Tag Archives: international

If Crimea Really is Important, Tell Us What Obama Ought to Do About It

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Fareed Zakaria has a piece in the Washington Post about Ukraine. Here’s the headline:

Why (this time) Obama must lead

So I clicked. Plenty of sensible stuff. The EU dithered. Ukraine blew up. Putin responded stupidly. “Let’s not persist in believing that Moscow’s moves have been strategically brilliant,” Zakaria says. His invasion of Crimea has turned the rest of Ukraine irretrievably pro-Western; triggered lots of anti-Russian sentiment on his borders; soured relations with Poland and Hungary; and sparked Western sanctions that are going to hurt.

And Zakaria says this is important stuff. “The crisis in Ukraine is the most significant geopolitical problem since the Cold War….And it involves a great global principle: whether national boundaries can be changed by brute force. If it becomes acceptable to do so, what will happen in Asia, where there are dozens of contested boundaries — and several great powers that want to remake them?”

OK, fine. So what should Obama do? Here it is:

Obama must rally the world, push the Europeans and negotiate with the Russians.

Go ahead and click the link if you don’t believe me. This is, literally, the sum total of Zakaria’s advice. So what’s the point? Obviously Obama is already doing this. Is he doing it badly? Is he pressing for the wrong sanctions? Is he working too much behind the scenes and not enough publicly? Should he be threatening a military response? Should he ask Zach Galifianakis to tape an episode of “Between Two Ferns” with Vladimir Putin? Or what?

Maybe I’m more frustrated than usual with this because I tend to like Zakaria. Sure, he’s sometimes a little bit too weather-vaney for my taste, but he’s smart and practical and tends to understand the big picture pretty well. So why not tell us what he thinks the US response should be? We could use some judicious advice to make up for the tsunami of idiocy emanating from the crackpot wing of the foreign policy community right now.

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If Crimea Really is Important, Tell Us What Obama Ought to Do About It

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You Thought It Was Tough Being Gay in Uganda. “It’s Hell in Nigeria.”

by Martha8879 Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Around midnight on February 13, a young Nigerian man named Femi* was jolted out of his evening prayer by shouting outside his window. A crowd of some 40 people had gathered around his house. “No more homosexuals in Gishiri!” they yelled, referring to Femi’s neighborhood within Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja. The mob broke down his door and dragged him outside in his boxers. They beat him and about 13 other gay men that night with broken furniture, machete handles, sticks, and a garden rake, vowing to kill them if they didn’t clear out of the neighborhood.

The attack, and other acts of vigilante violence targeting gays and lesbians around the country, was motivated by a new anti-gay law that Nigeria’s president signed on January 7. The measure, modeled off the one that Uganda enacted in late February, levies harsh prison sentences on anyone who makes a “public show” of a “direct” or “indirect” same-sex relationship or supports an LGBT organization (10 years), and anyone who attempts to enter into a same-sex marriage (14 years), even though this would be virtually impossible in Nigeria. The anti-gay backlash the law has provoked in Nigeria has led not just to violence, but to homelessness, unemployment, harassment, and a steep drop-off in HIV/AIDS treatment.

John Adeniyi narrowly escaped the attack in Gishiri and has been recording accounts of the violence that night. He’s a human rights program officer at the International Center for Advocacy on Rights to Health (ICARH), an HIV intervention organization based in Abuja. To find out what life is like for Nigeria’s gay community under the country’s new law—and what gay Ugandans are starting to face—I visited with Adeniyi during a recent trip to Nigeria.

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You Thought It Was Tough Being Gay in Uganda. “It’s Hell in Nigeria.”

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Marco Rubio Wants to Save the Internet From Foreigners

by ErnestoCTL Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Sen. Marco Rubio, still engaged in his campaign to reconnect with his tea party roots after blowing it on immigration reform, announced today that he plans to introduce a bill that would “prevent a ‘takeover’ of the Internet by the United Nations or another government regime.” Steve Benen is puzzled:

To be sure, there are foreign governments that censor their citizens’ access to online content, but it’s not at all clear why Rubio sees this as a domestic threat here in the U.S. As best as I can tell, there is no effort to empower the United Nations or anyone else to regulate the Internet on a global scale. Such a policy would certainly be scary, and would require opposition, but at present, it’s also non-existent.

For the most part, Rubio is probably just glomming onto a random bit of jingoism that he thinks will rile up his base. Still, there’s actually a kernel of substance to this. Right now, the US Department of Commerce exercises ultimate control over the DNS root zone, and ICANN, a nonprofit that administers the DNS naming system, does so under contract to the Commerce Department. And while ICANN has a global governance structure, it’s based in Los Angeles and has historically had a heavy American management presence.

But that could change. Last year, in response to some of Edward Snowden’s spying revelations, ICANN’s board of directors issued a statement that called for “accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing.” Last month the European Commission joined in, releasing a statement that lamented a “continued loss of confidence in the Internet and its current governance” and proposing new governance that would “identify how to globalise the IANA functions” and “establish a clear timeline for the globalisation of ICANN.” A week later, rumors surfaced that ICANN might try to move its headquarters to Geneva.

Now, this kind of squabbling has gone on forever, and the politics behind these statements is usually pretty murky. There’s no telling if it will ever amount to anything, and in any case it certainly has nothing to do with UN control over the internet. Nonetheless, other countries have long chafed under effective American control of the internet’s plumbing, and the Snowden leaks have given new momentum to calls for that control to end. It’s possible that this is what Rubio is thinking of.

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Marco Rubio Wants to Save the Internet From Foreigners

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Meet the American Pastor Behind Uganda’s Anti-Gay Crackdown

by HubertN55u Posted on March 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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In late February, when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the nation’s harsh new anti-gay bill into law, he claimed the measure had been “provoked by arrogant and careless western groups that are fond of coming into our schools and recruiting young children into homosexuality.” What he failed to mention is that the legislation—which makes homosexuality a crime punishable by life in prison in some cases—was itself largely due to Western interlopers, chief among them a radical American pastor named Scott Lively.

Lively, a 56-year-old Massachusetts native, specializes in stirring up anti-gay feeling around the globe. In Uganda, which he first visited in 2002, he has cultivated ties to influential politicians and religious leaders at the forefront of the nation’s anti-gay crusade. Just before the first draft of Uganda’s anti-gay bill began circulating in April 2009, Lively traveled to Kampala and gave lengthy presentations to members of Uganda’s parliament and cabinet, which laid out the argument that the nation’s president and lawmakers would later use to justify Uganda’s draconian anti-gay crackdown—namely that Western agitators were trying to unravel Uganda’s social fabric by spreading “the disease” of homosexuality to children. “They’re looking for other people to be able to prey upon,” Lively said, according to video footage. “When they see a child that’s from a broken home it’s like they have a flashing neon sign over their head.”

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Meet the American Pastor Behind Uganda’s Anti-Gay Crackdown

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Let’s Please Put the Myth of the Iron-Willed Putin to Rest Once and For All

by Giuseppe4532 Posted on March 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here is Doyle McManus today:

When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, one of his selling points was the promise of a more modest foreign policy than that of his predecessor. And when Obama won reelection 16 months ago, he renewed that pledge….Mitt Romney warned at the time that Obama wasn’t being tough enough on Vladimir Putin, but the president scoffed at the idea that Russia was a serious geopolitical threat.

It’s not quite fair to accuse Obama of direct responsibility for Putin’s occupation of Crimea, as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other hawkish critics have. After all, Putin invaded Georgia in 2008, when George W. Bush was president, and no one accused Bush of excessive diffidence in defending American interests.

But it’s still worth asking: Has Obama’s downsizing of U.S. foreign policy gone too far?

This stuff is driving me crazy. Later in the piece, McManus mentions Obama’s Middle East policy, and I suppose that’s fair game: Obama really has downsized our military footprint there. Personally, I’m just fine with a president who conducts foreign policy in the interests of the United States, regardless of whether Israel and Saudi Arabia approve, but I suppose your mileage may vary. Feel free to argue about it.

But it’s nuts to talk about Ukraine the same way. Putin didn’t invade Crimea because the decadent West was aimlessly sunning itself on a warm beach somewhere. He invaded Crimea because America and the EU had been vigorously promoting their interests in a country with deep historical ties to Russia. He invaded because his hand-picked Ukrainian prime minister was losing, and the West was winning. He invaded because he felt that he had been outplayed by an aggressive geopolitical opponent and had run out of other options.

None of this justifies Putin’s actions. But to suggest that he was motivated by weakness in US foreign policy is flatly crazy. He was motivated by fear; by shock over the speed of events in Kiev; by a sense of betrayal when the February 21 agreement collapsed; by nationalistic fervor; by domestic political considerations; by provocative actions from the new Ukrainian parliament; by an increasing insularity among his inner circle; and by just plain panic.

The one thing he wasn’t motivated by was US weakness. Can we at least get that much straight?

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Let’s Please Put the Myth of the Iron-Willed Putin to Rest Once and For All

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Sanctions Against Putin Won’t Do Much For Crimea, But We Should Impose Them Anyway

by IonaMartinelli Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dan Drezner, after waiting an unconscionably long four or five days, has weighed in on the efficacy of economic sanctions against Russia:

Sorry, but the fact remains that sanctions will not force Russia out of the Crimea. This doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be imposed. Indeed, there are two excellent reasons why the United States should orchestrate and then implement as tough as set of sanctions on Russia as it can muster.

First, this problem is going to crop up again. Vladimir Putin has now invaded two neighbors in six years to destabilize regimes perceived to be hostile to him. Post-Crimea, any new Ukraine government will continue to be hostile to the Russian Federation. There are other irredentist areas in the former Soviet Union — *cough* Transnistria *cough* — where Putin will be tempted to intervene over the next decade. At a minimum, he should be forced to factor in the cost of sanctions when calculating whether to meddle in his near abroad again. President Obama was correct to point out the “costs” to Putin for his behavior — now he has to follow through on that pledge.

Second, while sanctions cannot solve this problem on their own, they can be part of the solution. Over the long term, Russia does need to export energy to finance its government and fuel economic growth. Even if planned sanctions won’t bite in the present, the anticipation of tougher economic coercion to come is a powerful lever in international bargaining. The closer the European Union moves towards joining the U.S. sanctioning effort, the more that Russia has to start thinking about the long-term implications of its actions. Any political settlement over the future of Ukraine will require compromise by the new Ukrainian government and its supporters in the West. Imposing sanctions now creates a bargaining chip that can be conceded in the future.

This mirrors my own judgment. Putin has very plainly decided that invading Crimea is worth the price, and it’s improbable that economic sanctions—especially the scattershot variety that we’re likely to put together in this case—will change that. Nevertheless, it needs to be clear that there really is a price. It also needs to be clear that face-saving compromises are still available to Putin that might lower that price.

For my money, the biggest price Putin is paying comes not from any possible sanctions, but from the very clear message he’s now sent to bordering countries who have long been suspicious of him anyway. Yes, Putin has shown that he’s not to be trifled with. At the same time, he’s also shown every one of his neighbors that he can’t be trusted. Two mini-invasions in less than a decade is plenty to ramp up their anti-Russian sentiment to a fever pitch.

Putin’s invasion has already cost him a lot in flexibility and maneuvering room, and it’s very unlikely that tighter control over Crimea really makes up for that. At this point, it’s hardly a question of whether Putin has won or lost. It’s only a question of just how big his losses will be.

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Sanctions Against Putin Won’t Do Much For Crimea, But We Should Impose Them Anyway

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The Art of Learning – Josh Waitzkin

by Myrna Posted on March 6, 2014

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Art of Learning

A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence

Josh Waitzkin

Genre: Self-Improvement

Price: $10.99

Publish Date: May 8, 2007

Publisher: Free Press

Seller: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc.


Josh Waitzkin knows what it means to be at the top of his game. A public figure since winning his first National Chess Championship at the age of nine, Waitzkin was catapulted into a media whirlwind as a teenager when his father's book Searching for Bobby Fischer was made into a major motion picture. After dominating the scholastic chess world for ten years, Waitzkin expanded his horizons, taking on the martial art Tai Chi Chuan and ultimately earning the title of World Champion. How was he able to reach the pinnacle of two disciplines that on the surface seem so different? &quot;I've come to realize that what I am best at is not Tai Chi, and it is not chess,&quot; he says. &quot;What I am best at is the art of learning.&quot; In his riveting new book, The Art of Learning , Waitzkin tells his remarkable story of personal achievement and shares the principles of learning and performance that have propelled him to the top — twice. With a narrative that combines heart-stopping martial arts wars and tense chess face-offs with life lessons that speak to all of us, The Art of Learning takes readers through Waitzkin's unique journey to excellence. He explains in clear detail how a well-thought-out, principled approach to learning is what separates success from failure. Waitzkin believes that achievement, even at the championship level, is a function of a lifestyle that fuels a creative, resilient growth process. Rather than focusing on climactic wins, Waitzkin reveals the inner workings of his everyday method, from systematically triggering intuitive breakthroughs, to honing techniques into states of remarkable potency, to mastering the art of performance psychology. Through his own example, Waitzkin explains how to embrace defeat and make mistakes work for you. Does your opponent make you angry? Waitzkin describes how to channel emotions into creative fuel. As he explains it, obstacles are not obstacles but challenges to overcome, to spur the growth process by turning weaknesses into strengths. He illustrates the exact routines that he has used in all of his competitions, whether mental or physical, so that you too can achieve your peak performance zone in any competitive or professional circumstance. In stories ranging from his early years taking on chess hustlers as a seven year old in New York City's Washington Square Park, to dealing with the pressures of having a film made about his life, to International Chess Championships in India, Hungary, and Brazil, to gripping battles against powerhouse fighters in Taiwan in the Push Hands World Championships, The Art of Learning encapsulates an extraordinary competitor's life lessons in a page-turning narrative.

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The Art of Learning – Josh Waitzkin

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Actually, You Can Link Climate Change to Specific Weather Events

by LloydCrommelin Posted on March 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“You can’t link climate change to specific weather events.” That is the accepted wisdom that has been trotted out repeatedly as the wettest winter in at least 250 years battered England and Wales. But the accepted wisdom is wrong: It is perfectly possible to make that link and, as of today, you can play a part in doing so.

A new citizen science project launched by climate researchers at the University of Oxford will determine in the next month or so whether global warming made this winter’s extreme deluge more likely to occur, or not. You can sign up here.

The weather@home project allows you to donate your spare computer time in return for helping turn speculation over the role of climate change in extreme weather into statistical fact. That debate has been reignited by the devastating winter weather and the flooding and storm damage it wrought (more on that debate here).

The research that links global warming to particular extreme weather events is called attribution and has already notched up notable successes. The Oxford team showed in 2011 that climate change was loading the extreme-weather dice as far back as 2000, in a study that showed serious flooding in England that year was made two to three times more likely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The killer heat waves in Europe in 2003 and 2010 were also made far more likely by global warming, similar research has demonstrated, while another new study shows how Hurricane Katrina would have been far less devastating had it happened 100 years ago.

The attribution studies work by taking a period of time in which an extreme weather event occurred and rerunning it many thousands of times in climate models. One set of models starts with the actual real-world conditions—i.e., with high levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases—and reveals how frequently the extreme event occurs. Another set of models starts with atmospheric and ocean conditions that would have existed without the carbon emissions pumped into the air by human activities and therefore shows how frequently the extreme event occurs would occur in an unwarmed world.

Comparing the frequency of the extreme event in each set of models gives a measure of how heavily global warming has loaded the extreme-weather dice—or not. The models have to be run many thousands of times because the extreme events being studied are, by definition, rare. Many repetitions are required to generate robust statistics, and that’s why they need your computer time: It’s a huge computing task. Nathalie Schaller, a member of the Oxford team, explains the experiment further in this video:

The researchers do not know what the result of this new experiment will be, and they will post the results of the computer model runs as they come in, on their site and this blog. The science will unfold live before your eyes, and theirs, at the same time.

They estimate that a total of roughly 30,000 reruns of the English winter of 2013-14 will be needed to reach a definitive conclusion. That should take a month, depending on how many people sign up.

To give you a sense of what the results will look like, the team have generated some illustrative graphs, based on previous data but not pertaining to the new experiment. The plots show the chance of the total winter rainfall exceeding 450 millimeters in a particular year (the winter of 2013-14 saw 435 mm fall on England and Wales, the highest in records dating back to 1766).

Each rerun winter is represented by a dot, with blue dots coming from the set representing the real-world conditions and green dots coming from the set representing the modeled world without climate change. If the blue dots plot above the green dots, then climate change has made that event more likely, and vice versa. If the dots plot in the same place, then climate change has not affected the chances of that event happening.

In the plot below, containing just 120 simulations of the winter, it is hard to discern any convincing trend. That is because when examining extreme events, many simulations are needed to generate a robust result.

The small dots represent uncertainties in the estimates, University of Oxford

But in the following plot, with over 2000 simulations, the trend is much clearer. The new experiment is likely to need 5,000 reruns of the winter under real-world conditions and 24,000 reruns of the winter as it would have occurred in world without climate change.

University of Oxford

Predicting the impacts of climate change rightly takes up much of the time of climate change researchers, but this use of climate models reveals the extent to which climate change ands extreme weather is a danger right here, right now.

It is rare that anyone with a computer can participate in cutting-edge scientific research, particularly on such a relevant and important topic, but the weather@home project presents that opportunity. The Oxford team would be grateful if you took it.

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Actually, You Can Link Climate Change to Specific Weather Events

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The Global Economy Is Not Looking Too Great Right Now

by MollieUrquhart Posted on March 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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I post here periodically about declining European inflation and rising European unemployment, and today Paul Krugman draws our attention to an IMF blog post about the threat of actual deflation in Europe. The bottom line is that there’s no actual deflation—yet—in most of Europe, but there is in three countries, and there’s persistently low inflation across the continent:

Although inflation—headline and core—has fallen and stayed well below the ECB’s 2% price stability mandate, so far there is no sign of classic deflation, i.e., of widespread, self-feeding, price declines.
But even ultra low inflation—let us call it “lowflation”—can be problematic for the euro area as a whole and for financially stressed countries, where it implies higher real debt stocks and real interest rates, less relative price adjustment, and greater unemployment.
Along with Japan’s experience, which saw deflation worm itself into the system, this argues for a more pre-emptive approach by the ECB.

The chart on the right illustrates one of the big problems with “lowflation,” even if it doesn’t turn into outright deflation: the countries with the lowest inflation are also the ones with the highest debt levels and the biggest growth problems. They need to reduce wages relative to other countries, but with low inflation that’s very hard to do. It requires actual pay cuts, something that’s historically difficult, rather than simply freezing wages and allowing them to erode via inflation. As a result, it’s hard for their economies to recover, and that in turn makes it all but impossible to fix their debt problem. It’s a vicious spiral.

Krugman warns that without more aggressive policy from the European Central Bank, the EU risks following Japan into economic stagnation: “When people warn about Europe’s potential Japanification, they’re way behind the curve. Europe is already experiencing all the woes one associates with deflation, even though it’s only low inflation so far; and the human and social costs are, of course, far worse than Japan ever experienced.”

In related news, I’ll also draw your attention to China’s latest woes: “China’s leaders kept the growth target for their giant economy unchanged but signaled that they are more concerned than ever about reaching it, giving themselves the option of letting credit flow freely to keep from falling short.” In the long run, China’s slowdown was inevitable as wages rose and demographic realities intruded. But it’s bad news in the short term. With the economy still flat in the US; European recovery threatened by debt and deflation; Chinese growth getting harder to come by; and the developing world seemingly running out of steam—with all that happening at once, there aren’t very many bright spots in the global economic picture. At best, it looks like we have fairly gray times ahead of us. At worst—well, it might be worse.

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The Global Economy Is Not Looking Too Great Right Now

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All the Times Putin Said He Wouldn’t Invade Ukraine

by MariamSimon Posted on March 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Many a theory has been offered about how the situation in Ukraine has escalated to this point. On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel wondered if Russian President Vladimir Putin was “in touch with reality.” Her point was bolstered by his rambling Tuesday press conference, during which Putin implied—among other things—that this whole thing was the United States’ fault and that the troops on the ground weren’t Russian soldiers but well-outfitted, trained military imposters. “If I do decide to use armed forces,” he said, “this will be in full compliance with international law.” President Barack Obama offered his take, saying that “President Putin seems to have a different set of lawyers making a different set of interpretations, but I don’t think that’s fooling anybody.” Obama added, “There is a strong belief that Russia’s action is violating international law.”

The thing is, Putin actually loves international law—at least, in theory. The Russian president has expressed strong support for international law many times, but, no surprise, it usually comes when he’s singling out the United States as a violator. In recent months and years, Putin has repeatedly assured the public that what’s happening in Crimea right now—the use of force without UN permission and potential violations of the 1994 Budapest memorandum—would never happen on his watch. So in case a reminder might be useful—as diplomatic efforts are underway to de-escalate the crisis—below is a partial timeline of Putin’s many vows to abide by international law and not resort to the unilateral use of force to resolve a crisis.

1) December 19, 2013: About a month after protesters first occupied the Maidan in Kiev, Putin held his annual end-of-year press conference in Moscow and got several questions on Ukraine. One reporter reminded Putin of Russian interventions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and then asked, “Is a situation possible, even hypothetically, in which you will similarly protect the interests of Russian-speaking residents or Russian citizens of Crimea?…Is the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine at all possible?”

Putin’s answer was a definitive no: “None of what is happening in Crimea is like what occurred in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.” He noted that Russia interfered in these other spots only because the ethnic conflicts in these regions had placed Russian citizens in the area at risk. “We care about the situation of our compatriots…But this does not mean that we’re going to swing sabers and bring in troops. That is absolute nonsense. Nothing of the sort is or will be happening.”

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All the Times Putin Said He Wouldn’t Invade Ukraine

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