is that of the ruler bestowing gifts on his people, who'd better be grateful, rather than a process where Saudi society decides through an open process of debate. [...]
The World Economic Forum’s Human Capital Report ranks Saudi Arabia 87th in the world, a notch behind Egypt, which isn’t exactly Silicon Nile Valley. It’s not that the kingdom wants for money to educate its population, but Saudis have gotten too used to the idea that real work is performed by expatriates. The idea that they will be leading and founding innovative, transformative business is hard to imagine.
23 August 2018
99 Percent Invisible: Bundyville
By his own account, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy never wanted to start a war with the federal government. To hear him tell the story, he is a folksy, rural Nevada rancher trying to eke out a living on a piece of land near Bunkerville. But in 2014, on the same piece of land Bundy claims is so peaceful, armed militias showed up and pointed guns at Bureau of Land Management agents who had come to round up his cattle because of Bundy’s unpaid grazing fees.
During the chaotic events that were broadcast on national television, Bundy took to the stage and gave a list of demands. He wanted federal parks officers to turn over their weapons to the crowd. He wanted federal buildings demolished. He wanted all public lands in Clark County, Nevada, turned over to local control. It was a stark contrast to the image Bundy paints of himself. Far from peaceful, Bundy was calling for an armed rebellion if he didn’t get his way.
And that’s essentially what happened. Militia members pointed their guns at BLM agents, and those agents backed off after being surrounded in a river wash near the ranch. Bundy got his cattle back and for years faced no consequences for his actions. He had, it seemed, beaten the federal government.
The Atlantic: Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt
The answer may lie in how Trump and his supporters define corruption. In a forthcoming book entitled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”
Fox’s decision to focus on the Iowa murder rather than Cohen’s guilty plea illustrates Stanley’s point. For many Fox viewers, I suspect, the network isn’t ignoring corruption so much as highlighting the kind that really matters. When Trump instructed Cohen to pay off women with whom he had affairs, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional gender and class hierarchies. Since time immemorial, powerful men have been cheating on their wives and using their power to evade the consequences. [...]
Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about Clinton’s? Likely because Hillary’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption. “When female politicians were described as power-seeking,” noted the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto in a 2010 study, “participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust).”
Nautilus Magazine: Beyond Sexual Orientation
As Diamond followed up every two years with the women she was studying, her hypothesis found new support. “They were moving in all possible directions,” says Diamond. In 2005, 10 years after she began her study, the pie charts continued to change, and about 67 percent of the women had changed their sexual identity labels at least once. Many self-labeled lesbians had unlabeled themselves. Most of the women who had initially preferred not to have a label had taken on the bisexual label. Some unlabeled women became lesbian, and others heterosexual. [...]
In her 2008 book Sexual Fluidity, Diamond says sexual fluidity is actually relatively common. It’s not a conclusion that everyone agrees with: Qazi Rahman, a senior lecturer of cognitive neuropsychology at King’s College London, for example, suggests that her study was too small to “tell us much about women in general.” But Charlotte Tate, a gender and sexuality psychologist at San Francisco State University, says that Diamond’s sample size is larger than the recommended sample size for qualitative research, and considers Diamond’s findings significant. “Sexual fluidity is a real phenomenon,” says Tate. “It is a part of the human experience.” [...]
If the narrative departure represented by bisexuality was discouraged, sexual fluidity—which denied the very idea of static orientation—was an even more remote afterthought, even though it had been observed in the academic literature by the late 1970s. “The notion of sexual fluidity is not a new one,” writes Diamond in Sexual Fluidity. A 1977 study of 156 bisexual male and female college students found that some had consistent patterns of attraction over time while others did not.1 The authors proposed that sexuality is not fixed at a young age, but could vary over a lifetime. A few other studies over the next decade made similar insights, underscoring the importance of time in measuring human attraction. At one point, some researchers devised a new model for quantifying sexuality that included the element of time.2 Yet the model, along with these early studies, failed to have much of an impact.
Political Critique: Pride and Prejudice in Prague
Pride has become a commercial event. It still does a lot of good – events such as art happenings, lectures, and workshops that focus on education and showing the sexual minorities in a positive light definitely have their place in a country that prefers equality not to intrude the reality. It is easy to cheer for the tide of happy, colorful waving people, especially when their opposition consists of Catholic crackpots and neo-Nazi twits physically incapable of setting a flag on fire (quotes: “Burn, you bastard” and “Those assholes made them fireproof on purpose!”). But there is an element of protest in the march, a statement of identity: we are different, we are not ashamed of it and we deserve being treated equally, just like the rest of our society.
But what Prague Pride actually gets – as the media coverage shows – is tolerance; a rather different concept. Instead of pushing for equality, there is a sense of condescending acceptance of those weird colorful people and their quirks. Do what you want, kids, as long as it does not threaten us in any way. Again, make no mistake: this is a preferable state of events to that in other Eastern European countries; very few Czechs still feel the need to cure homosexuality through violence. The majority seems content to just pretend no political issues connected to sexual orientation exist. And while Prague Pride tried to address this, this year’s theme being familial life and labels pinned on LGBT people, the discussion somehow failed to reach past the people already involved. It’s like preaching to the choir.
This leaves the event somewhat devoid of a central message; a vacuum that many rush to fill with their own agenda. This year, two political parties – the Greens and the Pirates – took part in the events. They had their parade floats with nicely visible logos, they had their stands where politicians and volunteers handed out fliers and kept reassuring everyone of just how awesome they are. Pride by its very nature cannot be an apolitical event (if such a thing even exists) and both parties have profiled themselves as pro-LGBT, but there are time and place for scoring brownie points with potential voters and, apparently much to the surprise of our elected representatives, it might not be at an event aiming for equality.
Deutsche Welle: Inequality - how wealth becomes power | (Poverty Richness Documentary)
Germany is one of the world’s richest countries, but inequality is on the rise. The wealthy are pulling ahead, while the poor are falling behind. [Online until: 17 September 2018]
For the middle classes, work is no longer a means of advancement. Instead, they are struggling to maintain their position and status. Young people today have less disposable income than previous generations. This documentary explores the question of inequality in Germany, providing both background analysis and statistics. The filmmakers interview leading researchers and experts on the topic. And they accompany Christoph Gröner, one of Germany’s biggest real estate developers, as he goes about his work. "If you have great wealth, you can’t fritter it away through consumption. If you throw money out the window, it comes back in through the front door,” Gröner says. The real estate developer builds multi-family residential units in cities across Germany, sells condominium apartments, and is involved in planning projects that span entire districts. "Entrepreneurs are more powerful than politicians, because we’re more independent,” Gröner concludes. Leading researchers and experts on the topic of inequality also weigh in, including Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, economist Thomas Piketty, and Brooke Harrington, who carried out extensive field research among investors from the ranks of the international financial elite. Branko Milanović, a former lead economist at the World Bank, says that globalization is playing a role in rising inequality. The losers of globalization are the lower-middle class of affluent countries like Germany. "These people are earning the same today as 20 years ago," Milanović notes. "Just like a century ago, humankind is standing at a crossroads. Will affluent countries allow rising equality to tear apart the fabric of society? Or will they resist this trend?”
Motherboard: Researchers Built a Cat Paradise for Science
As detailed in a recent paper in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, the research facility was created by University of Illinois researchers in order to study a new type of feline contraceptive that could drastically reduce feral cat populations. Although spaying and neutering cats is an effective way to control feline populations, the minor surgeries are expensive and invasive. An injectable contraceptive vaccine called GonaCon showed promise as an alternative population control mechanism in a variety of mammals, including laboratory-raised cats, but testing its effectiveness in the wild proved difficult. [...]
"Many facilities have come a long way in making research conditions more humane for the animals, but they still involve small enclosures without a lot of enrichment," said Amy Fischer, a researcher at the University of Illinois’ Department of Animal Sciences. "We wanted to make our cats' environment much more stimulating."
Of the 35 cats that live in the lab, 30 are female and all the cats were taken from local animal shelters. This in itself was a major departure from usual research protocols, which almost always use genetically identical, lab-raised cats. The hope was that this would provide better insight into the effectiveness of the vaccine as it would actually work in the wild.
Politico: Berlin sees rise in Salafists, extreme right and radical left: report
The growing numbers in Berlin mirror a nationwide pattern that saw the number of Salafists — who espouse a hard-line interpretation of Islam, and in some cases embrace jihadist ideology — in Germany edge up to 10,800 in 2017 compared to 9,700 the previous year, according to an interior ministry report released last year.
In its report, the ministry describes Germany’s Salafism scene as “the main recruiting source for jihad” despite the fact that “political Salafists usually refrain from using violence.” It also noted that analysis of recent terror attacks in Germany and in Europe shows that “jihadist activities are very often preceded by Salafist radicalization.”
Berlin has also seen a rise in adherents of the extreme right Reich Citizens’ Movement, which advocates for a return to Germany’s pre-World War II borders and rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. The movement counts 500 Berlin adherents, up from 400 the year before, according to the Berlin report. Roughly 100 are classified as far-right extremists.
Politico: German foreign minister calls for revamp of EU-US ties
To “renew and preserve” the historic relationship, Germany, alongside France and its European partners, should seek a “balanced partnership” with Washington in which they “form a counterweight where the U.S. crosses red lines” and advance “where America retreats,” according to Maas.
He called on European allies to “strengthen the European pillar” of NATO — “not because Donald Trump is always setting new percentage targets [for defense spending], but because we can no longer rely on Washington to the same extent as before” — and to move forward with plans for closer security and defense cooperation among EU members. [...]
Maas also defended Europe’s efforts to legally protect its companies from U.S. sanctions linked to Iran. “It is of strategic importance that we say clearly to Washington: We want to work together. But we will not allow you to act over our heads at our expense,” he wrote.
22 August 2018
The New York Review of Books: NATO and the Myth of the Liberal International Order
Behind Trump’s bullying and bluster, though, the core message he delivered in Brussels was not that different from those given by previous administrations. Indeed, the same kvetches have recurred under every US government, Democrat and Republican alike, since the end of World War II. Even before NATO was founded in 1949, there were disagreements between the US and UK over how to divide the burden of the postwar transatlantic security architecture; Wallace Thies, in his 2002 book on NATO, Friendly Rivals, dubbed it “an argument even older than the alliance itself.” [...]
So why the sudden concern, if US complaints about their allies’ military and financial contributions are nothing new? Liberal anxieties about NATO stem more from discontent with Trump’s brusqueness and his discourteous tone—at a rally in Montana in early July, he said “we’re the schmucks paying for the whole thing,” and claimed to have told German Chancellor Angela Merkel, “I don’t know how much protection we get by protecting you”—than from the actual substance of US policy toward the alliance, which has remained remarkably consistent over time. Rhetorical differences aside, successive US governments have always been clear that NATO is not a gathering of peers. Its function has been to bind European states into an international order dominated by the US—and to do it on Washington’s terms. NATO communiqués talk about shared security goals, but it has always been the US that determines what those goals are; they are only shared after the fact. From that point of view, browbeating from Washington has been a structural feature of the alliance from the outset. [...]
NATO expansion was designed above all to enable the US to have a guiding hand in the post-Communist transformation of Eastern Europe. Much has been made in recent years of a growing threat to NATO’s eastern flank from a resurgent Russia. But it is important to register that this threat was of little account in the original decision to expand NATO in the early 1990s. On the contrary, the absence of a serious challenge to the West from a greatly weakened Russia was a crucial enabling condition for it. [...]
That prediction has certainly been borne out. In this sense, NATO expansion itself helped to generate the threat it was supposedly intended to counter. The rise in tensions between Russia and the West over the past decade, meanwhile, has highlighted the questionable wisdom of admitting to NATO the string of countries along Russia’s western border. Militarily, these new members were at best only ever going to make marginal contributions to the alliance. On the other hand, they have added significantly to NATO’s obligations for collective defense, under Article 5 of the organization’s charter. Indeed, while the alliance’s growth was notionally premised on the idea of extending the US security umbrella, it is not at all clear that Europe has, as a result, become any safer. Ukraine, where the US and Russia are effectively engaged in a proxy war, is a case in point: the deadly confrontation there has its origins in a contest between Washington and Moscow for Ukraine’s allegiance, which in turn developed inexorably out of the decision to expand NATO in the 1990s.
Aeon: Against mourning
The Stoics trace their lineage to Zeno of Citium, who founded a philosophical school in Athens about 300 years before the birth of Christ. Along with Seneca, the Stoics are mostly known today by the works of Epictetus, an emancipated slave, and the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius. Central to their worldview was the need to distinguish between what we can and cannot control, and waste no time worrying about the latter. In other words, we should conform our thoughts and behaviour to Mother Nature’s ineluctable course, which the Stoics believed was a major part of what it is to be good or virtuous. Among other things, they took this to entail that it is simply wrong to grieve after the death of a loved one. [...]
That is what is so different about their intuitions and ours. To put it simply, if you are not a Stoic philosopher – if you have not been training yourself, year in and year out, to calmly face life’s vagaries and inescapables – and you feel no hint of sadness when your child, or spouse, or family member dies, then there probably is something wrong with you. You probably have failed to love or cherish that person appropriately or sufficiently while they were alive, and that would be a mark against you. [...]
Therein lies the importance of mental preparation. It is a systematic means of freeing oneself from false beliefs, including wishful thinking about life and death. If, when we are free of such thinking, we still feel sadness when our child dies, that feeling will be in accordance with Nature – and hence something it is permitted to feel. [...]
In fact, the quality of their love for those closest to them might be even richer than ours – assuming that we are not Stoics – because in every moment they remind themselves how valuable that moment is. Then, after some shocking blow, though their souls might at first reflexively feel the sting of sadness, they can soon shift to reflecting fondly on those same enriched relationships. As Seneca says: ‘Let us see to it that the recollection of those whom we have lost becomes a pleasant memory to us.’
The New York Review of Books: ‘Silence Is Health’: How Totalitarianism Arrives
Sent by his German immigrant family to the Heimat for schooling at the age of nine, Darré later specialized in agriculture, the logical choice for someone with an Argentine background at a time when the succulent beef and abundant wheat of Argentina’s pampas made the country renowned as the “breadbasket of the world.” For a while, during the 1920s, he contemplated returning to Buenos Aires to pursue a career in farming, but that was before his writing caught the attention of Adolf Hitler’s rising Nazi Party. His 1930 book A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, in which he proposed applying selective cattle-breeding methods for the procreation of perfect Aryan humans, dazzled the Führer. [...]
Subsequently, in my work as a writer, I focused on how hundreds of Nazis and their collaborators escaped to Argentina. This made me painfully aware of how their presence during the thirty years between the end of World War II and the 1976 coup had numbed the moral sense of what was then an affluent, well-educated nation, with disastrous consequences for its people. Argentines’ forced cohabitation with Nazi fugitives resulted, I came to believe, in a normalization of the crimes that the German émigrés had committed. “He came to our country seeking forgiveness,” Argentina’s Cardinal Antonio Caggiano told the press when Israeli operatives captured the Nazi arch-criminal Adolf Eichmann and spirited him out of Argentina in 1960 to stand trial in Jerusalem. “Our obligation as Christians is to forgive him for what he’s done.” [...]
With every turn, the billboard schooled Argentines in the total censorship and suppression of free speech that the dictatorship would soon impose. The billboard message was the brainchild of Oscar Ivanissevich, Argentina’s reactionary minister of education, ostensibly to caution motorists against excessive use of the horn. His other mission was an “ideological purge” of Argentina’s universities, which had become a hotbed of student activism. During an earlier ministerial term in 1949, Ivanissevich had led a bitter campaign against the “morbid… perverse… godless” trend of abstract art, recalling the Nazis’ invective against “degenerate” art. During that period, his sister and his nephew were both involved in smuggling Nazis into Argentina. [...]
To comprehend would-be totalitarians requires understanding their view of themselves as victims. And in a sense, they are victims—of their delusional fear of others, the nebulous, menacing others that haunt their febrile imaginations. This is something I saw repeated in the many interviews I carried out with both the perpetrators of Argentina’s dictatorship and the aging Nazis who had been smuggled to Argentina’s shores three decades earlier. (My interviews with the latter are archived at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.) Their fears were, in both cases, irrational given the unassailable dominance of the military in Argentina and of the Nazis in Germany, but that was of no account to my interviewees.
Politico: Czech president under fire for skipping Prague Spring commemoration
Ivan Bartoš, the head of the Pirate Party, said he is not surprised by the president’s “sad” announcement considering his political worldview, a reference to Zeman’s close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Zeman has repeatedly defended Putin against criticism from the West, calling for an end to economic sanctions against Russia and even denying that Moscow has deployed soldiers in Ukraine. [...]
The tweet inspired a Czech political activist, Robin Suchánek, to lobby public broadcaster Česká televize to show a commemorative speech by Slovakia’s president, Andrej Kiska, which is being shown on Slovak television.
The broadcaster agreed. As a result, the major Czech event commemorating the 1968 invasion will be a speech by a foreign head of state, which will almost certainly be regarded as a black mark against Zeman’s statesmanship. [...]
The head of the Czech Communist Party, Vojtěch Filip, made few friends in the Czech Republic, for himself or Babiš, when he told the Guardian this month that Russia bears no responsibility for the invasion because the Soviet leader who ordered it, Leonid Brezhnev, was Ukrainian and “the major force of the invading armies were Ukrainian.”
Curbed: 15 cities tackling pollution by curbing cars
As a result, cities like London, Paris, and Seoul are doubling down on car-free policies, aiming to decrease pollutants and make people’s daily lives better. Some regulations call for low-emission zones and the banning of diesel vehicles, since diesel cars are one of the worst sources of urban air pollution. In Germany, where diesel technology was developed, the country’s highest administrative court ruled in February 2018 that banning diesel cars in an effort to improve air quality was legal, opening the floodgates for German cities to go car-free. [...]
Amid all of the restrictions are other urban planning goals: Oslo, Norway; Bogotá, Colombia; and Hamburg, Germany are all betting big on bike lanes, converting boulevards into pedestrian plazas and creating bike “superhighways” that cater to people looking to ditch diesels and get on two wheels. If banning vehicles is one part of the puzzle, creating walkable cities and expanding public transit options are the other pieces to master. [...]
Meanwhile, Los Angeles is reconsidering its transportation future, paving the way for how shared, self-driving vehicles could be used in an urban setting. The city is also using its Great Streets Program to reinvigorate thoroughfares with art, pedestrian walkways, and plazas. And San Francisco has plans to ban cars and add bike lanes on Market Street, one of the city’s busiest streets. Elsewhere, rapidly growing cities like Charlotte and Denver are considering long-term plans that would emphasize pedestrians and multi-modal transportation over cars.
Quartz: Egyptian archeologists have identified one of the world’s oldest cheeses—and it might be poisonous
The “solidified whitish mass” was first found a few years ago in the tomb of an ancient Egyptian mayor, at the Saqqara necropolis near Cairo. The tomb was discovered in 1885, only for its location to be hidden by shifting sands, according to The New York Times. It was rediscovered in 2010.
While archaeologists suspected the substance was food, they were only just able to establish it was cheese. Tests to confirm the sample were carried out by teams from the University of Catania in Italy and the University of Cairo and suggested the substance was a “dairy product,” likely created by mixing sheep or goat and cow milk. The full details of the find were published in the journal Analytical Chemistry in late July.
Tests on the cheese also found traces of the bacteria which causes brucellosis, an infectious disease caused by consuming unpasteurized dairy products. Brucellosis can trigger bouts of fever, headaches, and muscle pain. Given this, the researchers are hopeful that this discovery will contribute to a range of fields beyond archaeology, from “medicine history to the forensic sciences.”
21 August 2018
99 Percent Invisible: Post-Narco Urbanism
In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord, had effectively declared war on the Colombian state. At one point, his cartel was supplying 80% of the world’s cocaine and the violence surrounding the drug trade had become extreme. The bloodshed was focused in the city of Medellin.
As the years went on, Medellin became the most dangerous city in the world. In 1991 alone, around 6,000 people were killed. The murder rate was almost 400 people per 100,000 residents, which is three or four times more than the world’s most violent cities in recent history.
But today, Medellin is very different. In just thirty years, it’s transformed from being the bloody cocaine capital of the world into a place that’s often described as a “model city.” It’s now safer than many cities in the U.S, and, to the surprise of many, one of the things that helped to pull the city out of the violence was a whole new approach to urban planning, including a major overhaul of the city’s public transportation system.
99 Percent Invisible: Right to Roam
When 99% Invisible producer Katie Mingle’s father Jim Mingle retired, he began walking —a lot. He’d always been a walker, but with more time, he took up long-distance, multi-day trips. And even though he’s an American, he mostly preferred to walk in the UK. In fact, over the course of a decade, he walked the entire length of Great Britain.
On one of his many trips, Jim found he needed to hitchhike (rather than walk) back to the village where he was staying. A jeep pulled up and he hopped in. The driver was dressed in a traditional tweed outfit with a funny cap. He introduced himself as the gamekeeper for Madonna and her then husband, Guy Ritchie. Katie’s dad had been walking across their private estate.
This walk across private land was not unusual. Thousands of distance walkers in Britain, regularly do the same thing , which is different from what people typically do in the United States. If you wanted to walk across America, you’d have to do it on a combination of public trails and roads and you certainly couldn’t cut across Madonna’s property.
In the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is known as “the right to roam.” The movement to win this right was started in the 1930s by a rebellious group of young people who called themselves “ramblers” and spent their days working in the factories of Manchester, England.
Aeon: In 2009, a man arrived in an Irish town with a plan to disappear forever
In 2009, a grey-haired man arrived by bus in the seaport town of Sligo in Ireland. Under the name Peter Bergmann, he checked into a hotel and carried three large pieces of luggage to his room. Over the next three days, he was captured by closed-circuit security cameras leaving the hotel with a full plastic bag and returning to his room with nothing. On the fourth day, he went to the nearby seaside village of Rosses Point, where he would later wash up on the shore. A haunting mystery unravelled through a combination of eye-witness interviews and CCTV footage, The Last Days of Peter Bergmann is an existential rumination on a mysterious man’s story – or perhaps on its absence.
Politico: Britain’s middle-class Brexit Anxiety Disorder
For Britain’s pro-European middle classes, Brexit is akin to a psychological trauma which has left many unable to behave rationally, according to two leading experts. Far from being hyper-rational observers concerned only with what is economically sensible, many have morphed into the “Remainiacs” of Brexiteer disdain. [...]
To an extent unparalleled in British political history, Brexit has ripped away the veneer of security that the managerial and professional classes enjoyed, throwing — in their mind at least — almost everything into question, from the U.K.’s place in the world to the future prosperity of their children. It is a threat that many find hard to cope with psychologically.
It is also something many of them feel can be blamed on those over whom Britain’s educated professionals usually have day-to-day political, economic and social control — the working-class, provincial, poor and elderly who were over-represented among Leave voters. [...]
Such a prognosis goes some way to explaining why other EU countries are far less concerned by Brexit than the U.K., even if it could have similar, if less severe, disruptive economic effects. For Britain, Brexit is existential, affecting almost all its political, diplomatic and economic ties with Europe — and therefore more likely to cause anxiety about the future. For other countries, it is just a pain.
Politico: Italy’s high-speed railway dilemma
“It is necessary to go ahead with the TAV, not go back,” said Interior Minister and Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini, leader of the League. Although the party has indicated in recent days that the project could be scaled back. “The most reasonable thing is to downsize,” said Giancarlo Giorgetti, undersecretary to the prime minister and a key League figure, on Sunday.
The issue became even more fraught for the 5Stars after the Genoa bridge collapse that killed 43 people. Part of the movement’s early appeal was its opposition to infrastructure projects, including a new highway in Genoa — and it is now paying the political price. Its earlier dismissal of warnings that the bridge was fragile as a “children’s tale” has now been scrubbed from the party website (screenshot here). [...]
The 5Stars are now hedging their earlier opposition. Toninelli has commissioned a cost-benefit analysis before he makes a decision. Deputy Prime Minister (and 5Stars leader) Luigi Di Maio promised to “rethink” the project and to renegotiate the terms with Paris. [...]
The 270-km rail line is supposed to be completed by 2030. It includes an €8.6 billion, 57-kilometer tunnel running under the Alps, and is part of the EU’s Mediterranean transport corridor. The goal is to shift some of the truck traffic running between France and Italy onto rail, which would help reduce EU reliance on oil imports and cut emissions from transport.
Jacobin Magazine: The End of ETA
Basque nationalism has deep roots in the autonomy enjoyed by the provinces of Araba, Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia in the Middle Ages. Even after these provinces came under the rule of Navarra and Castile, and eventually the unitary Spanish state, they maintained their own traditional laws and fiscal privileges, the so-called fueros (charters). Only in 1839, at the end of a bloody civil war, were these fueros finally subordinated to the national constitution, as liberal forces promoted the creation of common Spanish institutions. When Sabino Arana founded the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) in 1885, it harked back to this lost autonomy. Even today members of the PNV, a centre-right party representing the biggest force in the Basque Autonomous Community, are known as “jelkides,” followers of “Jaungoikoa eta Lege Zaharrak” (“God and the Ancient Laws”). This name also highlights the cultural thrust of the early Basque nationalist movement, and in particular its devout Catholicism.
Early Basque nationalism was also shaped by the industrialization that took place in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, notably in the Bizkaia province and later in neighboring Gipuzkoa. These changes drove inward migration and a radical change in the Basque Country’s cultural, linguistic and national identity, at the same time as the central state was trying to galvanize a common Spanish nationality. This also set the terms of the opposition between the PNV and the Socialist PSOE, founded in 1879. While this latter party arose in reaction against the exploitation and terrible living standards in the mines and the steel industry, the PNV emerged in reaction against the Basque people’s loss of cultural identity and national political institutions. [...]
If at first ETA did not declare itself socialist, this changed considerably over subsequent years. The revolutions in Algeria, Vietnam and Cuba over the 1950s – socialist-hued national liberation movements, centering on the armed struggle – deeply impressed ETA. At its Third Assembly (April-May 1964) it asserted that the Basque Country, like Algeria, Vietnam and Cuba, was a colony subject to a foreign state. This projection of ETA’s own aspirations onto distant examples also allowed it to adopt a vaguely-defined “socialist” perspective, and most importantly a strategy focused on armed struggle. Since these far-flung insurrectionary models were hardly practicable under the Franco regime, at first ETA’s “direct action” was limited to propaganda and graffiti, or a few occasional homemade bombs chucked at government buildings. In practice, the most important consequence of the Third Assembly line was that ETA adopted the perspective that national liberation would first require a common front of nationalist organizations to create an independent Basque homeland, only after which it would be possible to begin the transition to socialism. [...]
Even in this period of Transition from Francoism, ETA’s armed activity intensified. Between 1978 and 1988 ETA pm and ETA M claimed a combined total of 513 victims, compared to 75 in the previous decade. This was also a time of significant mobilisations in the factories (and indeed among education workers) as well as around questions like opposition to nuclear power stations and Spain joining NATO. Faced with severe police repression, the nationalist Left was an important part of all such movements and gained major popular recognition for its role. This was also the period in which the LAB trade union federation stepped up its activity, rapidly gaining shopfloor influence. The context of continuing violence and repression in the Basque Country highlighted the limits of the “democratic” transition from Francoism. The state continued a paramilitary Dirty War against the nationalist Left, combined with direct police repression. If in late 1977, the end of the dictatorship allowed for the release of ETA’s political prisoners, by 1987 some 504 of its members languished in jail.
IFLScience: Bizarre Video Shows Ants Performing A Strange Ritual Around A Dead Bee
The video in question features a sadly-expired bee surrounded by pink petals. As you watch, you realize the petals are rustling, and are actually covered in ants. As you continue watching, you see that the ants are the ones dragging the petals over to the bee and placing them in a circle around it. [...]
For ants, once they have detected a dead or dying comrade by the chemicals released from them, the undertakers will carry the dead outside the colony and take them a safe distance away, often to the same place – an ant cemetery if we're being anthropomorphic. For bees, it's not quite so romantic. The undertakers drag them out of the hive and then fly off and dump them, which could be what happened here. [...]
"[It's] hard to say as the locality and type of ant is not clear, but most probably they are harvester ants (vegetarian) taking petals back to their nest as food, and a dead bee has somehow ended up on top of the nest entrance," he told IFLScience. "That is to say the bee may be more of an obstacle for the ants if it is preventing them taking food down their burrow."
Think Progress: Cardinal blames ‘homosexual culture’ for Catholic Church’s child sex abuse problem
“It was clear after the studies following the 2002 sexual abuse crisis that most of the acts of abuse were in fact homosexual acts committed with adolescent young men,” Cardinal Raymond Burke said in an interview Thursday. “There was a studied attempt to either overlook or to deny this.”
Burke went on to emphasize that he believes there is “a very grave problem of a homosexual culture” both among the clergy and within the Church’s hierarchy that “needs to be purified at the root.” He added, “It is of course a tendency that is disordered.”
Downplaying the possibility there is any systemic problem within the Church, he claimed that Pope Francis bore direct responsibility for the scandal, calling on the pontiff to “take action” to enforce the Church’s disciplinary procedures.
The Guardian: Evidence in the bones reveals rickets in Roman times
Researchers from Historic England and McMaster University in Canada examined 2,787 skeletons from 18 cemeteries across the Roman empire and discovered that rickets was a widespread phenomenon 2,000 years ago.
Rickets is caused by vitamin D deficiency, often because of a lack of exposure to sunshine. It was a particular problem in the crowded, polluted towns and cities of 19th-century Britain and is often assumed to be a Victorian disease. [...]
“The big surprise to me was how young most of the sufferers were,” said Mays. “Some were suffering even in the first few months of life. The inescapable conclusion was that people were keeping their infants indoors too much.”
Quite why mothers might have been staying inside with their children is open for debate. “One tends to assume most women would have gone out and worked in agriculture: this throws open the possibility that that did not happen.”
19 August 2018
99 Percent Invisible: Built to Burn
The Santa Ana winds of Southern California are sometimes called the “Devil Winds.” They pick up in the late summer and early fall, sweeping down from the mountains and across the coast. They’re hot and dry, and known for creating dangerous fire conditions.
In late November of 1980 — as the Santa Anas blew in at up to 90 miles an hour — an unknown arsonist lit a fire near Panorama Point in the San Bernardino Mountains. Pushed by the wind, the fire grew and quickly spread down the mountain toward the city of San Bernardino.
In just a few hours, the Panorama Fire destroyed hundreds of homes and killed four people. It was one of the worst wildfire disasters in California history at the time, which sent one man off on a mission to try and change the way we address wildfires.
Jack Cohen was a few years out of graduate school, and a recent transplant to California at the time of the fire. He was working as a research scientist for the Forest Service, studying fire behavior, and he was interested in how the Panorama fire had destroyed so many homes — especially when there was such a robust firefighting response.
One of the first things that Cohen did was to listen to emergency dispatch tapes from the day of the fire. And as he listened, he began to notice a pattern. People were calling in about houses on fire long before the fire front ever reached their neighborhoods.
The Calvert Journal: Home from home
The Soviet sanatorium was a unique phenomenon that has now been well-documented. The central Georgian spa town of Tskaltubo was one of the most popular holiday destinations for workers and elites alike — Stalin was a fan — and at its peak this small town was home to 22 sanatoria welcoming over 100,000 visitors a year, with four trains arriving daily from Moscow. These guests arrived to intricate and stunning estates designed in the high post-war Neoclassical opulence that characterised the Soviet sanatorium at its finest. Their sprawling complexes housed hundreds of rooms, various spas and saunas, medical facilities and verdant outdoor space.
This history of grandeur and leisure is now a distant memory. The sanatoria were abandoned and then ransacked for scrap following the fall of the Soviet Union. These days they could serve as yet more fodder for the post-Soviet ruin porn industry. But another, often neglected story has been unfolding within these walls for practically the entire post-Soviet period, one that connects the 20th-century history of the sanatorium with the 21st-century crises surrounding refugees and migration. In 1992, war broke out in the secessionist northwestern Georgian region of Abkhazia and tens of thousands of people were displaced; the abandoned sanatoria of Tskaltubo were offered as “temporary” accommodation to thousands of these families. 25 years later and several generations deep, around 800 displaced people are still living in the ruins.
Photographer Ryan Koopmans didn’t know about the Abkhazian population of the sanatoria when he first arrived hoping to explore the “abandoned” Soviet complexes, but he realised soon enough what was happening. “The fact that farm animals could be found wandering through the corridors was clear indications that people must be caring for them,” he says. “Upon discovering the families, my interest went from a purely architectural focus to a fascination with the inside of these spaces and to learn about the people inhabiting them.” The result is Sanatorium, a series on these remarkable buildings and the people who live in them.
The Atlantic: Why Do Humans Talk to Animals If They Can’t Understand? (AUG 18, 2017)
“First of all,” Herzog told me, “talking to our pets is absolutely natural. Human beings are natural anthropomorphizers, meaning we naturally tend to [ascribe] all kinds of thoughts and meanings to other things in our lives.”
Humans can do this with just about anything—one might feel bad for the colored pencil that never gets used, or get angry at the phone that won’t hold a charge, or feel real grief over news that a hitchhiking robot has been abused. But that impulse is especially strong for things that are or seem animate, like animals and AI—and when it comes to pets, people often think of them as little members of the family. So of course people talk to them. But even though it might feel like I’m talking to my pets the same way I talk to other people, studies show consistent distinctions between the two. [...]
But though the instinct to anthropomorphize is innate, there are circumstances that make someone more likely to do so. In a 2008 study, researchers tested two motivations for treating non-human entities like thinking, feeling humans: first, that someone lacking social interaction needs to “create” a human to hang out with; second, that someone lacking control wants to feel more secure in uncertain circumstances, and anthropomorphizing allows him to predict an animal’s action based on interpersonal experience. Both hypotheses bore out. Chronically lonely participants were much more likely to describe their pets with words suggesting those pets provided emotional support—thoughtful, considerate, sympathetic—than participants with vibrant social lives, and participants who self-identified as desiring control in their daily lives were more likely to assign emotions and conscious will to dogs they were unfamiliar with than those who were more willing to hand over the reins, as it were. [...]
Beyond dogs, there’s little research on animal understanding of language, but evidence does suggest dogs process language similarly to humans. In a study led by Hungary’s Family Dog Project, dogs who went willingly into an fMRI were played recordings of their trainers, and their brains, like ours, processed familiar words in the left hemisphere and intonation on the right. It’s tricky to say dogs understand language, but they can at least recognize it. Or some of it.
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