BUSINESS INSIDER - Aug. 7, 2015
Akio Toyoda has China on his mind. On Tuesday, the day he announced record earnings, the Toyota Motors president warned of a sharp slowdown in the world's biggest market, echoing concerns already aired by BMW. But another development in China may spell even more trouble for global carmakers: a $21,700 Land Rover look-alike manufactured domestically. An SUV bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Evoque model is to hit the market at one-third the price of the original, and it's already racking up thousands of preorders. Jaguar Land Rover's Ralf Speth has railed at the rise of China's "copy-and-paste" car industry. But complaining is all the chief executive and his peers can do as China continues churning out ever more clones of cars, electronics, appliances, and clothes originally designed in other countries. The prevailing opinion in boardrooms from New York to Frankfurt to Tokyo has long been that China, which is minting new millionaires at the fastest rate in history and creating a massive middle class, will be easy prey for established brands with expertise in hawking goods to higher-income consumers. The richer mainlanders get, multinational companies presumed, the more they will want Burberry in the closet, Rolex on the wrist, and Lexus parked outside.
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Saturday, August 8, 2015
A survey of America's top International Relations scholars on foreign-policy research
FOREIGN POLICY
Which area of the world do you consider to be of greatest strategic importance to the United States today?
Which area of the world do you consider to be of greatest strategic importance to the United States 20 years from now?
Germany Has a Refugee Problem, and the Problem Is the Germans
Anti-immigrant sentiment is fueling violence and arson. What's the matter with Deutschland?
By Sumi Somaskanda
FOREIGN POLICY - August 7, 2015
REICHERTSHOFEN, Germany — It was just before 3 a.m. on July 16 when firefighters arrived to find part of the former Däuber inn in flames. The white, three-story guest house on Winden am Aign’s main drag had long been empty. Now, smoke was billowing out of the brown-trimmed windows and onto a street lined with tidy Bavarian homes and tomato plants.
It didn’t take long to put out the flames eating through the back annex and locate the cause: Fire accelerant was found by two rear doors. The blaze was started on purpose.
Dozens of asylum-seekers from Syria, Iraq, and other countries had been scheduled to move into the building in September. Winden has just 830 residents and many of them protested plans to house 130 asylum-seekers in their town, saying the number was too many for such a small town. They negotiated with officials and settled on 67, instead.
Michael Franken, the mayor of Reichertshofen, the larger town that incorporates Winden, had lobbied to turn the vacant building into a home for the growing number of asylum-seekers arriving in his district. Before the fire, he’d thought the fight was over. “Only eight residents showed up to the last meeting we had, which shows how much the debate had died down,” he said. “So we were even more surprised and incensed when the fire happened.”
Nobody was injured, and the front wing of the building — where asylum-seekers will live next month — was undamaged. But the reaction has been strong and swift. District officials have redoubled efforts to clean up the damage and welcome the new residents on schedule. And a 50-person police commission is working to find out who was behind the arson.
“If the person who started the fire really wanted the building to burn down they would have done it differently,” Franken said. “This seems to be more of a signal.”
READ MORE.....
By Sumi Somaskanda
FOREIGN POLICY - August 7, 2015
REICHERTSHOFEN, Germany — It was just before 3 a.m. on July 16 when firefighters arrived to find part of the former Däuber inn in flames. The white, three-story guest house on Winden am Aign’s main drag had long been empty. Now, smoke was billowing out of the brown-trimmed windows and onto a street lined with tidy Bavarian homes and tomato plants.
It didn’t take long to put out the flames eating through the back annex and locate the cause: Fire accelerant was found by two rear doors. The blaze was started on purpose.
Dozens of asylum-seekers from Syria, Iraq, and other countries had been scheduled to move into the building in September. Winden has just 830 residents and many of them protested plans to house 130 asylum-seekers in their town, saying the number was too many for such a small town. They negotiated with officials and settled on 67, instead.
Michael Franken, the mayor of Reichertshofen, the larger town that incorporates Winden, had lobbied to turn the vacant building into a home for the growing number of asylum-seekers arriving in his district. Before the fire, he’d thought the fight was over. “Only eight residents showed up to the last meeting we had, which shows how much the debate had died down,” he said. “So we were even more surprised and incensed when the fire happened.”
Nobody was injured, and the front wing of the building — where asylum-seekers will live next month — was undamaged. But the reaction has been strong and swift. District officials have redoubled efforts to clean up the damage and welcome the new residents on schedule. And a 50-person police commission is working to find out who was behind the arson.
“If the person who started the fire really wanted the building to burn down they would have done it differently,” Franken said. “This seems to be more of a signal.”
READ MORE.....
The Best International Relations Schools in the World
U.S. scholars rank the top 25 IR programs for undergraduates, master's, and Ph.D.s.
By Daniel Maliniak, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, and Michael J. Tierney
FOREIGN POLICY
The road to Washington is paved with elite educations. Indeed, for young people hoping to secure jobs in Foggy Bottom, on Pennsylvania Avenue, and elsewhere in the foreign-policy establishment, a key ingredient to success is often a diploma in international relations (IR) from one of America’s top universities. There are debates to be had about this model—how the pipeline can become more affordable, for instance, to ensure greater diversity among government hires. Scholars and policymakers alike rightly agree, however, that language skills, expertise about regions of the world, and other knowledge gleaned in the classroom make for a stronger, more effective corps of foreign-policy wonks. So which schools prepare students best?
The results of the 2014 Ivory Tower survey—a collaboration between Foreign Policy and the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project at the College of William & Mary—provide an insider’s guide. Responses from 1,615 IR scholars drawn from 1,375 U.S. colleges and universities determined rankings for the leading Ph.D., terminal master’s, and undergraduate programs in IR. (The scholars were asked to list the top five institutions in each category.) The survey also quizzed respondents about recent historical events and future policy challenges: Just how plausible is a U.S. war with China, for example, and who was the most effective secretary of state over the past 50 years? (Hint: Neither Condoleezza Rice nor John Kerry.)
All told, the Ivory Tower survey offers a window into how America’s top IR scholars see the world today—and which institutions are effectively nurturing future generations of thinkers and policymakers.
READ MORE....
By Daniel Maliniak, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, and Michael J. Tierney
FOREIGN POLICY
The road to Washington is paved with elite educations. Indeed, for young people hoping to secure jobs in Foggy Bottom, on Pennsylvania Avenue, and elsewhere in the foreign-policy establishment, a key ingredient to success is often a diploma in international relations (IR) from one of America’s top universities. There are debates to be had about this model—how the pipeline can become more affordable, for instance, to ensure greater diversity among government hires. Scholars and policymakers alike rightly agree, however, that language skills, expertise about regions of the world, and other knowledge gleaned in the classroom make for a stronger, more effective corps of foreign-policy wonks. So which schools prepare students best?
The results of the 2014 Ivory Tower survey—a collaboration between Foreign Policy and the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project at the College of William & Mary—provide an insider’s guide. Responses from 1,615 IR scholars drawn from 1,375 U.S. colleges and universities determined rankings for the leading Ph.D., terminal master’s, and undergraduate programs in IR. (The scholars were asked to list the top five institutions in each category.) The survey also quizzed respondents about recent historical events and future policy challenges: Just how plausible is a U.S. war with China, for example, and who was the most effective secretary of state over the past 50 years? (Hint: Neither Condoleezza Rice nor John Kerry.)
All told, the Ivory Tower survey offers a window into how America’s top IR scholars see the world today—and which institutions are effectively nurturing future generations of thinkers and policymakers.
READ MORE....
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me
by Marlon Brando and Robert Lindsey
Songs My Mother Taught Me an autobiography by Marlon Brando with Robert Lindsey as co-author in 1995.
Brando writes of his memories as a struggling actor and of his various relationships with other actors, producers and directors.
The book has been translated into several languages, including a Persian version translated by Niki Karimi in 1999.
The book is not so much a collection of described chronological events as it is a medium for Brando's thoughts and beliefs, all voiced through a diverse array of topics. Particularly later on in the book, he intersperses stories from both his youth and his older years. Brando doesn't delve into himself more than he needs to, rather the people who shaped his life; notably, little to no mention is made of his wives or children.
Specific mention is made of figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Laurence Olivier, John F. Kennedy, David Niven, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, John Huston, amongst many others. His actual coverage of his films tends to be succinct, characterised more by anecdotes than step-by-step descriptions of production.
READ MORE....
Brando writes of his memories as a struggling actor and of his various relationships with other actors, producers and directors.
The book has been translated into several languages, including a Persian version translated by Niki Karimi in 1999.
The book is not so much a collection of described chronological events as it is a medium for Brando's thoughts and beliefs, all voiced through a diverse array of topics. Particularly later on in the book, he intersperses stories from both his youth and his older years. Brando doesn't delve into himself more than he needs to, rather the people who shaped his life; notably, little to no mention is made of his wives or children.
Specific mention is made of figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Laurence Olivier, John F. Kennedy, David Niven, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, John Huston, amongst many others. His actual coverage of his films tends to be succinct, characterised more by anecdotes than step-by-step descriptions of production.
READ MORE....
Why DC loves Biden's terrible plan to divide Iraq Updated
by Max Fisher
VOX on August 5, 2015
Now that it looks like a Joe Biden presidential candidacy could actually happen, it seems inevitable that people will discuss what are said to be his considerable foreign policy chops. That includes one of his best-known and most controversial ideas: that Iraq should be partitioned into three separate states, one for each of the main sectarian groups. Except that this is a myth. In fact, Biden never actually proposed partitioning Iraq — but he does he want to divide it along softer, less drastic lines. His plan is that Iraq adopt a federal system in which the country would remain unified under a central government, but power would be shared between three semi-autonomous regions. Perversely, much of DC, which for years has wrongly mocked Biden for proposing a plan he didn't actually propose, has since come around to seeing both partition (the plan Biden didn't propose) and the actual Biden plan as great ideas that could save Iraq. They're wrong: Either plan would be a catastrophic disaster for the country.
READ MORE....
VOX on August 5, 2015
Now that it looks like a Joe Biden presidential candidacy could actually happen, it seems inevitable that people will discuss what are said to be his considerable foreign policy chops. That includes one of his best-known and most controversial ideas: that Iraq should be partitioned into three separate states, one for each of the main sectarian groups. Except that this is a myth. In fact, Biden never actually proposed partitioning Iraq — but he does he want to divide it along softer, less drastic lines. His plan is that Iraq adopt a federal system in which the country would remain unified under a central government, but power would be shared between three semi-autonomous regions. Perversely, much of DC, which for years has wrongly mocked Biden for proposing a plan he didn't actually propose, has since come around to seeing both partition (the plan Biden didn't propose) and the actual Biden plan as great ideas that could save Iraq. They're wrong: Either plan would be a catastrophic disaster for the country.
READ MORE....
China to establish police offices in top internet firms
RUSSIA TODAY - 5 Aug, 2015
According to the ministry, the new measures would allow law enforcement to react more quickly to illegal online activities as well as helping to protect personal information and prevent online crimes.
“We will set up network security offices inside important website and internet firms, so that we can catch criminal behavior online at the earliest possible point,” said the deputy minister, Chen Zhimin, at a press conference in Beijing on Tuesday.
READ MORE....
In efforts to better tackle “criminal behavior online”, China is
planning to set up cyber-security police offices in the country’s major
internet companies.
“As the country enters
the internet age, network security has become a national security issue
and social stability issue, important to economic development and a
serious day-to-day working issue for citizens,” the Public Security Ministry said in a statement published on Tuesday.According to the ministry, the new measures would allow law enforcement to react more quickly to illegal online activities as well as helping to protect personal information and prevent online crimes.
“We will set up network security offices inside important website and internet firms, so that we can catch criminal behavior online at the earliest possible point,” said the deputy minister, Chen Zhimin, at a press conference in Beijing on Tuesday.
READ MORE....
J.P. Morgan to Move 2,150 Jobs From Manhattan to Jersey City
Bank will get $19 million in subsidies for move to New Jersey
By Peter Grant And Heather Haddon
The Wall Street Journal - Aug. 5, 2015
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. has cut a deal to move 2,150 jobs from Manhattan to Jersey City, taking advantage of a $19 million incentive package offered by the state of New Jersey.
READ MORE....
By Peter Grant And Heather Haddon
The Wall Street Journal - Aug. 5, 2015
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. has cut a deal to move 2,150 jobs from Manhattan to Jersey City, taking advantage of a $19 million incentive package offered by the state of New Jersey.
READ MORE....
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Unbalanced The Codependency of America and China
Stephen Roach
Yale University Press - 2014
Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China
Stephen Roach, senior fellow at Yale University and former chairman of
Morgan Stanley Asia, lays bare the pitfalls of the current China-U.S.
economic relationship. He highlights the conflicts at the center of
current tensions, including disputes over trade policies and
intellectual property rights, sharp contrasts in leadership styles, the
role of the Internet, the recent dispute over cyberhacking, and more. A firsthand witness to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s,
Roach likely knows more about the U.S.-China economic relationship than
any other Westerner. Here he discusses:
The Chinese and U.S. economies have been locked in an uncomfortable embrace since the late 1970s. Although the relationship initially arose out of mutual benefits, in recent years it has taken on the trappings of an unstable codependence, with the two largest economies in the world losing their sense of self, increasing the risk of their turning on one another in a destructive fashion. In
Stephen Roach is senior fellow, Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and School of Management, Yale University, and the former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. He lives in New Canaan, CT.
READ MORE.....
Yale University Press - 2014
Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China
Stephen Roach, senior fellow at Yale University and former chairman of
Morgan Stanley Asia, lays bare the pitfalls of the current China-U.S.
economic relationship. He highlights the conflicts at the center of
current tensions, including disputes over trade policies and
intellectual property rights, sharp contrasts in leadership styles, the
role of the Internet, the recent dispute over cyberhacking, and more. A firsthand witness to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s,
Roach likely knows more about the U.S.-China economic relationship than
any other Westerner. Here he discusses:The Chinese and U.S. economies have been locked in an uncomfortable embrace since the late 1970s. Although the relationship initially arose out of mutual benefits, in recent years it has taken on the trappings of an unstable codependence, with the two largest economies in the world losing their sense of self, increasing the risk of their turning on one another in a destructive fashion. In
- Why America saving too little and China saving too much creates mounting problems for both
- How China is planning to re-boot its economic growth model by moving from an external export-led model to one of internal consumerism with a new focus on service industries
- How America, shows a disturbing lack of strategy, preferring a short-term reactive approach over a more coherent Chinese-style planning framework
- The way out: what America could do to turn its own economic fate around and position itself for a healthy economic and political relationship with China
Stephen Roach is senior fellow, Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and School of Management, Yale University, and the former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. He lives in New Canaan, CT.
READ MORE.....
The Future of Work: Don't Blame the Robots
The latest entry in a special project in which business and labor leaders, social scientists, technology visionaries, activists, and journalists weigh in on the most consequential changes in the workplace.
Dean Baker
PACIFIC STANDARD - JUNE 4, 2015
There has been a bizarre debate in national policy circles in recent years, with many raising the prospect that the development of robots and other technologies will lead to mass unemployment and lower living standards. The debate is bizarre for two reasons. First, productivity growth has actually been quite slow in recent years; this is the opposite of the “robots replacing workers’’ story. Second, faster productivity growth should mean higher wages and better living standards in a well-working economy.
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Dean Baker
PACIFIC STANDARD - JUNE 4, 2015
There has been a bizarre debate in national policy circles in recent years, with many raising the prospect that the development of robots and other technologies will lead to mass unemployment and lower living standards. The debate is bizarre for two reasons. First, productivity growth has actually been quite slow in recent years; this is the opposite of the “robots replacing workers’’ story. Second, faster productivity growth should mean higher wages and better living standards in a well-working economy.
Taking
these points in turn, productivity growth has slowed sharply in the
last decade. From 2005 to 2014 productivity growth has averaged just 1.4
percent annually. This is down from 2.9 percent from 1995 to 2005. In
the last two years productivity growth has been even slower, averaging
less than one percent. By comparison, in the post-World War II Golden
Age from 1947 to 1973, productivity growth averaged almost three
percent.
Productivity growth is a direct measure
of the rate at which technology is increasing output per worker hour. If
robots and other technologies are making workers obsolete, we should be
seeing sharp increases in the rate of productivity growth, since they
are allowing us to produce goods and services with few or no workers.
Instead, slower productivity growth means technology is displacing
workers less quickly than in 1995–2005.
READ MORE.....
Are plants intelligent?
New book says yes A new book, Brilliant Green, argues that not only are plants intelligent and sentient, but that we should consider their rights, especially in the midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction
Jeremy Hance
THE GUARDIAN - JUNE 4, 2015
Plants are intelligent. Plants deserve rights. Plants are like the Internet – or more accurately the Internet is like plants. To most of us these statements may sound, at best, insupportable or, at worst, crazy. But a new book, Brilliant Green: the Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, by plant neurobiologist (yes, plant neurobiologist), Stefano Mancuso and journalist, Alessandra Viola, makes a compelling and fascinating case not only for plant sentience and smarts, but also plant rights.
For centuries Western philosophy and science largely viewed animals as unthinking automatons, simple slaves to instinct. But research in recent decades has shattered that view. We now know that not only are chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants thinking, feeling and personality-driven beings, but many others are as well. Octopi can use tools, whales sing, bees can count, crows demonstrate complex reasoning, paper wasps can recognise faces and fish can differentiate types of music. All these examples have one thing in common: they are animals with brains. But plants don’t have a brain. How can they solve problems, act intelligently or respond to stimuli without a brain?
READ MORE....
Jeremy Hance
THE GUARDIAN - JUNE 4, 2015
Plants are intelligent. Plants deserve rights. Plants are like the Internet – or more accurately the Internet is like plants. To most of us these statements may sound, at best, insupportable or, at worst, crazy. But a new book, Brilliant Green: the Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, by plant neurobiologist (yes, plant neurobiologist), Stefano Mancuso and journalist, Alessandra Viola, makes a compelling and fascinating case not only for plant sentience and smarts, but also plant rights.
For centuries Western philosophy and science largely viewed animals as unthinking automatons, simple slaves to instinct. But research in recent decades has shattered that view. We now know that not only are chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants thinking, feeling and personality-driven beings, but many others are as well. Octopi can use tools, whales sing, bees can count, crows demonstrate complex reasoning, paper wasps can recognise faces and fish can differentiate types of music. All these examples have one thing in common: they are animals with brains. But plants don’t have a brain. How can they solve problems, act intelligently or respond to stimuli without a brain?
READ MORE....
Food Security: Egypt Plans To Raise Crops In Sub-Saharan Africa
By Walaa Hussein
By Walaa Hussein
By Walaa HusseinAFK INSIDER - August 4, 2015
Amid Egypt’s water scarcity, which threatens to worsen the country’s food shortage, Cairo is working to form agricultural alliances outside its borders. The efforts — which have been in place as limited experiments since the 1980s under Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak — include sending Egyptian farmers to cultivate land in Sudan and Congo, transfer their expertise to those countries and take advantage of the available water to cover the food needs of the Egyptian people. The efforts also aim at establishing model farms for strategic crops in a number of countries, including Mali, Niger and Zambia. The countries covered by the Egyptian project for foreign agriculture have an abundance and diversity of water sources, but declining agricultural development due to lack of funding and agricultural machinery. In Sudan, which has a surface area of 1.8 million square kilometers (445 million acres), cultivated areas do not exceed 45 million acres, according to the latest statistics by the Central Bank of Sudan. That is about a fifth of the country’s arable area, estimated at 200 million acres. The surface area of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the second-largest African country, is 2.35 million square kilometers (581 million acres). The country has 1.3 million square kilometers (321 million acres) of forest areas. Several rivers — such as the Nile and the Congo rivers — supply the Congo with a lot of water and the country’s arable land is of excellent quality. Nevertheless, 95% of the country’s population suffers from hunger. At the Arab Summit in March, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir put forth an initiative for Arab food security to have the troubled Egyptian program cultivate thousands of acres in Sudan. In April, the Sudanese government announced the allocation of Sudanese land in several water-rich areas where the Egyptians can implement joint projects in food security and by using the agricultural integration program. The latter aims to achieve self-sufficiency when it comes to agricultural and food production. The program was announced in a meeting in Khartoum on April 24, in the presence of five ministers concerned with agriculture and irrigation issues from the two countries.
READ MORE.....
Human settlement on Mars? MIT researchers join debate
By Steve Annear
Boston Globe - August 04, 2015
Move aside, Pluto. It’s Mars’s turn to take center stage.
At a convention celebrating the planet this month, two MIT researchers will debate the chief exeucutive of Mars One, the non-profit organization backing an ambitious mission to the Red Planet.
MIT students Sydney Do and Andrew Owens will “have it out” with Mars One’s Bas Lansdorp at the 18th annual International Mars Society Convention on Aug. 13.
Mars One was launched in 2012. Its founders want to establish a human settlement on Mars as early as 2027. One hundred volunteers, including a Stoneham resident, have already been picked as potential settlers, who, if they get there, will never return to Earth.
The convention, which will be held at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., will feature scientists, elected officials, and space advocates versed in all things pertaining to Mars.
The format of the debate will consist of two 20-minute presentations — one from each side — followed by two rounds of rebuttals. Participants will then take questions from the audience.
READ MORE....
Boston Globe - August 04, 2015
Move aside, Pluto. It’s Mars’s turn to take center stage.
At a convention celebrating the planet this month, two MIT researchers will debate the chief exeucutive of Mars One, the non-profit organization backing an ambitious mission to the Red Planet.
MIT students Sydney Do and Andrew Owens will “have it out” with Mars One’s Bas Lansdorp at the 18th annual International Mars Society Convention on Aug. 13.
Mars One was launched in 2012. Its founders want to establish a human settlement on Mars as early as 2027. One hundred volunteers, including a Stoneham resident, have already been picked as potential settlers, who, if they get there, will never return to Earth.
The convention, which will be held at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., will feature scientists, elected officials, and space advocates versed in all things pertaining to Mars.
The format of the debate will consist of two 20-minute presentations — one from each side — followed by two rounds of rebuttals. Participants will then take questions from the audience.
READ MORE....
Monday, August 3, 2015
Area Studies and International Studies
Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years
Noam Chomsky, Laura Nader, Immanuel Wallerstein, Richard C. Lewontin, Richard Ohmann
The New Press - 1998
The years following 1945 witnessed a massive change in American intellectual thought and in the life of American universities. The effort to mobilize intellectual talent during the war established new links between the government and the academy. After the war, many of those who had worked with the military or the Office of Strategic Studies took jobs in the burgeoning postwar structure of university-based military research and intelligence agencies, bringing large infusions of government money into many fields.
The essays in this text explore what happened to the university in these years and why. They show the many ways existing disciplines, such as anthropology, were affected by the Cold War ethos, and discuss the rise of new fields, such as area studies, and the changing nature of dissent and academic freedom during and since the Cold War.
The Politics of Knowledge Area Studies and the Disciplines
David Szanton (Editor)
University of California Press - 2004
The usefulness and political implications of Area Studies programs are currently debated within the Academy and the Administration, where they are often treated as one homogenous and stagnant domain of scholarship. The essays in this volume document the various fields’ distinctive character and internal heterogeneity as well as the dynamism resulting from their evolving engagements with funders, US and international politics, and domestic constituencies. The authors were chosen for their long-standing interest in the intellectual evolution of their fields. They describe the origins and histories of US-based Area Studies programs, highlighting their complex, generative, and sometimes contentious relationships with the social science and humanities disciplines and their diverse contributions to the regions of the world with which they are concerned.
CONTENTS:
Introduction: The Origin, Nature, and Challenges of Area Studies in the United States, David L. Szanton
Latin American Studies: Theory and Practice, Paul W. Drake and Lisa Hilbink
The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science, Timothy Mitchell
Area Studies in Search of Africa, Pearl T. Robinson
Japanese Studies: The Intangible Act of Translation, Alan Tansman
Soviet and Post-Soviet Area Studies, Victoria E. Bonnell and George W. Breslauer
Eastern Europe or Central Europe? Exploring a Distinct Regional Identity, Ellen Comisso and Brad Gutierrez
The Transformation of Contemporary China Studies, 1977–2002, Andrew G. Walder
South Asian Studies: Futures Past, Nicholas B. Dirks
The Development of Southeast Asian Studies in the UnitedStates, John Bowen
David Haney
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS - 2008
A highly readable introduction to and overview of the postwar social sciences in the United States, The Americanization of Social Science explores a critical period in the evolution of American sociology’s professional identity from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. David Paul Haney contends that during this time leading sociologists encouraged a professional secession from public engagement in the name of establishing the discipline’s scientific integrity. According to Haney, influential practitioners encouraged a willful withdrawal from public sociology by separating their professional work from public life. He argues that this separation diminished sociologists’ capacity for conveying their findings to wider publics, especially given their ambivalence towards the mass media, as witnessed by the professional estrangement that scholars like David Riesman and C. Wright Mills experienced as their writing found receptive lay audiences. He argues further that this sense of professional insularity has inhibited sociology’s participation in the national discussion about social issues to the present day.
American Empire Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization
Neil Smith
University of California Press - 2004
An American Empire, constructed over the last century, long ago overtook European colonialism, and it has been widely assumed that the new globalism it espoused took us "beyond geography." Neil Smith debunks that assumption, offering an incisive argument that American globalism had a distinct geography and was pieced together as part of a powerful geographical vision. The power of geography did not die with the twilight of European colonialism, but it did change fundamentally. That the inauguration of the American Century brought a loss of public geographical sensibility in the United States was itself a political symptom of the emerging empire. This book provides a vital geographical-historical context for understanding the power and limits of contemporary globalization, which can now be seen as representing the third of three distinct historical moments of U.S. global ambition. The story unfolds through a decisive account of the career of Isaiah Bowman (1878–1950), the most famous American geographer of the twentieth century. For nearly four decades Bowman operated around the vortex of state power, working to bring an American order to the global landscape. An explorer on the famous Machu Picchu expedition of 1911 who came to be known first as "Woodrow Wilson’s geographer," and later as Frankin D. Roosevelt’s, Bowman was present at the creation of U.S. liberal foreign policy. A quarter-century later, Bowman was at the center of Roosevelt’s State Department, concerned with the disposition of Germany and heightened U.S. access to European colonies; he was described by Dean Acheson as a key "architect of the United Nations." In that period he was a leader in American science, served as president of Johns Hopkins University, and became an early and vociferous cold warrior. A complicated, contradictory, and at times controversial figure who was very much in the public eye, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Bowman’s career as a geographer in an era when the value of geography was deeply questioned provides a unique window into the contradictory uses of geographical knowledge in the construction of the American Empire. Smith’s historical excavation reveals, in broad strokes yet with lively detail, that today's American-inspired globalization springs not from the 1980s but from two earlier moments in 1919 and 1945, both of which ended in failure. By recharting the geography of this history, Smith brings the politics—and the limits—of contemporary globalization sharply into focus.
Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford
Rebecca S. Lowen
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997
The "cold war university" is the academic component of the military-industrial-academic complex, and its archetype, according to Rebecca Lowen, is Stanford University. Her book challenges the conventional wisdom that the post-World War II "multiversity" was created by military patrons on the one hand and academic scientists on the other and points instead to the crucial role played by university administrators in making their universities dependent upon military, foundation, and industrial patronage.
ARTICLES:
- Jonathan Z. Friedman and Cynthia Miller-Idriss. The International Infrastructure of Area Studies Centers: Lessons for Current Practice From a Prior Wave of Internationalization. Journal of Studies in International Education 2015, Vol. 19(1) 86–104
- David Engerman, “Rethinking Cold War Universities: Some Recent Histories,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2003)
- Neil Smith, The Politics of Space: Jigsaw Geographies After Area Studies.ABYSMAL IGNORANCE”: THE PRE-LIFE OF AREA STUDIES, 1917 - 1958
Saturday, August 1, 2015
A politician in Finland declared war on multiculturalism. This is how his country responded.
By Ishaan Tharoor
The Washington Post - July 31, 2015
Earlier this week, Olli Immonen, a legislator belonging to The Finns, an anti-immigration political party that's part of Finland's ruling coalition, published an incendiary post on Facebook.
Written both in English and Finnish, the statement called on Immonen's countrymen to "defeat this nightmare called multiculturalism," describing it as "an ugly bubble that our enemies live in." The full post follows below.
In various Nordic nations, far-right, populist political parties have in recent years made inroads at the expense of the traditional left, buoyed in part by concerns over continued immigration.
READ MORE...
The Washington Post - July 31, 2015
Earlier this week, Olli Immonen, a legislator belonging to The Finns, an anti-immigration political party that's part of Finland's ruling coalition, published an incendiary post on Facebook.
Written both in English and Finnish, the statement called on Immonen's countrymen to "defeat this nightmare called multiculturalism," describing it as "an ugly bubble that our enemies live in." The full post follows below.
I'm dreaming of a strong, brave nation that will defeat this nightmare called multiculturalism. This ugly bubble that our enemies live in, will soon enough burst into a million little pieces. Our lives are entwined in a very harsh times. These are the days, that will forever leave a mark on our nations future. I have strong belief in my fellow fighters. We will fight until the end for our homeland and one true Finnish nation. The victory will be ours.Immonen is hardly the first ultra-nationalist European politician to inveigh against the dangers of multiculturalism. It's a watchword that, for far-right populists and even more moderate conservatives, has come to signify everything wrong with society -- from the erosion of traditional values to the means by which radical Islam can flourish in some communities in the West.
In various Nordic nations, far-right, populist political parties have in recent years made inroads at the expense of the traditional left, buoyed in part by concerns over continued immigration.
READ MORE...
Sunday, July 26, 2015
The summer reading lists at America's most prestigious private schools
Abby Jackson and Peter Jacobs
Business Insider - Jul. 25, 2015
For many people, the summer months symbolize pleasure reading at its best. It's a time to indulge in the texts that are most appealing, without scrutiny: an easy beach read, a guilty pleasure, or that book you've always meant to start. But students at America's most prestigious private schools must still endure the rigors of homework during their summer vacations with a little reading — some required, some merely recommended. The topics of the titles cover issues such as war, sexuality, and racial history.
READ MORE....
Business Insider - Jul. 25, 2015
For many people, the summer months symbolize pleasure reading at its best. It's a time to indulge in the texts that are most appealing, without scrutiny: an easy beach read, a guilty pleasure, or that book you've always meant to start. But students at America's most prestigious private schools must still endure the rigors of homework during their summer vacations with a little reading — some required, some merely recommended. The topics of the titles cover issues such as war, sexuality, and racial history.
READ MORE....
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Satan’s Paradise
Elliot Ross
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS - 24 July 2015
Barack Obama’s plane will land at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport this evening. He will be welcomed on the runway by Jomo Kenyatta’s son, Uhuru, Kenya’s fourth president. Both men were born in 1961, three years after the Embakasi Airport was opened (it was renamed in 1978). The website of the Kenya Airports Authority has a page about the airport’s history. It says that it was ‘constructed in the mid-1950s’ before going into considerably more detail about its World Bank-financed refit in the 1970s. It doesn’t mention that the airport was built with the forced labour of thousands of men during the Mau Mau uprising that began in the early 1950s.
In Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005), Caroline Elkins points out that Britain’s decision to pursue a counterinsurgency strategy based on mass detention dovetailed with the governor Evelyn Baring’s desire to ‘modernise’ the country through large-scale infrastructure projects as a way of deepening and prolonging British rule:
READ MORE....
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS - 24 July 2015
Barack Obama’s plane will land at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport this evening. He will be welcomed on the runway by Jomo Kenyatta’s son, Uhuru, Kenya’s fourth president. Both men were born in 1961, three years after the Embakasi Airport was opened (it was renamed in 1978). The website of the Kenya Airports Authority has a page about the airport’s history. It says that it was ‘constructed in the mid-1950s’ before going into considerably more detail about its World Bank-financed refit in the 1970s. It doesn’t mention that the airport was built with the forced labour of thousands of men during the Mau Mau uprising that began in the early 1950s.
In Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005), Caroline Elkins points out that Britain’s decision to pursue a counterinsurgency strategy based on mass detention dovetailed with the governor Evelyn Baring’s desire to ‘modernise’ the country through large-scale infrastructure projects as a way of deepening and prolonging British rule:
Colonial officials at [Embakasi] were under enormous pressure to complete the airport, a massive project that had a limitless need for labour, before the end of the Emergency. Camp commandants… seemed to consider it their duty to work the convicts to death. Production pressures combined with the pervasive exterminationist attitude toward Mau Mau to create a uniquely perverse environment.Elkins says that many detainees referred to Embakasi as ‘Satan’s Paradise’. In his memoir, Mau Mau Detainee (1963), Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, the socialist politician assassinated in 1975, wrote:
READ MORE....
Rethinking American National Strategy for the 21st Century
"The United States, as the world’s most powerful nation, should continue to take the lead in sustaining and extending a rule based international order."
James Dobbins
NATIONAL INTEREST - July 24, 2015
Foreign policy and national security seem likely to play a significant role in the 2016 presidential election campaign. Candidates from both parties will probably try to distinguish their approaches from that of the current administration. Recent events, most notably Russian aggression in Ukraine, the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and the continued proliferation of other violent extremist groups throughout the Middle East, South Asia and much of Africa have created concern that current American responses are still inadequate. Cyber security, climate change, and the increasing power of China are also growing national preoccupations. While some criticize the Obama administration for weak and indecisive leadership, significant voices on both sides of the political spectrum argue for even greater restraint, lower resource commitments and reduced engagement in addressing at least some of these issues.
Defining national strategy was easier when the country faced a single overarching threat. During the Cold War it was possible to relate almost any endeavor to a genuinely existential competition with the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and disappearance of the Soviet Union, the expansion of Western values and institutions into this space became the initial focus of American policy. In the aftermath of 9/11, the global war on terror became the organizing principle for American engagement with partners and against adversaries in every corner of the world. These oversimplifications led the United States down some costly and unnecessary paths but such easy to grasp rationales nevertheless succeeded in mobilizing domestic and international support for strong action and costly commitments.
READ MORE....
James Dobbins
NATIONAL INTEREST - July 24, 2015
Foreign policy and national security seem likely to play a significant role in the 2016 presidential election campaign. Candidates from both parties will probably try to distinguish their approaches from that of the current administration. Recent events, most notably Russian aggression in Ukraine, the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and the continued proliferation of other violent extremist groups throughout the Middle East, South Asia and much of Africa have created concern that current American responses are still inadequate. Cyber security, climate change, and the increasing power of China are also growing national preoccupations. While some criticize the Obama administration for weak and indecisive leadership, significant voices on both sides of the political spectrum argue for even greater restraint, lower resource commitments and reduced engagement in addressing at least some of these issues.
Defining national strategy was easier when the country faced a single overarching threat. During the Cold War it was possible to relate almost any endeavor to a genuinely existential competition with the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and disappearance of the Soviet Union, the expansion of Western values and institutions into this space became the initial focus of American policy. In the aftermath of 9/11, the global war on terror became the organizing principle for American engagement with partners and against adversaries in every corner of the world. These oversimplifications led the United States down some costly and unnecessary paths but such easy to grasp rationales nevertheless succeeded in mobilizing domestic and international support for strong action and costly commitments.
READ MORE....
Turkey's 200-Year War against 'ISIS'
Can Turkey be at the forefront of the latest battle against the Islamic State?
Selim Koru
National Interest - July 24, 2015
In 1818, Amir Abdullah bin Saud was taken to Istanbul for execution. This was no ordinary prisoner. He was leader of a rebellion that had occupied the two holy cities of Islam for a decade and had dared to declare the Ottoman sultan, Caliph of the Faithful, an unbeliever. Among the various public humiliations before ibn Saud’s execution—since his strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam forbade music—the Ottomans made him listen to the lute. But the cruelest punishments were reserved for the rebels’ religious leaders, some of whom were stuck into the muzzles of cannons and mortars and blown to pieces.
The rebellion clearly struck a nerve with the Ottomans. The rebels belonged to the Salafi tradition of Sunni Islam, meaning that they believed in a literal reading of the earliest Islamic texts. The mainstream Anatolian Sunnis of Turkey on the other hand, belong to the Hanafi-Maturidi tradition, which goes into textual interpretation to attain the true meaning of the Prophet’s teachings. It sprang out of an age of enlightenment, when Islamic civilization reached its zenith in mathematics, medicine, astronomy and the arts. The Ottomans saw themselves as the heirs of Islam’s natural evolution towards a higher civilization. They did not care to be called infidels.
READ MORE...
Selim Koru
National Interest - July 24, 2015
In 1818, Amir Abdullah bin Saud was taken to Istanbul for execution. This was no ordinary prisoner. He was leader of a rebellion that had occupied the two holy cities of Islam for a decade and had dared to declare the Ottoman sultan, Caliph of the Faithful, an unbeliever. Among the various public humiliations before ibn Saud’s execution—since his strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam forbade music—the Ottomans made him listen to the lute. But the cruelest punishments were reserved for the rebels’ religious leaders, some of whom were stuck into the muzzles of cannons and mortars and blown to pieces.
The rebellion clearly struck a nerve with the Ottomans. The rebels belonged to the Salafi tradition of Sunni Islam, meaning that they believed in a literal reading of the earliest Islamic texts. The mainstream Anatolian Sunnis of Turkey on the other hand, belong to the Hanafi-Maturidi tradition, which goes into textual interpretation to attain the true meaning of the Prophet’s teachings. It sprang out of an age of enlightenment, when Islamic civilization reached its zenith in mathematics, medicine, astronomy and the arts. The Ottomans saw themselves as the heirs of Islam’s natural evolution towards a higher civilization. They did not care to be called infidels.
READ MORE...
Friday, July 24, 2015
The Mystery of ISIS
By Anonymous
The New Yorker - August 13, 2015 Issue
ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan Regan Arts, 270 pp., $14.00 (paper)
ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger Ecco, 385 pp., $27.99
The author has wide experience in the Middle East and was formerly an official of a NATO country. We respect the writer’s reasons for anonymity. —The Editors
Ahmad Fadhil was eighteen when his father died in 1984. Photographs suggest that he was relatively short, chubby, and wore large glasses. He wasn’t a particularly poor student—he received a B grade in junior high—but he decided to leave school. There was work in the garment and leather factories in his home city of Zarqa, Jordan, but he chose instead to work in a video store, and earned enough money to pay for some tattoos. He also drank alcohol, took drugs, and got into trouble with the police. So his mother sent him to an Islamic self-help class. This sobered him up and put him on a different path. By the time Ahmad Fadhil died in 2006 he had laid the foundations of an independent Islamic state of eight million people that controlled a territory larger than Jordan itself.
The rise of Ahmad Fadhil—or as he was later known in the jihad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—and ISIS, the movement of which he was the founder, remains almost inexplicable. The year 2003, in which he began his operations in Iraq, seemed to many part of a mundane and unheroic age of Internet start-ups and a slowly expanding system of global trade. Despite the US-led invasion of Iraq that year, the borders of Syria and Iraq were stable. Secular Arab nationalism appeared to have triumphed over the older forces of tribe and religion. Different religious communities—Yezidis, Shabaks, Christians, Kaka’is, Shias, and Sunnis—continued to live alongside one another, as they had for a millennium or more. Iraqis and Syrians had better incomes, education, health systems, and infrastructure, and an apparently more positive future, than most citizens of the developing world. Who then could have imagined that a movement founded by a man from a video store in provincial Jordan would tear off a third of the territory of Syria and Iraq, shatter all these historical institutions, and—defeating the combined militaries of a dozen of the wealthiest countries on earth—create a mini empire?
READ MORE....
The New Yorker - August 13, 2015 Issue
ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan Regan Arts, 270 pp., $14.00 (paper)
ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger Ecco, 385 pp., $27.99
The author has wide experience in the Middle East and was formerly an official of a NATO country. We respect the writer’s reasons for anonymity. —The Editors
Ahmad Fadhil was eighteen when his father died in 1984. Photographs suggest that he was relatively short, chubby, and wore large glasses. He wasn’t a particularly poor student—he received a B grade in junior high—but he decided to leave school. There was work in the garment and leather factories in his home city of Zarqa, Jordan, but he chose instead to work in a video store, and earned enough money to pay for some tattoos. He also drank alcohol, took drugs, and got into trouble with the police. So his mother sent him to an Islamic self-help class. This sobered him up and put him on a different path. By the time Ahmad Fadhil died in 2006 he had laid the foundations of an independent Islamic state of eight million people that controlled a territory larger than Jordan itself.
The rise of Ahmad Fadhil—or as he was later known in the jihad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—and ISIS, the movement of which he was the founder, remains almost inexplicable. The year 2003, in which he began his operations in Iraq, seemed to many part of a mundane and unheroic age of Internet start-ups and a slowly expanding system of global trade. Despite the US-led invasion of Iraq that year, the borders of Syria and Iraq were stable. Secular Arab nationalism appeared to have triumphed over the older forces of tribe and religion. Different religious communities—Yezidis, Shabaks, Christians, Kaka’is, Shias, and Sunnis—continued to live alongside one another, as they had for a millennium or more. Iraqis and Syrians had better incomes, education, health systems, and infrastructure, and an apparently more positive future, than most citizens of the developing world. Who then could have imagined that a movement founded by a man from a video store in provincial Jordan would tear off a third of the territory of Syria and Iraq, shatter all these historical institutions, and—defeating the combined militaries of a dozen of the wealthiest countries on earth—create a mini empire?
READ MORE....
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Monetary Policy and the Economy
CSPAN - July 15, 2015
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen presented her semiannual report on monetary policy to the House Financial Services Committee. She answered several questions on interest rates, in reply to which she reemphasized reemphasized that interest rates were likely to go up later in the year but would not give a timeline. Other topics included information leaks from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
WATCH THE FULL TESTIMONY
http://www.c-span.org/video/?327076-1/janet-yellen-testimony-us-monetary-policy-economy
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen presented her semiannual report on monetary policy to the House Financial Services Committee. She answered several questions on interest rates, in reply to which she reemphasized reemphasized that interest rates were likely to go up later in the year but would not give a timeline. Other topics included information leaks from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
WATCH THE FULL TESTIMONY
http://www.c-span.org/video/?327076-1/janet-yellen-testimony-us-monetary-policy-economy
Monday, July 20, 2015
3rd ISA Forum of Sociology: THE FUTURES WE WANT: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World
Vienna, Austria, 10-14 July
2016
http://www.isa-sociology.org/forum-2016/
The Third ISA Forum will be convened in Vienna, Austria, 10-14 July 2016 on the theme “The Futures We Want: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World.” This theme encourages a forward-orientation in empirical, theoretical, and normative research to tackle the problems and opportunities that often cut across borders.
Protests around the globe have challenged inequality, oppression, and ecological destruction, and have insisted on the possibility of another, better world. Intensifying uncertainties demand innovations in methods and theories. Tomorrow no longer appears as pre-determined by inevitable trends but as a rather contingent outcome of complex, typically multi-scalar dynamics that vary in their intensity of contentiousness. Social actors aspire, desire, envision, expect, fear, imagine, plan, project, reject, sustain, and wage war over futures. What can sociology contribute to these broader debates? How do assumptions and aspirations about the future influence daily routines and long-term collective lives? How are risks identified, avoided, mitigated, transferred, or shared? What closes and opens the horizons of social imaginaries? How are different forces positioned to shape futures? How can the making of futures be democratized? What can be learned by comparing struggles in different countries and settings? How do emancipatory movements and everyday practices at the grassroots overcome discipline, exploitation, and misrecognition? What visions for alternative futures are imaginable, desirable, and achievable? What are viable roadmaps for social transformation?
This general theme provides a platform for dialog among ISA’s many participating Research Committees (RCs), Working Groups (WGs), and Thematic Groups (TGs). It calls for research on the full range of sociological topics from the tiny worlds of micro situations to the broad macro dynamics affecting the entire planet. It encourages inquiries into the multiplicity of possibilities, projects, and visions. It welcomes diverse approaches, including comparative and interdisciplinary collaborations.
Markus S. Schulz
ISA Vice-President for Research
and Forum President
http://www.isa-sociology.org/forum-2016/
The Third ISA Forum will be convened in Vienna, Austria, 10-14 July 2016 on the theme “The Futures We Want: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World.” This theme encourages a forward-orientation in empirical, theoretical, and normative research to tackle the problems and opportunities that often cut across borders.
Protests around the globe have challenged inequality, oppression, and ecological destruction, and have insisted on the possibility of another, better world. Intensifying uncertainties demand innovations in methods and theories. Tomorrow no longer appears as pre-determined by inevitable trends but as a rather contingent outcome of complex, typically multi-scalar dynamics that vary in their intensity of contentiousness. Social actors aspire, desire, envision, expect, fear, imagine, plan, project, reject, sustain, and wage war over futures. What can sociology contribute to these broader debates? How do assumptions and aspirations about the future influence daily routines and long-term collective lives? How are risks identified, avoided, mitigated, transferred, or shared? What closes and opens the horizons of social imaginaries? How are different forces positioned to shape futures? How can the making of futures be democratized? What can be learned by comparing struggles in different countries and settings? How do emancipatory movements and everyday practices at the grassroots overcome discipline, exploitation, and misrecognition? What visions for alternative futures are imaginable, desirable, and achievable? What are viable roadmaps for social transformation?
This general theme provides a platform for dialog among ISA’s many participating Research Committees (RCs), Working Groups (WGs), and Thematic Groups (TGs). It calls for research on the full range of sociological topics from the tiny worlds of micro situations to the broad macro dynamics affecting the entire planet. It encourages inquiries into the multiplicity of possibilities, projects, and visions. It welcomes diverse approaches, including comparative and interdisciplinary collaborations.
Markus S. Schulz
ISA Vice-President for Research
and Forum President
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2015
CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE - January 15, 2015
Barbara Salazar Torreon
Analyst in Defense Budget and Military Manpower
SUMMARY:
This report lists hundreds of instances in which the United States has used its Armed Forces abroad in situations of military conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes. It was compiled in part from various older lists and is intended primarily to provide a rough survey of past U.S. military ventures abroad, without reference to the magnitude of the given instance noted. The listing often contains references, especially from 1980 forward, to continuing military deployments, especially U.S. military participation in multinational operations associated with NATO or the United Nations. Most of these post-1980 instances are summaries based on presidential reports to Congress related to the War Powers Resolution. A comprehensive commentary regarding any of the instances listed is not undertaken here. The instances differ greatly in number of forces, purpose, extent of hostilities, and legal authorization. Eleven times in its history the United States has formally declared war against foreign nations. These 11 U.S. war declarations encompassed 5 separate wars: the war with Great Britain declared in 1812; the war with Mexico declared in 1846; the war with Spain declared in 1898; the First World War, during which the United States declared war with Germany and with Austria-Hungary during 1917; and World War II, dur ing which the United States declared war against Japan, Germany, and Italy in 1941, and agai nst Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania in 1942. Some of the instances were extended military engagements that might be considered undeclared wars. These include the Undeclared Naval War with France from 1798 to 1800; the First Barbary War from 1801 to 1805; the Second Barbary War of 1815; the Korean War of 1950-1953; the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1973; the Persian Gulf War of 1991; global actions against foreign terrorists after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States; and the war with Iraq in 2003. With the exception of the Korean War, all of these conflicts received congressional authorization in some form short of a formal declaration of war. Other, more recent instances often involve deployment of U.S. military forces as part of a multinational operation associated with NATO or the United Nations. The majority of the instances listed prior to World War II were brief Marine or Navy actions to protect U.S. citizens or promote U.S. interests. A number were actions against pirates or bandits. Covert actions, disaster relief, and routine alliance stationing and training exercises are not included here, nor are the Civil and Revolutionary Wars and the continual use of U.S. military units in the exploration, settlement, and pacification of the western part of the United States. For additional information, see CRS Report RL31133, Declarations of War and Authorizations for the Use of Military Force: Historical Background and Legal Implications , by Jennifer K. Elsea and Matthew C. Weed and CRS Report R41989, Congressional Authority to Limit Military Operations , by Jennifer K. Elsea, Michael John Garcia, and Thomas J. Nicola.
DOWNLOAD THE REPORT.....
Barbara Salazar Torreon
Analyst in Defense Budget and Military Manpower
SUMMARY:
This report lists hundreds of instances in which the United States has used its Armed Forces abroad in situations of military conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes. It was compiled in part from various older lists and is intended primarily to provide a rough survey of past U.S. military ventures abroad, without reference to the magnitude of the given instance noted. The listing often contains references, especially from 1980 forward, to continuing military deployments, especially U.S. military participation in multinational operations associated with NATO or the United Nations. Most of these post-1980 instances are summaries based on presidential reports to Congress related to the War Powers Resolution. A comprehensive commentary regarding any of the instances listed is not undertaken here. The instances differ greatly in number of forces, purpose, extent of hostilities, and legal authorization. Eleven times in its history the United States has formally declared war against foreign nations. These 11 U.S. war declarations encompassed 5 separate wars: the war with Great Britain declared in 1812; the war with Mexico declared in 1846; the war with Spain declared in 1898; the First World War, during which the United States declared war with Germany and with Austria-Hungary during 1917; and World War II, dur ing which the United States declared war against Japan, Germany, and Italy in 1941, and agai nst Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania in 1942. Some of the instances were extended military engagements that might be considered undeclared wars. These include the Undeclared Naval War with France from 1798 to 1800; the First Barbary War from 1801 to 1805; the Second Barbary War of 1815; the Korean War of 1950-1953; the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1973; the Persian Gulf War of 1991; global actions against foreign terrorists after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States; and the war with Iraq in 2003. With the exception of the Korean War, all of these conflicts received congressional authorization in some form short of a formal declaration of war. Other, more recent instances often involve deployment of U.S. military forces as part of a multinational operation associated with NATO or the United Nations. The majority of the instances listed prior to World War II were brief Marine or Navy actions to protect U.S. citizens or promote U.S. interests. A number were actions against pirates or bandits. Covert actions, disaster relief, and routine alliance stationing and training exercises are not included here, nor are the Civil and Revolutionary Wars and the continual use of U.S. military units in the exploration, settlement, and pacification of the western part of the United States. For additional information, see CRS Report RL31133, Declarations of War and Authorizations for the Use of Military Force: Historical Background and Legal Implications , by Jennifer K. Elsea and Matthew C. Weed and CRS Report R41989, Congressional Authority to Limit Military Operations , by Jennifer K. Elsea, Michael John Garcia, and Thomas J. Nicola.
DOWNLOAD THE REPORT.....
Diary By Tariq Ali
London Review of Books
Vol. 37 No. 15 · 30 July 2015
READ MORE....
Vol. 37 No. 15 · 30 July 2015
In the early hours
of 16 July, the Greek parliament voted overwhelmingly to give up its
sovereignty and become a semi-colonial appendage of the EU. A majority
of the Syriza Central Committee had already come out against the
capitulation. There had been a partial general strike. Tsipras had
threatened to resign if fifty of his MPs voted against him. In the event
six abstained and 32 voted against him, including Yanis Varoufakis, who
had resigned as finance minister after the referendum, because, he
said, ‘some Eurogroup participants’ had expressed a desire for his
‘“absence” from its meetings’. Now parliament had effectively declared
the result of the referendum null and void. Outside in Syntagma Square
thousands of young Syriza activists demonstrated against their
government. Then the anarchists arrived with Molotov cocktails and the
riot police responded with tear-gas grenades. Everyone else left the
square and by midnight it was silent again. It’s difficult not to feel
depressed by all this. Greece has been betrayed by a government that
when elected only six months ago offered hope. As I walked away from the
empty square the EU’s coup brought back memories of another.
I first went to Greece at Easter 1967. The occasion was a peace
conference in Athens honouring the left-wing Greek deputy, Grigoris
Lambrakis, murdered by fascists in Salonika in 1963 as the police looked
on, and later immortalised in Costa-Gavras’s movie Z. Half a
million people attended his funeral in Athens. During the conference
wild rumours began to spread around the hall. On the podium, a Buddhist
monk from Vietnam couldn’t understand why people had stopped listening
to him. Someone with family connections in the military had reported
that the Greek military, backed by Washington, was about to launch a
coup to pre-empt elections in which they feared the left might do a bit
too well. The foreign delegates were advised to leave the country
straightaway. I caught an early-morning flight back to London. That
afternoon tanks occupied the streets. Greece remained under the Colonels
for the next seven years.READ MORE....
200 Years of US Military Interventions – Interactive Map
By Jennifer Baker
REVOLUTION NEWS on 07/03/2015
A recent report by the United States Congressional Research Service details hundreds of overseas military deployments spanning more than two centuries. The scope of and justification for the deployments vary wildly, from conflicts with pirates and bandits to formal declarations of war against an array of sovereign nations.
Explore where, when and why US armed forces have been deployed using our interactive map.
Pirates, raiders and ruffians
Adventurers, brigands, freebooters, privateers, pirates, raiders, ruffians, smugglers and thieves. These terms are all used to describe the wide variety of groups the US military fought in early conflicts.
Pirates were a common enemy on the high seas, as were cross-border raiders preying on outlying US townships and settlements. During the eight years between 1815 and 1823, there were more than 3,000 pirate attacks on “merchantmen” (non-naval vessels) reported, a rate of more than one per day.
There is a gap of more than a century between the final two reported actions against pirates. Conflicts with pirates seem to wind down throughout the 19th century, finishing with US forces destroying the pirate ship Forward in 1870. But modern times have seen a renewal of US naval forces being deployed against pirates, with the report noting a 2012 operation by “Special Operations Forces” to rescue Ms Jessica Buchanan “who had been kidnapped by a group linked to Somali pirates and financiers”.
READ MORE....
REVOLUTION NEWS on 07/03/2015
A recent report by the United States Congressional Research Service details hundreds of overseas military deployments spanning more than two centuries. The scope of and justification for the deployments vary wildly, from conflicts with pirates and bandits to formal declarations of war against an array of sovereign nations.
Explore where, when and why US armed forces have been deployed using our interactive map.
Pirates, raiders and ruffians
Adventurers, brigands, freebooters, privateers, pirates, raiders, ruffians, smugglers and thieves. These terms are all used to describe the wide variety of groups the US military fought in early conflicts.
Pirates were a common enemy on the high seas, as were cross-border raiders preying on outlying US townships and settlements. During the eight years between 1815 and 1823, there were more than 3,000 pirate attacks on “merchantmen” (non-naval vessels) reported, a rate of more than one per day.
There is a gap of more than a century between the final two reported actions against pirates. Conflicts with pirates seem to wind down throughout the 19th century, finishing with US forces destroying the pirate ship Forward in 1870. But modern times have seen a renewal of US naval forces being deployed against pirates, with the report noting a 2012 operation by “Special Operations Forces” to rescue Ms Jessica Buchanan “who had been kidnapped by a group linked to Somali pirates and financiers”.
READ MORE....
Stop laughing at Donald Trump
By William H. Frey
THE WASHINGTON POST - July 17, 2015
READ MORE...
THE WASHINGTON POST - July 17, 2015
William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution and a population studies professor at the
University of Michigan, is the author of “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America.”
He
may not have a shot at becoming president, but Donald Trump has already
succeeded in uniting America — one nation, awash in snark. Pundits from
the left and the right have declared open season on the Donald. As
longtime Democratic strategist Paul Begala told The Washington Post,
“I am a person of faith — and the Donald’s entry into this race can
only be attributed to the fact that the good Lord is a Democrat with a
sense of humor.” Or, as conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer said
on Fox News: “This is the strongest field of Republican candidates in
35 years. You could pick a dozen of them at random and have the
strongest Cabinet America’s had in our lifetime, and instead all of our
time is spent discussing this rodeo clown.”
But writing Trump
off is dangerous. The billionaire may play the buffoon, but he is an
important one — one whom Americans appear to adore. A USA Today-Suffolk
University poll
released Tuesday shows him leading all Republican presidential
hopefuls. And while establishment candidates in both parties might want
to ignore him, or express a milder version of his anti-immigration
opinions, an enormous number of voters clearly like his views.
Pretending they don’t allows Trump and other immigration firebrands,
such as Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz, to resuscitate a century-old
nativism that could stick around beyond this election. Given that the
United States is undergoing a demographic diversity explosion, our workforce — our very future — is tied to people Trump is rallying support against.READ MORE...
How to decolonize your yoga practice
Susanna Barkataki
OPEN DEMOCRACY - 13 July 2015
As an Indian woman living in the US I’ve often felt uncomfortable in many yoga spaces. At times, such as when I take a $25.00 yoga class by a well-known teacher who wants to “expose us to the culture by chanting Om to start class“ and her studio hangs the Om symbol in the wrong direction, my culture is being stripped of its meaning and sold back to me in forms that feel humiliating at best and dehumanizing at worst.
It took me going to India to really connect with the roots I was seeking on the mat in yoga studios. As I walked the streets of Shimla’s legendary markets I learned that Indians had been forbidden to tread the main thoroughfares.
It was here that I started to apprehend the true meaning of colonization. Did you know that Yoga and Ayurveda were banned in India under British rule and colonization?
The practices millions of Westerners now turn to for alternative health and wellness therapies were intentionally eradicated from parts of India to the point that lineages were broken and thousand-year old traditions lost.
READ MORE....
OPEN DEMOCRACY - 13 July 2015
As an Indian woman living in the US I’ve often felt uncomfortable in many yoga spaces. At times, such as when I take a $25.00 yoga class by a well-known teacher who wants to “expose us to the culture by chanting Om to start class“ and her studio hangs the Om symbol in the wrong direction, my culture is being stripped of its meaning and sold back to me in forms that feel humiliating at best and dehumanizing at worst.
It took me going to India to really connect with the roots I was seeking on the mat in yoga studios. As I walked the streets of Shimla’s legendary markets I learned that Indians had been forbidden to tread the main thoroughfares.
It was here that I started to apprehend the true meaning of colonization. Did you know that Yoga and Ayurveda were banned in India under British rule and colonization?
The practices millions of Westerners now turn to for alternative health and wellness therapies were intentionally eradicated from parts of India to the point that lineages were broken and thousand-year old traditions lost.
READ MORE....
The Future of Work
According to academic entrepreneur and strategist Heather McGowan, a focus on certainty over creativity is coming at our peril.
By Natalie Nixon
Director of the Strategic Design MBA at Philadelphia University and Principal of Figure 8 Thinking, LLC
INC. - Jul 16, 2015
Last month innovation strategist Heather McGowan gave an interesting talk at the Amplify Festival on "the future of work." I've had the pleasure of working with Heather in the past when launching the Strategic Design MBA program at Philadelphia University. Here, I've captured some of Heather's top of mind on what needs to be in place for the ways we will need to work.
Heather, just to provide some context, what's the impetus of your thoughts on "the future of work"?
The world of work has changed dramatically, and higher education is not prepared and not preparing graduates to navigate. In the last decade I have focused increasingly on the future of work and on how higher education has to prepare workers. I have since advised college/university presidents and corporate leaders on how to prepare for and adjust to these new realities.
So what is the Amplify Festival and how did you come to be part of it?
The Amplify Festival, now in its 10th year, is a weeklong event created and sponsored by AMP Limited, the largest financial service provider in Australia and New Zealand, as a learning event for their employees, but it's also open to the public. Its founder and executive producer Annalie Killian created the Amplify Festival because she believes "in today's rapidly changing world, learning must be part of work."
This year the theme was Rethink Everything. Annalie and her team selected 32 speakers from around the world and chose topics like the future of work, the future of money, and reimagining the economy (videos of the talks can be seen here). I was impressed with how they weaved together topics to offer a synthesis of the shifting landscape of life and work. Annalie approached me to be a speaker after reading some of my blogs. I was selected to synthesize, conceptualize, and visualize the impact of accelerated change on the economy, jobs, skills, and education.
READ MORE.....
By Natalie Nixon
Director of the Strategic Design MBA at Philadelphia University and Principal of Figure 8 Thinking, LLC
INC. - Jul 16, 2015
Last month innovation strategist Heather McGowan gave an interesting talk at the Amplify Festival on "the future of work." I've had the pleasure of working with Heather in the past when launching the Strategic Design MBA program at Philadelphia University. Here, I've captured some of Heather's top of mind on what needs to be in place for the ways we will need to work.
Heather, just to provide some context, what's the impetus of your thoughts on "the future of work"?
The world of work has changed dramatically, and higher education is not prepared and not preparing graduates to navigate. In the last decade I have focused increasingly on the future of work and on how higher education has to prepare workers. I have since advised college/university presidents and corporate leaders on how to prepare for and adjust to these new realities.
So what is the Amplify Festival and how did you come to be part of it?
The Amplify Festival, now in its 10th year, is a weeklong event created and sponsored by AMP Limited, the largest financial service provider in Australia and New Zealand, as a learning event for their employees, but it's also open to the public. Its founder and executive producer Annalie Killian created the Amplify Festival because she believes "in today's rapidly changing world, learning must be part of work."
This year the theme was Rethink Everything. Annalie and her team selected 32 speakers from around the world and chose topics like the future of work, the future of money, and reimagining the economy (videos of the talks can be seen here). I was impressed with how they weaved together topics to offer a synthesis of the shifting landscape of life and work. Annalie approached me to be a speaker after reading some of my blogs. I was selected to synthesize, conceptualize, and visualize the impact of accelerated change on the economy, jobs, skills, and education.
READ MORE.....
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
A New Book: Gulf Security and the U.S. Military Regime Survival and the Politics of Basing
Geoffrey F. Gresh
Stanford University Press - 2015
The U.S. military maintains a significant
presence across the Arabian Peninsula but it must now confront a new and
emerging dynamic as most Gulf Cooperation Council countries have begun
to diversify their political, economic, and security partnerships with
countries other than the United States—with many turning to ascending
powers such as China, Russia, and India. For Gulf Arab monarchies, the
choice of security partner is made more complicated by increased
domestic and regional instability stemming in part from Iraq, Syria, and
a menacing Iran: factors that threaten to alter totally the Gulf's
current security dynamic.
Understanding the dynamics of base politicization in a Gulf host nation—or any other—is therefore vitally important for the U.S. today. Gulf National Security and the U.S. Military examines both Gulf Arab national security and U.S. military basing relations with Gulf Arab monarchy hosts from the Second World War to the present day. Three in-depth country cases—Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Oman—help explain the important questions posed by the author regarding when and why a host nation either terminated a U.S. military basing presence or granted U.S. military basing access.
The analysis of the cases offers a fresh perspective on how the United States has adapted to sometimes rapidly shifting regional security dynamics and factors that influence a host nation's preference for eviction or renegotiation, based on its perception of internal versus external threats.
Stanford University Press - 2015
Understanding the dynamics of base politicization in a Gulf host nation—or any other—is therefore vitally important for the U.S. today. Gulf National Security and the U.S. Military examines both Gulf Arab national security and U.S. military basing relations with Gulf Arab monarchy hosts from the Second World War to the present day. Three in-depth country cases—Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Oman—help explain the important questions posed by the author regarding when and why a host nation either terminated a U.S. military basing presence or granted U.S. military basing access.
The analysis of the cases offers a fresh perspective on how the United States has adapted to sometimes rapidly shifting regional security dynamics and factors that influence a host nation's preference for eviction or renegotiation, based on its perception of internal versus external threats.
About the author
Geoffrey F. Gresh is an Associate Professor at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
China Fences In Its Nomads, and an Ancient Life Withers
点击查看本文中文版 Read in Chinese
By ANDREW JACOBS
THE NEW YORK TIMES - JULY 11, 2015
READ MORE....
By ANDREW JACOBS
THE NEW YORK TIMES - JULY 11, 2015
MADOI, China — If modern material comforts are the measure of success, then Gere, a 59-year-old former yak-and-sheep herder in China’s western Qinghai Province, should be a happy man.
In
the two years since the Chinese government forced him to sell his
livestock and move into a squat concrete house here on the windswept
Tibetan plateau, Gere and his family have acquired a washing machine, a
refrigerator and a color television that beams Mandarin-language
historical dramas into their whitewashed living room.
But Gere, who like many Tibetans uses a single name, is filled with regret. Like hundreds of thousands of pastoralists across China
who have been relocated into bleak townships over the past decade, he
is jobless, deeply indebted and dependent on shrinking government
subsidies to buy the milk, meat and wool he once obtained from his
flocks.
“We don’t go hungry, but we have lost the life that our ancestors practiced for thousands of years,” he said.
In
what amounts to one of the most ambitious attempts made at social
engineering, the Chinese government is in the final stages of a
15-year-old campaign to settle the millions of pastoralists who once
roamed China’s vast borderlands. By year’s end, Beijing claims it will
have moved the remaining 1.2 million herders into towns that provide
access to schools, electricity and modern health care.
READ MORE....
The Struggle for the Leadership of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood
Georges Fahmi Article
CARNEGIE - July 14, 2015
A sharp conflict over the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has played out recently. The former members of the Guidance Bureau, the top executive body that formulates the policies of the organization, are jockeying with the new leadership that was elected in February 2014 and has been spearheading the activities of the Brotherhood on the ground since then. The conflict is not a new development—the Brotherhood had managed to contain the dispute for months to avoid harming the cohesion of the organization and the morale of its members on the ground. But the public expression of protracted disagreement is new. It burst into the open in May 2015 after sharp exchanges between the two factions in the media.
CARNEGIE - July 14, 2015
A sharp conflict over the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has played out recently. The former members of the Guidance Bureau, the top executive body that formulates the policies of the organization, are jockeying with the new leadership that was elected in February 2014 and has been spearheading the activities of the Brotherhood on the ground since then. The conflict is not a new development—the Brotherhood had managed to contain the dispute for months to avoid harming the cohesion of the organization and the morale of its members on the ground. But the public expression of protracted disagreement is new. It burst into the open in May 2015 after sharp exchanges between the two factions in the media.
A
sharp conflict over the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
has played out recently. The former members of the Guidance Bureau, the
top executive body that formulates the policies of the organization, are
jockeying with the new leadership that was elected in February 2014 and
has been spearheading the activities of the Brotherhood on the ground
since then.
The conflict is not a new development—the Brotherhood had managed to contain the dispute for months to avoid harming the cohesion of the organization and the morale of its members on the ground. But the public expression of protracted disagreement is new. It burst into the open in May 2015 after sharp exchanges between the two factions in the media.
Read more at: http://carnegie-mec.org/2015/07/14/struggle-for-leadership-of-egypt-s-muslim-brotherhood/idbr
The conflict is not a new development—the Brotherhood had managed to contain the dispute for months to avoid harming the cohesion of the organization and the morale of its members on the ground. But the public expression of protracted disagreement is new. It burst into the open in May 2015 after sharp exchanges between the two factions in the media.
Read more at: http://carnegie-mec.org/2015/07/14/struggle-for-leadership-of-egypt-s-muslim-brotherhood/idbr
A
sharp conflict over the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
has played out recently. The former members of the Guidance Bureau, the
top executive body that formulates the policies of the organization, are
jockeying with the new leadership that was elected in February 2014 and
has been spearheading the activities of the Brotherhood on the ground
since then.
The conflict is not a new development—the Brotherhood had managed to contain the dispute for months to avoid harming the cohesion of the organization and the morale of its members on the ground. But the public expression of protracted disagreement is new. It burst into the open in May 2015 after sharp exchanges between the two factions in the media.
Read more at: http://carnegie-mec.org/2015/07/14/struggle-for-leadership-of-egypt-s-muslim-brotherhood/idbr
READ MORE....
The conflict is not a new development—the Brotherhood had managed to contain the dispute for months to avoid harming the cohesion of the organization and the morale of its members on the ground. But the public expression of protracted disagreement is new. It burst into the open in May 2015 after sharp exchanges between the two factions in the media.
Read more at: http://carnegie-mec.org/2015/07/14/struggle-for-leadership-of-egypt-s-muslim-brotherhood/idbr
Panama Canal Expansion to Boost China-LatAm Infrastructure Cooperation: Chinese Official
Xinhua - July 15, 2015
PANAMA CITY, July 14 (Xinhua) -- The expansion project of the Panama Canal will create more opportunities for the cooperation on infrastructure between China and Latin America, a Chinese official said Monday.
The canal, which was built 101 years ago, is undergoing an expansion project of 5 billion U.S. dollars to allow larger modern vessels to go through.
Upon its completion in 2016, the canal will be able to accommodate so-called Post-Panamax ships that are larger than Panamax ships, which is important for trade between the Americas and Asia.
A Panamax ship, determined principally by the dimensions of the canal's lock chambers, is no more than 300 meters long, no more than 33 meters wide and has a draft no more than 12 meters deep.
Ports in the Caribbean countries and other Atlantic coastal nations will therefore need to update their facilities to receive bigger vessels, which will provide new opportunities of construction projects for Chinese companies, said Wang Jian, deputy representative of the Chinese Commercial Development Bureau in Panama.
READ MORE....
PANAMA CITY, July 14 (Xinhua) -- The expansion project of the Panama Canal will create more opportunities for the cooperation on infrastructure between China and Latin America, a Chinese official said Monday.
The canal, which was built 101 years ago, is undergoing an expansion project of 5 billion U.S. dollars to allow larger modern vessels to go through.
Upon its completion in 2016, the canal will be able to accommodate so-called Post-Panamax ships that are larger than Panamax ships, which is important for trade between the Americas and Asia.
A Panamax ship, determined principally by the dimensions of the canal's lock chambers, is no more than 300 meters long, no more than 33 meters wide and has a draft no more than 12 meters deep.
Ports in the Caribbean countries and other Atlantic coastal nations will therefore need to update their facilities to receive bigger vessels, which will provide new opportunities of construction projects for Chinese companies, said Wang Jian, deputy representative of the Chinese Commercial Development Bureau in Panama.
READ MORE....
First unmanned factory takes shape in Dongguan City
People's Daily Online - July 15, 2015
The first unmanned factory in Dongguan, a city of southeastern China's Guangdong province, lays out a vision of future manufacturing: all the processes are operated by computer-controlled robots, computer numerical control machining equipment, unmanned transport trucks and automated warehouse equipment. The technical staff just sits at the computer and monitors through a central control system.
At the workshop of Changying Precision Technology Company in Dongguan, known as the "world factory", which manufactures cell phone modules, 60 robot arms at 10 production lines are polishing the modules day and night. Each line has an automatic belt and three workers who are just responsible for checking lines and monitoring.
A few months ago, it required 650 workers to finish this process. A robot arm can replace six to eight workers, now there are 60 workers and the number will be reduced to 20 in the future, according to Luo Weiqiang, general manager of the company.
This is the first step of the "robot replace human" program. In the next two years the number of robots will be increased to 1,000 and 80 percent process will be conducted by robots, said Chen Qixing, president of the company.
READ MORE....
The first unmanned factory in Dongguan, a city of southeastern China's Guangdong province, lays out a vision of future manufacturing: all the processes are operated by computer-controlled robots, computer numerical control machining equipment, unmanned transport trucks and automated warehouse equipment. The technical staff just sits at the computer and monitors through a central control system.
At the workshop of Changying Precision Technology Company in Dongguan, known as the "world factory", which manufactures cell phone modules, 60 robot arms at 10 production lines are polishing the modules day and night. Each line has an automatic belt and three workers who are just responsible for checking lines and monitoring.
A few months ago, it required 650 workers to finish this process. A robot arm can replace six to eight workers, now there are 60 workers and the number will be reduced to 20 in the future, according to Luo Weiqiang, general manager of the company.
This is the first step of the "robot replace human" program. In the next two years the number of robots will be increased to 1,000 and 80 percent process will be conducted by robots, said Chen Qixing, president of the company.
READ MORE....
Comprehensive Chinese military buildup
by Richard Weitz
The recent Pentagon reports on Chinese
military power do not confirm any radical changes or breakthroughs in
Chinese military capabilities during the past few years but do suggest a
comprehensive Chinese military buildup that should propel China to
great power status in a few decades regardless of its leaders’
intentions
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army
(PLA) continues to operate at ever-greater distances from Chinese
territory, including for supporting global peace and security missions
as well as for more unilateral coercive activities. China remains the
leading contributor of the five permanent members of the Security
Council to UN peacekeeping missions. In addition, the PLA Navy continues
to assign ships to the Gulf of Aden fighting the sea pirates that
operate from bases in Somalia. Meanwhile, Chinese warships can
increasingly be found patrolling in the disputed waters of the East and
South China Seas. The Chinese armed forces are also engaging in larger
and more complex exercises.
U.S. officials are not concerned about of
any single Chinese weapon system or exercise, but by the comprehensive
and sustained nature of China’s military buildup, which is having
“destabilizing” effect in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, the
sheer magnitude of China’s missile buildup continued to impress,
especially its concentration near Taiwan at a time when cross-strait
tensions remain low. The military balance continues its inexorable shift
against Taipei, with little prospect of any development that might
reverse this trend given China’s advantages in size and proximity.
Although the U.S. military prepares to defend Taiwan if ordered by the
White House, the PLA’s ballistic missiles, cyber capabilities, and other
instruments of deterrence and disruption are giving the PLA formidable
anti-access, area-denial (A2AD) capabilities against the Pentagon.
Iran deal is a step toward reimagining the Middle East
By Stephen Kinzer
Boston Globe - July 14, 2015
Pieces on the global chessboard are not nailed permanently into place. With Iran, as recently with Cuba, President Obama has proven that world leaders can move the pieces when it is in their interest. This will be his greatest foreign policy legacy.
The newly announced accord between Iran and six outside powers deals only with the nation’s nuclear program. Its true meaning, though, is far greater. It is a step toward reimagining the Middle East and America’s role there.
Hostility between the United States and Iran is a 36-year-old institution in global politics. Poisoned relationships like these fall into patterns that are amazingly difficult to break. Anger takes on a momentum of its own. Each party looks for new reasons to detest the other. This is the spiral Obama now seeks to break.
The central achievement of this new accord, at least from the US perspective, it that it all but guarantees Iran will not develop nuclear weapons. This is a strategic breakthrough for which Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry deserve great credit. Unless the accord falls apart, they have removed a profoundly destabilizing factor from Middle East politics.
READ MORE....
Boston Globe - July 14, 2015
Pieces on the global chessboard are not nailed permanently into place. With Iran, as recently with Cuba, President Obama has proven that world leaders can move the pieces when it is in their interest. This will be his greatest foreign policy legacy.
The newly announced accord between Iran and six outside powers deals only with the nation’s nuclear program. Its true meaning, though, is far greater. It is a step toward reimagining the Middle East and America’s role there.
Hostility between the United States and Iran is a 36-year-old institution in global politics. Poisoned relationships like these fall into patterns that are amazingly difficult to break. Anger takes on a momentum of its own. Each party looks for new reasons to detest the other. This is the spiral Obama now seeks to break.
The central achievement of this new accord, at least from the US perspective, it that it all but guarantees Iran will not develop nuclear weapons. This is a strategic breakthrough for which Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry deserve great credit. Unless the accord falls apart, they have removed a profoundly destabilizing factor from Middle East politics.
READ MORE....
Poetry and Politics in Iran
By Neima Jahromi
The New Yorker - July 14, 2015
In 1965, after a trip through China and Japan, the Iranian modernist Sohrab Sepehri found his voice. It could be heard in a new poem he had written, called “The Sound of Water’s Footsteps.” Sepehri puzzles over his identity as a writer, as a Muslim, as a widely travelled painter, and as a man from Kashan, where, in the seventh century, according to legend, Arab invaders intent on spreading Islam subdued the poet’s home town by throwing scorpions over the walls. Sepehri muses on the space race and “the idea of smelling a flower on another planet,” and he writes in free verse, inspired by Nima Yushij, a kind of Ezra Pound figure in the history of modern Persian poetry, who was inspired by the poetic notions of French Symbolists. Reflecting on a country with centuries of bumpy foreign contact, he draws out figures of confusion and displacement:
I saw a book with words made of crystal.
I saw a sheet of paper made of spring.
I saw a museum far from grass,
A mosque far from water.
Sepehri’s poem spoke to the alienation that many Iranians felt in the nineteen-sixties, as technology, literature, film, and imperial encroachments brought ideas from distant cultures to bear on the country’s traditions. Alienation eventually gave way to resentment and distress. Many people—poets, mullahs, and political dissidents among them—lamented what they saw as Iran’s increasing economic and cultural dependence on foreign powers.
READ MORE....
The New Yorker - July 14, 2015
In 1965, after a trip through China and Japan, the Iranian modernist Sohrab Sepehri found his voice. It could be heard in a new poem he had written, called “The Sound of Water’s Footsteps.” Sepehri puzzles over his identity as a writer, as a Muslim, as a widely travelled painter, and as a man from Kashan, where, in the seventh century, according to legend, Arab invaders intent on spreading Islam subdued the poet’s home town by throwing scorpions over the walls. Sepehri muses on the space race and “the idea of smelling a flower on another planet,” and he writes in free verse, inspired by Nima Yushij, a kind of Ezra Pound figure in the history of modern Persian poetry, who was inspired by the poetic notions of French Symbolists. Reflecting on a country with centuries of bumpy foreign contact, he draws out figures of confusion and displacement:
I saw a book with words made of crystal.
I saw a sheet of paper made of spring.
I saw a museum far from grass,
A mosque far from water.
Sepehri’s poem spoke to the alienation that many Iranians felt in the nineteen-sixties, as technology, literature, film, and imperial encroachments brought ideas from distant cultures to bear on the country’s traditions. Alienation eventually gave way to resentment and distress. Many people—poets, mullahs, and political dissidents among them—lamented what they saw as Iran’s increasing economic and cultural dependence on foreign powers.
READ MORE....
Saturday, July 4, 2015
Saturday, June 20, 2015
The Decline of International Studies Why Flying Blind Is Dangerous
By Charles King
Foreign Affairs - Tuesday, June 16, 2015
In October 2013, the U.S. Department of State eliminated its funding program for advanced language and cultural training on Russia and the former Soviet Union. Created in 1983 as a special appropriation by Congress, the so-called Title VIII Program had supported generations of specialists working in academia, think tanks, and the U.S. government itself. But as a State Department official told the Russian news service RIA Novosti at the time, “In this fiscal climate, it just didn’t make it.” The program’s shuttering came just a month before the start of a now well-known chain of events: Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the descent of U.S.-Russian relations to their lowest level since the Cold War. The timing was, to say the least, unfortunate.
The end of the United States’ premier federal program for Russian studies saved taxpayers only $3.3 million—the cost of two Tomahawk cruise missiles or about half a day’s sea time for an aircraft carrier strike group. The development was part of a broader trend: the scaling back of a long-term national commitment to education and research focused on international affairs. Two years ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences warned of a hidden crisis in the humanities and social sciences. “Now more than ever,” the academy’s report concluded, “the spirit of international cooperation, the promotion of trade and foreign investment, the requirements of international diplomacy, and even the enhancement of national security depend in some measure on an American citizenry trained in humanistic and social scientific disciplines, including languages, transnational studies, moral and political philosophy, global ethics, and international relations.” In response to lobbying by universities and scholarly associations, Title VIII was resuscitated earlier this year, but it came back at less than half its previous funding level and with future appropriations left uncertain. Given the mounting challenges that Washington faces in Russia and eastern Europe, now seems to be an especially odd time to reduce federal support for educating the next cohort of experts.
READ MORE.....
Foreign Affairs - Tuesday, June 16, 2015
In October 2013, the U.S. Department of State eliminated its funding program for advanced language and cultural training on Russia and the former Soviet Union. Created in 1983 as a special appropriation by Congress, the so-called Title VIII Program had supported generations of specialists working in academia, think tanks, and the U.S. government itself. But as a State Department official told the Russian news service RIA Novosti at the time, “In this fiscal climate, it just didn’t make it.” The program’s shuttering came just a month before the start of a now well-known chain of events: Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the descent of U.S.-Russian relations to their lowest level since the Cold War. The timing was, to say the least, unfortunate.
The end of the United States’ premier federal program for Russian studies saved taxpayers only $3.3 million—the cost of two Tomahawk cruise missiles or about half a day’s sea time for an aircraft carrier strike group. The development was part of a broader trend: the scaling back of a long-term national commitment to education and research focused on international affairs. Two years ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences warned of a hidden crisis in the humanities and social sciences. “Now more than ever,” the academy’s report concluded, “the spirit of international cooperation, the promotion of trade and foreign investment, the requirements of international diplomacy, and even the enhancement of national security depend in some measure on an American citizenry trained in humanistic and social scientific disciplines, including languages, transnational studies, moral and political philosophy, global ethics, and international relations.” In response to lobbying by universities and scholarly associations, Title VIII was resuscitated earlier this year, but it came back at less than half its previous funding level and with future appropriations left uncertain. Given the mounting challenges that Washington faces in Russia and eastern Europe, now seems to be an especially odd time to reduce federal support for educating the next cohort of experts.
READ MORE.....
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
The man who was caged in a zoo
In 1904, Ota Benga was kidnapped from Congo and taken to the US, where he was exhibited with monkeys. His appalling story reveals the roots of a racial prejudice that still haunts us
By Pamela Newkirk
The Guardian - Wednesday 3 June 2015
The black clergymen who had been summoned to Harlem’s Mount Olivet Baptist Church for an emergency meeting on the morning of Monday 10 September 1906, arrived in a state of outrage. A day earlier, the New York Times had reported that a young African man – a so-called “pygmy” – had been put on display in the monkey house of the city’s largest zoo. Under the headline “Bushman Shares a Cage With Bronx Park Apes”, the paper reported that crowds of up to 500 people at a time had gathered around the cage to gawk at the diminutive Ota Benga – just under 5ft tall, weighing 103lb – while he preoccupied himself with a pet parrot, deftly shot his bow and arrow, or wove a mat and hammock from bundles of twine placed in the cage. Children giggled and hooted with delight while adults laughed, many uneasily, at the sight.
In anticipation of larger crowds after the publicity in the New York Times, Benga was moved from a smaller chimpanzee cage to one far larger, to make him more visible to spectators. He was also joined by an orangutan called Dohang. While crowds massed to leer at him, the boyish Benga, who was said to be 23 but appeared far younger, sat silently on a stool, staring – sometimes glaring – through the bars.
The exhibition of a visibly shaken African with apes in the New York Zoological Gardens, four decades after the end of slavery in America, would highlight the precarious status of black people in the nation’s imperial city. It pitted the “coloured” ministers, and a few elite allies, against a wall of white indifference, as New York’s newspapers, scientists, public officials, and ordinary citizens revelled in the spectacle. By the end of September, more than 220,000 people had visited the zoo – twice as many as the same month one year earlier. Nearly all of them headed directly to the primate house to see Ota Benga.
READ MORE......
By Pamela Newkirk
The Guardian - Wednesday 3 June 2015
The black clergymen who had been summoned to Harlem’s Mount Olivet Baptist Church for an emergency meeting on the morning of Monday 10 September 1906, arrived in a state of outrage. A day earlier, the New York Times had reported that a young African man – a so-called “pygmy” – had been put on display in the monkey house of the city’s largest zoo. Under the headline “Bushman Shares a Cage With Bronx Park Apes”, the paper reported that crowds of up to 500 people at a time had gathered around the cage to gawk at the diminutive Ota Benga – just under 5ft tall, weighing 103lb – while he preoccupied himself with a pet parrot, deftly shot his bow and arrow, or wove a mat and hammock from bundles of twine placed in the cage. Children giggled and hooted with delight while adults laughed, many uneasily, at the sight.
In anticipation of larger crowds after the publicity in the New York Times, Benga was moved from a smaller chimpanzee cage to one far larger, to make him more visible to spectators. He was also joined by an orangutan called Dohang. While crowds massed to leer at him, the boyish Benga, who was said to be 23 but appeared far younger, sat silently on a stool, staring – sometimes glaring – through the bars.
The exhibition of a visibly shaken African with apes in the New York Zoological Gardens, four decades after the end of slavery in America, would highlight the precarious status of black people in the nation’s imperial city. It pitted the “coloured” ministers, and a few elite allies, against a wall of white indifference, as New York’s newspapers, scientists, public officials, and ordinary citizens revelled in the spectacle. By the end of September, more than 220,000 people had visited the zoo – twice as many as the same month one year earlier. Nearly all of them headed directly to the primate house to see Ota Benga.
READ MORE......
Monday, June 1, 2015
How to shrink a city
Many cities are losing inhabitants. Better to manage decline than try to stop it '
The Economist - May 28th 2015
ONE of the biggest challenges for the world this century is how to accommodate the hundreds of millions of people who will flock to cities, especially in emerging economies.
READ MORE......
The Economist - May 28th 2015
ONE of the biggest challenges for the world this century is how to accommodate the hundreds of millions of people who will flock to cities, especially in emerging economies.
READ MORE......
Map: The U.S. is bound by treaties to defend a quarter of humanity
By Adam Taylor
The Washington Post - May 30, 2015
The United States is bound by a number of treaties that could, in theory, force it to get involved in a war if an ally is attacked. Consider, for example, the situation in Ukraine, a non-member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. If a NATO ally were to find itself under similar threat from Russia, the U.S. may find itself duty bound to war.
Or alternatively, cast your mind to the South China Sea and its territorial disputes. If China were to engage militarily with the Philippines at some point in the near future, the U.S. may well be expected to step in to protect its ally: Since 1951, the U.S. and the Philippines have had a bilateral agreement for mutual defense.
It goes without saying that war with either Russia or China would be a very big deal – especially if that war is on behalf of a third party. This becomes more startling when you realize that, thanks to various treaties and deals set up since 1945, the U.S. government might be legally obligated to defend countries containing 25 percent of the world's population.
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The Washington Post - May 30, 2015
The United States is bound by a number of treaties that could, in theory, force it to get involved in a war if an ally is attacked. Consider, for example, the situation in Ukraine, a non-member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. If a NATO ally were to find itself under similar threat from Russia, the U.S. may find itself duty bound to war.
Or alternatively, cast your mind to the South China Sea and its territorial disputes. If China were to engage militarily with the Philippines at some point in the near future, the U.S. may well be expected to step in to protect its ally: Since 1951, the U.S. and the Philippines have had a bilateral agreement for mutual defense.
It goes without saying that war with either Russia or China would be a very big deal – especially if that war is on behalf of a third party. This becomes more startling when you realize that, thanks to various treaties and deals set up since 1945, the U.S. government might be legally obligated to defend countries containing 25 percent of the world's population.
READ MORE....
Men adrift
Men adrift Badly educated men in rich countries have not adapted well to trade, technology or feminism
THE ECONOMIST - MAY 2015
KIMBERLEY, a receptionist in Tallulah, thinks the local men are lazy. “They don’t do nothin’,” she complains. This is not strictly true. Until recently, some of them organised dog fights in a disused school building.
Tallulah, in the Mississippi Delta, is picturesque but not prosperous. Many of the jobs it used to have are gone. Two prisons and a county jail provide work for a few guards but the men behind bars, obviously, do not have jobs. Nor do many of the young men who hang around on street corners, shooting dice and shooting the breeze. In Madison Parish, the local county, only 47% of men of prime working age (25-54) are working.
The men in Tallulah are typically not well educated: the local high school’s results are poor even by Louisiana’s standards. That would have mattered less, in the old days. A man without much book-learning could find steady work at the mill or in the fields. But the lumber mill has closed, and on nearby farms “jobs that used to take 100 men now take ten,” observes Jason McGuffie, a pastor. A strong pair of hands is no longer enough.
READ MORE....
THE ECONOMIST - MAY 2015
KIMBERLEY, a receptionist in Tallulah, thinks the local men are lazy. “They don’t do nothin’,” she complains. This is not strictly true. Until recently, some of them organised dog fights in a disused school building.
Tallulah, in the Mississippi Delta, is picturesque but not prosperous. Many of the jobs it used to have are gone. Two prisons and a county jail provide work for a few guards but the men behind bars, obviously, do not have jobs. Nor do many of the young men who hang around on street corners, shooting dice and shooting the breeze. In Madison Parish, the local county, only 47% of men of prime working age (25-54) are working.
The men in Tallulah are typically not well educated: the local high school’s results are poor even by Louisiana’s standards. That would have mattered less, in the old days. A man without much book-learning could find steady work at the mill or in the fields. But the lumber mill has closed, and on nearby farms “jobs that used to take 100 men now take ten,” observes Jason McGuffie, a pastor. A strong pair of hands is no longer enough.
READ MORE....
Printing a human kidney
TED2011 · Filmed Mar 2011
Surgeon Anthony Atala demonstrates an early-stage experiment that could someday solve the organ-donor problem: a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney. Using similar technology, Dr. Atala's young patient Luke Massella received an engineered bladder 10 years ago; we meet him onstage.
WATCH THE VIDEO.....
Surgeon Anthony Atala demonstrates an early-stage experiment that could someday solve the organ-donor problem: a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney. Using similar technology, Dr. Atala's young patient Luke Massella received an engineered bladder 10 years ago; we meet him onstage.
WATCH THE VIDEO.....
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