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You Insult Henry Kissinger At Your Peril

by gt67dx1 Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Newly declassified documents show that Fidel Castro pissed off Henry Kissinger so badly that he drew up plans to “clobber the pipsqueak”:

Mr. Kissinger, who was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977, had previously planned an underground effort to improve relations with Havana. But in late 1975, Mr. Castro sent troops to Angola to help the newly independent nation fend off attacks from South Africa and right-wing guerrillas.

That move infuriated Mr. Kissinger, who was incensed that Mr. Castro had passed up a chance to normalize relations with the United States in favor of pursuing his own foreign policy agenda, Mr. Kornbluh said.

“Nobody has known that at the very end of a really remarkable effort to normalize relations, Kissinger, the global chessboard player, was insulted that a small country would ruin his plans for Africa and was essentially prepared to bring the imperial force of the United States on Fidel Castro’s head,” Mr. Kornbluh said.

“You can see in the conversation with Gerald Ford that he is extremely apoplectic,” Mr. Kornbluh said, adding that Mr. Kissinger used “language about doing harm to Cuba that is pretty quintessentially aggressive.”

Yep, that’s everyone’s favorite geopolitical strategic master at work. Kissinger considered Castro’s actions to be a personal insult, so he began drawing up plans for the US military to blockade Cuba, mine its harbors, and potentially touch off a war with the Soviet Union. Because that’s what you do when a small country irritates Henry Kissinger. Amirite?

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You Insult Henry Kissinger At Your Peril

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When Did Republicans Start Hating the Environment?

by KourtneyLeane Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s one of those facts that sweeps you back into an alien, almost unrecognizable era. On July 9, 1970, Republican President Richard Nixon announced to Congress his plans to create the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By the end of that year, both agencies were a reality. Nowadays, among their other tasks, they either monitor or seek to mitigate the problem of global warming—actions that make today’s Republicans, Nixon’s heirs, completely livid.

To give one example of how anti-environment the right today is, just consider this ThinkProgress analysis, finding that “over 58 percent” of congressional Republicans refuse to accept the science of climate change.

So what happened to the GOP, from the time of Nixon to the present, to turn an environmental leader into an environmental retrograde? According to a new study in the journal Social Science Research, the key change actually began around the year 1991—when the Soviet Union fell. “The conservative movement replaced the ‘Red Scare’ with a new ‘Green Scare’ and became increasingly hostile to environmental protection at that time,” argues sociologist Aaron McCright of Michigan State University and two colleagues.

So is that causal explanation right? Before getting to that question, let’s examine the study itself.

For starters, it is pretty much undebatable that Americans today are polarized over environmental issues. In a figure in their paper, McCright and his colleagues visualize this polarization by charting the average League of Conservation Voters environmental scores for congressional Democrats and Republicans from 1970 through 2013:

Polarization in environmental voting in Congress McCright et al., “Political Polarization on Support for Government Spending on Environmental Protection in the USA, 1974-2012,” Social Science Research, 2014

This figure suggests that the key left-right break point on the environment occurred sometime in the early 1990s. So does the analysis at the center of the new paper: a look at how Americans belonging to different political parties have answered the same General Social Survey question about the environment going back to the year 1974. In that year and at regular intervals ever since, the GSS has asked the following question:

We are faced with many problems in this country, none of which can be solved easily or inexpensively. I’m going to name some of these problems, and for each one I’d like you to tell me whether you think we’re spending too much money on it, too little money, or about the right amount.

One of the items then listed is “the environment” or “improving and protecting the environment.” Here’s how many Americans responded to that question over time by saying that we’re spending “too little” on environmental protection, separated by political party membership:

Polarization of Americans’ views of environmental spending McCright et al., “Political Polarization on Support for Environmental Protection in the USA, 1974-2012,” Social Science Research, 2014

Once again, the key break appears to happen in the early 1990s. (Note: You might think that this just reflects a distaste on the right for government spending in general. But using more GSS data, the authors looked at support for government spending on other issues—like space exploration and foreign aid—and controlled for this general support for spending in their analysis.)

So what happened in the early 1990s? Well, for one thing, Bill Clinton was elected, flanked by a vice president, Al Gore, who had just published a book called Earth in the Balance. That made environmental issues salient in a very political way.

And then, there was the once super-intense fight over habitat protections for the northern spotted owl. Remember that?

The authors, for their part, cite the “rise of global environmentalism with the 1992 Rio Earth Summit,” which, they say, “generated a heightened level of anti-environmental activity by the conservative movement and Congressional Republicans.” Here, they rely to a significant part on another 2008 paper, noting how the conservative think tank movement mobilized to oppose environmental protections in the early 1990s. The upshot is that as environmentalism became an increasingly global movement, many conservatives tarred it with the label “socialism.” “Rio reflected a heightened sense of urgency for environmental protection that was seen as a threat by conservative elites, stimulating them to replace anti-communism with anti-environmentalism,” that study observed.

But this is not the only possible explanation for the trends noted above. There has been a great deal of research on why American politics have become so polarized (on all issues, not just environmental ones), and theories to explain the trend abound. For instance, one major factor is clearly “party sorting“—the idea that conservatives have moved more into the GOP over time, even as liberals have, at least to some extent, coalesced in the Democratic Party. So, the Republicans answering a General Social Survey question about the environment in 1996 or so simply were not the same bunch of people who were answering it in 1974.

One intriguing related hypothesis posits that the right wing has become more unwilling to compromise in general because it has become more psychologically authoritarian—closed-minded, prone to black-and-white thinking. That’s not a pattern that would uniquely affect environmental issues, though. If anything, it would be felt most strongly on the topics that authoritarians most care about: crime, national defense, religion in public life, and matters of that ilk.

Whatever the cause, the consequence is clear: We can’t get anything done in a bipartisan way on the environment any longer. “The situation,” conclude the authors, “does not bode well for our nation’s ability to deal effectively with the wide range of environmental problems—from local toxics to global climate change—we currently face.”

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When Did Republicans Start Hating the Environment?

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Chris Christie Takes Blowhardism on the Road

by JoleenRayner Posted on May 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Being a blowhard has worked well for Chris Christie at home, so it’s no surprise that he endorses blowhardism as a foreign policy too. In a speech on Sunday, he assured everyone that a Christie administration would….would…..well, something:

In Sunday’s speech, with rhetoric reminiscent of President Bush’s first speeches after 9/11, the governor made a moralistic case for clearly distinguishing between “good” allies and “evil” enemies.

….Though Christie offered few specifics, he particularly trashed Obama’s policies on Russia, Syria, and Iran. “We see Russian activism once again rearing its head in the world, we see an America that backed away from a commitment made by the president of the United States in Syria, we see a country, our country, permitting even a thought of a terrorist state like Iran having nuclear capability,” he said. “Here’s something that should not be up for debate, that once you draw that red line, you enforce it — because if you don’t, America’s credibility will be at stake and will be at risk all over the world.”

There should be a constitutional amendment or something banning speeches like this unless you’re willing to explain, in some detail, exactly what you would have done instead. Cut and run, like Christie’s hero Ronald Reagan did in Beirut? Lie your way into a disastrous war like his hero George Bush did? Or what? I’m really tired of hearing nonsense about how we should have “supported” one side or another in Egypt or Syria or Ukraine. Or how we should have sent heavy arms over, even though no one was trained to use them and in some cases we didn’t even have anyone reliable to send them too. Or that somehow just giving another “evil empire” speech would have sent the mullahs screaming into the night.

We didn’t win the Cold War because Reagan gave some speeches. We won because of low oil prices, a foolish war in Afghanistan, poor harvests, and the effective bankruptcy of the Soviet Union. We’re not going to win any of these other conflicts with bluster either. So let’s hear it. Is Christie planning a military strike against Iran? Troops on the ground in Syria? Cruise missile strikes against Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border? If Christie doesn’t have the guts to say this stuff outright, he should keep his bluster to himself. Without specifics, this is just laughable schoolyard bravado.

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Chris Christie Takes Blowhardism on the Road

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The 2,000-Year History of GPS Tracking

by AlvaroJxmb Posted on April 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Boston Globe technology writer Hiawatha Bray recalls the moment that inspired him to write his new book, You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves. “I got a phone around 2003 or so,” he says. “And when you turned the phone on—it was a Verizon dumb phone, it wasn’t anything fancy—it said ‘GPS’. And I said, ‘GPS? There’s GPS in my phone?'” He asked around and discovered that yes, there was GPS in his phone, due to a 1994 FCC ruling. At the time, cellphone usage was increasing rapidly, but 911 and other emergency responders could only accurately track the location of land line callers. So the FCC decided that cellphone providers like Verizon must be able to give emergency responders a more accurate location of cellphone users calling 911. After discovering this, “It hit me,” Bray says. “We were about to enter a world in which…everybody had a cellphone, and that would also mean that we would know where everybody was. Somebody ought to write about that!”

So he began researching transformative events that lead to our new ability to navigate (almost) anywhere. In addition, he discovered the military-led GPS and government-led mapping technologies that helped create new digital industries. The result of his curiosity is You Are Here, an entertaining, detailed history of how we evolved from primitive navigation tools to our current state of instant digital mapping—and, of course, governments’ subsequent ability to track us. The book was finished prior to the recent disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, but Bray says gaps in navigation and communication like that are now “few and far between.”

Here are 13 pivotal moments in the history of GPS tracking and digital mapping that Bray points out in You Are Here:

1st century: The Chinese begin writing about mysterious ladles made of loadstone. The ladle handles always point south when used during future-telling rituals. In the following centuries, lodestone’s magnetic abilities lead to the development of the first compasses.

Model of a Han Dynasty south-indicating ladle Wikimedia Commons

2nd century: Ptolemy’s Geography is published and sets the standard for maps that use latitude and longitude.

Ptolemy’s 2nd-century world map (redrawn in the 15th century) Wikimedia Commons

1473: Abraham Zacuto begins working on solar declination tables. They take him five years, but once finished, the tables allow sailors to determine their latitude on any ocean.

The Great Composition by Abraham Zacuto. (A 17th-century copy of the manuscript originally written by Zacuto in 1491.) Courtesy of The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary

1887: German physicist Heinrich Hertz creates electromagnetic waves, proof that electricity, magnetism, and light are related. His discovery inspires other inventors to experiment with radio and wireless transmissions.

The Hertz resonator John Jenkins. Sparkmuseum.com

1895: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, one of those inventors inspired by Hertz’s experiment, attaches his radio transmitter antennae to the earth and sends telegraph messages miles away. Bray notes that there were many people before Marconi who had developed means of wireless communication. “Saying that Marconi invented the radio is like saying that Columbus discovered America,” he writes. But sending messages over long distances was Marconi’s great breakthrough.

Inventor Guglielmo Marconi in 1901, operating an apparatus similar to the one he used to transmit the first wireless signal across Atlantic Wikimedia Commons

1958: Approximately six months after the Soviets launched Sputnik, Frank McLure, the research director at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, calls physicists William Guier and George Weiffenbach into his office. Guier and Weiffenbach used radio receivers to listen to Sputnik’s consistent electronic beeping and calculate the Soviet satellite’s location; McLure wants to know if the process could work in reverse, allowing a satellite to location their position on earth. The foundation for GPS tracking is born.

â&#128;&#139;1969: A pair of Bell Labs scientists named William Boyle and George Smith create a silicon chip that records light and coverts it into digital data. It is called a charge-coupled device, or CCD, and serves as the basis for digital photography used in spy and mapping satellites.

1976: The top-secret, school-bus-size KH-11 satellite is launched. It uses Boyle and Smith’s CCD technology to take the first digital spy photographs. Prior to this digital technology, actual film was used for making spy photographs. It was a risky and dangerous venture for pilots like Francis Gary Powers, who was shot down while flying a U-2 spy plane and taking film photographs over the Soviet Union in 1960.

KH-11 satellite photo showing construction of a Kiev-class aircraft carrier Wikimedia Commons

1983: Korean Air Lines flight 007 is shot down after leaving Anchorage, Alaska, and veering into Soviet airspace. All 269 passengers are killed, including Georgia Democratic Rep. Larry McDonald. Two weeks after the attack, President Ronald Reagan directs the military’s GPS technology to be made available for civilian use so that similar tragedies would not be repeated. Bray notes, however, that GPS technology had always been intended to be made public eventually. Here’s Reagan’s address to the nation following the attack:

1989: The US Census Bureau releases (PDF) TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) into the public domain. The digital map data allows any individual or company to create virtual maps.

1994: The FCC declares that wireless carriers must find ways for emergency services to locate mobile 911 callers. Cellphone companies choose to use their cellphone towers to comply. However, entrepreneurs begin to see the potential for GPS-integrated phones, as well. Bray highlights SnapTrack, a company that figures out early on how to squeeze GPS systems into phones—and is purchased by Qualcomm in 2000 for $1 billion.

1996: GeoSystems launches an internet-based mapping service called MapQuest, which uses the Census Bureau’s public-domain mapping data. It attracts hundreds of thousands of users and is purchased by AOL four years later for $1.1 billion.

2004: Google buys Australian mapping startup Where 2 Technologies and American satellite photography company Keyhole for undisclosed amounts. The next year, they launch Google Maps, which is now the most-used mobile app in the world.

2012: The Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Jones (PDF) restricts police usage of GPS to track suspected criminals. Bray tells the story of Antoine Jones, who was convicted of dealing cocaine after police placed a GPS device on his wife’s Jeep to track his movements. The court’s decision in his case is unanimous: The GPS device had been placed without a valid search warrant. Despite the unanimous decision, just five justices signed off on the majority opinion. Others wanted further privacy protections in such cases—a mixed decision that leaves future battles for privacy open to interpretation.

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The 2,000-Year History of GPS Tracking

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VIDEO: Meet the Olympic Workers Still Waiting for Payday

by DonnyLangston Posted on February 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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In November, Milenko Kuljic left Bileca, his rundown town in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for Sochi. He was lured by a recruiter who promised he’d make about 2,000 Euro ($2,700) a month building infrastructure for Sochi’s winter Olympics .

Kuljic says he began working for a major construction company overseeing work at some of the games’ most iconic venues, where he says he never got anywhere near the amount of money he was promised. Instead over two months of working, he says he was only given the equivalent of about $1000 for basic living expenses. living in a dormitory with pay-to-use showers, sharing four toilets with some 200 other workers. All the while, he says his employers promised to eventually pay him in full.

At the end of the two months, he was suddenly arrested, detained for a week, and then flown home with 122 other workers from the Balkans on a flight chartered by the Serbian government.

Hundreds of other guest workers from all around the world feared a similar fate, and fled Sochi without pay to avoid arrest, and the arguably worse punishment it would bring: a 5-year ban on returning to Russia as a guest worker.

It was Kuljic’s second time seeking work in Russia. The first time, he says no one cared about workers, like him, who lacked official work permits: “I suspect that they told the authorities about us so that they wouldn’t have to pay the money they promised.”

Kuljic’s experience is far from unique. Of the approximately 96,000 workers who helped build Sochi’s Olympic buildings, parks, and infrastructure about 16,000 were migrant workers, according to Human Rights Watch. Most hailed from former Soviet countries, primarily Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan, as well as from communities—like Kuljic’s in Bosnia—where families rely on money sent by workers abroad.

For years, such workers put up with rampant xenophobia and exploitative conditions—overcrowded housing, paltry and unsavory food—in pursuit of a decent wage in Russia. But this fall, with just six months left until the games, thousands of migrants were rounded up and deported. In October alone, according to Russia’s Federal Migration Service (FMS), over 3,000 workers were expelled from the Krasnodar region, which includes Sochi.

Migrants to Russia face routine discrimination, as nationalists blame them for taking work from employable Russians. Polls have shown that two-thirds of Russians believe immigrants are prone to crime, and, whether or not they came legally or illegally, want to reduce their numbers in the country.

As non-Russian workers flooded Sochi, such anti-immigrant sentiment escalated—and was encouraged at the highest levels of government.

“It would be very easy for people of other nations to take over this land,” Alexander Tkachev, the governor of the Krasnodar region, declared in August of 2012. “We have no other choice: we will squeeze them out, restore order, ask for documents…so that those who are trying to come here on illegal business understand that maybe it’s better they don’t come.”

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VIDEO: Meet the Olympic Workers Still Waiting for Payday

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14 Haunting Portraits of Life After Nuclear Disaster

by bt88jtv Posted on December 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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If you lived near Chernobyl or Fukushima, would you stay?

On April 26, 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant changed history, sending radiation and political shockwaves across Europe. Radioactive fallout contaminated 56,700 square miles of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, a region larger than New York state.

A generation later in Japan, on March 11, 2011, the Tohoku earthquake and the tsunami it triggered brought on multiple nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In the initial fires, Fukushima released ten to thirty percent as much radiation as Chernobyl, contaminating some 4,500 square miles of Japan—nearly the area of Connecticut. Radioactive water continues to leak from the Fukushima plant to this day.

To the world, Chernobyl and Fukushima seem like dangerous places, but for the people who live there, that danger is simply a fact of life.

In my photography, I explore the human consequences of environmental contamination. I am interested in questions about home: how do people cope when their homeland changes irreversibly? Why do so many stay?

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14 Haunting Portraits of Life After Nuclear Disaster

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Oh no, the Doomsday Clock didn’t change at all

by oks23po Posted on January 15, 2013

Oh no, the Doomsday Clock didn’t change at all

By Philip Bump

venosdale

This clock — like all clocks — is wrong.

If you are asked what time it is, the answer is 11:55. If you are asked what happens at midnight, the answer is “all of humanity is destroyed and the Earth becomes the crumbling home planet of resilient insects until it is eventually consumed by the sun.” On the plus side, if you answer this way people will probably stop asking you what time it is.

Yes, our friends at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (not a supervillain meetup) have decided that we are five theoretical minutes from our complete destruction — a determination that … doesn’t change from last year. So that’s good, I guess? From Live Science:

Keeping their outlook for the future of humanity quite dim, the group of scientists also wrote an open letter to President Barack Obama, urging him to partner with other global leaders to act on climate change.

The clock is a symbol of the threat of humanity’s imminent destruction from nuclear or biological weapons, climate change and other human-caused disasters. In making their deliberations about how to update the clock’s time this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists considered the current state of nuclear arsenals around the globe, the slow and costly recovery from events like Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and extreme weather events that fit in with a pattern of global warming.

I don’t really get why the clock didn’t change. We took more steps backward in 2012 than we did forward, according to analysis by yers truly. And isn’t the nature of climate change such that the threat of it automatically increases over time?

But that’s not my main complaint. My main complaint relates to this:

The Doomsday Clock came into being in 1947 as a way for atomic scientists to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons. That year, the Bulletin set the time at seven minutes to midnight, with midnight symbolizing humanity’s destruction. By 1949, it was at three minutes to midnight as the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated. In 1953, after the first test of the hydrogen bomb, the doomsday clock ticked to two minutes until midnight.

The Bulletin was at its most optimistic in 1991, when the Cold War thawed and the United States and Russia began cutting their arsenals. That year, the clock was set at 17 minutes to midnight.

Why bother making the clock run from midnight to midnight if you’ve only ever used 17 minutes of it? I get that in 1947 they unveiled this thing and were like, “Guess what, motherfuckers: Time’s almost up.” But it seems like the schtick would grow old pretty fast. The first mention I could find of the clock was in this 1968 Times article. The story was four paragraphs, buried somewhere in the paper. The paper doesn’t specifically say, “This news caused us to shrug,” because journalists were more polite back then.

But anyway: Use the whole clock! Last year could have been, like, 10:37. And then this year, 10:52! Oh man, we’d think. Is it that late? And we’d probably also try to stop the clock from moving forward because we certainly don’t want the clock to go to 11:30 because that’s when Jay Leno comes on and he is the worst. Talk about a horrifying apocalypse, am I right? Of course, for all we know it’s 11:55 a.m.? Hard to tell sometimes on those old clocks that no one uses anymore.

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, if a horde of alien destroyers appeared over the United States next week, alerting us that the planet was going to be destroyed to make way for an interstellar highway, the most the clock could advance is four minutes — meaning we’d be only .28 percent more likely to be destroyed than we are now. That seems like it’s probably wrong.

Anyway, gotta get going. Didn’t realize it was so late.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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