China’s Ultimate Play For Global Oil Market Control

All attention is focused on the twists-and-turns of the very noisy US-Iran dispute in the Persian Gulf, but all the while the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is rapidly and quietly consolidating a dominant presence in the area with the active support of Russia.

Beijing, as a result, is fast acquiring immense influence over related key dynamics such as the price of oil in the world market and the relevance of the petrodollar. The PRC and the Russians are capitalizing on both the growing fears of Iran and the growing mistrust of the US. Hence, the US is already the main loser of the PRC’s gambit.

The dramatic PRC success can be attributed to the confluence of two major trends:

(1) The quality and relevance of what Beijing can offer to both Iran and the Saudi-Gulf States camp; and

(2) The decision of key Arab leaders — most notably Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin ‘Abd al-’Aziz al Sa’ud (aka MBS) and his close ally, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (aka MBZ) — to downgrade their traditional close ties with the US, and reach out to Beijing to provide a substitute strategic umbrella.

Hence, the PRC offer to oversee and guarantee the establishment of a regional collective security regime — itself based on the Russian proposals and ideas first raised in late July 2019 — is now getting considerable positive attention from both shores of the Persian Gulf. Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Oman appear to be becoming convinced that the PRC could be the key to the long-term stability and prosperity in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula.

Iran is also considering the expansion of security cooperation with Russia as an added umbrella against potential US retaliation.

Overall, according to sources in these areas, the US was increasingly perceived as an unpredictable, disruptive element.

The profound change in the attitude of the Saudi and Emirati ruling families, who for decades have considered themselves pliant protégés of the US, took long to evolve. However, once formulated and adopted, the new policies have been implemented swiftly.

The main driving issue is the realization by both MBS and MBZ that, irrespective of the reassuring rhetoric of US Pres. Donald Trump and Jared Kushner, their bitter nemesis — Qatar — is far more important to the US than the rest of the conservative Arab monarchies and sheikhdoms of the GCC. The last straw came in early July 2019 in the aftermath of the visit of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, to Washington, DC. Sheikh Tamim received an extravagant reception from both Pres. Trump in person and official Washington. Trump lavished praises on Qatar and the Emir, and emphasized the US renewed commitment “to further advancing the high-level strategic cooperation between our two countries”.

There are good reasons for the US preference of Qatar.

The Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar is by far the most important US base in the entire greater Middle East. Qatar is mediating between the US and several nemeses, including Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. Qatar is providing “humanitarian cash” to HAMAS in the Gaza Strip, thus buying quiet time for Israel. Qatar has given generous “political shelter” to numerous leaders, seniors, and commanders of questionable entities the US would like to protect but would never acknowledge this (including anti-Russia Chechens and other Caucasians, and anti-China Uighurs).

Qatari Intelligence is funding and otherwise supporting the various jihadist entities which serve as proxies of the CIA and M?T (Milli ?stihbarat Te?kilat?: the Turkish National Intelligence Organization) in the greater Middle East (mainly Syria, Iraq, Libya, Jordan, Yemen) and Central Asia (mainly Afghanistan-Pakistan, China’s Xinjiang and Russia’s Caucasus and the Turkic peoples of eastern Siberia).

On top of this, Qatar is purchasing billions of dollars’ worth of US-made weapons; and paying cash on-time (unlike the habitually late Saudis who now cannot afford to pay what they’ve already promised).

Moreover, the Middle East is awash with rumors that Qatari businessmen saved the financial empire of the Kushner family by investing at least half-a-billion dollars in the 666 5th Avenue project in New York. The rumors are very specific in that the investment was made for political reasons on instruction of the Emir. In the conspiracies-driven Arab Middle East, such rumors are believed and serve as a viable motive for the policies of the Trump White House: an ulterior motive the Saudis and Gulfies cannot challenge.

The handling by the Trump White House of the Iranian shootdown of the US RQ-4A/BAMS-D Global Hawk drone on June 20, 2019, only exacerbated further the anguish of both MBS and MBZ. Both of them, along with other Arab leaders, urged the Trump White House to strike hard at Iran in retaliation. Both MBS and MBZ communicated in person with the most senior individuals at the White House. They were stunned to learn that Trump communicated directly with Tehran on the possibility of a largely symbolic retaliatory strike, and the prospects of bilateral negotiations.

Both MBS and MBZ consider the last-minute cancellation of the US retaliatory strike a personal affront and humiliation because Trump did not accept and follow their positions and demands for action. Both MBS and MBZ are now convinced that not only the US demonstrated weakness and lack of resolve, but that Pres. Trump was personally not committed to fighting Iran on behalf of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms. (...)

Both MBS and MBZ concluded that they need a far stronger strategic umbrella than the US and Israel could offer in order to survive in the era of Iran’s ascent.

As a result, MBZ reached out to Beijing in early July 2019. After comprehensive preparatory negotiations, MBZ arrived in Beijing on July 20, 2019, for a milestone visit in which he met PRC Pres. Xi Jinping for lengthy discussions. According to PRC senior officials, Mohammed bin Zayed and Xi Jinping “elevated the two countries’ relationship to that of a strategic partnership”. The key outcome was the UAE’s acceptance of the dominance of the PRC and Russia in the Persian Gulf.

“The UAE and China are moving towards a promising future,” MBZ said in his concluding meeting with Xi Jinping. His visit aimed at “developing co-operation and a comprehensive strategic partnership, as well as opening new horizons for joint action in various sectors,” MBZ explained. Xi Jinping responded by stressing “the profound significance of China-Arab relations”. The PRC and the UAE would now work closely together to transform the Persian Gulf into “a security oasis” rather than a new “source of turmoil”.

Significantly, Xi Jinping referred to “a hundred years of grand plan” when describing the PRC’s relations with the UAE. MBZ also signed a large number of bilateral agreements, both economic and strategic.

by Yossef Bodansky, OilPrice.com | Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Megaproject Management

Megaproject management is a new-ish subfield of project management. Originally considered to be the special case of project management where the budgets were enormous (billions of dollars), it is developing into a separate specialization because of the high complexity and tradition of failure among such projects. The driving force behind treating it as a separate field appears to be Bent Flyvbjerg, previously known around here for Reference Class Forecasting as the first person to develop an applied procedure. That procedure was motivated by megaprojects.

I will make a summary of the paper "What you should know about megaprojects, and why: an overview" from 2014. For casual reading, there is an article about it from the New Yorker here.

History

Megaprojects got their name from the association of mega with big, so think mega-city rather than mega-joule. It did match the unit prefix in the beginning however, as such projects were mostly dams, bridges, or very large buildings in the early 20th century.

The next shift upward took place with the Manhattan Project and then the Apollo program, which are also frequently drawn on as positive examples. The term 'megaproject' picked up steam in the 1970s, at the same time project costs crossed over into the billions.

Currently project costs of 50-100 billion are common, with even larger projects less common but not rare. If you were to view certain things which need dedicated management as a project, like the stimulus packages from 2008 or US defense procurement, then we have crossed over into the trillions and are entering a 'tera era' of megaprojects.

Ignoring these special cases, but counting infrastructure and industries where billion dollar projects are common, megaprojects account for ~8% of global GDP.

Four Sublimes

These are four reasons which drive the popularity of megaprojects. They are kind of a group bias for each type of stakeholder. They are:

• Technological sublime: because engineers and technologists love making the newest/tallest/fastest things.
• Political sublime: because politicians love being able to associate with huge projects and the publicity that comes with them.
• Economic sublime: because unions, contractors, and business people love all the jobs and fees.
• Aesthetic sublime: because designers love making beautiful things, and the public loves to adopt big beautiful things as distinctive for their city/country.

Predictably with biases, there are side effects:

The following characteristics of megaprojects are typically overlooked or glossed over when the four sublimes are at play and the megaproject format is chosen for delivery of large-scale ventures:

1. Megaprojects are inherently risky due to long planning horizons and complex interfaces (Flyvbjerg, 2006).

2. Often projects are led by planners and managers without deep domain experience who keep changing throughout the long project cycles that apply to megaprojects, leaving leadership weak.

3. Decision-making, planning, and management are typically multi-actor processes involving multiple stakeholders, public and private, with conflicting interests (Aaltonen and Kujala, 2010).

4. Technology and designs are often non-standard, leading to "uniqueness bias" amongst planners and managers, who tend to see their projects as singular, which impedes learning from other projects. 

5. Frequently there is overcommitment to a certain project concept at an early stage, resulting in “lock-in” or “capture,” leaving alternatives analysis weak or absent, and leading to escalated commitment in later stages. "Fail fast" does not apply; "fail slow" does (Cantarelli et al., 2010; Ross and Staw, 1993; Drummond, 1998).

6. Due to the large sums of money involved, principal-agent problems and rent-seeking behavior are common, as is optimism bias (Eisenhardt, 1989; Stiglitz, 1989; Flyvbjerg el al., 2009).

7. The project scope or ambition level will typically change significantly over time.

8. Delivery is a high-risk, stochastic activity, with overexposure to so-called "black swans," i.e., extreme events with massively negative outcomes (Taleb, 2010). Managers tend to ignore this, treating projects as if they exist largely in a deterministic Newtonian world of cause, effect, and control.

9. Statistical evidence shows that such complexity and unplanned events are often unaccounted for, leaving budget and time contingencies inadequate.

10. As a consequence, misinformation about costs, schedules, benefits, and risks is the norm throughout project development and decision-making. The result is cost overruns, delays, and benefit shortfalls that undermine project viability during project implementation and operations.

The Iron Law of Megaprojects

• Over time.
• Over budget.
• Under utilized.

These aren't little, either: cost overruns of 1.5x are common, in bad cases they can run more than 10x, and 90% of projects have them; it is common for projects to have 0.5x or less utilization once complete. This holds for the public and private sectors, and also across countries, so things like excessive regulation or corruption aren't good explanations.

They start off badly, but they do still manage to get completed, which is due to...

Break-Fix Model

Since management of megaprojects doesn't know what they are doing or don't have the incentives to care, inevitably something breaks. Then additional time and money are spent to fix what broke, or the conditions of the project are renegotiated, and it limps along to the next break. This process continues until the project is finished.

If it is so terrible and we know it is terrible, why do we do it this way?

by Ryan_b., LessWrong |  Read more:

[ed. I used to do this for 30 years in Alaska, megaprojects: multi-billion dollar dams, oil field exploration and development, large mining projects, whatever. Many of them did not get built for the reasons stated above. For additional insight into how this process works, see: How the Process Works - An Outsider's Guide to Cherry Point (Duck Soup).]

Talking Heads

[ed. See also: How the Talking Heads wrote "Once in a Lifetime" (YouTube)]

Tiger Woods’s Caddie Is a Reluctant Star

Friday was perhaps the closest that Joe LaCava’s dream job will ever come to a nightmare. His boss, Tiger Woods, couldn’t get much going on or around the greens in his second consecutive round of one-under-par 71 at the BMW Championship, and LaCava had nowhere to hide from fans who feted him all the way around Medinah Country Club.

“Congratulations, Joe!” they cried out to LaCava, who was inducted into the Caddie Hall of Fame this week in a ceremony held by the Western Golf Association, which runs the BMW Championship, the second of three FedEx Cup playoff events.

“I’m just not comfortable with the attention,” said LaCava, who dropped his gaze and gave a thumbs-up in response to a shout of “Mr. Hall of Fame” on the second green after Woods tapped in for par.

As LaCava walked off the 18th green, he was greeted by Jim Mackay, the caddie-turned-broadcaster who gave him a consoling pat on the back.

“He knew I was frustrated,” LaCava said. His voice trailed off. (...)

Woods and LaCava have collaborated on a comeback that became one of the most thrilling stories in sports over the past year. So it was perhaps fitting that LaCava was approached Wednesday after his induction speech by a writer who said without preamble: “You’re good at this. You should write a book.”

It was like receiving encouragement from Britney Spears to record an album. The man was the best-selling author James Patterson, but after he trundled off, LaCava conceded that he had never heard of him.

“I’m not the biggest reader,” he said apologetically.

What LaCava does quite well is read people. The caddies’ creed is show up, keep up, shut up. But when he started working with Woods in the fall of 2011, he quickly ascertained that one of the ways he could be of service was by talking more, since the public’s hunger for insight into Woods is far greater than Woods’s appetite for sharing.

“I talk to everybody because I don’t think Tiger talks to everybody all the time,” LaCava said. “I want Tiger to be the show. I want him doing the interviews and everything else. So that’s just not a comfortable role for me.”

Being the guest of honor at a meal where most of the other diners are strangers is the attention shunner’s equivalent of playing the T.P.C. Sawgrass’s 17th island par-3 in a gale. Even as he walked off yardages and studied the greens during Wednesday’s pro-am round, LaCava was fretting over the speech he would have to deliver hours later.

“He doesn’t like to be part of the spotlight,” Woods said, adding: “For him to be recognized for what he does, he’s very uncomfortable with that.”

So great was LaCava’s discomfort that he failed to mention the induction to his wife, Megan, who learned of it from the couple’s daughter, Lauren, who had found out from an article online.

“I probably should have told my wife,” LaCava said. (...)

LaCava, who has helped Woods to 10 PGA Tour titles during their time together, shares more than a sense of humor with his boss. They have the same competitive drive. “He’s very fiery,” Woods said. “He wants to win.”

In a taped interview played during the induction ceremony, Woods spoke of LaCava’s loyalty. It was the highest praise he could offer. As the sun around which everyone else in golf revolves, Woods is always on guard against the superficial, transactional relationship.

“The curse of being Tiger is he doesn’t know who’s a friend and who’s a hanger-on,” said Robert Damron, a former tour player who provided commentary for the Golf Channel on Woods’s Friday round.

LaCava’s loyalty was tested during a four-year stretch, starting in 2014, when Woods’s balky back limited him so much that at one point LaCava went 466 days without working.

In 2016, Woods made just one start, at the tournament he hosts in the Bahamas. He told LaCava he was free to seek other employment. LaCava essentially said thanks but no thanks. He believed Woods had good golf left to play and he was willing to wait.

His patience was rewarded handsomely at the Masters this spring. After Woods secured his 15th major victory, his first major title in 11 years and his fifth green jacket, he hugged LaCava on the 18th green.

“We did it,” Woods told him.

Later that night, LaCava said, he received a text from Woods, which ended, “I love you like a brother.”

LaCava can’t remember the rest of it, and he can’t look it up. “I deleted it,” he said.

He explained that he gets rid of all his texts and emails.

But of course. Every caddie worth his bib will tell you that what’s past is past. All that matters is what’s in front of you.

by Karen Crouse, NY Times | Read more:
[ed. Freddie Couples' caddie for years. One of the best.]

The American Aristotle

[I intend] to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle, that is to say, to outline a theory so comprehensive that, for a long time to come, the entire work of human reason, in philosophy of every school and kind, in mathematics, in psychology, in physical science, in history, in sociology and in whatever other department there may be, shall appear as the filling up of its details.
C S Peirce, Collected Papers (1931-58)

The roll of scientists born in the 19th century is as impressive as any century in history. Names such as Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, George Washington Carver, Alfred North Whitehead, Louis Agassiz, Benjamin Peirce, Leo Szilard, Edwin Hubble, Katharine Blodgett, Thomas Edison, Gerty Cori, Maria Mitchell, Annie Jump Cannon and Norbert Wiener created a legacy of knowledge and scientific method that fuels our modern lives. Which of these, though, was ‘the best’?

Remarkably, in the brilliant light of these names, there was in fact a scientist who surpassed all others in sheer intellectual virtuosity. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), pronounced ‘purse’, was a solitary eccentric working in the town of Milford, Pennsylvania, isolated from any intellectual centre. Although many of his contemporaries shared the view that Peirce was a genius of historic proportions, he is little-known today. His current obscurity belies the prediction of the German mathematician Ernst Schröder, who said that Peirce’s ‘fame [will] shine like that of Leibniz or Aristotle into all the thousands of years to come’.

Some might doubt this lofty view of Peirce. Others might admire him for this or that contribution yet, overall, hold an opinion of his oeuvre similar to that expressed by the psychologist William James on one of his lectures, that it was like ‘flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness’. Peirce might have good things to say, so this reasoning goes, but they are too abstruse for the nonspecialist to understand. I think that a great deal of Peirce’s reputation for obscurity is due, not to Peirce per se, but to the poor organisation and editing of his papers during their early storage at and control by Harvard University (for more on this, see André de Tienne’s insightful history of those papers).

Such skepticism, however incorrect, becomes self-reinforcing. Because relatively few people have heard of Peirce, at least relative to the names above, and because he has therefore had a negligible influence in popular culture, some assume that he merits nothing more than minor fame. But there are excellent reasons why it is worth getting to know more about him. The leading Peirce scholar ever, Max Fisch, described Peirce’s intellectual significance in this fecund paragraph from 1981:

Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer ‘Charles S Peirce’ is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short-story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician [and] metaphysician … He was, for a few examples, … the first metrologist to use a wave-length of light as a unit of measure, the inventor of the quincuncial projection of the sphere, the first known conceiver of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit computer, and the founder of ‘the economy of research’. He is the only system-building philosopher in the Americas who has been both competent and productive in logic, in mathematics, and in a wide range of sciences. If he has had any equals in that respect in the entire history of philosophy, they do not number more than two.

Peirce came from a well-to-do, prominent family of senators, businessmen and mathematicians. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was considered the greatest US mathematician of his generation, teaching mathematics and astronomy at Harvard for some 50 years. Charles’s brother, James, also taught mathematics at Harvard, eventually becoming a dean there. C S Peirce was, on the other hand, despised by the presidents of Harvard (Charles Eliot; where Peirce studied) and Johns Hopkins University (Daniel Gilman; where Peirce initially taught). Eliot and Gilman, among others, actively opposed Peirce’s employment at any US institution of higher education and thus kept him in penury for the latter years of his life. They falsely accused him of immorality and underestimated his brilliance due to input from jealous rivals, such as Simon Newcomb.

Though the story of Peirce’s life and thinking processes is inspiring and informative, this story is not told here. (I recommend Joseph Brent’s 1998 biography of Peirce as an excellent beginning. My own planned intellectual biography of Peirce intends to trace his life from his Pers family roots in Belgium in the 17th century to the history of the influence of his work on modern philosophy and science.) The objective here is rather to highlight some portions of Peirce’s thought to explain why his theories are so important and relevant to contemporary thinking across a wide range of topics.

The importance and range of Peirce’s contributions to science, mathematics and philosophy can be appreciated partially by recognising that many of the most important advances in philosophy and science over the past 150 years originated with Peirce: the development of mathematical logic (before and arguably better eventually than Gottlob Frege); the development of semiotics (before and arguably better than Ferdinand de Saussure); the philosophical school of pragmatism (before and arguably better than William James); the modern development of phenomenology (independently of and arguably superior to Edmund Husserl); and the invention of universal grammar with the property of recursion (before and arguably better than Noam Chomsky; though, for Peirce, universal grammar – a term he first used in 1865 – was the set of constraints on signs, with syntax playing a lesser role).

Beyond these philosophical contributions, Peirce also made fundamental discoveries in science and mathematics. A few of these are: the shape of the Milky Way galaxy; the first precise measurement of the Earth’s gravity and circumference; one of the most accurate and versatile projections of the 3D globe of the Earth onto 2D space; the chemistry of relations and working out the consequences of the discovery of the electron for the periodic table; the axiomisation of the law of the excluded middle, or Peirce’s Law: ((P→Q)→P)→P); existential graphs and the transformation of mathematics into an (quasi-)empirical component of studies on cognition; one of the first studies of the stellar spectra, particularly the spectral properties of argon; the invention of the then most accurate gravimetric pendulum; the first standardisation of the length of the metre by anchoring it to the length of a wavelength of light (which he figured out via his own experiments in multiple stations around Europe and North America). This is by no means an exhaustive list.

by Daniel Everett, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Harvard University Archives

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Keanu Reeves, Explained

Keanu Reeves, explained (Vox)

[ed. A veritable link-fest. My nephew Tony (the model) reminds me of Keanu a lot and has the same demeanor and kindness of character (longer hair).]

Magazine

Damir Kurta, Fishing
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Purple Mountains

David Berman, one of the most incisive and raw voices in indie rock, who brought the acuity of poetry to his songs, took his own life earlier this month. He was 52.

Berman left a flock of devoted listeners. The albums he released under the Silver Jews moniker were wry, scarred, hyperliterate and deeply comedic. This year, he put out his first album under a new recording alias, Purple Mountains, and at the time of his death, was just a few days away from going out on the road.

A Tribute to David Berman, Who Never Hid His Truth (NY Times)

Arthur Elgort, Wendy Whitelaw, Park Avenue, 1981
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Our Caesar: Can the Country Come Back? The Republic Already Looks Like Rome In Ruins.

[ed. Prefaced by a lengthy and interesting history of the Roman empire - how it flourished and how it died.] 

Class conflict — which, in America, has merged with a profound cultural clash — has split the country into two core interests: the largely white lower and middle classes in the middle of the country, roughly equivalent to Rome’s populares and susceptible to populist appeals by powerful men and women; and the multicultural coastal elites, whose wealth has soared as it has stagnated for the rest, and who pride themselves on their openness and meritocracy: the optimates. And just as in late-republican Rome, each side has begun not to complement but to delegitimize the other.

The result, as in Rome, is a form of deepening deadlock, a political conflict in which many on both sides profoundly fear their opponents’ power, and in which compromise through the existing republican institutions, particularly Congress, has become close to impossible. Think of Pompey’s and Caesar’s armies not as actual soldiers but as today’s political-party members and activists, mobilized for nonviolent electoral battle and dissatisfied, especially on the right, with anything less than total victory. The battles in this Cold Civil War take place all the time on the front lines of the two forces: in states where fights over gerrymandering and vote suppression are waged; in swing states in presidential elections; in the courts, where the notion of impartial justice has been recast in the public mind as partisan-bloc voting; in Congress, where regular order is a distant memory, disputes go constantly to the brink, the government is regularly shut down, the entire country’s credit is threatened, and long-established rules designed for republican compromise, like the filibuster, are being junked as fast as any Roman mos maiorum.

And the American system has a vulnerability Rome didn’t. We have always had a one-man executive branch, a head of state, with exclusive and total command of the armed forces. There is no need for an office like Rome’s dictator for when a systemic crisis hits, because we have an existing commander-in-chief vested with emergency powers who can, at any time, invoke them. The two consuls in Rome shared rule and could veto each other; what defines the American presidency is its individual, unitary nature. Over the past century, moreover, as America’s global clout has grown exponentially, and as the challenges of governing a vast and complicated country have spawned a massive administrative state under the president’s ultimate control, what was once designed as an office merely to enforce the laws made by the Congress has changed beyond recognition. (...)

When you think of how the Founders conceived the presidency, the 21st-century version is close to unrecognizable. Their phobia about monarchy placed the presidency beneath the Congress in the pecking order, stripping him of pomp and majesty. No newspaper bothered even to post a reporter at the White House until the 20th century. The “bully pulpit” was anathema, and public speeches vanishingly rare. As George F. Will points out in his new book on conservatism, the president of the United States did not even have an office until 1902, working from his living room until Teddy Roosevelt built the West Wing.

Some presidents rose above this level of modesty. Lincoln temporarily assumed far greater powers in the Civil War, of course, but it was Teddy Roosevelt who added celebrity and imperial aspirations to the office, Woodrow Wilson who began to construct an administrative state through which the executive branch could govern independently, FDR who, as president for what turned out to be life, revolutionized and metastasized the American government and bequeathed a Cold War presidency atop a military-industrial complex that now deploys troops in some 164 foreign countries.

Kennedy — and the Camelot myth that surrounded him — dazzled the elites and the public; Reagan ushered in a movie-star model for a commander-in-chief — telegenic, charismatic, and, in time, something of a cult figure; and then the 9/11 attacks created an atmosphere similar to that of Rome’s temporary, emergency dictatorships, except vast powers of war-making, surveillance, rendition, and even torture were simply transferred to an office for non-emergency times as well, as theorists of the unitary executive — relatively unbound by Congress or the rule of law — formed a tight circle around a wartime boss. And there was no six-month time limit; almost none of these powers has since been revoked.

Some hoped that Barack Obama would wind this presidency-on-steroids down. He didn’t. His presidency began with a flurry of executive orders. He launched a calamitous war on Libya with no congressional authorization; he refused to prosecute those who were involved with Bush’s torture program, who continued to rise through the ranks on his watch; he pushed his executive powers to fix a health-care law that constitutionally only Congress had the right to; and, in his second term, he ignored Congress’s legally mandated deportation of 800,000 Dreamers by refusing to enforce it. He had once ruled such a move out — “I’m president, I’m not king” — and then reinvented the move as a mere shift in priorities. To advance his environmental agenda, he used the EPA to drastically intensify regulations, bypassing Congress altogether. To push his cultural agenda, his Justice Department refused to defend the existing marriage laws and abruptly interpreted Title IX to cover transgender high-school kids without any public debate.

No Democrats regarded these moves as particularly offensive — although partisan Republicans were eager to broadcast their largely phony constitutional objections as soon as the president was not a Republican. And Congress had long since acquiesced to presidentialism anyway, wriggling out of any serious input on the war on terror, dodging the difficult task of amending the health-care law, bobbing and weaving on the environment. And although the worship of Trump is on a whole different level of fanaticism, if you didn’t see some cultish elements in the Obama movement, you weren’t looking very hard. Like Roman commanders slowly acquiring the trappings of gods, presidents have long since slipped the bounds of republican austerity into a world of elected monarchs, flying the world in a massive, airborne chariot, constantly photographed, and now commanding our attention every single day through Twitter.

But Obama was Obama, and Trump is Trump, obliterating most of what mos maiorum remained after his predecessor. Like Pompey, who bypassed all the usual qualifications for the highest office of consul, Trump stormed into party politics by mocking the very idea of political qualifications, violating norms with abandon. He had never been elected to office before; he was a businessman and a brand, not a public servant of any kind; he had no serious grip on the Constitution, liberal-democratic debate, the separation of powers, or limited government. His tangible proposals were slogans. He referred to his peers with crude nicknames, and his instincts were those of a mob boss. But he offered himself, rather like the populares in Rome, as a riposte and antidote to the political and cultural elite, the optimates. A brilliant if dangerous demagogue, he became the first presidential candidate to run not as the leader of a political party, or as a disciple of conservatism or liberalism, but as a fully fledged strongman who promised unilaterally to “make America great again.” It is hard to equate any kind of republican government with a leader who insists, of any American problem, “I, alone, can fix it.”

No one in the American system at this level has ever behaved like this before, crudely trampling on republican practices, scoffing at the rule of law, targeting individual citizens for calumny, openly demonizing his opponents, calling a free press treasonous, deploying deceit impulsively, skirting the boundaries of mental illness, bragging of sexual assault, delegitimizing his own government when it showed even a flicker of independence — and yet he almost instantly commanded the near-total loyalty of an entire political party, and of 40 percent of the country, and this loyalty has barely wavered.

If republicanism at its core is a suspicion of one-man rule, and that suspicion is the central animating principle of the American experiment in self-government, Trump has effectively suspended it for the past three years and normalized strongman politics in America. Nothing and no one in his administration matters except him, as he constantly reminds us. His Cabinet appeared to rein him in for a while, until most experienced adults left it as his demands for total subservience became more insistent. Vast tracts of the bureaucracy are simply ignored, the State Department all but shut down, foreign policy made by impulse, whim, nepotism, for financial gain, or from strange personal rapport with thugs like Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, rather than by any kind of collective deliberation or policy process. Pliant nobodies fill administrative roles where real expertise matters and pushback against the president could have been effective in the past. Congress has very occasionally objected, but it has either been vetoed, as in the recent attempt to curtail U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s wars, or, if it succeeded in passing legislation with a veto-proof majority, as in Russian sanctions, been slow-walked by the White House.

Writing honestly about this — and the extraordinary upping of the authoritarian ante this presidency has entailed — comes across at times like a dystopian portrait of a nightmare future, except it is very much the present and greeted either with enthusiastic support from the GOP or growing numbness and acceptance by the broader public. The old-school relative reticence of the republican concept of a president had already been transformed, of course, but Trump ramped up the volume to 11: a propaganda channel broadcasting round the clock, with memes almost instantly retweeted by the president, endless provocations to own the news cycle, and mass rallies to sustain his populist appeal. If the definition of a free society is that you don’t have to think about who governs you every minute of the day, then we no longer live in a free society. The press? Vilified, lied to, ignored, mocked, threatened.

When Trump has collided with the rule of law, moreover, he has had a remarkable string of victories. After a period in which he was amazed that his attorney general would follow legal ethics rather than the boss’s instructions, he has now finally appointed one to protect him personally, pursue his political opponents, and defend an extreme theory of presidential Article 2 power. Checked for the first time this year by a Democratic House, he has responded the way a monarch would — by simply refusing, in an unprecedentedly total fashion, to cooperate with any congressional investigation of anything in his administration. Far from being transparent to prove his lack of corruption, he has actively sued anyone seeking any information on his finances. He has declared a phony emergency to justify seizing and using congressional funds for a purpose specifically opposed by the Congress, building a wall on the southern border, and gotten away with it. He has taken his authority to negotiate tariffs in a national-security emergency and turned it into a routine part of presidential conduct to wage a general trade war. And he has enabled an army of grifters and opportunists to line their pockets or accumulate perks at public expense — as long as they never utter a word of criticism.

He has also definitively shown that a president can accept support from a foreign power to get elected, attempt to shut down any inquiry into his crimes, obstruct justice, suborn perjury from an aide, get caught … and get away with all of it. Asking for his tax returns or a radical distancing from his business interests strikes him as an act of lèse-majesté. He refers to “my military” and “my generals,” and claims they all support him, as if he were Pompey or Caesar. He muses constantly about extending his term of office indefinitely, just as those Roman populists did.

Does he mean it? It almost doesn’t matter. He’s testing those guardrails to see just how numb a public can become to grotesque violations of ethical or rhetorical norms, and he has found them exhilaratingly wanting. And he has an unerring instinct for where the weaknesses of our republican system lie. He has abused the limitless pardon powers of the president that were created for rare occasions of clemency, a concept that to Trump has literally no meaning. He has done so to reward political friends, enthuse his base, and, much more gravely, to corrupt the course of justice in the Mueller investigation. The concept even of a “self-pardon” has been added to the existing interdiction on prosecuting a sitting president.

He has also abused various laws allowing him to declare national emergencies in order to get his way even when no such emergencies exist.

Congress has passed several of these laws, assuming naïvely that in our system, a president can be relied on not to invent emergencies to seize otherwise unconstitutional powers — like executive control of legislative spending. This, of course, is not a minor matter; it’s an assault on the core principle of separation of powers that makes a republican government possible. But when the Supreme Court recently lifted a stay on the funds in a legal technicality, where was the outcry? The ruling registered as barely a blip.

The whims of one man now determine much of what happens in what we think of as a republic, where power should, in principle, be widely disseminated. And you don’t just see this in what has objectively happened. You can feel the difference in the culture. Every morning, Washington wakes up and needs to ask only one question to figure out what’s going on, as they did in the royal courts of old: What is the president’s mood today? If that isn’t a sign of a fast-eroding republic, what is? (...)

A republican president respects how the system works, treats power as if it is always temporarily held, interacts with other agents with civility, however strained, and feels responsible, for a while, for keeping the system alive. Trump simply has no understanding of any of this. His very psyche — his staggering vanity, narcissism, and selfishness — is far more compatible with monarchical government than a republican one. He takes no responsibility for failures on his watch and every single credit for anything successful, whatever its provenance. The idea that he would put the system’s interest above his own makes no sense to him. It is only ever about him.

And the public has so internalized this fact it can sometimes seem like a natural feature of the political landscape, not the insidiously horrifying turn in American political history and culture that it is. If there is a conflict between his and others’ interests, his must always win decisively. If he doesn’t win, he has to lie to insist that he did. Everything in strongman rule is related to the strongman, as we are all sucked into the vortex of his malignant, clinical narcissism. You never escape him, every news cycle is dominated by him, every conversation is befouled, if you are not careful. And this saps the republican spirit. It engenders a kind of passivity. It makes submission feel like a kind of relief.

by Andrew Sullivan, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Joe Darrow
[ed. We need another Trump story like we need a hole in the head, but this one is particularly interesting (detailed Roman history notwithstanding). The important point being how dysfuntion in government and society is becoming normalized.]

Foreign-Policy Crisis: Hong Kong in the Balance

For two and a half years, the world has wondered how President Donald Trump would cope with a real international crisis. That crisis may have finally arrived in Hong Kong, as Beijing appears poised to execute a massive, violent crackdown against protesters. And how it’s resolved will matter not just for Trump’s political fortunes—it will determine whether the United States and China can find a basis for managing competition with each other, or whether they will be locked in a new and volatile Cold War.

Unrest in Hong Kong would pose a particularly difficult challenge for any American president, who would have to balance support for democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest against the need to avoid interfering in China’s domestic affairs.

The shadow of Budapest in 1956 looms large. Hungarians believed, with good reason, that the United States would support them if they rose up against the Soviet Union. When they did so, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to intervene, believing it could lead to a general war. This tragic episode was a warning to future presidents not to overpromise. That lesson was learned again when President George H. W. Bush encouraged the Kurds to rise up against Saddam Hussein in 1991, only to abandon them.

During Hong Kong’s 2014 umbrella protests, which were not as far-reaching as those taking place now, President Barack Obama struck a cautious note, expressing America’s inherent sympathy for freedom of speech and association and saying his government’s primary message was the avoidance of violence. Republicans, including Senator Marco Rubio, criticized Obama for not being more supportive of the protesters. The White House worried that any support would lend credibility to Beijing’s claim that the protests were orchestrated by the United States—and was careful not to overpromise.

Presidents are constrained in what they can say. We should cut Donald Trump some slack. But even taking those constraints into account, Trump’s response could hardly have been worse. Not only was Trump silent on America’s core values. He also increased the risk of a major miscalculation by China with seismic geopolitical consequences. It may prove to be the greatest mistake of his presidency.

Trump’s folly began with a phone call to China’s president, Xi Jinping, on June 18. According to the Financial Times and Politico, Trump told the Chinese leader that he would not condemn a crackdown in Hong Kong. The commitment was made on the fly, without prior consultation with his national-security team. On August 1, Trump made good on that secret promise when he told the press:

“Something is probably happening with Hong Kong, because when you look at, you know, what’s going on, they’ve had riots for a long period of time. And I don’t know what China’s attitude is. Somebody said that at some point they’re going to want to stop that. But that’s between Hong Kong and that’s between China, because Hong Kong is a part of China. They’ll have to deal with that themselves. They don’t need advice.”

On August 13, Trump called it “a very tough situation,” but added that he hoped “it works out for everybody, including China.” Later he tweeted, “Many are blaming me, and the United States, for the problems going on in Hong Kong. I can’t imagine why?” His secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, told CNBC, “What would we do, invade Hong Kong? … It’s a question of what role is there for the U.S. in that manner? This is an internal matter.” Politico reports have quoted administration officials as saying that Trump is singularly focused on a trade deal and does not want human rights to get in the way. After a torrent of criticism, and a deluge of statements from congressional leaders, he tweeted last night, vaguely asking Xi to deal with Hong Kong “humanely” and hinting at a meeting. He could have said no violence, but he chose not to. This morning, he again praised Xi and suggested he meet with protesters. It was marginally better than the unconditional green light he had offered previously, but it is still far short of what is required. (...)

The Hong Kong crisis comes at a particularly sensitive moment in U.S.-China relations. Competition between the two global powers may be inevitable, but its scope and intensity depends on the decisions both countries make. In Hong Kong, Xi faces a crucial choice—a 21st-century version of the Tiananmen Square crackdown would make a new Cold War all but inevitable.

A violent crackdown would make it much more difficult to calibrate competition with China. China will have revealed itself to be a totalitarian dictatorship guilty of the excesses associated with such regimes. Cooperation will become difficult, if not impossible, even on matters of mutual interest. Having crossed the Rubicon and incurred the costs, Xi may be even more willing to flex China’s muscles in the South China Sea and East China Sea, increasing tensions with its neighbors and the United States. If China handles Hong Kong in a heavy-handed way, that would also have repercussions for Taiwan, which would see its suspicions of the mainland confirmed.

A violent crackdown would also accelerate economic decoupling, with Western investors fleeing Hong Kong as it becomes just another Chinese city. More than 1,300 U.S. firms have a presence in Taiwan, including nearly every major U.S. financial firm. There are 85,000 U.S. citizens in Hong Kong. They would likely leave. A violent crackdown would almost surely lead to the imposition of sanctions by the U.S. Congress, if necessary with a supermajority to overcome a presidential veto. The decoupling would not be confined to Hong Kong. The tariffs and restrictions imposed to generate leverage in trade negotiations would become permanent.

by Thomas Wright, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Bobby Yip, Reuters 

via:

What is the 'Salmon Cannon'?

Earlier this week, a video shot through the Twitter feed fray with the velocity of a fish hurtling through a pneumatic tube.

The short video (set to house music, strangely) is a compilation of clips showing variations of the fish-shooting technology that Washington-based company Whooshh first developed five years ago. Not only has the video given the internet an ideal subject of absurdist fascination to dethrone last week’s 30-50 feral hogs, it’s also raised a lot of questions, like, “Wait, what?”, and “How does the fish feel about this?” and, “Can they potentially do this with humans?” (I can’t be the only person who was wondering this.)

For answers, I got on the phone with Vince Bryan III, CEO of Whooshh Innovations and inventor of the Salmon Canon (purposely spelled with only one “n” to distinguish the eco-friendly invention from a murderous weapon). His company’s name is derived from the sound fish make as they fly over the high dams that otherwise may block their upstream migratory routes, preventing them from spawning (declining salmon stocks are an issue of critical importance in the Pacific north-west).

So, how does the Whooshh Passage Portal work?

The Whooshh Passage Portal is a system that you put into a river that automates the entire process of getting a fish over a dam. In those early videos five years ago you would see people hand-feeding the fish in; today the fish swim into the system on their own. Inside the tubes is a kind of an airlock where we make a small pressure differential to create a force so the fish moves through the tube. And that tube is irrigated, it’s misted on the inside, so the fish is able to breathe, and it’s a frictionless environment.

From the fish’s perspective it’s a completely smooth ride and it actually feels to them like they’re in the water. And that’s why when they come out the exit they just swim away. They swim in, they slide, they glide, and they swim off. There’s no shock to their system. (...)

How many fish have gone through the cannon?

I don’t have an exact number, but many, many millions. We’ve been operating a version of the system in Norway for three or four years now, and transporting between 5,000 and 10,000 fish a day. They’ve been using the traditional Salmon Canon in Washington for five years now, and those are a hand-feed system. But they do about 15,000 fish a year.

Is your goal to have your technology integrated into every dam if possible, and what would the costs of implementation be?

We would like to see the Whooshh system everywhere on every dam. In the United States, for example, there are 85,000 dams. And just if you did 11 systems a day, you’d have fish passage on every one of those dams in 20 years.

Do you have any plans to make a human-sized cannon?

Only to the extent that we’ll move sturgeon at some point. Large, 200-plus pound sturgeon, and that will require us to make a larger tube. And at that point we’ve got a long list of volunteers who have said that they would like to be the first, and if somebody wants to do it, they’re welcome to try.

by Adrienne Matei, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: YouTube via USDE. Alternative video in the story.

See also: The Salmon Cannon: Easier Than Shooting Fish Out Of A Barrel (NPR) and The Nihilistic Euphoria of the Fish Tube (New Yorker).]

The Truth About Wanting to Die

I grew to love the hospital’s intercom announcements. Code Blue for cardiac arrest; Code White for a violent patient; Code Yellow for a missing person, an elopee, as they’re called, a runaway for whom I’d silently cheer. Go, sixty-eight-year-old Caucasian man with short brown hair last seen wearing hospital pants and a brown wool cardigan and no shoes! Run! (...)

I was sure if I just acted normal enough they would let me go. I tried to be courteous, lucid and calm but not suspiciously upbeat. I didn’t weep or scream at my own frustration or impotence or exhaustion or insomnia or self-loathing. I met, as required, multiple times a day with nurses and social workers. And my I’m-totally-fine, suicide-was-a-one-time-aberration ploy almost worked: I was almost set free by the first psychiatrist I saw within a week of my admission without so much as a follow-up appointment.

This isn’t, incidentally, best practice: it’s a great way to ensure people fall through the cracks and (if they’re lucky) wind up back in hospital in worse shape than before.

Unbeknownst to me, as I paced by my bed and prepared for life outside the windowless ward, my parents had pushed for a second opinion, my dad writing desperate, pleading emails at three o’clock in the morning. The second psychiatrist was smart and sardonic and treated me like someone capable of communicating in multisyllabic sentences. He also had a far better bullshit detector. He did not buy my argument that this whole suicide thing was an anomalous one-off, a mental misunderstanding, never to recur. He decided I had major depression. And that I was fucked up enough to merit more time locked up lest I try to off myself again.

Eight hundred thousand people around the world kill themselves every year, which means about 2,200 a day, or three every two minutes. Statistically, two dozen people killed themselves in the time it took you to get out of bed, showered, and caffeinated. Maybe forty-five during your commute to work, another ninety in the time you spent making dinner. Unless you, like me, take an eternity to do any of those things, if they happen at all. In which case, think of it this way: every time you mull killing yourself and manage to talk yourself down because you have more to do and more to ask of life, a handful of people have lost that internal, wrenching wrestling match and ended it.

In Canada, where eleven people kill themselves daily, you’re almost ten times more likely to kill yourself than you are to be killed by someone else. About 120 Americans kill themselves every day: Americans are more than twice as likely to die by their own hands as someone else’s. Victims of America’s gun epidemic are almost twice as likely to have shot themselves to death than have been shot to death by someone else. If you die young, suicide’s much more likely to be the cause: in 2016 it was the second-leading cause of death for Americans between ten and thirty-four years old. Many, many more people try to kill themselves than actually do it—about half a million Americans are brought to emergency rooms every year after having tried to end their lives.

The reality is likely even worse: evidence indicates we’re undercounting suicides by a significant amount—by as much as a third, depending how you guesstimate. For one thing, despite the supposed decrease in shame in having a family member kill themselves, our persistent societal freak-out regarding suicide can make both relatives and authorities hesitant to classify deaths as such. There’s a very high burden of proof required for coroners and medical examiners to classify a death as a suicide. There’s rarely incontrovertible evidence: most people don’t leave suicide notes, and not everyone talks about killing themselves before killing themselves. Even if they had at some point in the past, how do you know this specific incident was a suicide? If someone is depressed, even suicidal, but also misuses drugs, how do you know for sure whether an overdose is purposeful? How do you know for sure whether a single-vehicle crash was careless driving or driven by a need for death? How can you be certain whether someone slipped or jumped?

You’re more likely to find suicides when you look for them. And, much of the time, we don’t. Grieving families would frequently prefer not to touch the issue. “The underreporting of suicide is a recognized concern in Canada and internationally,” reads a 2016 study based on data from the Public Health Agency of Canada. Suicide deaths are also examined a lot less closely, on average: a 2010 report found that about 55 percent of US suicide deaths get autopsied, compared to 92 percent of homicides. (...)

This has been a known issue for a while. The consequences of underreporting extend beyond public-health nerds who get off on accuracy. Undercounting suggests something is less of a problem than it is and therefore less deserving of our attention and our dollars. Which is convenient, given how icky suicide makes us feel in the first place. Finding fewer suicides can make it seem like suicide is less of an issue. “If you think about it, society hasn’t been that invested in suicide prevention,” Rockett points out. “If you more accurately portray the self-injury deaths and say, ‘This is mental health,’ there’s potential for rather more resources to be directed toward the problem.”

Botched suicide attempts also go underreported: many people who try to kill themselves either don’t seek medical help or lie about why they are seeking it. I’ve done both those things. I’d do them again. As I’ve said, telling anyone you’ve tried to kill yourself, let alone someone you don’t know, let alone someone who could suspend your right to freedom of movement, gives one enormous pause. (Not that telling someone you love is any easier.)

by Anna Mehler Paperny, The Walrus |  Read more:

Image: Paul Kim