The Big Picture Archives - Page 28 of 33

October 15, 2012

Iranians Planning to Create Environmental Catastrophe in Hormuz Strait – SPIEGEL ONLINE

By Erich Follath

Iran could be planning to create a vast oil spill in the Strait of Hormuz, according to a top secret report obtained by Western intelligence officials. The aim of the operation is to both temporarily block the vital shipping channel and to force a suspension of Western sanctions.

…..Western intelligence experts speculate that Jafari’s planned operation is an expression of growing frustration. ……..Iran derives more than 50 percent of its government revenue from oil exports, which declined from about 2.4 million barrels a day in July 2011 to about 1 million barrels in July 2012…….Iran can hardly sell its oil because of the embargo. Even countries that don’t feel bound to uphold the sanctions are shying away from deals, because no one wants to insure the oil shipments……

via Iranians Planning to Create Environmental Catastrophe in Hormuz Strait – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

October 10, 2012

Failing History – By Amy Zegart | Foreign Policy

By AMY ZEGART

The more important and overlooked lesson…. is that the structure of the U.S. intelligence system made a tough job nearly impossible. Although the CIA was created in 1947 to prevent another Pearl Harbor, the agency has never really been central. Intelligence agencies in the State, War, Navy, and Justice departments hobbled the CIA from its earliest days to protect their own turf. As a result, in 1962 intelligence reporting and analysis about Cuba was handled by half a dozen agencies with different missions, specialties, incentives, security clearance levels, access to information, and no common boss with the power to knock bureaucratic heads together short of the president. In this bureaucratic jungle, signals of Khrushchev’s true intentions — and there were several — got dispersed and isolated instead of consolidated and amplified to sound the alarm.

Sound familiar? Before 9/11, this same fragmentation kept U.S. intelligence agencies from seizing 23 different opportunities to disrupt the terrorist plot…….

via Failing History – By Amy Zegart | Foreign Policy.

September 26, 2012

ROSS GITTINS: We need a more balanced approach to progress

Ross Gittins:

A lot of the problems the nation struggles with and argues over boil down to the considerable potential for conflict between what economists summarise as “equity” and “efficiency”. We act as though one is right and the other wrong but, in truth, sensible people want a mix of both. So, though we don’t always realise it, the hard part is finding the best trade-off between the two……..

via ROSS GITTINS: We need a more balanced approach to progress.

September 25, 2012

Tim Harford — Don’t take growth for granted

By Tim Harford

Economic growth is a modern invention: 20th-century growth rates were far higher than those in the 19th century, and pre-1750 growth rates were almost imperceptible by modern standards. Many have seen this as an encouraging trend, but [economist Robert Gordon] draws a different lesson: growth is a recent phenomenon, so why assume that it will last?

……Demographics and debt accumulation have both speeded up growth in the past and, as the pendulum swings back, demographics and debt repayment will reduce it in the future…….

via Tim Harford — Don’t take growth for granted.

September 25, 2012

Czech foreign minister: The West is losing to Putin | The Cable

By Josh Rogin

“We are not going back to Stalin, we are going back to Nicholas I,” said Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech minister of foreign affairs, in an exclusive interview with The Cable. “It was under Nicholas that the great part of Central Asia was conquered by the Russians and Putin is quite successfully getting them under the control of Russia again, and the West is losing.”

…..”The Pacific basin is now more important [to the US] than Europe, it’s perfectly understandable,” he said. “I think in Europe we have to learn that we have to care much more ourselves, for our own security.”

via Czech foreign minister: The West is losing to Putin | The Cable.

September 24, 2012

Down with politics | WashingtonExaminer.com

By Gene Healy

Politics makes us worse because “politics is the mindkiller,” as intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it……. we indulge our tribal hard-wiring by picking a political “team” and denouncing the “enemy.”

But our atavistic Red/Blue tribalism plays to the interests of “individual politicians in getting you to identify with them instead of judging them.”

……..We’ll get more of the same, Yudkowsky argues, until “Republifans and Demofans … stop enthusiastically cheering for rich lawyers because they wear certain colors, and begin judging them as employees severely derelict in their duties.”

via Down with politics | WashingtonExaminer.com.

September 18, 2012

Dangerous Waters | Foreign Policy

BY STEPHANIE KLEINE-AHLBRANDT

The wave of anti-Japanese protests that swept across dozens of cities in China this weekend, prompted by Tokyo’s purchase of three disputed islands, has obscured a potentially more worrying development that risks drawing the two countries into a larger conflict: China’s adoption of a legal framework empowering it to expel foreign vessels in disputed waters in the East China Sea.

……More frequent Chinese patrols in the area, along with the Japanese Coast Guard continuing to patrol near the islands, raises the risk of maritime clashes higher than it has ever been. Although the two countries have dealt with past run-ins — such as when the Japanese Coast Guard arrested a Chinese skipper in 2010 after his boat collided with a Japanese vessel — and succeeded in cooling tensions, the current situation is of a different order. That act could be attributed to an overzealous Chinese fisherman. But now, a skirmish between official law enforcement vessels in the current context could prove irresolvable.

via Dangerous Waters – By Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt | Foreign Policy.

August 19, 2012

The Oil Drum | America’s Deficit Attention Disorder

According to the World Wildlife Federation’s 2012 Living Planet Report, at the current rate of consumption, “it is taking 1.5 years for the Earth to fully regenerate the renewable resources that people are using in a single year. Instead of living off the interest, we are eating into our natural capital.” This is a path to never-never land. Unlike with financial deficits, simple debt forgiveness is not an option.

When we deplete Earth’s bio-capacity—its capacity to support life in its many varied forms—we are not borrowing from the future; we are stealing from the future. Even though it is the most serious of all human-caused deficits, it rarely receives mention in current political debates.

via The Oil Drum | Drumbeat: August 18, 2012.

August 18, 2012

New Wave of Deft Robots Is Changing Global Industry – NYTimes.com

The cost of automated assembly lines is falling and at some point will become cheaper than their labor-intensive equivalent. The result could be a tectonic shift in manufacturing but where will the redundant assembly workers find jobs? JOHN MARKOFF of the NYTimes writes:

The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,” they wrote in their book, “Race Against the Machine.”

In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today.

via New Wave of Deft Robots Is Changing Global Industry – NYTimes.com.

August 13, 2012

Which Country Has the Best Government? – SPIEGEL ONLINE

The Craft of Ruling: Which Country Has the Best Government?
By Bernhard Zand

American political scientist Charles Kupchans claims that there is a “mismatch between the growing demand for good governance and its shrinking supply,” putting Western powers under pressure. He says it’s no coincidence that the political systems in the US, Europe and Japan are all discovering their limits almost simultaneously. Their traditional tools, such as their currency control instruments, have repeatedly proven to be powerless when faced with the sheer might of global financial groups. Likewise, democratic governments, which rely on the approval of their electorate, “have proved far better at distributing benefits than at apportioning sacrifice.” Worse still, many likeminded Western democracies no longer see eye-to-eye on how to solve global problems, from climate change to the isolation of Iran.

via Good Governance Series: Which Goverment Is Best – SPIEGEL ONLINE.