The Atlantic: The Unintended Consequences of Helsinki

Since Trump took office, the U.S. has sanctioned more than 200 Russian individuals and entities, expelled 60 Russian diplomats, closed the Russian consulate in Seattle, approved weapons sales to Ukraine, and significantly increased spending on European defense meant to deter Russia. And despite Trump’s lambasting of European allies for not spending more on defense at last week’s nato summit in Brussels, the U.S. signed the joint nato communique, which condemned Russia for its annexation of Crimea, its alleged nerve-agent attack in the United Kingdom, and other acts of aggression against European countries. In 2017, the U.S. Senate passed legislation that prevents the president from unilaterally removing sanctions on Russia without Congress’s consent. The law also grants a broad mandate to the administration for sanctioning Russian companies and Putin’s cronies. Oddly, the president himself has appointed advisers, most notably Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National-Security Adviser John Bolton, who are known for their hawkish views on Russia.

In stark contrast to the administration’s policies, however, Trump’s own views on Russia don’t seem to have shifted—something Trump made clear in the lead-up to the Helsinki meeting. Trump suggested that he would be open to recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea because “everyone there speaks Russian.” He called for Russia to be readmitted to the G7. At a rally in Montana earlier this month, Trump said that Putin is “fine.” There is no shortage of evidence that despite occasional lip service to being tougher on Russia than Obama, Trump’s affinity for Putin in particular has remained unshakeable. Indeed, Trump has likely grown increasingly impatient with the constraints his advisers, Congress, and the unfolding special-counsel investigation have placed on his ability to pursue that elusive U.S.-Russia friendship. He undoubtedly felt frustrated that he was prevented from meeting with Putin earlier in his presidency and instead had to seek out opportunities to talk with Putin one-on-one on the sidelines of other meetings (which he did twice, in Germany and Vietnam). These frustrations likely built up when he went against his advisers and called to congratulate Putin on his sham election victory in March. It was during that call that Trump finally invited Putin for a tete-a-tete and set the wheels in motion for Helsinki. [...]

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, suggested that the Senate may take up new legislation to address the Russian threat. In January, Senators Marco Rubio and Chris Van Hollen introduced a bill that would require the administration to implement sanctions on Russia within 10 days if Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats determines that the Kremlin has interfered in any future elections. It likely had little chance of amassing enough support before the Helsinki summit, but it’s gaining traction now. And if President Trump was hoping to be able to remove sanctions on Russia, he has achieved the opposite: The bill would require even harsher sanctions on Russia’s economy, and it would be up to Coats, who has reaffirmed that Russia is actively carrying out influence operations ahead of the fall midterms, to make that call. Earlier this month, the Senate also passed, 97–2, a motion to support nato. Some Congressional members are now considering new initiatives that would make it impossible for the U.S. president to pull out of the alliance.

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Vox: Donald Trump and the crisis of elite impunity

But I think I know why Trump thought it was okay to do what he did — why he could get away with it. The reason is a culture of elite impunity, where business and political leaders face absolutely no accountability for misdeeds. And it’s a culture that Brennan and many political elites like him have fostered, and from which they have personally benefited.

It’s much bigger than collusion. It encompasses many decades during which political officials have evaded accountability for broken laws and illicit foreign contacts, and business and corporate elites have skirted punishment for outright fraud. It’s a problem that, ironically, Trump hammered home in the campaign: that there’s a different set of rules for elites than for normal people. It just happens that Trump knows that because he, for decades now, has been taking advantage of elite impunity.[...]

Only one Wall Street executive ever served jail time for the financial crisis. Rampant foreclosure fraud during the crisis, in which mortgage companies illegally forced millions of families from their homes on the basis of false evidence, went largely unpunished. Lanny Breuer, President Obama’s assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the Department of Justice, was so notoriously lax that Obama’s White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler once jokingly asked him, “How many cases are you dismissing this week?” [...]

It wasn’t even two decades later that the next Republican administration conspired with a foreign government, namely Iran’s. This time, the actions weren’t just horrendously immoral but illegal as well; elongating the Vietnam War was, alas, not a crime, but funding the Contras with Iranian arms deal money was. So was lying to Congress about it. Fourteen members of Reagan’s administration were indicted, and 11 were convicted.

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The Atlantic: Americans Have Some Pretty Vanilla Sexual Fantasies

“If you look back to, say, Alfred Kinsey, he was focused much more on people's behaviors rather than their desires. Same with [William] Masters and [Virginia] Johnson. They were focused more on studying the physiological side of sex,” Lehmiller told me in an interview. The last significant scientific publication on the topic dates to 1995, before the popularization of the Internet, which has made pornography, sexual information, and sexual misinformation all much more widely available.[...]

Lehmiller’s findings tell a different story, however. Whether it’s due to generational change, cultural and technological change, or just differences in research methods, Lehmiller finds that the innermost fantasies of Americans appear to have evolved: For example, Lehmiller says he was surprised by how often he found men—not women, as is the stereotype—fantasized about romantic or emotional fulfillment. He asked participants how often they’d had sexual fantasies in which a variety of emotional needs were met: feeling appreciated, receiving approval, feeling desired, feeling irresistible, feeling reassured, feeling sexually competent, and emotionally connecting with a partner. Women reported having these fantasies more often than men did, but the majority of men said they fantasized about meeting these needs at least some of the time. A clear majority of people—more than 70 percent of both men and women—said they rarely or never fantasized about emotionless sex.[...]

But many Americans’ sexual fantasies remain remarkably tame, especially with regard to whom Americans fantasize about. Nine out of 10 Americans reported they had fantasized about their current partner; just over half said they did so often. “No one else comes close,” Lehmiller writes; only 7 percent reported they fantasized about any famous people—like celebrities, porn stars, or politicians—often. And favorite fantasies about simply trying a new sex act or engaging in a favorite one, statistically speaking, outnumbered favorite fantasies that fall under the category “taboo and forbidden sex” (like fetishism and voyeurism).[...]

That said, of course, it’s worth considering that people’s pornography habits might just be reflecting their desires, not inspiring them; of Lehmiller’s respondents, a vast majority said they had looked for videos that depicted their favorite fantasy, and it’s certainly possible that people who watch pornography do so because they already fantasize about the body types particular to the genre, and not the other way around. “I suspect that the availability of online porn isn’t necessarily changing our deeper underlying sexual desires, but rather is more often just giving us new ways of fulfilling existing desires that we might not necessarily have thought of before,” Lehmiller wrote to me in an email.

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Jacobin Magazine: Divided They Fall

Steve Baker, the junior of resigned Brexit Secretary David Davis, interprets the White Paper as a stitch-up from the top. He argues that the Brexit office was a Potemkin village designed to distract people while the Cabinet Office’s Europe Unit got on with developing a soft Brexit plan. This is congruent with long-standing Brexit complaints that the higher civil service is an anti-Brexit fifth column. Indeed, they have long complained that effective control of the process of withdrawal has been ceded to this treacherous group. [...]

Most businesses want to be tied down by EU rules, and Brexiteers just don’t see why. If middle-class “free market” ideology had minimal descriptive accuracy, that shouldn’t happen. Businesses should be queueing up for tax cuts and deregulation.

And if British capitalism is as globally important as the Brexit Right think, then China and India ought to have been eager to offer British businesses access to expanding export markets — as was necessary to support domestic austerity and wage cuts. In fact, India seemed mildly embarrassed by the approach, while China was politely indifferent.

Part of the problem is that British capitalism no longer exists in the way it once did. Earlier this year, businesses in the European Round Table of Industry threatened Theresa May with what amounts to an investment strike if she failed to secure a frictionless customs union. The fact that they could make such a threat demonstrates just how much the British economy is imbricated with the rest of Europe. [...]

The EU seems to have understood this. For all that it has worried about “unfair competition” from UK tax cuts, it is also concerned about the “distortive effects of subsidies on investment, trade and competition.” Thus, the steel cage of special sanctions being devised for the United Kingdom in any future trade deal is intended to uphold “state aid” rules as much as anything else. One of the reasons why pro-EU Tories are so incandescently angry with Brexiteers is that they risk unintentionally creating opportunities for a future Corbyn government.

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IFLScience: This Researcher Discovered Something Very Surprising About How Women Watch Porn

This shouldn't actually be a surprise to those paying attention. Last year, Pornhub (that's fairly SFW, unless your office has banned bar charts) dug a little deeper into their annual review and revealed that over a quarter of their users were women. What's more, when you look at the users watching gay male porn, the audience is 37 percent female. As Pornhub's report notes, that makes women proportionally more likely than men to watch gay male porn by 69 percent (nice.) [...]

But some respondents gave deeper reasons for the preference. Women reported feeling guilty about the female actors in straight porn – something they don't have to worry about for a scene starring only men. For some, this had a distressingly personal meaning – "For a subset of women who are rape and abuse survivors, m/m is one of the few types of sexually explicit media they can enjoy without feeling triggered or re-traumatised," Dr Neville explained.

Perhaps one of the most surprising findings of the study was that over half of the women watching m/m porn also imagine themselves as a man while masturbating. Many described the experience as "empowering" and "exciting" – even feeling sorry for men, who they believed feel less freedom to experiment with their identity in this way.

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CityLab: What Can a Gondola Do for Munich?

In Munich, the future of public transit might be up in the air. This month, the city is discussing a plan to create a new 4.5-kilometer gondola link in the northern part of the city, linking two districts on the internal beltway that are currently poorly connected for everyone except drivers. [...]

The fact is that even the better public transit systems have their limitations. Munich’s subway (U Bahn), Suburban rail (S Bahn), and tram networks offer good coverage of the area, but they all focus primarily on getting people in and out of the city center. This is fine for commuters, but can pose an inconvenience for people in outlying districts who simply want to travel between two adjacent neighborhoods. Bus routes compensate for this, but their speed and efficiency is dependent on road traffic. [...]

The gondola could knit these two districts tidily together. Sailing over the road, the wires would be far cheaper to install than the terrestrial rails of a train or tram, but still ferry up to 4,000 passengers an hour. Land-wise, the gondola would only take up the space that’s necessary to support its towers. Indeed, the road it would follow already has space for these in the median. To make it a fully functioning link, it’s vital that each terminus connects swiftly to the subway, but broadly the idea seems sensible.

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Al Jazeera: Why are Iraqis protesting?

For the past two weeks, waves of mass protests have engulfed several of Iraq's southern governorates, spreading from Basra all the way to the capital, Baghdad.

Summer protests are a fairly regular feature of the Iraqi political calendar, as the unbearable heat brings the public's long-simmering grievances to boiling point. However, this year's protests will likely cause Iraq's political classes more concern than usual.

The root causes and triggers of the ongoing protests are not that different from previous years: lack of basic services (especially electricity shortages), corruption, and unemployment. In addition to the infernal heat, this summer has been marked by unprecedented water shortages. The ensuing public anger was exacerbated by 15 years of remarkable levels of waste and theft. [...]

The reduction of violence, the retreat of identity politics and the relative stabilisation of the state have brought Iraq's systemic failures into sharper focus. In the absence of existential struggles and civil war, Iraqis finally got some breathing space that has allowed them to demand more from their corrupt political elites. [...]

There is no guiding ideology to be overturned, no Leviathan to tear down and no singular authoritarian figure whose demise might signal a structural shift in the governing order. Rather than revolutionary climaxes, Iraq is far more likely to witness gradual change through a recurring cycle of political and economic pressures leading to protests and riots that, in turn, meet a combination of force and piecemeal reforms. Indeed, elements of just such a dynamic have been in evidence since 2011 and more so since 2014.

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Haaretz: Israel's ultra-Orthodox Establishment Is Consolidating Its Power

The dreaded proposal recommended establishing a new state-run Orthodox authority independent of the Chief Rabbinate to take on the formidable task of converting the hundreds of thousands of Israelis - mostly immigrants from the former Soviet Union and their families - who remain officially “without religion.” This population, most of whom consider themselves Jewish and are fully contributing members of Israeli society have refused to subject themselves to the difficult and often humiliating process of converting to Judaism under the auspices of the Rabbinate. [...]

With the switch of a few words, the message was sent that the state of Israel was only committed to the unity of the Jewish people outside its borders. Within the state, the ultra-Orthodox rabbinic monopoly wanted to make it clear that there was only one officially approved form of practicing Judaism in Israel - their kind. [...]

It was yet another sign that the leader of what is now officially the "Jewish Nation State” cares little for the concerns of the non-Orthodox and modern Orthodox Jews who live outside it - as well as the embattled minority of Jews in the country who, under increasingly difficult circumstance, continue to believe that there is more than one way to observe their religion.

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