The Psychology of the Suitcase

Full Disclosure: I hate packing. More, even, than the first whiff of aviation fuel, getting out the suitcases makes my stomach flip over. I regard those unruffled business travellers, with their capsule wardrobes folded into tiny, carry-on wheelie bags, as an alien species. Admittedly I am a nervous flyer, so while I’m packing there is always a corner of my brain wondering what my belongings will look like hanging from a tree on the television news. But that’s far from the only reason packing is stressful.

There is plenty of advice in the cyber­sphere and declutter-your-life books about packing. There’s the luggage itself. Hard- or soft-sided? Four wheels or two? Then there’s whether it’s better to roll your clothes or pack them flat. People with naive ideas about how suitcases are treated at airports swear you must pack your shoes at the “bottom”. Others will tell you to put everything into plastic bags first—true, I think, only of sponge bags, which are prone to leaking at altitude. On arrival, if your clothes are creased (perhaps you forgot to interleave them with tissue paper?) you can supposedly transform them in a bathroom filled with steam. And so on, and on.

There is less analysis of what makes packing so stressful in the first place. It seems to me that the combination of rigid constraints—the deadlines, weight- and size-limits on luggage—and the 
unknown variables of different climates and unfamiliar dress codes is tailor-made to induce anxiety. (...)

Coincidentally, one of the few times I envy men the simplicity of their uniform is when faced with an empty suitcase (one word). Men don’t, as a rule, need to pack tights as well as socks, or different underwear for different outfits, or make-up and heels for evening. Women don’t actually need these, we just feel we do. Because clothes are a kind of camouflage, they are about fitting in. When we travel—indeed one of the reasons we do it—our routines are broken. So we can’t know exactly what we’ll have to fit in with. The trauma of packing is about squeezing the infinite possibilities of elsewhere into a couple of pieces of luggage.

Travelling light to faraway places is a result of the democratisation of travel, which began in the late 19th century, and the ascendancy of the aeroplane. In the days when only rich people travelled for leisure it was a process more akin to moving house, with porters and staff to do the carrying and the packing, and dozens of pieces of luggage each with a specific function, from vast trunks to hat boxes. The suit case, then two separate words, was simply the one dedicated to holding men’s dress suits. (...)

The only rational way to prepare for the unexpected is, like a prosperous Victorian, to take everything with you—which is impossible unless you have the same bag as Mary Poppins. We know we own too much stuff, that we’re too attached to material things, and that it would be good to ditch most of it. But we fear being ill-equipped. At this time of year it’s traditional for a newspaper article to point out what we already know: that we use only 50% of what we pack. But the thing is, we don’t know beforehand which half it will be. Perhaps on a business trip you can predict 
exactly, boringly, what you’ll need. Otherwise packing is a kind of spread-betting: the extra 50% is to cover the possibilities, as well as ourselves.

by Rebecca Willis, More Intelligent Life | Read more:
Image: Bill Brown

Meanwhile, Over at the Real New York Stock Exchange

[ed. How convenient, just as the market was tanking: Outage upends an already tough day for markets. And: Meanwhile over at the real New York Stock Exchange.]

Germany Crushes All Hope Of Greece Getting Debt Relief

As the Grexit debate is falling into the background a new, far more powerful conflict emerges: one between Germany on one side, and the IMF, France, Italy, and perhaps even the US, when it comes to the all important issue of debt relief.

As a reminder, it was the unexpected release of the IMF's debt (un)sustainability draft late last week (with US support over the vocal objections of Europe) that not only gave Tsipras a Greferendum win (he did not desire), but showed clearly that without a debt haircut of at least 30%, any Greek deal will merely lead to another, even more violent Greek default down the line.

Of course, it is not only Greece that needs debt reduction but so do all the other peripheral nations:

Overnight, the Telegraph reported that the "debt-haircut" axis has even more supporters in Europe:

French leaders are working in concert with the White House. Washington is bringing its immense diplomatic power to bear, calling openly on the EU to put "Greece on a path toward debt sustainability" and sort out the festering problem once and for all.

The Franco-American push is backed by Italy's Matteo Renzi, who said the eurozone has to go back to the drawing board and rethink its whole austerity doctrine after the democratic revolt in Greece. He too now backs debt relief for Greece.

Finally, it was none other than Tsipras who piggybacked on the IMF's imlicit recommendation and in the hours following the "victorious" Greferendum, made a clear demand of Europe:

• TSIPRAS ASKS FOR 30 PERCENT DEBT HAIRCUT

Fast forward to this morning when shortly after the latest Greek capitulation, when in Tsipras' official request for ESM bailout he said timidly that "as part of a broader discussion to be held, Greece welcomes the opportunity to explore potential measures to be taken so that its official sector related debt becomes both sustainable and viable over the long term" Germany made it very clear whether there will be any debt haircuts, or reprofiling in the coming years.

Nein. (...)

Reuters just reported that "the German government does not see any reason to grant Greece either a classic debt haircut or any other measures that would slash the value of money on loan to the crisis-ridden country, a spokesman for the finance ministry said on Wednesday.

The only quesiton is whether the German hard-line stance against Greek debt reduction also means that the Troika as we know it is finished, and even more importantly, whether the two European camps, one for and one against debt reduction are now on terminal collision course. (...)

And all to preserve the equity "wealth" of a few banker oligarchs because as we showed on Tuesday, saving the banks is what this has been all about from day one.

by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge |  Read more:

Images: ZeroHedge

Marc Ribot

Chico Bialas, I'll be seeing you 
via:

Looking It in the Face

Of course, I never really believed it would happen. Grow old, I mean. I knew it was coming, saw the evidence of it in my friends and relatives, but despite that, I acted as if aging had nothing to do with me. Even having people congratulate me on my seventy-fifth birthday doesn’t sound right to me. Either they or I must have screwed up the count somewhere along the way. Knowing the truth, of course, is better than fooling oneself, but who wants to look truth in the face every morning? Over the years, I’ve watched a few people on their deathbeds and they were not entirely convinced either about what was coming. They held on to a small hope that they would turn out to be exceptions to the rule. “You’ll get caught,” I remember telling a couple of chums in my youth who were planning to break into a garage in the neighborhood that night and carry off some tools. How they cackled! How they made fun of me! Dummies get nabbed, but not smart guys like them, they assured me; and promptly found themselves in jail the next day.

“You’ll see when you grow old,” someone was always telling us when we were young. In the days before cash machines, when we had to run to our grandmothers for emergency funds, they made us sit and listen to a lecture first. They told us how the world had changed for the worst, how when they were young, boys called their fathers Sir, and girls from good homes had the modesty to blush when spoken to by boys. I would sit at the edge of my chair, nodding in agreement, waiting for grandma to click open her purse and hand over the money. Even then, I vaguely understood that grumbling about the young was one of the few satisfactions people have left in old age. I didn’t mind hearing about the calamities that befell members of our family who failed to listen to the sensible advice I was getting—and I would get all that I could put up with, until she started sighing and telling me how I’ll come to understand everything she was saying now when I reached her age. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Poor grandma, what a drag she was, though I have to admit today that she was right. With age, I do see things differently than I once did.

The reality of that didn’t hit me until I was almost fifty. I woke up one morning a few days before my fiftieth birthday and suddenly grasped the enormity of it. A half a century is no joke. When I was already old enough to pull the tail of our cat in Belgrade, German tanks were rolling into Paris. It wasn’t the gray hairs on my head that got me, but the deluge of memories. I remembered sitting in the first grade classroom in the fall of 1945 staring at the pictures of Marx, Stalin, and Marshal Tito that hung over the blackboard. I recalled the long forgotten brands of Balkan cigarettes; Russian, French, and American pop tunes from the war years, and the 1930s movies, of which few people alive today have any notion, that were still being shown in my childhood. So many memories came back to me at once; all of a sudden my life seemed to be that of a complete stranger. It took months to get used to it—if one can ever get used to knowing that the world and people one once knew have vanished without a trace.

In the final months of my father’s life, every time I went to visit him we talked about books. He had no patience for novels any more. History still fascinated him, and so did certain philosophers. The gloomier the thinker he was reading, the more pleased my father became, since it confirmed his long-held suspicion: the world was going to hell. Naturally, we argued about that. At least one is never bored in hell, I kept reminding him, only in paradise. I’m what you may call a part-time pessimist. I could smell the evils to come as well as he could, but I tend to be of a cheerful temperament. I wake up most mornings full of hope. Still, I can’t deny that in the thirty years since we had these conversations, I’ve grown progressively more exasperated about our species and foresee a day when I will no longer be able to bring myself to read newspapers and watch television out of concern for my mental health.

by Charles Simic, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Grandville

Paul McCartney Opens Up

By the time it reached Osaka, Japan, in late April, Paul McCartney's "Out There" tour had been on the road for nearly two years. It had played to close to two million people, from Montevideo to Winnipeg, Nashville to Warsaw, with crowds in Seoul and Marseille and Stockholm still awaiting its arrival. "Out There" succeeded the "On the Run" tour, which itself followed closely on the heels of the "Up and Coming" tour, which began at the start of this decade. I could keep rewinding through his past in this way to make my point about McCartney's tireless globetrotting, but not with anything like the energy and enthusiasm the man himself can summon for each retrospective spectacular. He plays up to 40 songs at each gig, from a catalogue that stretches back more than 50 years. Each show lasts nearly three hours. The intense demands this places on him would have been remarkable in 1965, when he was 23, so it's anyone's guess how he does it now. Not that he shows any signs of stopping, or even slowing down.

There are long breaks in the schedule, of course, and there have been years when McCartney didn't perform in public at all, but at least since the turn of the century he has been out there (if not, until recently, "Out There"), with much the same band and much the same crew and friends and associates in tow, singing the songs that made him rich and famous and adored, many of which you and everyone you know and millions of people you'll never meet can sing word for word. Really, who doesn't know the opening lines to 'Yesterday'?

McCartney's flight landed at Kansai International at 7am on 20 April, and was met with the same tightly controlled arrivals-hall hysteria he's been causing since the early Sixties. One suspects an unsparing internal investigation would be launched inside Camp Macca were the boss ever to arrive anywhere unnoticed. How would Japan learn of his presence without a minor scuffle at the airport? What's a rock star without a hyperventilating frenzy to follow him around?

It's hard to get a sense, from the shaky video clip I see on his publicist Stuart Bell's phone later that day, of the number of people who greeted him at the airport (estimates vary between 500 and 800). What's certain is that most had been waiting for him since the early hours, in heavy rain, holding aloft notably polite homemade placards – YOU ARE MY SINGER; THANK YOU PAUL, YOU CAME BACK – and that when he did at length appear, in the traditional manner they screamed and shook and palpitated and covered their mouths with their hands in tremulous overexcitement.

Accompanied by his wife, Nancy, McCartney stepped off the plane in his current off-duty uniform: dark jeans and a denim jacket over a white shirt, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. He was carrying the Hofner violin bass guitar that is one of his trademarks – he has had this one since the Royal Variety performance of 1963 – and that travels everywhere with his personal assistant, John Hammel, who has been with him almost as long. Like Hammel, the Hofner gets its own seat. (Later, backstage, a friendly guitar tech lets me inspect it and, expert that I am, I can confirm that it is indeed a guitar.)

McCartney had flown in from Cleveland, Ohio, where the previous evening he had inducted Ringo Starr into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (McCartney: "As my daughter said when I got inducted, 'About fucking time.'") He slept well on the plane, he said, and by the time he arrived at the Kyocera Dome, a baseball stadium where the following evening he and his band were booked to play to a sell-out crowd of 55,000, he seemed rested and relaxed.

His touring routine is well established: breakfast, a workout, perhaps a massage, then meetings with his team. If the weather's clement and security conditions are favourable, a bike ride around the locality of the hotel. If there's water nearby, he might try to get out on it in a boat. Today, he will rehearse with the band, then have a quiet early dinner with Nancy and a few friends from the touring party. Tomorrow's soundcheck will be any time between 3pm and 4:30pm. Then, as show time approaches, he will retreat to his dressing room to watch trashy American TV. After the concert, a drink, dinner, bed. And up early to travel to Tokyo for the next show.

"It's what I do," he told me, when I asked what kept him at it all after all these years. "It's my life."

I am introduced to McCartney in a corridor backstage at the concert venue, on the afternoon of his arrival in the city. As expected, he is slim and spry, his handshake vigorous, his gaze direct, his movements swift and decisive; this is not a man who wants to be detained long, in a corridor or anywhere else.

Any of us should be so lucky to make it to McCartney's age – 73 by the time you read this – in such fine fettle. But there's a cruelty to growing old in public. McCartney was the most cherubic of the Fabs, doe of eye and cheeky of grin. No septuagenarian looks the same as he did at 20, and McCartney is not an exception. He dresses like a younger man: today, grey jeans, a casual blue shirt with the cuffs rolled back, black skate-style slip-ons. The chestnut hair is reliably ageless: flicky, collar-length, grey only at the sideburns. But the Bambi eyes are hooded now, the lips, once pouty, are pursed. His face is lined, craggy. Those high, arched eyebrows seem coolly appraising; one gets the feeling of being sized up: Is he OK? Can we trust him? Should we let him in?

The (mostly) fond caricature of McCartney as pop culture's slightly embarrassing uncle – Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft, as Smash Hits famously had it – seems pretty comprehensively wide of the mark. Yes, in public when the mood takes him he makes silly faces and strikes ironic poses and gives the double thumbs-up. But in private, it seems to me, there is a seriousness of purpose to him. Nobody suffers fools gladly – that's a ridiculous idea – but most of us do suffer them, out of necessity if for no other reason. McCartney, one guesses from his brisk, no-nonsense manner, is unwilling to suffer fools at all. He certainly has the effect on me of making me want to raise my game, so as not to irritate him, or bore him.

That said, once one is past the initial bedazzlement – Jesus Christ, it's Paul fucking McCartney! – he's extremely good at putting people at ease, loose and chatty and good humoured. He asks questions, makes small talk, cracks jokes, so that it's almost, almost possible to forget that you're looking into the eyes of one of the most recognisable people on the planet. (...)

Each generation struggles to escape the shadow of the one before it. McCartney, I think, rather than an embarrassing uncle, is a sort of dad figure to pop culture, someone whose influence we can't help but acknowledge, someone we admire – love, even, without always wanting to admit it – but also someone to criticise; someone whose minor faults are exaggerated and whose abundant qualities are diminished or overlooked. Dads can be mortifying, and our relationships with them can be fraught. Paul McCartney, unlike Keith Richards or Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page or, for that matter, John Lennon, grew up to be a respectable family man, happily married, nicely turned out with lovely manners and clean fingernails. He is not a rock renegade. He was never a drug addict, or a womaniser, or a trasher of hotel rooms. He's a great cultural ambassador for Britain – which is admirable, but not very rock'n'roll.

Whatever feelings you have about McCartney, conflicted, contradictory, or otherwise, before you file him away consider this. He wrote, among many others, the following songs: 'Hey Jude', 'Blackbird', 'Jet', 'Band on the Run', 'Good Day Sunshine', 'Yesterday', 'Penny Lane', 'And I Love Her', 'Helter Skelter', 'Hello Goodbye', 'Eleanor Rigby', 'Maybe I'm Amazed', 'Live and Let Die', 'Let it Be'. And he kept it together well enough to be able to play them to millions of people around the world into his seventies.

How to fit it all into a magazine interview? What to ask the man who's been asked everything? And, worse luck, answered it all obligingly, and at considerable length.

by Alex Bilmas, Esquire | Read more:

Image: uncredited

Brenda Cablayan, Makawao Suburbia
via:

Robert Caro and the Man/Monster Who Built New York

Walking uncertainly through the crowds on Oxford’s High Street is an elderly man in a blue jacket, light blue pullover and red and black tie. When he is yards away from me, I notice he is also wearing scholarly bifocals. “Robert,” I say.

“Broyan — oi wasn’t sure oi’d recognoise you.”

This is the first thing you need to know about Robert Caro: he has a New York accent so thick, you feel as if you’re in a Jimmy Cagney movie. The second thing you need to know is that he is one of the great reporters of our time — he smells of my trade: I am a sucker for that smell — and probably the greatest biographer.

He is also an extraordinary writer. After reading page 136 of his book The Power Broker, I gasped and read it again, then again. This, I thought, is how it should be done. Once we are seated, with coffee, I mention this page to him. Unexpectedly, he looks shocked and moved.

“You are the first person who has ever interviewed me who has picked out that page. You write something and you know it’s going to be in your mind for ever — and no one mentions it again for the rest of your life. I wrote that page over and over. I gotta tell you, Bryan, however your story comes out, you made my day. I’m going to tell Ina [his wife].”

When, as a young reporter, he started his book, he taught himself the craft of writing by reading Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Tolstoy’s War and Peace — one chapter of one, then one of the other. “I believe there’s something not understood enough about biography. If you want a work of history or biography to endure, the writing, the prose, the narrative, has to be at the same level as a work of fiction.”

Caro published The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York in 1974. It was garlanded with awards, including a Pulitzer, and the reviews were sensational. It was said to be one of the greatest nonfiction works ever written. But it is only now being published in the UK. Why? Well, because nobody here had heard of Moses — mind you, not many people in America had heard of him before Caro came along.

It is being published now because of the recent success of Caro’s second biography. This is, so far, a four-volume life of Lyndon Johnson (he is working on the fifth, while acknowledging that, being 79, he may not finish it). Every MP, wonk and would-be wonk in Westminster has read it, because they think it is the greatest insight into power ever written. They’re nearly right: it’s the second greatest after The Power Broker.

His first book happened because, great reporter that he is, he asked the right question and saw a truth invisible to others. The question was: how do cities decide to build bridges, roads and so on? He got plenty of answers, particularly when he took a break from his job to do a course in urban planning at Harvard for a year, but he didn’t believe any of them.

“These two guys had written a textbook on highway and land planning, and they explained it by mathematical equations. I’m sitting there, taking assiduous notes, and all of a sudden it came to me — this is all bullshit. OK, I know why highways get built. They get built because Robert Moses wants them built. They’re writing this book about power and didn’t understand where power comes from, and neither did anybody else.”

For half a century, Moses was the most powerful man in New York, outwitting and outlasting political masters including Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor, and President Franklin D Roosevelt. He was also the greatest builder the world has ever known. He constructed state parks, vast highways, expressways and parkways, the colossal Triborough, Verrazano and countless other bridges, Shea Stadium, the Lincoln Center, hundreds of playgrounds, tennis courts, swimming pools and baseball diamonds, the UN building, apartment complexes… In a nutshell, he built the New York you now know.

“Power reveals. One of the things people need to understand is that when a person is climbing to power, he has to conceal what he really is. But then maybe they recoil from what he is really like.”

Moses was arrogant beyond belief. Caro interviewed him several times (he died in 1981) until he asked a tricky question and was cut off. The man was a vicious racist and an intolerable snob. He built hundreds of playgrounds all over Manhattan, but only one in Harlem. He was convinced black people hated swimming in cold water, so a pool near Harlem was kept cold. And they stayed away, not because of the water, but because of the animosity of the guards. Ever wonder why those stone bridges over the parkways are so low? To keep buses containing black and poor people out. His “projects” — public housing complexes — were miserable buildings, designed to keep residents out of sight and out of mind.

“When you fly into JFK and look down, there’s this huge beach on the left, miles and miles long. It’s called the Rockaways, and there are rows and rows of 18-, 19-, 20-storey apartment houses, all for poor people, all low-income. When he got the power to build this stuff in Manhattan, he had to get rid of the people who lived there, so he hounded them out like cattle. He told everyone he was doing it humanely, but he just hounded them out with phoney eviction notices. He had embodied racism in concrete. He wanted to make people feel poor. He was very racist. This city is still divided by race and income because he believed in that.”

This was a man who started out as an idealist. Understanding how he became that monster and grabbed power — well, you’re going to read it, so that’s enough about Moses. What about Caro?

by Bryan Appleyard, Bryan Appleyard.com |  Read more:

Image: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images North America via:

How You Consist of Trillions of Tiny Machines

Today, driven by ongoing technological innovations, the exploration of the “nanoverse,” as the realm of the minuscule is often termed, continues to gather pace. One of the field’s greatest pioneers is Paul Falkowski, a biological oceanographer who has spent much of his scientific career working at the intersection of physics, chemistry, and biology. His book Life’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable focuses on one of the most astonishing discoveries of the twentieth century—that our cells are comprised of a series of highly sophisticated “little engines” or nanomachines that carry out life’s vital functions. It is a work full of surprises, arguing for example that all of life’s most important innovations were in existence by around 3.5 billion years ago—less than a billion years after Earth formed, and a period at which our planet was largely hostile to living things. How such mind-bending complexity could have evolved at such an early stage, and in such a hostile environment, has forced a fundamental reconsideration of the origins of life itself.

At a personal level, Falkowski’s work is also challenging. We are used to thinking of ourselves as composed of billions of cells, but Falkowski points out that we also consist of trillions of electrochemical machines that somehow coordinate their intricate activities in ways that allow our bodies and minds to function with the required reliability and precision. As we contemplate the evolution and maintenance of this complexity, wonder grows to near incredulity.

One of the most ancient of Falkowski’s biological machines is the ribosome, a combination of proteins and nucleic acids that causes protein synthesis. It is an entity so tiny that even with an electron microscope, it is hard to see it. As many as 400 million ribosomes could fit in a single period at the end of a sentence printed in The New York Review. Only with the advent of synchrotrons—machines that accelerate the movements of particles, and can be used to create very powerful X-rays—have its workings been revealed. Ribosomes use the instructions embedded in our genetic code to make complex proteins such as those found in our muscles and other organs. The manufacture of these proteins is not a straightforward process. The ribosomes have no direct contact with our DNA, so must act by reading messenger RNA, molecules that convey genetic information from the DNA. Ribosomes consist of two major complexes that work like a pair of gears: they move over the RNA, and attach amino acids to the emerging protein.

All ribosomes—whether in the most humble bacteria or in human bodies—operate at the same rate, adding just ten to twenty amino acids per second to the growing protein string. And so are our bodies built up by tiny mechanistic operations, one protein at a time, until that stupendous entity we call a human being is complete. All living things possess ribosomes, so these complex micromachines must have existed in the common ancestor of all life. Perhaps their development marks the spark of life itself. But just when they first evolved, and how they came into being, remain two of the great mysteries of science.

All machines require a source of energy to operate, and the energy to run not only ribosomes but all cellular functions comes from the same source—a universal “energy currency” molecule known as adenosine triphosphate (ATP). In animals and plants ATPis manufactured in special cellular structures known as mitochondria. The nanomachines that operate within the mitochondria are minute biological electrical motors that, in a striking parallel with their mechanical counterparts, possess rotors, stators, and rotating catalytic heads.

The ATP nanomachine is the means by which life uses electrical gradients, or the difference in ion concentration and electrical potential from one point to another, to create energy. The nanomachine is located in a membrane that separates a region of the cell with a high density of protons (hydrogen ions) from an area with a lower density. Just as in a battery, the protons pass from the area of high density into the area of lower density. But in order to do so in the cell, they must pass through the ATP nanomachine, and their flow through the minute electric motor turns its rotor counterclockwise. For every 360-degree turn the rotor makes, three molecules of ATP are created.

Living things use a great many primary energy sources to create ATP. The most primitive living entities are known as archaea. Though bacteria-like, they are a distinct group whose various members seem to have exploited almost every energy source available on the early Earth. Some, known as methanogens, cause carbon dioxide to react with hydrogen to create the electrochemical gradient required to make ATP, producing methane as a by-product. Others use ammonia, metal ions, or hydrogen gas to create the electrochemical gradient. Bacteria also use a variety of energy sources, but at some point a group of bacteria started to use sunlight to power photosynthesis. This process yielded vastly more energy than other sources, giving its possessors a huge evolutionary advantage. Falkowski has spent most of his career unraveling the deep mystery of photosynthesis and how it changed the world.

by Tim Flannery, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Martin Oeggerli/Micronaut

Hannah Hoch, Liebe (1931)
via:

via:

Thomas Piketty: Germany Has Never Paid

[ed. See also: End Greece's Bleeding. Update: See also: Austerity has failed: an open letter from Thomas Piketty to Angela Merkel.]

In a forceful interview with German newspaper Die Zeit, the star economist Thomas Piketty calls for a major conference on debt. Germany, in particular, should not withhold help from Greece. This interview has been translated from the original German.

Since his successful book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the Frenchman Thomas Piketty has been considered one of the most influential economists in the world. His argument for the redistribution of income and wealth launched a worldwide discussion. In a interview with Georg Blume of DIE ZEIT, he gives his clear opinions on the European debt debate.

DIE ZEIT: Should we Germans be happy that even the French government is aligned with the German dogma of austerity?

Thomas Piketty: Absolutely not. This is neither a reason for France, nor Germany, and especially not for Europe, to be happy. I am much more afraid that the conservatives, especially in Germany, are about to destroy Europe and the European idea, all because of their shocking ignorance of history.

ZEIT: But we Germans have already reckoned with our own history.

Piketty: But not when it comes to repaying debts! Germany’s past, in this respect, should be of great significance to today’s Germans. Look at the history of national debt: Great Britain, Germany, and France were all once in the situation of today’s Greece, and in fact had been far more indebted. The first lesson that we can take from the history of government debt is that we are not facing a brand new problem. There have been many ways to repay debts, and not just one, which is what Berlin and Paris would have the Greeks believe.

ZEIT: But shouldn’t they repay their debts?

Piketty: My book recounts the history of income and wealth, including that of nations. What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.

ZEIT: But surely we can’t draw the conclusion that we can do no better today?

Piketty: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.

ZEIT: Are you trying to depict states that don’t pay back their debts as winners?

Piketty: Germany is just such a state. But wait: history shows us two ways for an indebted state to leave delinquency. One was demonstrated by the British Empire in the 19th century after its expensive wars with Napoleon. It is the slow method that is now being recommended to Greece. The Empire repaid its debts through strict budgetary discipline. This worked, but it took an extremely long time. For over 100 years, the British gave up two to three percent of their economy to repay its debts, which was more than they spent on schools and education. That didn’t have to happen, and it shouldn’t happen today. The second method is much faster. Germany proved it in the 20th century. Essentially, it consists of three components: inflation, a special tax on private wealth, and debt relief.

ZEIT: So you’re telling us that the German Wirtschaftswunder [“economic miracle”] was based on the same kind of debt relief that we deny Greece today?

Piketty: Exactly. After the war ended in 1945, Germany’s debt amounted to over 200% of its GDP. Ten years later, little of that remained: public debt was less than 20% of GDP. Around the same time, France managed a similarly artful turnaround. We never would have managed this unbelievably fast reduction in debt through the fiscal discipline that we today recommend to Greece. Instead, both of our states employed the second method with the three components that I mentioned, including debt relief. Think about the London Debt Agreement of 1953, where 60% of German foreign debt was cancelled and its internal debts were restructured.

ZEIT: That happened because people recognized that the high reparations demanded of Germany after World War I were one of the causes of the Second World War. People wanted to forgive Germany’s sins this time!

Piketty: Nonsense! This had nothing to do with moral clarity; it was a rational political and economic decision. They correctly recognized that, after large crises that created huge debt loads, at some point people need to look toward the future. We cannot demand that new generations must pay for decades for the mistakes of their parents. The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books. But despite this, the younger generation of Greeks carries no more responsibility for the mistakes of its elders than the younger generation of Germans did in the 1950s and 1960s. We need to look ahead. Europe was founded on debt forgiveness and investment in the future. Not on the idea of endless penance. We need to remember this.

ZEIT: The end of the Second World War was a breakdown of civilization. Europe was a killing field. Today is different.

Piketty: To deny the historical parallels to the postwar period would be wrong. Let’s think about the financial crisis of 2008/2009. This wasn’t just any crisis. It was the biggest financial crisis since 1929. So the comparison is quite valid. This is equally true for the Greek economy: between 2009 and 2015, its GDP has fallen by 25%. This is comparable to the recessions in Germany and France between 1929 and 1935.

ZEIT: Many Germans believe that the Greeks still have not recognized their mistakes and want to continue their free-spending ways.

Piketty: If we had told you Germans in the 1950s that you have not properly recognized your failures, you would still be repaying your debts. Luckily, we were more intelligent than that.

ZEIT: The German Minister of Finance, on the other hand, seems to believe that a Greek exit from the Eurozone could foster greater unity within Europe.

Piketty: If we start kicking states out, then the crisis of confidence in which the Eurozone finds itself today will only worsen. Financial markets will immediately turn on the next country. This would be the beginning of a long, drawn-out period of agony, in whose grasp we risk sacrificing Europe’s social model, its democracy, indeed its civilization on the altar of a conservative, irrational austerity policy.

ZEIT: Do you believe that we Germans aren’t generous enough?

Piketty: What are you talking about? Generous? Currently, Germany is profiting from Greece as it extends loans at comparatively high interest rates.

by Georg Blum, DIE ZEIT via Zero Hedge |  Read more:

Image: dpa

via:

Justice and Warfare in Cyberspace

There was a moment during the First Gulf War when ideologues argued that warfare technology had reached a tipping point. Gains in efficiency would reduce casualties and destruction; supremely accurate weapons would minimize unnecessary suffering without compromising military objectives. This inaugurated the age of target bombings and stealth missions enabled by precision technology. Now, we are at the threshold of yet another tipping point for war and technology. Software interference and cyber technologies threaten mass disruptionand destruction without a shot or bomb explosion. Physically waged wars—populated and won by armed bodies and manned weaponry—have given way to data and coding wars, creating vast, powerful, and yet not fully tapped, spaces and abilities.

Cyberwarfare acts are broadly understood as the use of cyber capabilities for spying or sabotage by one nation against another. However, the term “cyberaggression” can refer to everything from individual cyberbullying and harassment to sabotage that affects national interests. One example of the latter type is the infamous Stuxnet computer worm that targeted and invaded Iranian nuclear facilities in order to derail the Iranian nuclear program. The term ‘cyberaggression’ was also applied to the April 2015 breach of cybersecurity at the White House when sensitive details of the President’s schedule were obtained. It is therefore of little surprise that civilian and military resources to wage and contain cyberaggression are on the rise. Last January, there were reports that North Korea had doubled its military cyberwarfare units to over 6,000 troops.

To be sure, it is not clear when an act is merely an instance of cyberaggression as opposed an act of war. To complicate matters further, our conception of cyberwarfare and cyberaggression is taking shape against a background of increasing state domestic surveillance and other incursions to privacy, often defended on the basis of considerations of safety or convenience. (...)

In asking the question of what cyberaggression is—and when such aggression constitutes an act of war—we confront questions of how to (or if it is even meaningful to) apply the old paradigms of the state and state sovereignty, and of the laws of war based on them, to the new realities of cyberspace. One of the more important aspects of the traditional laws of war is the question of proportionality. According to standard understandings of the proportionality principle, a military in war has to weigh risk to civilians against the importance of the military objective at hand and the choice of military means to achieve their objective. How would proportionality apply in cyberspace, where victimization is not necessarily physical in personal or economic terms?

Imagine, for example, that the United States assesses a variety of serious cyberthreats coming from a foreign territory—these might range from shutting down White House cybercommunications to disrupting nuclear power plant operations in the US. As a response, the United States neutralizes or erases all of the cyber content created and hosted within that foreign territory so that individuals within this territory are no longer able to have a cyberpresence, effectively wiping out communications between the conspirators behind the serious threat in question. According to Rule 51 of the Tallinn Manual—a non-binding guide to the application of international law to cyberconflicts produced by NATO—collateral damage in cyberwar is acceptable so long as it is not “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”If no tangible “property”was destroyed and nobody was killed, was the act proportional? Under the current laws of war, the answer could be yes. However, given how much of life has moved or expanded to cyberspace, would this answer pass moral and legal muster?

One argument that may come into play in such new scenarios is the economic one. People’s data is immensely valuable on such a large scale—some estimates put the average value of a Facebook account at $174.17. Even if only a quarter of, say, the Russian population has a Facebook presence, erasing even selective cybercontent would amount to approximately 5.2 billion dollars in damages. However, there is also an added emotional value. Social media is becoming more and more central to the lives of individuals, and the content created, curated, and “owned”in cyberspace is very personal indeed. To lose such a cache would be, to many, devastating in a way that monetary value does not account for.

Some argue that unless and until cyberaggression escalates to the point of threatening life and limb, it should not be put into the context of warfare. Others argue that response in kind does nothing to redress the act, and that physical response to certain acts of cyberaggression is the best option. Still others believe that the traditional laws of war are not applicable to cyberwarfare and cyberaggression and that explicit rules about the consequences for cyberaggression should be created. These positions only scratch the surface of the legal and moral challenges ahead.

by Lisa Lucile Owens, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: NASA Marshall

[ed. See also: Greece enters uncharted territory after referendum 'no' vote and Greece - How did we get here?]
via:

via:

Lee Baker, Storm
via:

via:

Regulating Sex

[ed. See also: Teenager's jailing brings a call to fix sex offender registries.]

This is a strange moment for sex in America. We’ve detached it from pregnancy, matrimony and, in some circles, romance. At least, we no longer assume that intercourse signals the start of a relationship. But the more casual sex becomes, the more we demand that our institutions and government police the line between what’s consensual and what isn’t. And we wonder how to define rape. Is it a violent assault or a violation of personal autonomy? Is a person guilty of sexual misconduct if he fails to get a clear “yes” through every step of seduction and consummation?

According to the doctrine of affirmative consent — the “yes means yes” rule — the answer is, well, yes, he is. And though most people think of “yes means yes” as strictly for college students, it is actually poised to become the law of the land.

About a quarter of all states, and the District of Columbia, now say sex isn’t legal without positive agreement, although some states undercut that standard by requiring proof of force or resistance as well.

Codes and laws calling for affirmative consent proceed from admirable impulses. (The phrase “yes means yes,” by the way, represents a ratcheting-up of “no means no,” the previous slogan of the anti-rape movement.) People should have as much right to control their sexuality as they do their body or possessions; just as you wouldn’t take a precious object from someone’s home without her permission, you shouldn’t have sex with someone if he hasn’t explicitly said he wants to.

And if one person can think he’s hooking up while the other feels she’s being raped, it makes sense to have a law that eliminates the possibility of misunderstanding. “You shouldn’t be allowed to make the assumption that if you find someone lying on a bed, they’re free for sexual pleasure,” says Lynn Hecht Schafran, director of a judicial education program at Legal Momentum, a women’s legal defense organization.

But criminal law is a very powerful instrument for reshaping sexual mores. Should we really put people in jail for not doing what most people aren’t doing? (Or at least, not yet?) It’s one thing to teach college students to talk frankly about sex and not to have it without demonstrable pre-coital assent. Colleges are entitled to uphold their own standards of comportment, even if enforcement of that behavior is spotty or indifferent to the rights of the accused. It’s another thing to make sex a crime under conditions of poor communication.
Most people just aren’t very talkative during the delicate tango that precedes sex, and the re-education required to make them more forthcoming would be a very big project. Nor are people unerringly good at decoding sexual signals. If they were, we wouldn’t have romantic comedies. “If there’s no social consensus about what the lines are,” says Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a retired judge, then affirmative consent “has no business being in the criminal law.”

Perhaps the most consequential deliberations about affirmative consent are going on right now at the American Law Institute. The more than 4,000 law professors, judges and lawyers who belong to this prestigious legal association — membership is by invitation only — try to untangle the legal knots of our time. They do this in part by drafting and discussing model statutes. Once the group approves these exercises, they hold so much sway that Congress and states sometimes vote them into law, in whole or in part. For the past three years, the law institute has been thinking about how to update the penal code for sexual assault, which was last revised in 1962. When its suggestions circulated in the weeks before the institute’s annual meeting in May, some highly instructive hell broke loose.

In a memo that has now been signed by about 70 institute members and advisers, including Judge Gertner, readers have been asked to consider the following scenario: “Person A and Person B are on a date and walking down the street. Person A, feeling romantically and sexually attracted, timidly reaches out to hold B’s hand and feels a thrill as their hands touch. Person B does nothing, but six months later files a criminal complaint. Person A is guilty of ‘Criminal Sexual Contact’ under proposed Section 213.6(3)(a).”

Far-fetched? Not as the draft is written. The hypothetical crime cobbles together two of the draft’s key concepts. The first is affirmative consent. The second is an enlarged definition of criminal sexual contact that would include the touching of any body part, clothed or unclothed, with sexual gratification in mind. As the authors of the model law explain: “Any kind of contact may qualify. There are no limits on either the body part touched or the manner in which it is touched.” So if Person B neither invites nor rebukes a sexual advance, then anything that happens afterward is illegal. “With passivity expressly disallowed as consent,” the memo says, “the initiator quickly runs up a string of offenses with increasingly more severe penalties to be listed touch by touch and kiss by kiss in the criminal complaint.”

The obvious comeback to this is that no prosecutor would waste her time on such a frivolous case. But that doesn’t comfort signatories of the memo, several of whom have pointed out to me that once a law is passed, you can’t control how it will be used. For instance, prosecutors often add minor charges to major ones (such as, say, forcible rape) when there isn’t enough evidence to convict on the more serious charge. They then put pressure on the accused to plead guilty to the less egregious crime.

The example points to a trend evident both on campuses and in courts: the criminalization of what we think of as ordinary sex and of sex previously considered unsavory but not illegal.

by Judith Shulevitz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Yu Man Ma