Politico: The world America made — and Trump wants to unmake

The initial efforts to create this liberal world order preceded the Cold War. And the key pillars on which the order was established had little to do with the Soviet Union. The central element was the transformation of the two great originators of conflict, the autocracies of Germany and Japan, into peaceful, democratic nations. Through force and coercion, but also with financial support and political encouragement, they were led to abandon the geopolitical ambitions that had produced two world wars and adopt instead ambitions for peace, greater prosperity and social welfare. Their large and talented populations gave up the geopolitical competition and entered the competition for economic success. They were in a sense liberated to prosper in peace. [...]

The success of the order did depend on the United States abiding by some basic rules. Chief among these was that it not exploit the system it dominated to gain lasting economic advantages at the expense of the other powers in the order. It could not treat the economic competition as a zero-sum game that it insisted on always winning. It also meant taking part in imperfect institutions, such as the United Nations, that other nations might value more than American policymakers did. America’s willing involvement helped knit the members of the liberal order into what they could regard as a common international community. This proved to be a key advantage in the Cold War confrontation. A major weakness of the Soviet empire was that important members of the Warsaw Pact were not content with the Soviet order, and as soon as they had a chance to defect, they took it. [...]

Yet for all the shortcomings and despite America’s often high-handed and hypocritical behavior, none of the members of the liberal order — not one — ever sought to leave it. For America’s allies in Europe and Asia and elsewhere, even a flawed American world order was preferable to the alternative, and not just the Soviet alternative but the old European alternative. The Europeans never feared American aggression against them, despite America’s overwhelming military power. They trusted the United States not to exploit its superior power at their expense. Although Americans were selfish, like any people, the Europeans recognized that they were acting on a more complex and expansive definition of self-interest, that the United States was invested in preserving an order that, to work, had to enjoy some degree of voluntary acceptance by its members. Flawed as this system might be — flawed as the Americans were — in the real world this was as good as it was likely to get. The order held together because the other members regarded American hegemony, by any realistic standards, as relatively benign, and superior to the alternatives.

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Jacobin Magazine: Why the Media Is Pro-Israel

Another academic survey of daily newspapers, this one published in 2007, finds that there are “fre­quent conflicts between the business side and the journalism side of newspaper operations” and that “advertising directors are will­ing to appease their advertisers, and are also willing to positively respond to advertisers’ requests.” The survey suggests that this problem is particularly acute at chain-owned newspapers, which are especially prone to compromising editorial integrity to either please their advertisers or keep from offending them. A similar problem exists in television, where polls of network news correspondents say that nearly one-third feel directly pressured to report certain stories and not others because of owners’ or adver­tisers’ financial concerns. [...]

The three widespread narratives about Palestine-Israel discussed throughout my book are, as I have shown, highly misleading. An accurate rendering of the story would tell of Israel violently colonizing Palestine, with vital US support, and functioning as a garrison for US-led imper­ialist capitalism. Instead news media outlets present fables in which both Israelis and Palestinians have subjected each other to comparable wrongs and are blameworthy to a similar extent for the unresolved status of Palestine. Readers are also offered disorienting accounts saying the problem is that extrem­ists are driving events in Palestine-Israel rather than moderates. Equally unhelpful are the tales the news tells about Israel’s sup­posed “right to defend itself.” [...]

The people in charge of these outlets do not necessarily hatch conscious plots to trick the population into believing mis­leading tales about Palestine-Israel. The institutional orientation of news organizations steers them toward consistently framing issues in ways beneficial to the class to which they belong whether the topic is Palestine-Israel or any number of other subjects.

For the question of Palestine to be resolved, the Western ruling class will have to be prevented from backing Israel as a means of dominating the Middle East. Because of Western mili­tary, financial, and political support for Israel, public opinion in Western societies has a role to play in bringing a just, de-colonial peace across historic Palestine. Western states will not undertake the massive policy shifts necessary for that to happen unless mass pressure compels them to do so. Yet the structure of Western news media suggests it is unlikely to begin telling stories about Pales­tine-Israel that are less weighted in Israel’s favor, which means that this formidable barrier to building the popular sentiments necessary to stop Western imperialism will remain in place for the foreseeable future.

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The Atlantic: The United States Could End the War in Yemen If It Wanted To

That war has long since devolved into a humanitarian catastrophe. The United Nations stopped counting its civilian death toll two years ago, when it hit 10,000. An independent estimate by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, which tracks conflicts worldwide, found that nearly 50,000 people, including combatants, died between January 2016 and July 2018. The war has also left more than 22 million people—75 percent of the population of Yemen, already one of the poorest countries in the world—in need of humanitarian aid.

As public anger over America’s role in the Saudi-led war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen has grown, Congress has slowly tried to exert pressure on America’s longtime allies to reduce civilian casualties. Last month, a bipartisan group of lawmakers included a provision in the defense spending bill requiring the Trump administration to certify that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are taking “demonstrable actions” to avoid harming civilians and making a “good faith” effort to reach a political settlement to end the war. Congress required the administration to make this certification a prerequisite for the Pentagon to continue providing military assistance to the coalition. This assistance, much of which began under the Obama administration, includes the mid-air refueling of Saudi and Emirati jets, intelligence assistance, and billions of dollars-worth of missiles, bombs, and spare parts for the Saudi air force. [...]

While the Saudis are quick to blame Iran for the war, several researchers, including Thomas Juneau, a professor at the University of Ottawa and a former analyst at Canada’s Department of National Defense, have shown that the Houthis did not receive significant support from Tehran before the Saudi intervention in 2015. Iran has stepped up military assistance to the Houthis since the war, and Hezbollah has begun sending military advisers to train the Yemeni rebels. But the costs of this assistance fall far short of those incurred by Saudi Arabia and its allies. For Iran, the Yemen conflict is a low-cost way to bleed its regional rival.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: Why Meat is the Best Worst Thing in the World 🍔

Quartz: Economists are severely underestimating the amount of trade between African countries

However, a large part of cross-border trade between African countries is informal. It either avoids customs entirely, or goes through official posts but is not recorded. Informal trade is difficult to measure. Most studies have relied on estimates based on partial surveys, or on accounting exercises. They concluded that a substantial share of Africa’s regional trade was informal, on the order of 30% to 40%. [...]

Using this data, our study confirms that informal trade is, in effect, a vital part of the trade system. For example, informal trade makes up the major part of trade in domestic products between Benin and Nigeria. Official statistics underestimate total trade by 50% for imports, and by about 85% for exports. [...]

Our study also shows that formal and informal trade differ by product composition. Informal trade isn’t restricted to livestock and a few agricultural goods. Product and sector diversity is high. For example industrial products, such as textiles, agro-food, and transportation equipment are traded heavily on this channel. [...]

Reducing tariffs should help formalize some of this informal trade. But it is difficult to predict by how much. It’s possible that incentives to go informal remain high for many traders, even under the continent’s proposed free trade agreement, especially if preferential treatment is costly or difficult to obtain.

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Quartz: China’s provinces are secretly building coal plants in defiance of the national government

Between 2014 and 2016, China’s provincial authorities issued a spree of permits for the construction of new coal power plants, totaling some 259 gigawatts of coal-energy capacity (pdf)—roughly equal the entire current US coal fleet. Then China’s national government said “not so fast,” and issued a series of orders in 2016 and 2017 to stop or delay the construction of more than 150 planned plants, comprising nearly 57 GW of energy capacity. A new report suggests many are being built anyway.[...]

Half the world’s coal power plant capacity is in China, and the country has been using coal plants as a way to goose economic growth and investment at the provincial level. On average, one large coal plant per week has come online since 2016 thanks to guaranteed financing, cheap state credit, and permissive provincial authorities. “It’s difficult to persuade the local governments to give up on them,” Lin Boqiang, director of the China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy at Xiamen University, told the New York Times (paywall).

A series of suspension orders by China’s National Energy Administration between 2016 and 2017 seem to have had limited effect. In 2017, plans to cancel or slow construction on 151 planned or underway coal projects were announced. But in many cases, the rules were ignored entirely, and in others, construction plans were simply “delayed” until after 2017.

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IFLScience: Scientists Have Discovered The Strongest Known Material In The Universe

Using simulations to study the elastic properties of neutron star crusts, the researchers were able to conclude that the material inside it is up to 10 billion billion times more rigid than steel. Neutron stars are, after all, 100 trillion times denser than any material here on Earth. The results are published in Physical Review Letters.

The simulations required 2 million hours worth of processor time, which was conducted using a supercomputer. On a regular laptop, the simulations would run for 250 years. [...]

"A lot of interesting physics is going on here under extreme conditions and so understanding the physical properties of a neutron star is a way for scientists to test their theories and models,” Caplan added. “With this result, many problems need to be revisited. How large a mountain can you build on a neutron star before the crust breaks and it collapses? What will it look like? And most importantly, how can astronomers observe it?"

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