Monica Lewinsky, TED Speech

Monica Lewinsky and the Shame Game, The New Yorker

What Charisma Is, and How To Get It

From CBS: January 8, 2012

CHARISMA is a word that’s mentioned a lot when discussing political candidates. Can charisma be precisely measured? Or is something we simply know when we see it? Our Cover Story is reported now by Susan Spencer of “48 Hours”:

 

International Golf Contest in North Korea?

Communists are not communists any more: they are even hosting international golf contest.

SEOUL (Yonhap) — North Korea may host an international golf tournament on Mount Kumgang next year, a move to vex South Korean investors, according to a news report on Aug. 5.

This year’s North Korea Golf Open took place at the Pyongyang Golf Complex on the outskirts of the capital city on July 28-29 in a yearly event that has been sponsored by Britain’s Lupine Travel since 2011, reported the Radio Free Asia (RFA).

In an interview with the Washington-based RFA, the British firm’s president, Dylan Harris, said it has received permission to open such an international tournament for amateur golfers in 2015 at the Mount Kumgang course, which is currently closed amid the suspension of the inter-Korean tourism program.

The South-run tour of the scenic mountain on the North’s east coast came to a halt in 2008, shortly after a South Korean tourist was shot dead by a North Korean soldier there.

The golf course, the second of its kind in the reclusive communist nation, was constructed by South Korean investors. It would be absurd for the North to open the facility to foreigners without consultations with them.

A total of 15 players from eight nations, including Britain, China, Singapore and Estonia, meanwhile, participated in this year’s North Korea Open, Harris was quoted as saying.

The number marks a significant drop from an average of around 30 in previous competitions.

The decrease seems to be attributable to sharp military tensions on the peninsula and the North’s cancellation of this year’s massive dance and gymnastics performance known as the Arirang show.

Tech’s Political Culture: The Libertarianism of Silicon Valley

Whether you agree with this article or not, it is worth reading. Do you have any comments to share with others about this view?

Tech’s toxic political culture: The stealth libertarianism of Silicon Valley bigwigs: Who talks like FDR but acts like Ayn Rand? Easy: Silicon Valley’s wealthiest and most powerful people, by ANDREW LEONARD, Salon

Marc Andreessen is a major architect of our current technologically mediated reality. As the leader of the team that created the Mosaic Web browser in the early ’90s and as co-founder of Netscape, Andreessen, possibly more than any single other person, helped make the Internet accessible to the masses.

In his second act as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Andreessen has hardly slackened the pace. The portfolio of companies with investments from his VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is a roll-call for tech “disruption.” (Included on the list: Airbnb, Lyft, Box, Oculus VR, Imgur, Pinterest, RapGenius, Skype and, of course, Twitter and Facebook.) Social media, the “sharing” economy, Bitcoin — Andreessen’s dollars are fueling all of it.

So when the man tweets, people listen.

And, good grief, right now the man is tweeting. Since Jan. 1, when Andreessen decided to aggressively reengage with Twitter after staying mostly silent for years, @pmarca has been pumping out so many tweets that one wonders how he finds time to attend to his normal business.

On June 1, Andreessen took his game to a new level. In what seems to be a major bid to establish himself as Silicon Valley’s premier public intellectual, Andreessen has deployed Twitter to deliver a unified theory of tech utopia.

In seven different multi-part tweet streams, adding up to a total of almost 100 tweets, Andreessen argues that we shouldn’t bother our heads about the prospect that robots will steal all our jobs.  Technological innovation will end poverty, solve bottlenecks in education and healthcare, and usher in an era of ubiquitous affluence in which all our basic needs are taken care of. We will occupy our time engaged in the creative pursuits of our heart’s desire.

Food Price Watch, May 2014

The May 2014 Issue of Food Price Watch finds that international prices of food increased by 4% between January and April 2014, putting an end to the declining trend of food prices sustained since August 2012. The thematic section of this report discusses the role that food prices and food shortages may have on food riots, a term widely used but poorly defined, and partially reflecting decades of overlooking the food-to-conflict nexus.

World Bank Global Food Price Index

Read the report from The World Bank

Timothy Geithner from New Republic

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s profile of Tim Geithner in Sunday’s New York TimesMagazine, pegged to the former Treasury secretary’s just-released book, doesn’t break much news. Most of us who followed Geithner’s career already knew he wanted to bail out Lehman Brothers, opposed nationalizing Citigroup, and tried to spike the Volcker Rule. But I’ll say this for Sorkin’s piece: It includes one of the most revealing Geithner quotes I’ve ever read. It comes at the end of the piece, while Geithner  is defending his new job as president of the private equity firm Warburg Pincus. “The private sector is what most people do for a living,” Geithner tells Sorkin. “I thought that the possibility some people would criticize me for not staying a public servant was not a good reason not to go try and learn something new.” From the New Republic

Elizabeth Warren 2016?

While Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she hopes former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton makes a run for the White House in 2016, she declined to explicitly endorse Clinton’s candidacy today on “This Week.”

“You know, all of the women – Democratic women, I should say, of the Senate – urged Hillary Clinton to run, and I hope she does,” Warren responded when asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if Clinton was her candidate in 2016.

“Hillary is terrific,” she said when asked again if she would endorse her in the event Clinton makes a run for the Democratic nomination…

From ABC News

Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices

For more than a year, ever since leaving the post of Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has been playing the game of being in but not officially in the 2016 Presidential contest. This strategy has accomplished what it was clearly intended to do: freezing the race and deterring any other top-level Democrats from entering it, while protecting Clinton from the additional media scrutiny and Republican attacks she would have faced if she had already declared her candidacy. From The New Yorker

A Fighting Chance, Elizabeth Warren

In her new book, Elizabeth Warren tells the story of her life in order to make an argument about America (the middle class is trapped in a vise of debt), which is the sort of thing politicians do when they’re running for office. Warren, who spent most of her career as a law-school professor, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012; she’s not up for reëlection until 2018. “I am not running for President,” she insisted at a press conference in Boston in December, pledging that she will finish her term. But the publication, this month, of her autobiography, “A Fighting Chance” (Metropolitan), ahead of a memoir by Hillary Clinton that is due out this summer, only adds to the speculation that Warren is considering challenging Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016. And, even if Warren doesn’t run, this book is part of that race…

From THE NEW YORKER, THE WARREN BRIEF BY JILL LEPORE

Amazon

The Libertarian Surge: George Orwell’s “1984” on the Best-Seller Lists

Libertarianism — the political philosophy that says limited government is the best kind of government — is having its moment. Unfortunately, that’s mostly because government has been expanding in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and the financial crisis. Somehow government failures lead to even more government.

When the financial crisis hit in the fall of 2008, the politicians in Washington had one response: start printing money and bailing out big businesses. First it was Bear Stearns, then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, then most of Wall Street. But voters had a different response. Polls showed widespread opposition to the bailouts. When Congress prepared to vote on President George W. Bush’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, Americans made their opinions known in no uncertain terms. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown reported, “Like my colleagues, my phones have been ringing off the hook. The sentiment from Ohioans about this proposal is universally negative.”

In the end, though, Congress took another vote, and the lobbyists won. Wall Street got its bailout. And we can date the birth of the tea party movement to that very week.

Meanwhile, the government’s response to the financial crisis sent people looking for answers. Sales of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” soared. The Cato Institute’s pocket edition of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution even hit The Washington Post best-seller list.

Libertarian ideas often cross left-right boundaries. Lots of libertarians were involved in the tea party and the opposition to the bailouts, the car company takeovers, the 2009 stimulus bill and the quasi-nationalization of health care. But libertarians were also involved in the movement for gay marriage. Indeed, John Podesta, a top adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and founder of the Center for American Progress, noted in 2011 that you probably had to have been a libertarian to have supported gay marriage 15 years earlier. Or take marijuana legalization, which is just now becoming a majority position: Libertarians have been leaders in the opposition to the drug war for many years.

Libertarians have played a key role in the defense of the right to keep and bear arms over the years, notably in the two recent Supreme Court cases that affirmed that the Second Amendment means what it says: Individuals have a right to own guns. Support for stricter gun control has been declining for years.

Much of the libertarian energy in the past few years was generated by the presidential campaigns of former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, and then by the leadership of his son Rand Paul representing Kentucky in the Senate. When Ron Paul began his campaign in 2007, he didn’t attract much attention. But then, in a nationally televised debate, he clashed with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani over the causes of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The confrontation became the cable TV moment of the night.

The next day, the conservative magazine National Review declared it a victory for Giuliani. But his campaign never got off the ground, while Ron Paul’s took off. “Ron Paul” briefly even became one of the most popular search terms on Google News. Paul’s support, especially online and among young voters, was intense, but it wasn’t broad enough to win any primaries.

Paul ran again in 2012, and he found even more success. He hadn’t changed much; indeed, his themes sounded like what he’d been saying since he entered Congress in 1976: The federal government is spending too much, printing too much money and launching too many wars. But the country, and the issues, had changed.

In 2007, Ron Paul warned that an economy based on debt and cheap money from the Federal Reserve was not sustainable, but the economy was booming and nobody wanted to listen. After the crash of 2008, they started listening.

In 2007, Paul criticized excessive federal spending, but with a Republican in the White House Republicans weren’t much interested. When Obama opened taxpayers’ wallets, they listened.

In 2007, Paul criticized endless military intervention, but most Republicans were content to repeat, “The surge is working.” By 2012, even Republicans were getting weary of 10 years of war. They listened.

In 2007, Ron Paul said that Congress and the president should not act outside their powers under the Constitution, but Republicans didn’t want to hear about unconstitutional acts by a Republican president. After the bailouts and the health care takeover and Obama’s unauthorized war in Libya, they listened.

And in 2010, a hitherto unknown ophthalmologist in my home state of Kentucky got elected to the U.S. Senate, helped by being the son of Ron Paul and by the energy of the tea party. Rand Paul upset the Republican establishment candidate in the primary, then comfortably defeated the Democratic attorney general in November.

Rand Paul, like his father, doesn’t agree with libertarians on everything. But in the Senate he’s been a strong voice for freedom on a wide range of issues. He introduced a bill to cut spending and actually balance the federal budget. He spoke out against President Obama’s intervention in Libya. He managed to kill a particularly bad piece of indefinite detainment legislation just by demanding that the Senate vote on it in public view. He fought “government bullies” from the EPA to the TSA, and even managed to get detained by the TSA when he objected to a full-body patdown.

Most memorably, in 2013 he stood like Jimmy Stewart in the movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” at a desk in the Senate for 13 straight hours to force the country’s attention on the issue of unmanned drone strikes.

Shortly after Paul’s filibuster, America’s libertarian soul was pricked again by a series of revelations about government surveillance, overreach and abuse of power. First came the reports suggesting that the IRS had targeted tea party groups and those engaged in “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights” for extra scrutiny and delays in confirming their tax-exempt status. Then we learned that the Justice Department had been looking at the telephone records of as many as 20 reporters and editors at The Associated Press as well as Fox News reporter James Rosen. Both those efforts were part of the Obama administration’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers.

Then came the stunning revelations about the massive surveillance of Americans’ phone calls and emails by the National Security Agency. We learned that in more than a dozen secret rulings, the secret surveillance court has created a secret body of law authorizing the NSA to amass vast collections of data on Americans. The NSA broke privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times a year.

Americans were shocked. Members of Congress expressed outrage. President Obama defended the surveillance programs and assured us that the people with access to all this data “take this work very seriously. They cherish our Constitution.”

But distrust of government is in America’s DNA. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in condemning the Alien and Sedition Acts: “Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism. Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.”

This time it wasn’t “Atlas Shrugged” or “The Road to Serfdom” that shot up on the best-seller lists, it was another libertarian classic: George Orwell’s “1984,” known for its warning that “Big Brother is watching.”

From POLITICO