Tag Archives: western

Is Vladimir Putin Ready to Make a Deal?

by RitaCantor Posted on December 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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In his yearly press conference, Vladimir Putin appeared to be trying to cool down the rhetoric over Ukraine:

Mr. Putin recognized the efforts of President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine in ending the conflict in the southeast of that country, but he suggested that others in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, may be trying to prolong the conflict….“We hear a lot of militant statements; I believe President Poroshenko is seeking a settlement, but there is a need for practical action,” Mr. Putin added. “There is a need to observe the Minsk agreements” calling for a cease-fire and a withdrawal of forces.

Russia has toned down its talk on the Ukraine crisis in the past month, and some of its most incendiary language, like “junta” and “Novorossiya,” a blanket term used for the separatist territories, is no longer used on state-run television news. Mr. Putin also notably omitted those terms, which he had used in other public appearances, on Thursday.

So does this mean Putin is adopting a more conciliatory attitude toward the West? You be the judge:

In general, he blamed “external factors, first and foremost” for creating Russia’s situation — accusing the West of intentionally trying to weaken Russia. “No matter what we do they are always against us,” Putin said, one of a series of observations directed at how he said the West has been treating Russia.

Putin attributed Western sanctions that have targeted Russia’s defense, oil and gas and banking sectors for about “25 percent” of Russia’s current difficulties.

But Putin stood firm over the actions that brought on the Western backlash, including Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula after pro-Moscow rebels in eastern Ukraine began an uprising earlier this year….“Taking Texas from Mexico is fair, but whatever we are doing is not fair?” he said, in comments seemingly directed at the United States.

Putin also suggested that the West was demanding too many concessions from Russia, including further nuclear disarmament. Likening Russia to a bear — a longtime symbol of the country — he chided the West for insisting the Russian bear “just eat honey instead of hunting animals.”

“They are trying to chain the bear. And when they manage to chain the bear, they will take out his fangs and claws,” Putin said. “This is how nuclear deterrence is working at the moment.”

For what it’s worth, I’d say Putin is probably right about sanctions being responsible for around 25 percent of Russia’s economic problems. As for his guess that those problems will last two years before Russia returns to growth? That might not be far off either, though I suspect growth will be pretty slow for longer than that.

It’s hard to render a real judgment here without being fluent in Russian and watching the press conference in real time, but based on press reports I’d say Putin’s anti-Western comments were milder than they could have been. My guess is that events in Ukraine really haven’t worked out the way he hoped, and he’d be willing to go ahead and disengage if he could do so without admitting that he’s conceding anything. The anti-Western bluster is just part of that. (Of course, the bluster is also partly genuine: Putin really does believe, with some justification, that the West wants to hem in Russia.)

Oddly, then, I’d take all this as a mildly positive sign. The rhetoric seemed fairly pro forma; Putin obviously knows that sanctions are hurting him; and there were no serious provocations over Ukraine. I’ll bet there’s a deal to be made with Putin as long as it’s done quietly.

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Is Vladimir Putin Ready to Make a Deal?

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How a War-Shattered African Nation Gave Birth to a Heavy-Metal Scene

by ToddBainerry Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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When the dust cleared and the war formally ended in 2002, Angolans looked back on their previous 40 years and saw little more than violence and bloodshed. After 350 years of Portuguese rule, the country fell into a war of independence followed by a civil war. Factions became Cold War players. Armed with Western and Soviet weapons, the warring sides destroyed the little infrastructure the Portuguese had built, sowed the countryside with land mines, and displaced and killed people by the thousands.

Filmmaker Jeremy Xido’s new documentary, Death Metal Angola, is about what happens after those years of destruction. The film follows one woman, Sónia Ferreira, the mother figure behind an orphanage for boys, and her boyfriend, Wilker Flores, as they launch Angola’s first-ever metal festival in Huambo, Angola’s second-largest city. I asked Xido about his experiences with Angolan metal musicians, and how they are rebuilding a scene in a country whose culture was virtually lost amid the fighting.

Mother Jones: How did you first get interested in Angola?

Jeremy Xido: I was invited to Lisbon to work on a performance project, and the thing I was most struck by was the African presence in the city. It was very different than other cities in Europe. There was something intimate about it, so I just found myself talking to a lot of Africans. I was interviewing a young law student, and I asked her what she was going to end up doing when she was done with her degree. Would she stay in Europe? And she just looked at me like I was just insane. She said, “Europe’s dead. The future is Angola.”

I grew up in Detroit. I was the only white kid in my neighborhood. Everyone always talked about going “back to Africa,” even though no one actually knew where Africa was. And to hear this moment in which Angola wasn’t mythological in the sense of being a safe haven, or rife with clichés about the suffering of Africa—it was the first glimpse that I got of the continent being at the forefront of 21st century power and politics. I was like, “Okay, I have to go.”

MJ: Your film takes place not in the capital, Luanda, where Angola’s new oil wealth is concentrated, but in Huambo, a battleground during the war and still a really burnt-out city.

JX: That’s where the story was taking place. In the aftermath of the war, money started flowing into Luanda to turn it into a sort of Miami Beach poster child of “New Africa.” Huambo had been largely left alone. These were people who had experienced unimaginable things and survived, and the power of this particular music is that it can go to those deep places of human experience and allow people to touch them and express them collectively in such a way that’s permissible—people can tell the story of what happened, as opposed to that sort of Economist Angola: “Well, war is behind us, and now we’re marching to the future.” Huambo is a place that defies that approach, a place where the ghosts still exist and people are wrestling with them. It was interesting for me to juxtapose the glittering Luanda that people in the West hear about and this story that these people who had been fighters all their lives were telling. That tension became the real focus of the film.

MJ: Angola’s war is unique among African wars in that it employed so many modern weapons. There seems to be a parallel in this music—Angola destroys itself with Western bombs, and then Angola’s youth rebuild an identity with Western music.

JX: Angola is trying to figure out what the roots are, because people don’t fully know. Rock hit Portugal later than other parts of Europe. War was raging in Angola, and anybody who had enough money or enough luck sent their kids to live with relatives in Portugal—in the middle of this rock youth culture that was emerging as Portugal was coming out of a dictatorship. I think some of those guys came back and started their bands. And people like Sónia watched all of that music and fell in love with it. But because the war was raging, it was never possible to really connect all the different parts of the country. In the aftermath of the war, the young guys suddenly had access to the internet and technologies which could link different parts of the country. Even if you couldn’t drive from Luanda to Huambo, these technologies allowed people to know about each other, and those who knew about rock started to play it.

MJ: Is the music more a subject of conversation between Angolans, or just the means to have a conversation?

JX: I think it’s both. Socially it’s just really hard. You have to practice, you have to learn stuff, you have to seek out people, you have to teach each other. And you have to have band practice, which is, like, insane, because you have to mediate and negotiate between personalities. In and of itself, that’s rebuilding things that were lost in the years of the war: basic education, basic principles of conflict resolution.

Also, there’s a history of rock talking about things that authority doesn’t want you to talk about. So, in and of itself, to play the music is justice, an act of self-definition and release. Metal musicians, particularly death-metal musicians are some of the most erudite and curious, and also soft-spoken people I’ve met. I’ve always wondered about that since the thing they do on stage is so tough and the iconography is so bombastic. And then you realize there’s something unbelievable about getting together with a group of people and getting up in front of others and going to this very primal place—a primal place that requires an extreme technical capacity. But you go there together, and by permitting each other to go there, there’s the kind of release that exists anytime people tell what they believe to be the truth. That itself is an act, and that is the conversation.

MJ: You mentioned that the history of rock in the West is one of rebellion. Do they see it that way?

JX: We filmed this a couple years ago. At that time, there was a revolutionary act to just getting up on stage and doing this thing that people don’t understand and not getting shut down by the police. They couldn’t, at that moment, actively talk against the government, because they weren’t strong enough yet. Since then, they’ve continued to have concerts and festivals and different things that are growing exponentially. I really see the rock movement as the revolution that happens in the aftermath of destruction. It’s the thing that people don’t talk about. Media always talks about war, but nobody really talks about the day after, and the year after, and the five years after—what it means to rebuild. It’s that hidden story that’s less sensationalist, and less sexy. It’s much more complex, and much more human. You are confronted with your own inadequacies when you start thinking about the difficult things, the work of what it is to be human.

MJ: What is the future of metal in Angola? The musicians want to talk about the government, but Angola is an incredibly repressive country.

JX: They’re on a very thin line. It’s easy for me to travel around in the world and say whatever I want to say, but I have to be very careful about representing them in any way that might cause them trouble. Sónia and I have actually had moments where she’s read some interview and she’s like, “You can’t say these things. Think about where we are.”

MJ: How does one survive as a metal musician in Angola?

JX: A lot of the musicians from the bigger bands have jobs. There are a bunch who work at banks or in internet technology or satellite installation. Some of the big singers work for the military, in the air force. The younger guys, some of them don’t have work, and they struggle. They’ve also decided to have the concerts be free events so they can build an audience, so this is a moment of sweat equity for all of them. Sónia struggles day to day to keep 75 boys alive and healthy and to organize all this stuff. But I think it’s as much of a struggle to be a musician pretty much anywhere. The amount of love and passion at the core of this, and the amount of good that it brings to people is off the charts.

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How a War-Shattered African Nation Gave Birth to a Heavy-Metal Scene

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Sexts from Scarlett O’Hara

by FelicitRooney Posted on November 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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For many people who grow up with their noses in books, meeting their favorite character is the ultimate fantasy. Mallory Ortberg isn’t one of those readers.

“They’re such assholes,” the co-founder of feminist website The Toast says when I ask her who in the Western canon she’d most want as a texting buddy. “I don’t know that I would want any of them to have my phone number, because they would all feel very free to text me at 2:00 in the morning just screaming.”

Ortberg has put a lot of thought into the phone etiquette of literary personalities. Her book Texts from Jane Eyre, published November 4, features imagined exchanges between characters both classic and modern. From Hamlet whining about the relish on his tuna fish sandwich to Scarlett O’Hara sexting Ashley, the conversations are both LOL-worthy and true to the spirit of the works they parody.

Mother Jones: Where’d you get the inspiration for your first “Texts From” piece?

Mallory Ortberg: This is actually one of the only projects I’ve ever done where I can 100 percent pinpoint where it got started. It was back on The Awl when The Toast co-founder Nicole Cliffe was doing her Classic Trash series, and she was talking about Gone With the Wind, and somebody in the comments said, “I’m from the South and it’s actually exactly like this now, except everybody has cell phones.”

As soon as I saw that I was just like, “Oh God, the idea of Scarlett O’Hara with the ability to get in touch with all of her friends at any time and ask them for favors is horrific and vivid and amazing.” And I immediately wrote “Texts from Scarlett O’Hara” in like 10 minutes. So weirdly something good has come out of Internet comments—I got a book deal from it.

MJ: Would you say your own texting style is similar to the way the book is written?

MO: As a medium, texting is a really great way to get out of stuff when you know that you’re wrong, but you want to minimize having to make eye contact with someone as you bail on them or tell them that you fucked up. So I have definitely in my in life used a text to be like, “Oh hey, dude, I’m sorry, turns out I can’t make it after all!” like five minutes before I’m supposed to be somewhere.

Texts from Scarlett The Hairpin

MJ: When did you realize that you were funny?

MO: Oh man. I’ve always thought that I was funny. The world has not always agreed, but…I’ve always just been like, “Yes, absolutely, let’s do this! I will make jokes come hell or high water! Even if no one laughs.”

There were a lot of different influences on me. I started reading P.G. Wodehouse when I was about twelve, and that was huge for me. And certainly the classics like Monty Python, The Kids in the Hall, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, very dry British humor. But also like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, your mid-century American humorists. And then I remember when I was a little kid my brother and I would stay up and watch Comedy Central specials and we saw Maria Bamford together. It must’ve been her first standup special, because I think it was 1999—she was a kid. And I just remember being captivated that someone could be that weird in a way that felt so universal.

Henry Holt & Company

MJ: Was the process of coming up with jokes for this book similar to how you come up with stuff you’ve done at The Toast? If you’re working on, say, Women in Western Art History, is that just you sitting in front of Google Images looking at old paintings until something comes to you?

MO: Often it is, yeah. I love the art history ones because it’s so little work for me. There’s so many paintings that when I look at them, the look on the lady’s face is like so clear and her body language and her posture or their physical situation is so immediately recognizable. Anyone who’s been in a conversation they didn’t want to have, or been getting harangued by a little kid they didn’t want to pay attention to or been tired and wanted to go to bed is just like, “Yes, of course.” You can instantly see in this person’s face the universal sense of “Oh God, please leave me alone.”

MJ: How did you know there would be an audience for something like that?

MO: It was really a calculated risk. At the time that we started it, Nicole was coming off about a year or a year and a half as co-editor of The Hairpin, and I had been working as the weekend editor for Gawker and also a place called The Gloss. So by the time we started The Toast it wasn’t a complete leap in the dark. We weren’t completely unknown. The time felt right enough that we were like, “Let’s give this a year, and if it turns out to be the kind of thing that six people love and adore and nobody else cares about, we’ll say that we had a fun time trying something new and we’ll call it quits.” But it was kind of—it wasn’t a shock, but it was a really pleasant surprise that within the first couple of weeks it was clear to us that there were people who felt like The Toast was home for them.

MJ: Do you have a favorite thing that The Toast has published so far?

MO: I have a lot of favorites. We had a woman who wrote a piece about her first name. It was also about her Muslim-American identity and being the daughter of immigrants, and it was just thoughtful and stirring and profound, and it really moved me. That’s definitely up there for me. I also love Nicole’s blind items from Ontario. That’s so weird. That’s so Canadian. Just the blind items about, like, who was late to the potluck and what person was growing medical marijuana. I just love everything Nicole writes.

MJ: So, you’re from the Bay Area—how do you feel about artisanal toast?

MO: You know, when I hear “artisan,” I think of being in social studies and learning about the old classes and the rise of merchants during the late Middle Ages. So that’s what I think of—I picture an old-timey guy at a fucking loom, maybe like trading with some Dutchmen.

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Sexts from Scarlett O’Hara

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Russians Dismantle Steve Jobs Memorial After Tim Cook Comes Out as Gay

by DominikTreasure Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

Russian media is reporting that a memorial to Steve Jobs in St. Petersburg was dismantled on Friday, one day after current Apple CEO Tim Cook came out as gay.

A group of Russian companies called the Western European Fiscal Union (ZEFS) erected the more than six-foot tall monument, shaped like an iPhone and featuring an interactive screen that showed information about the Apple founder, in January of 2013, outside of an IT research university in St. Petersburg.

The ZEFS press office said the monument was taken down in order to comply with Russia’s law prohibiting “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors” a broadly-worded law passed in June 2013 that effectively criminalizes most LGBT expression.

ZEFS noted in their statement that the memorial had been “in an area of direct access for young students and scholars.”

“After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was taken down to abide by the Russian federal law protecting children from information promoting denial of traditional family values.”

Shortly after Cook wrote publicly about being gay, famously anti-gay St. Petersburg legislator Vitaly Milonov suggested that Cook be banned from Russia forever, because he might bring Ebola, AIDs, and gonorrhea into the country.

According to Russian media reports, ZEFS gave a second reason for the monument’s removal: revelations by Edward Snowden that Apple sends information about its users to America’s National Security Agency. (When these revelations first came to light, Apple denied having knowledge of the NSA’s surveillance.)

Russian media also reported that the head of ZEFS said he wouldn’t be opposed to re-installing the monument, provided that it had the capability to send a message to the US rejecting all Apple products.

So the next logical step here would be for Russia’s elite to give up their personal iPhones, right? Well, fat chance.

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Russians Dismantle Steve Jobs Memorial After Tim Cook Comes Out as Gay

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Finally, Nigeria’s Kidnapped Schoolgirls Are Coming Home

by MariettaGrantha Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, Nigeria’s government announced it had reached a deal with Boko Haram to release the approximately 200 schoolgirls held captive by the Islamist terror group since April.

The agreement, announced by the country’s defense minister, also involves a cease fire between Boko Haram and Nigeria’s military. The government expects the terror group will not back out on the deal. “Commitment among parts of Boko Haram and the military does appear to be genuine,” an official with Nigeria’s security forces told Reuters Friday. “It is worth taking seriously.”

Boko Haram militants abducted more than 300 schoolgirls from Chibok boarding school in northern Nigeria in mid-April, sparking a worldwide outcry and propelling the group onto to the international stage for the first time. Over fifty of the girls escaped early on. The rest have remained in captivity ever since.

Boko Haram, whose name roughly means “Western education is sinful,” has been terrorizing Nigeria since 2009 in an effort to return the country to the pre-colonial era of Muslim rule. Over the past half-decade, the Islamist group has killed approximately 5,000 Nigerians the group regards as pro-government in attacks on schools, churches, and mosques, as well as military checkpoints, police stations, highways, and a bus station in the capital city of Abuja.

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Finally, Nigeria’s Kidnapped Schoolgirls Are Coming Home

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Let’s Not Give ISIS Exactly What They Want

by RefugioDurbin Posted on September 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I wrote a post noting that a supposedly war-weary public had suddenly become awfully war happy. “All it took,” I said, “was a carefully stagecrafted beheading video and the usual gang of conservative jingoists to exploit it.” Here’s a Twitter conversation that followed (lightly edited for clarity):

DS: Think of what you wrote: “All it took was…beheading”? I opposed W’s but this is what wars are made from & I think rightly so.

Me: Really? So any group anywhere in the world merely needs to commit an atrocity to draw us into war?

DS: On what other basis should wars be fought if not to stop groups from committing atrocities against Americans?

I’m not trying to pick on anyone in particular here, but it’s pretty discouraging that this kind of attitude is so common. There’s no question that the beheading of American citizens by a gang of vicious thugs is the kind of thing that makes your blood boil. Unless you hail from Vulcan, your gut reaction is that you want to find the barbarians who did this and crush them.

But that shouldn’t be your final reaction. This is not an era of conventional military forces with overwhelming power and no real fear of blowback. It’s an era of stateless terrorists whose ability to commit extremely public atrocities is pretty much unlimited. And while atrocities can have multiple motivations, one of the key reasons for otherwise pointless actions like one-off kidnappings and beheadings is their ability to either provoke overreactions or successfully extort ransoms. Unfortunately, Americans are stupidly addicted to the former and Europeans seem to be stupidly addicted to the latter, and that’s part of what keeps this stuff going.

In any case, a moment’s thought should convince you that we’re being manipulated. We’ve read account after account about ISIS and its remarkably sophisticated command and publicity apparatus. The beheading video is part of that. It’s a very calculated, very deliberate attempt to get us to respond stupidly. It’s not even a very subtle manipulation. It’s just an especially brutal one.

So if we’re smart, we won’t give them what they want. Instead we’ll respond coldly and meticulously. We’ll fight on our terms, not theirs. We’ll intervene if and only if the Iraqi government demonstrates that it can take the lead and hold the ground they take. We’ll forego magical thinking about counterinsurgencies. We won’t commit Western troops in force because we know from experience that this doesn’t work. We’ll avoid pitched battles and instead take advantage of our chances when they arise. Time is on our side.

Above all, we won’t allow a small band of medieval theocrats to manipulate us. We need to stop giving them exactly what they want. We need to stop doing stupid stuff.

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Let’s Not Give ISIS Exactly What They Want

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ISIS is a Problem That Only Iraqis Can Solve

by Arlen23Bbfkswz Posted on September 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Christopher Paul and Colin Clarke have studied 71 insurgencies during the post-WWII period and have concluded that every successful counterinsurgency shared several characteristics. They apply the results of their research to the problem of the ISIS insurgency in Iraq:

First, we found that in every case where they succeeded, counterinsurgent forces managed to substantially overmatch the insurgents and force them to fight as guerrillas before getting down to the activities traditionally associated with counterinsurgency….U.S. air power could make a significant contribution toward that end. Airstrikes will help curb Islamic State advances in strategically important parts of Iraq and thus, help bolster the Iraqi government and security forces, at least in the short term.

Second, we concluded from the research that “effective COIN practices tend to run in packs”….Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) techniques identified three COIN concepts critical to success. These three concepts were implemented in each and every COIN win, and no COIN loss implemented all three: Tangible support reduction; commitment and motivation; and flexibility and adaptability.

….U.S. support to an Iraqi counterinsurgency strategy to defeat the Islamic State must focus on reducing tangible support to the insurgents, increasing the commitment and motivation of the Iraqi military and security forces and increasing the government’s legitimacy among Iraqi Sunnis.

It’s been a long time since I spent much time reading about COIN and COIN strategies, but this basically sounds right to me. And it should send a shiver down the spine of anyone who thinks the US should get deeply involved in fighting ISIS.

Here’s why. One of the key factors that I remember identifying during the height of the Iraq insurgency was local commitment. In a nutshell, it turns out that virtually no postwar COIN effort led by a big Western country has been successful. Western help is OK, but the COIN effort has to be led by the local regime. It’s not a sufficient condition for success, but it’s a necessary one.

Paul and Clarke are basically confirming this. Sure, American air strikes might help in terms of the sheer firepower needed to successfully fight ISIS. But of the other three key COIN practices, two are purely local and the third is mostly local. There’s very little the United States can do to help out on these fronts. Only the Iraqi government can increase its legitimacy among the Sunni minority, and only the Iraqi government can properly motivate its military. (The US can provide training and materiel, but it can’t provide commitment and motivation.) Even the problem of reducing tangible support for the ISIS insurgents is mostly something only the Iraqi government can do. The US can help, but only if Iraqis are leading the way.

At the moment, there’s little evidence that the Iraqi government is capable of doing any of these three things. The new government of Haider Al-Abadi might be able to make progress on these fronts, but it hasn’t demonstrated that yet. Until it does, more US help is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Instinctive hawks should think long and hard about this. The record of the United States in counterinsurgencies is dismal. If the conditions are just right, we might be able to do some good in Iraq. At the moment, though, the conditions are appalling. We can put a few fingers in some dikes, but unless and until the Iraqi government steps up to the plate, there’s virtually no chance that deeper US involvement will turn out well.

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ISIS is a Problem That Only Iraqis Can Solve

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Drought Weighing You Down? Nope, It’s Lifting You Up

by VictoriaPethebr Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a odd piece of news: According to a study published Thursday in Science, the water loss due to this year’s drought has caused the entire western side of the United States to literally rise. After examining data from nearly 800 GPS stations across the country, researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that the area west of New Mexico has risen by an average of four millimeters this year. In the Sierra Nevadas and along California’s coast—two areas that have received far less precipitation this year than normal—the land rose 15 millimeters.

Adrian Borsa, a coauthor of the study, explained what’s happening: “The earth is an elastic material just like a block of rubber. If you put a water load on it, the earth deforms, if you take the water away, the earth will come back.” Using the GPS data, the researchers estimated that the Western United States has lost 62 trillion gallons of water to the atmosphere this year because of the drought. That’s enough water to cover the entire Western US in six inches of water.

The earth rising seems not only vaguely biblical, but also counterintuitive; one might expect the earth’s surface to fall if water is being taken from it. In fact, the ground is falling in some places: Some GPS stations in California had to be left out of the study because farmers are extracting so much groundwater that the ground is literally caving in. But this study didn’t examine the ground at a surface-level—it showed that the earth’s crust and mantle are responding elastically to the drought. So while some areas may be falling because of man-made changes at a local level, the West as a whole is rising.

As it turns out, the rise and fall of the earth due to water loss actually happens a little each year with the change of the seasons: Land is heavier in the winter and spring, and when water evaporates in the summer and fall, land is a little lighter. But the annual variation in California’s mountains is about 5 millimeters—not this year’s 15. The difference “sounds tiny,” said Borsa, but from a geological standpoint, “it’s a whopping signal” of the amount of water lost to the drought.

Contrary to most drought news these days, this rise of the West doesn’t have looming disastrous effects in and of itself: The researchers, for example, don’t think that this change will cause more extreme earthquakes.

But Borsa says that using GPS data on the rise of the earth could help regulators to understand how much water is being used in the West—particularly in California. California is the only Western state that doesn’t measure or regulate major groundwater use; if you can drill down to it, it’s all yours. A report produced for the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture estimated that California’s farmers will pump about 13 million acre-feet of groundwater this year—enough water to put a piece of land the size of Rhode Island 17 feet underwater.

With no regulatory system in place, though, it’s challenging for officials to know if these estimates are lining up with reality. “The extractions aren’t monitored, so no one really knows how to monitor the water supply,” says Borsa. Using GPS data “could be a great tool for water managers.”

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Drought Weighing You Down? Nope, It’s Lifting You Up

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Russian Sanctions Mostly Hitting Russian Consumers

by TandyChavers Posted on August 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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The BBC reports on how those Russian sanctions against Western food have put the squeeze on European and American suppliers:

Moscow officials say frozen fish prices in the capital’s major supermarkets have risen by 6%, milk by 5.3% and an average cheese costs 4.4% more than it did before the 7 August ban took effect. Russia has banned imports of those basic foods, as well as meat and many other products, from Western countries, Australia and Japan. It is retaliation for the West’s sanctions on Russia over the revolt by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine.

And it is not just Moscow. On the island of Sakhalin, in Russia’s far east, officials say the price of chicken thighs has soared 60%. Before the sanctions these were among the cheapest and most popular meat products in Russia.

Oops. Sorry about that. It’s actually Russian consumers who are paying the price. And for now, that seems to be OK:

Polls show that the vast majority of Russians approve of the sanctions against Western food. They have been told by government officials and state-controlled TV that the embargo will not affect prices, and that it will actually allow Russia’s own agriculture to flourish. And that message is being believed.

At a guess, Russian consumers aren’t very different from American consumers. Nationalistic pride will work for a while, as people accept higher prices as the cost of victory against whoever they’re fighting at the moment. But that won’t last any longer in Russia than it does in America. Give it a few months and public opinion is likely to turn decidedly surly. Who really cares about those damn Ukrainians anyway? They’re just a bunch of malcontents and always have been, amirite?

This is why Vladimir Putin needs a quick victory. The fact that he’s not getting it will eventually prompt him to either (a) quietly give up, or (b) go all in. Unfortunately, there’s really no telling which it will be.

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Russian Sanctions Mostly Hitting Russian Consumers

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Wildfires Cause Nearly a Fifth of Manmade Carbon Emissions

by CarmenWhitson Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wildfires are raging around the western United States: As of yesterday, more than 10,000 firefighters were battling 20 fires in Oregon and California. Another fire in Washington state recently grew to cover more than 8,000 acres. While the immediate consequences of the blazes are obvious—scorched earth, destroyed homes, millions of dollars in damages—the longer-term consequences for the climate have, until now, been poorly understood.

In a study published at the end of July in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University engineer, says the burning of biomass like trees, plants, and grass—either by accident or deliberately (often to create room for agriculture)—creates 18 percent of all human-caused carbon emissions. Worse yet, that pollution kills people: Around the world, Jacobson writes, biomass burning may account for 5-10 percent of all air pollution deaths worldwide, or about 250,000 people annually.

Lightning strikes and lava flows can burn down forests just as effectively as campfires, cigarettes, and slash and burn agriculture. But worldwide, Jacobson notes, the proportion of wildfires that are caused by nature could be as low as 3.6 percent. The rest are started by humans.

Possibly the worst news of all: Wildfires are part of a vicious circle. Emissions from fires cause climate change, which leads to drier conditions—which make it easier for humans and nature to start fires and for those fires to spread.

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Wildfires Cause Nearly a Fifth of Manmade Carbon Emissions

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