Deep in the Mojave Desert, there is a little town with a big name and a bizarre history: California City. For decades, real estate developers have sold a dream here: if you buy land now, you'll be rich one day. Thousands of people bought this dream. Many were young couples and hard-working immigrants looking to build a better future. But much of the land they bought is nearly worthless. In this new podcast from LAist Studios, host Emily Guerin tells a story of money, power and deception.
19 September 2021
The Red Line: Belarus: The Next Crimea?
Since 1994 Belarus has been ruled by Alexander Lukashenko, often dubbed Europe's last dictator. 2020 though brought a brand new wave of protests and Lukashenko's position in power has become somewhat shaky, and he is beginning to outlive his usefulness to the Kremlin. Will the Kremlin fight to keep him there, or place someone else on the throne? Is there a future for Belarus in the West?
New Statesman: The Fateful Chancellor: What the end of the Merkel era means for the world
Yet Merkel is also fiendishly hard to define. She is a Protestant woman scientist from the former East Germany in a political family (the CDU and its Bavarian ally the Christian Social Union or CSU) dominated by male Catholic lawyers from West Germany. She has been hailed as a progressive icon and defender of liberal democracy, yet is also a paragon of small-c conservatism and has been frustratingly reluctant to stand up to autocracy. She is a global power broker in an age of swaggering strongmen, yet is unflashy in her personality and habits; she lives in a modest flat and can be seen doing her own grocery shopping in a central Berlin supermarket. She has called multiculturalism “a grand delusion” yet is perhaps best known for admitting one million mostly Middle Eastern migrants at the peak of the migration crisis in 2015. She is profoundly interested in history yet travels light, ideologically and strategically, in her own style of leadership. [...]
Merkel is also fascinated by the 19th century and how a seemingly sophisticated world collapsed into the carnage of the First World War. The 60th birthday lecture was delivered by Jürgen Osterhammel, author of The Transformation of the World (2009), a history of that first age of globalisation and the uncontrollable, disruptive effects it unleashed. In 2018 she urged her ministers to read The Sleepwalkers (2012), Christopher Clark’s account of what Merkel herself called “the violent juggernaut of 1914”. “I am afraid that open societies in the post-Cold War world are more in danger than we realise,” she once said. [...]
That method has three main elements. The first is strategic inoffensiveness. Though wryly funny in private (her impressions of other world leaders are the stuff of Berlin political legend), Merkel’s public demeanour is usually bland to a fault. Where others lead from the podium, with soaring rhetoric and sharp dividing lines, her hedged and vague use of language can verge on the anaesthetic. Critics have called this “asymmetrical demobilisation”, the practice of diffusing conflicts and denying opponents substantial grievances with which to mobilise their voters. Merkel herself has acknowledged the advantages of avoiding drama (“in calmness lies power” is one of her mantras) and has achieved a sort of apolitical status. “She’s a bit like the Queen of England,” says Khuê Pham, an essayist for Die Zeit newspaper: “Her political style is ‘you know me, you can trust that I am going to do the right thing’, not a discussion about what she wants to do.” [...]
“Her biggest single historical failure was the eurozone crisis in 2010,” says Garton Ash. “She had the chance to convince Germans of the case to make the eurozone fit for the 21st century, but she did not use it. It was one of those moments where the chancellor has an extraordinary power to lead and she missed that chance and let the narrative of the idle, corrupt south preying on the virtuous north become established in German public opinion and politics. It took ten years and a pandemic to overcome that.” When bailouts became imperative to pull the eurozone back from the brink she presented them not so much as desirable but merely alternativlos (“without alternative”), a term with which she has become associated.
UnHerd: The danger of fetishising foreign lands
When I first arrived here, I tried to focus on foreign reporting, by challenging hysterical Western perspectives of Poland. The Government and, sometimes, the people here are often portrayed as being backwards and xenophobic — and I objected to such characterisations. To the extent that Poles are more right-wing than Western Europeans, moreover, I argued, they have the right to be. A lot of American and British commentary appeared to embody what the social scientist Richard Hanania calls “woke imperialism” — the aggressive promotion of progressive pet causes in countries where there is little appetite for them.
I take none of my criticisms back. But on the flip side, it would be unfair of me to obscure the existence of Polish progressives, who have more right to make prescriptive judgements about their homeland than I, an immigrant, do. On the fringes of Right-wing Western opinion there is a caricature of Poland as an ever-strengthening, “BASED”, traditionalist Catholic idyll — leading one conservative commentator from the USA to claim that “the mood [in Warsaw] is unmistakably buoyant”, as if Polish public opinion is not as divided as anywhere else — and I have no wish to feed such clichés. To be a valuable observer you must tell the whole truth and not just part of it. [...]
An outsider’s perspective can be valuable, inasmuch as if offers a sideways look at familiar problems. And of course, observers can become participants, visitors settlers. It would be wrong to think that a migrant cannot — like a native — love and criticise a country simultaneously. Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, for example, combines social criticism with a deep affection for the people and culture of the mafia-assailed island, to beautiful effect.
Nautilus Magazine: Existential Comfort Without God
Research in psychology and the cognitive science of religion offers some answers, but they’re not without nuance. For example, there’s evidence that scientific beliefs can deliver some of the benefits of religion,2 but there’s also evidence that some scientific beliefs—such as human evolution—are widely seen as a threat to human values.3 There’s evidence that people use language differently when reporting religious beliefs versus other commitments about the world4 (e.g., people believe in God, but think there are atoms, with analogs in other languages5), but there’s also evidence that religious and scientific beliefs reflect common psychological mechanisms.6 [...]
But the most striking results emerged when participants were asked to generate existential explanations that offered comfort and peace of mind. These instructions made participants most likely to generate explicitly religious or spiritual explanations—the proportion of such explanations jumped from 34 percent in the baseline condition to over 56 percent in the comfort condition. Yet participants without explicit religious commitments readily constructed “natural” (as opposed to supernatural) explanations that offered comfort, as well. In fact, natural sources of existential comfort were offered almost as often (about 36 percent of the time) as their explicitly supernatural counterparts (about 42 percent of the time). [...]
Just because people could generate natural sources of existential comfort, it doesn’t follow that those sources were just as comforting as their religious and supernatural counterparts. We also asked our participants to rate how successfully their explanations fostered positive emotions and buffered against negative ones, and we found that the explanations with only natural sources of comfort were judged significantly less successful than those that included only supernatural sources of comfort. Living on in people’s memories wasn’t quite as good as eternal life—at least when it came to emotional comfort, which is admittedly only one aspect of a valuable and meaningful system of beliefs.
Social Europe: Catalonia: a fraught dialogue begins
The date for the dialogue between the president of the Generalitat and the prime minister of Spain was organised in June, following the pardons issued by Sánchez to former political prisoners. It symbolised the start of what both sides describe as a transition towards progressive deliberation between Spain and Catalonia. [...]
Aragonès has consistently championed two main objectives for the dialogue: amnesty for exiles and former political prisoners and another referendum for Catalan independence. Sánchez, referencing the Spanish constitution (a clause about Spain’s ‘indivisibility’) and consistent with his dialogue throughout this year, said ‘neither amnesty nor a referendum are possible’ and suggested the two sides need to talk about ‘closer issues’. [...]
Controversy was sparked the day before the dialogue when the Catalan president rejected proposed attendees for the meeting from Junts—the other half of the ruling Catalan coalition. Aragonès justified his decision by saying that the attendees should only consist of members of the government.
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