My Kindle Clippings/2011

June

The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 337  | Added on Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 02:28 PM

federaist 4 is basically usimg the example of britain amd its three or four parts to demonstrate need for union. also covers economic reasons for doing so. 
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 371  | Added on Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 04:10 PM

interesting foreshadowing...
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 389-91  | Added on Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 04:14 PM

And here let us not forget how much more easy it is to receive foreign fleets into our ports, and foreign armies into our country, than it is to persuade or compel them to depart.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 393  | Added on Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 04:16 PM

definitely some eerie civil war foreshadowing concerning domestic and foreign conflicts and relationships among confederacies
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 398  | Added on Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 04:19 PM

not just talking about disunion and multiple confederacies. specifically discussing interstate conflicts that will occur even in a union
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Foreign Affairs May-June 2011 (Foreign Affairs)
- Note Loc. 124  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 01:34 AM

article argues that arab spring is not sngular phenomena but is happening for different reasons and with different driving forces in each country. also addresses that each country is facing different challenges. america and american committment to ara spring originates in tone se by obaa in cairo speech. but historical and country specific understanding is necessary to making the right moves/decisions
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 484  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 01:49 AM

sources of conflict: territory. hamilton goes on to give examples from the colonies themselves and doesnt leave the argument abstract
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 520  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 01:54 AM

additional reason for conflict beyond territory is economic/commercial
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 538  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 01:58 AM

third source of conflict: government budget
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 555-56  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 02:01 AM

and, in addition to the rest, the reluctance with which men commonly part with money for purposes that have outlived the exigencies which produced them, and interfere with the supply of immediate wants.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 559  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 02:03 AM

legal conflicts, stemming from inconsistent contract or other law
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 603  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 12:27 PM

essentially what he is arguing is that the geography and progress of war are such that confederacies will result in something like europe, a bunch of monarchies and wars and continual conflicts
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 618  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 12:33 PM

how were the armies of greece organized?

this would require more research for me to be convinced
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 619  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 12:36 PM

what does he mean by internal invasions?
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 621  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 12:38 PM

why? because they can spend their time on other stuff?

it would be interesting to examine some of his claims in the context of the civil war
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 621  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 12:40 PM

also would be interestinng to examine his claims in light of modern wilsonian external conflicts
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 629  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 12:42 PM

like, uh, terrorism
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 628-34  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 12:43 PM

The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors. The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters, is neither remote nor difficult; but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions, to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 654-55  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 01:01 PM

This objection will be fully examined in its proper place, and it will be shown that the only natural precaution which could have been taken on this subject has been taken; and a much better one than
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Bookmark Loc. 654  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 02:47 PM


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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 699-704  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 03:01 PM

So far are the suggestions of Montesquieu from standing in opposition to a general Union of the States, that he explicitly treats of a CONFEDERATE REPUBLIC as the expedient for extending the sphere of popular government, and reconciling the advantages of monarchy with those of republicanism. ``It is very probable,'' (says he1) ``that mankind would have been obliged at length to live constantly under the government of a single person, had they not contrived a kind of constitution that has all the internal advantages of a republican, together with the external force of a monarchical government. I mean a CONFEDERATE REPUBLIC.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 765-66  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 11:10 PM

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 794-97  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 11:19 PM

The inference to which we are brought is, that the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS. If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Bookmark Loc. 857  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 11:34 PM


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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 947-48  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 11:52 PM

A unity of commercial, as well as political, interests, can only result from a unity of government.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 957  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 11:54 PM

typo?
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Bookmark Loc. 959  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 11:54 PM


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Foreign Affairs May-June 2011 (Foreign Affairs)
- Highlight Loc. 136-42  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 11:58 PM

For a revolution to succeed, a number of factors have to come together. The government must appear so irremediably unjust or inept that it is widely viewed as a threat to the country's future; elites (especially in the military) must be alienated from the state and no longer willing to defend it; a broad-based section of the population, spanning ethnic and religious groups and socioeconomic classes, must mobilize; and international powers must either refuse to step in to defend the government or constrain it from using maximum force to defend itself. Revolutions rarely triumph because these conditions rarely coincide. This is especially the case in traditional monarchies and one-party states, whose leaders often manage to maintain popular support by making appeals to respect for royal tradition or nationalism.
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Foreign Affairs May-June 2011 (Foreign Affairs)
- Note Loc. 146  | Added on Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 11:59 PM

north korea anyone?
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Foreign Affairs May-June 2011 (Foreign Affairs)
- Highlight Loc. 229-30  | Added on Thursday, June 16, 2011, 01:24 AM

Unemployment among the educated, moreover, has been even worse: in Egypt, college graduates are ten times as likely to have no job as those with only an elementary school education.
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Foreign Affairs May-June 2011 (Foreign Affairs)
- Note Loc. 242  | Added on Thursday, June 16, 2011, 01:28 AM

if circumstances had been different, maybe the military would have killed the arab spring before it could even start... kind of a depressing thought
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Foreign Affairs May-June 2011 (Foreign Affairs)
- Note Loc. 242  | Added on Thursday, June 16, 2011, 01:28 AM

if circumstances had been different, maybe the military would have killed the arab spring before it could even start... kind of a depressing thought. it wasnt the overwhelming power of the people alone, but confoumding factors that weakened leaders.
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Ulysses (James Joyce)
- Highlight Loc. 1237  | Added on Thursday, June 16, 2011, 11:34 AM

The king was in his countinghouse. Nobody.
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Ulysses (James Joyce)
- Highlight Loc. 1284-89  | Added on Thursday, June 16, 2011, 11:55 AM

Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah yes, in the dead sea floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so thick with salt. Because the weight of the water, no, the weight of the body in the water is equal to the weight of the what? Or is it the volume is equal to the weight? It's a law something like that. Vance in High school cracking his fingerjoints, teaching. The college curriculum. Cracking curriculum. What is weight really when you say the weight? Thirtytwo feet per second per second. Law of falling bodies: per second per second. They all fall to the ground. The earth. It's the force of gravity of the earth is the weight.
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Five Little Pigs (Agatha Christie)
- Bookmark Loc. 808  | Added on Friday, June 17, 2011, 01:12 PM


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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Bookmark Loc. 1047  | Added on Friday, June 17, 2011, 01:44 PM


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Five Little Pigs (Agatha Christie)
- Highlight Loc. 1834-35  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2011, 10:52 AM

It is no use evading unhappiness by tampering with facts.
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Five Little Pigs (Agatha Christie)
- Note Loc. 1952  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2011, 11:10 AM

kind of a ridiculous attitude... he has no real reason to immediately agree with her and all the time be skeptical of the evidnce and all other accounts. poirot is certainly not a bayesian... he doesnt need information in the first place!!!
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Five Little Pigs (Agatha Christie)
- Highlight Loc. 1993  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2011, 11:13 AM

And he experienced in this moment the strongest doubts he had yet felt of the course to which he had committed himself.
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Five Little Pigs (Agatha Christie)
- Note Loc. 1993  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2011, 11:14 AM

yes, dont bother with evidence... commit to a course, commit to a hypothesis, regardless of the evidence. great detective... eye roll
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Five Little Pigs (Agatha Christie)
- Note Loc. 2402  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2011, 12:20 PM

this is twisted logic... creating a new narrative to suit ignored circumstances... like the reverse of what it shoul be
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Five Little Pigs (Agatha Christie)
- Note Loc. 2503  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2011, 12:28 PM

yes yes dont bother with evidence. the feeling of poirot has rubbd off into a feeling of meredith...
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Five Little Pigs (Agatha Christie)
- Highlight Loc. 2992-98  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2011, 12:47 PM

‘Reflect a minute. If you were to pass a fishmonger’s and saw twelve fish laid out on his slab, you would think they were all real fish, would you not? But one of them might be stuffed fish.’ Miss Williams replied with spirit: ‘Most unlikely and anyway—’ ‘Ah, unlikely, yes, but not impossible—because a friend of mine once took down a stuffed fish (it was his trade, you comprehend) to compare it with the real thing! And if you saw a bowl of innias in a drawing-room in December you would say that they were false—but they might be real ones flown home from Baghdad.’ ‘What is the meaning of all this nonsense?’ demanded Miss Williams. ‘It is to show you that it is the eyes of the mind with which one really sees…’
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Five Little Pigs (Agatha Christie)
- Highlight Loc. 3276-77  | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2011, 01:07 PM

‘There is always a danger of accepting facts as proved which are really nothing of the kind.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1333-34  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:28 AM

Brazil, China, India, and other fast-emerging states have a different set of cultural, political, and economic experiences, and they see the world through their anti-imperial and anticolonial pasts.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1346-48  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:29 AM

The struggle over international order today is not about fundamental principles. China and other emerging great powers do not want to contest the basic rules and principles of the liberal international order; they wish to gain more authority and leadership within it.Indeed,
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1357-58  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:34 AM

update the liberal order for a new era, ensuring that it continues to provide the benefits of security and prosperity that it has provided since the middle of the twentieth century.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1358  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:44 AM

capitais ad constitutionalism work well becausethey account for human nature and huma greed. communism does not. but that capability leads to homeless peple and goldman sachs coexisting...
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1358  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:44 AM

capitais ad constitutionalism work well becausethey account for human nature and huma greed. communism does not. but that capability leads to homeless peple and goldman sachs coexisting...

liyong conversation
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1359-61  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:45 AM

China and the other emerging powers do not face simply an American-led order or a Western system. They face a broader international order that is the product of centuries of struggle and innovation. It is highly developed, expansive, integrated, institutionalized, and deeply rooted in the societies and economies of both advanced capitalist states and developing states.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1368-70  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:47 AM

The "problems of Hobbes," that is, anarchy and power insecurities, have had to be solved in order to take advantage of the "opportunities of Locke," that is, the construction of open and rule-based relations.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1370  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:48 AM

peace of westphalia establishes state relation framework

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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1370  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:49 AM

peace of westphalia establishes state relation framework from nothing

liberal world order orders these relations
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1370-72  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:49 AM

The original principles of the Westphalian system -- sovereignty, territorial integrity, and nonintervention -- reflected an emerging consensus that states were the rightful political units for the establishment of legitimate rule.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1374-75  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:50 AM

Under the banners of sovereignty and self-determination, political movements for decolonization and independence were set in motion in the non-Western developing world, coming to fruition in the decades after World War II.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1381  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:56 AM

nuclear test ban treaty... and that example in particular is interesting because it is very illustrative of the libera world order counttries, russia arguably included, bnning tests, but emerguing powers like china and india testing anywa... throwing out the old rulebook
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Bookmark Loc. 1389  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:56 AM


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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1389-90  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:56 AM

But in the interwar period of closed economic systems and imperial blocs, this experiment in liberal order collapsed.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1400-1401  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:58 AM

In the decades since the end of the Cold War, notions of "the responsibility to protect" have given the international community legal rights and obligations to intervene in the affairs of sovereign states.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1401  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:59 AM

contrast with chinas position on noninterference policy wrt other countries internal affairs...
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1405-8  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 11:59 AM

But now, as this hegemonic organization of the liberal international order starts to change, the hierarchical aspects are fading while the liberal aspects persist. So even as China and other rising states try to contest U.S. leadership -- and there is indeed a struggle over the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of the leading states within the system -- the deeper international order remains intact.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1408  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:01 PM

liberal world order has two parts... hegemony and liberal aspects. he is arguing tha hegemonic aspects are declining, not the entire liberal world order
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1420-21  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:02 PM

China is already deeply enmeshed in the global trading system, with a remarkable 40 percent of its GNP composed of exports -- 25 percent of which go to the United States.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1421  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:02 PM

wow.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Bookmark Loc. 1426  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:03 PM


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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1426-27  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:03 PM

China will feel pressures to establish these same institutional preconditions if it wants the benefits of a global
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1427  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:03 PM

currency.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1433-35  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:04 PM

The UN Security Council, the G-20, the governing bodies of the Bretton Woods institutions -- these are all stages on which rising non-Western states can acquire great-power authority and exercise global leadership.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1435-40  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:05 PM

Meanwhile, there is no competing global organizing logic to liberal internationalism. An alternative, illiberal order -- a "Beijing model" -- would presumably be organized around exclusive blocs, spheres of influence, and mercantilist networks. It would be less open and rule-based, and it would be dominated by an array of state-to-state ties. But on a global scale, such a system would not advance the interests of any of the major states, including China. The Beijing model only works when one or a few states opportunistically exploit an open system of markets. But if everyone does, it is no longer an open system but a fragmented, mercantilist, and protectionist complex -- and everyone suffers.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1442-43  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:05 PM

China would be successful enough with its authoritarian model of development to resist the pressures to liberalize and democratize. But if the rest of the world does not gravitate toward this model, China will find itself subjected to pressure to play by the rules.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1446-50  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:47 PM

In the background, meanwhile, democracy and the rule of law are still the hallmarks of modernity and the global standard for legitimate governance. Although it is true that the spread of democracy has stalled in recent years and that authoritarian China has performed well in the recent economic crisis, there is little evidence that authoritarian states can become truly advanced societies without moving in a liberal democratic direction. The legitimacy of one-party rule within China rests more on the state's ability to deliver economic growth and full employment than on authoritarian -- let alone communist -- political principles.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1451-52  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:47 PM

"China cannot succeed in its goal of becoming a modern developed society until it can take the leap and allow the Chinese people to choose their own rulers."
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1455  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:49 PM

why not try to move in that direction but in a controlled way? systematically introduce reforms i mea. i dnt know. mabe they are doing that already.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1458  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:49 PM

and no competing political ideals even lurk on the sidelines.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1458  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:52 PM

is this right? i mean acceptable right. democracy is easily abused. the reublic system is wha .adethe united states so dominant. it wasnt just democracy. maybe too many failures of democracies will convince people it doesnt work. andmaybeit doesnt! the real push sould be toward an acceptable working republican system... not a blind support of democracy in its plainest form...
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1465-68  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:53 PM

The Atlantic Charter, announced by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in 1941, and the Bretton Woods agreements of 1944 were early efforts to articulate a vision of economic openness and social stability. The United States would do well to try to reach back and rearticulate this view. The world is not rejecting openness and markets; it is asking for a more expansive notion of stability and economic security.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1481  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:56 PM

article about advantages of an aggressive china... i cant exactly remember what it covered or what it cited as positive beavior...
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1485-87  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 12:58 PM

The country operated within layers of regional and global economic, political, and security institutions and constructed new ones -- thereby making itself more predictable and approachable and reducing the incentives for other states to undermine it by building countervailing coalitions.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1487  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 01:00 PM

and september 11th was perfect opportunity to renew or revisit this world order and make ourselves predictable and approachable and create an international coalition. but.........
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1491-93  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 01:01 PM

rising great powers are threatened less by mass armies marching across borders than by transnational dangers, such as terrorism, climate change, and pandemic disease. What goes on in one country -- radicalism, carbon emissions, or public health failures -- can increasingly harm another country.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1499  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 01:02 PM

i.e. decentralization or dehegemonization
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1501-4  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 01:03 PM

Markets and democracy have spread. Societies outside the West are trading and growing. The United States has more alliance partners today than it did during the Cold War. Rival hegemonic states with revisionist and illiberal agendas have been pushed off the global stage. It is difficult to read these world-historical developments as a story of American decline and liberal unraveling.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1515-16  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 01:05 PM

share the burdens of global economic and political governance,
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1517-18  | Added on Sunday, June 19, 2011, 01:06 PM

which is why states will continue to look to Washington for security and partnership.
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Murder on the Orient Express: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Agatha Christie)
- Highlight Loc. 900-902  | Added on Monday, June 20, 2011, 06:47 AM

“See you, my dear doctor, me, I am not one to rely upon the expert procedure. It is the psychology I seek, not the fingerprint or the cigarette ash. But in this case I would welcome a little scientific assistance. This compartment is full of clues, but can I be sure that those clues are really what they seem to be?”
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 1050-54  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 12:00 AM

The money saved from one object may be usefully applied to another, and there will be so much the less to be drawn from the pockets of the people. If the States are united under one government, there will be but one national civil list to support; if they are divided into several confederacies, there will be as many different national civil lists to be provided for—and each of them, as to the principal departments, coextensive with that which would be necessary for a government of the whole. The entire separation of the States into thirteen unconnected sovereignties is a project too extravagant and too replete with danger to have many advocates.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 1054  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 12:01 AM

hamilton doesnt seem worried about distribution of power instead of distillation of power...
an interesting and valid point
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 1063-65  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 12:03 AM

Civil power, properly organized and exerted, is capable of diffusing its force to a very great extent; and can, in a manner, reproduce itself in every part of a great empire by a judicious arrangement of subordinate institutions.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 1087  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 12:06 AM

interesting how the arguments against confederacies and disunion work almost equally i.e. without modification against sates rights
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 1087  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 12:06 AM

interesting how the arguments against confederacies and disunion work almost equally i.e. without modification against states rights
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 1090-92  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 12:08 AM

as the only substitute for those military establishments which have subverted the liberties of the Old World, and as the proper antidote for the diseases of faction, which have proved fatal to other popular governments, and of which alarming symptoms have been betrayed by our own.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 1089-92  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 12:08 AM

WE HAVE seen the necessity of the Union, as our bulwark against foreign danger, as the conservator of peace among ourselves, as the guardian of our commerce and other common interests, as the only substitute for those military establishments which have subverted the liberties of the Old World, and as the proper antidote for the diseases of faction, which have proved fatal to other popular governments, and of which alarming symptoms have been betrayed by our own.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 1098-1100  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 12:09 AM

It is, that in a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 1148-50  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 12:16 AM

If they should derive less benefit, therefore, from the Union in some respects than the less distant States, they will derive greater benefit from it in other respects, and thus the proper equilibrium will be maintained throughout.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 1150  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 12:17 AM

i seem to see a lot of these kind of arguments in the federalist paers. while they give good specific examples in some cases, they are completely vague in others and kind of handwave specifics
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 1164-68  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 12:20 AM

To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example, of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public happiness. Had no important step been taken by the leaders of the Revolution for which a precedent could not be discovered, no government established of which an exact model did not present itself, the people of the United States might, at this moment have been numbered among the melancholy victims of misguided councils, must at best have been laboring under the weight of some of those forms which have crushed the liberties of the rest of mankind.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Bookmark Loc. 1183  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 04:51 AM


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01 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
- Highlight Loc. 1628-30  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 04:02 PM

Was there a reason behind it? There would be no point in asking Zaphod, he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomability into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
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01 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
- Highlight Loc. 2279-83  | Added on Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 09:45 PM

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
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Ulysses (James Joyce)
- Bookmark Loc. 6867  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:12 PM


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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2366-75  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:15 PM

For a revolution to succeed, a number of factors have to come together. The government must appear so irremediably unjust or inept that it is widely viewed as a threat to the country's future; elites (especially in the military) must be alienated from the state and no longer willing to defend it; a broad-based section of the population, spanning ethnic and religious groups and socioeconomic classes, must mobilize; and international powers must either refuse to step in to defend the government or constrain it from using maximum force to defend itself. Revolutions rarely triumph because these conditions rarely coincide. This is especially the case in traditional monarchies and one-party states, whose leaders often manage to maintain popular support by making appeals to respect for royal tradition or nationalism. Elites, who are often enriched by such governments, will only forsake them if their circumstances or the ideology of the rulers changes drastically. And in almost all cases, broad-based popular mobilization is difficult to achieve because it requires bridging the disparate interests of the urban and rural poor, the middle class, students, professionals, and different ethnic or religious groups.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 2377  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:32 PM

north korea anyone?
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2455-56  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:33 PM

Unemployment among the educated, moreover, has been even worse: in Egypt, college graduates are ten times as likely to have no job as those with only an elementary school education.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 2468  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:41 PM

...military could have killed the arab string before it even started. kind of a depressing thought. it wasnt tha people had power and were able to overpower the government. it was just confounding factors.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 2002  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:43 PM

and lack of military support
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2012-14  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:45 PM

What follows this transition will depend on whether the forces that staged the revolution can remain united and organized or whether some groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, strike a separate deal with the military. If this were to happen, the secular and youth movements that were the driving force behind the January 25 revolution would be effectively marginalized.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2031-36  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:48 PM

Over the past five years, many workers -- both blue-collar laborers and educated professionals -- took to organizing strikes and other protests to show their anger at their economic disenfranchisement. These protests took place outside the control or leadership of the country's labor unions and professional syndicates, which were constrained by laws that limited their freedom to strike or carry out any protest. In 2008, property-tax collectors established Egypt's first independent trade union since 1959, the year that all such unions were brought under the control of the state. In 2010 alone, there were around 700 strikes and protest actions organized by workers across the country. However, these protests tended to focus exclusively on labor-specific demands and to shy away from political issues.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2040-43  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:49 PM

Youth unemployment is highest among those with more education: in Egypt in 2006, young people with a secondary education or more represented 95 percent of the unemployed in their age group. Those who do find jobs often work for low pay and in poor conditions. This combination of high unemployment and low pay has kept many young Egyptian men from marrying and forming families. Approximately half of all Egyptian men between the ages of 25 and 29 are not married.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2061-67  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:52 PM

Beginning in the mid-1970s, in an attempt to bolster his legitimacy both at home and abroad, then Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat began to liberalize the political system. He allowed opposition parties and movements to gain some representation in the country's elected assemblies. As long as the ruling NDP maintained its two-thirds majority and its control over the real levers of power, the Egyptian opposition could contest elections and maintain a limited presence in parliament and in civil society. When Mubarak came to power, he continued to follow this same formula with few adjustments. However, over the last five years, the Mubarak regime began to violate this implicit agreement, by imposing renewed constraints on the ability of political parties and movements to organize and to contest elections.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2071-72  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:52 PM

The regime's tactics in the 2010 elections were part of a broader plan to ensure a smooth succession from Mubarak to his son Gamal during the upcoming presidential election in 2011.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Bookmark Loc. 2072  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:52 PM


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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2073-75  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 02:53 PM

who had come to assume greater influence over the ruling party and the government in recent years. Not only did the country's opposition strongly oppose the succession plan, but many important factions within the state bureaucracy and the military were also skeptical. As 2010 came to a close, the country's ruling edifice was beginning to crack.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2119-20  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 03:00 PM

The High Council of the Armed Forces assumed control of the country, and one week later, it announced the suspension of the constitution and the dissolution of both houses of parliament.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 2120  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 03:00 PM

here ir wasnot s much that the military sat back and allowed the ara spring to happen, they actually made it happen
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2187-88  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:18 PM

Regimes fell and rose, countries united and fragmented, and armed conflicts erupted. Today's turmoil, then, is not unique; rather, it represents the second Arab revolution.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2204-7  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:20 PM

one, the number of politically significant actors within each state will increase; two, some of these actors will establish relationships across international boundaries. Malign and disruptive forces will benefit from this change. Transnational movements hostile to the interests of the United States -- such as al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood -- will find fertile new fields to plow.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 2163  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:37 PM

this whole article is a great history lesson on middle east and in particular nasser
draws several parallels to current events 
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 3  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:38 PM

read
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 3  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:39 PM

read
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 2  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:39 PM

read
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 2  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:39 PM

read
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1881  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:48 PM

wtf is he even talking about

tha analogy is horrible
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1887-89  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:49 PM

The nature of humans, quite reasonably, is to intervene in an effort to alter their world and the outcomes it produces. But government interventions are laden with unintended -- and unforeseen -- consequences, particularly in complex systems, so humans must work with nature by tolerating systems that absorb human imperfections rather than seek to change them.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1892-93  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:50 PM

The only difference this time around was the unprecedented magnitude of the hidden risks and a misunderstanding of the statistical properties of the system.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1899-1902  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:51 PM

The life of a turkey before Thanksgiving is illustrative: the turkey is fed for 1,000 days and every day seems to confirm that the farmer cares for it -- until the last day, when confidence is maximal. The "turkey problem" occurs when a naive analysis of stability is derived from the absence of past variations. Likewise, confidence in stability was maximal at the onset of the financial crisis in 2007.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1902  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:51 PM

ha ha ha
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1902-8  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:52 PM

The turkey problem for humans is the result of mistaking one environment for another. Humans simultaneously inhabit two systems: the linear and the complex. The linear domain is characterized by its predictability and the low degree of interaction among its components, which allows the use of mathematical methods that make forecasts reliable. In complex systems, there is an absence of visible causal links between the elements, masking a high degree of interdependence and extremely low predictability. Nonlinear elements are also present, such as those commonly known, and generally misunderstood, as "tipping points." Imagine someone who keeps adding sand to a sand pile without any visible consequence, until suddenly the entire pile crumbles. It would be foolish to blame the collapse on the last grain of sand rather than the structure of the pile, but that is what people do consistently, and that is the policy error.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1912-17  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:53 PM

Engineering, architecture, astronomy, most of physics, and much of common science are linear domains. The complex domain is the realm of the social world, epidemics, and economics. Crucially, the linear domain delivers mild variations without large shocks, whereas the complex domain delivers massive jumps and gaps. Complex systems are misunderstood, mostly because humans' sophistication, obtained over the history of human knowledge in the linear domain, does not transfer properly to the complex domain. Humans can predict a solar eclipse and the trajectory of a space vessel, but not the stock market or Egyptian political events. All man-made complex systems have commonalities and even universalities. Sadly, deceptive calm (followed by Black Swan surprises) seems to be one of those properties.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Bookmark Loc. 1929  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:55 PM


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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1932  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:55 PM

able to turn politics into the tractable randomness of
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1931-32  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:55 PM

No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics into the tractable randomness of blackjack.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1954  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 07:59 PM

another horrible analogy
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1975-77  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 08:05 PM

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, "A little bit of agitation gives motivation to the soul, and what really makes the species prosper is not peace so much as freedom." With freedom comes some unpredictable fluctuation. This is one of life's packages: there is no freedom without noise -- and no stability without volatility.∂
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 3  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 08:07 PM

interesting perspective on risk and probability analysis
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1802  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 08:19 PM

yea thanks for clarifying... nothing at all
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 4  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 08:21 PM

read. horrible analogies.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 4  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 08:21 PM

read
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 6  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 08:23 PM

read... very interesting view. read while in car wit liyong and had a chance to discuss it with him
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01 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
- Highlight Loc. 2519-22  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 08:44 PM

The two philosophers gaped at him. “Bloody hell,” said Majikthise, “now that is what I call thinking. Here, Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?” “Dunno,” said Vroomfondel in an awed whisper; “think our brains must be too highly trained, Majikthise.”
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01 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
- Highlight Loc. 2887-91  | Added on Thursday, June 23, 2011, 09:08 PM

“Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise,” said Frankie.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1559  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 10:54 AM

In contrast, al Qaeda believes that democracy is blasphemous, arguing that it places man's word above God's.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1561-62  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 10:55 AM

Al Qaeda's message is clear: secular democracy is as abhorrent as secular dictatorship.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1568-70  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 10:56 AM

Even more distressing to al Qaeda, change occurred in the Arab world without an initial blow being struck against the United States. Al Qaeda has long insisted that Muslims must first destroy the region's supposed puppet master in Washington before change will come to Tunis or Cairo.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1579-80  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 10:57 AM

even declared that al Qaeda was behind the protests, warning Libyans, "Do not be swayed by bin Laden" -- most likely in an effort to gain legitimacy for his crackdown against the demonstrators.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1580-83  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 10:57 AM

U.S. counterterrorism officials have worked well with authoritarian leaders because their regimes have generally had a low bar for imprisonment and detention. The United States could send a suspect captured in Europe to Egypt and be assured that he would be kept in jail. This low bar also meant that many minor players and innocents were swept up in security-service roundups.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1589-91  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 10:59 AM

If new governments take popular opinion into account, as democratic leaders do, cooperation will not be as close as it once was. Many of the new political players, particularly the Islamists, see the United States as a repressive power that aids Israel and other enemies.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1621-22  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:02 AM

But excluding the Brotherhood from power would be worse, for it would endanger the U.S. campaign against al Qaeda.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1662  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:09 AM

Many
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1662-64  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:10 AM

Many of the new security-service leaders will be new to counterterrorism. Even more important, they will be unaccustomed to the difficult task of balancing civil liberties and aggressive efforts against terrorism. Here, the FBI and other Western domestic intelligence services have much to offer.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1662  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:10 AM

Many of the new security-service
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1662  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:10 AM

possible
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1662-63  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:10 AM

Even more important, they will be unaccustomed to the difficult task of balancing civil liberties and aggressive efforts against terrorism.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 4  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:13 AM

read. grea perspective on how revolutions affect al qaeda and terrorism in general. some thoughts on a constructive path forward. some thoughts on not so constructive paths foward.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 5  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:15 AM

rea. very nteresting summary of existing liberal world orders. some thoughts on how tha ischanging. some thoughts on why it is not changing significantly and u.s. will remain imortant part of future world order.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1112-13  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 01:05 PM

providing the reasoning for Washington's backing of the Pakistani military's frequent interventions in domestic politics -- at the expense of its democratic institutions.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1118  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 01:06 PM

More than half its population faces severe poverty, which fuels resentment against the government and feeds political instability.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1130  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 01:08 PM

sunds like a great sales pitch... but that is partl in theory. i mean, howdemocratic is pakistan really?
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1134-36  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 01:09 PM

Pakistan is unlikely to collapse, but the imbalance of power between its civilian and military branches needs to be addressed if it is to become a normal modern state that is capable of effectively governing its territory.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1137-40  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 02:22 PM

The Pakistani military's political power is a historical legacy of the country's birth. The immediate onset of conflict over Kashmir in 1947-48 with a militarily and politically stronger India made the military central to the state's survival and placed it above civilian scrutiny. Today, after four wars with India, the military filters every internal and external development through the lens of Pakistan's rivalry with India.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1164-67  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 02:26 PM

Although ending the insurgency in Afghanistan will require more than just eliminating militant sanctuaries in Pakistan, the Pakistani military's reluctance to target Afghan militants in North Waziristan has been a particularly sore point in its relationship with the United States. U.S. officials believe that the lawlessness of North Waziristan hampers the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan, since insurgents can easily escape to safety on the Pakistani side of the border.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1177-80  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 04:25 PM

enough U.S. security assistance -- roughly $300 million since 2002 in foreign military financing and around $1.1 billion since 2008 for increasing its counterinsurgency capabilities, to be followed by $1.2 billion more next year -- to acquire the capacity it claims to so desperately need. In contrast, in 2010, U.S. aid for Pakistan's poorly paid, undertrained, and underresourced police forces, which are crucial to fighting insurgencies, totaled a paltry $66 million.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1210-15  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 04:33 PM

Militant extremism can be fought effectively only through serious governance reforms that ensure the rule of law and accountability. This will require a strong democracy, a viable economy, and well-balanced civil-military relations. In FATA, it will require abolishing the Frontier Crimes Regulation and integrating the region into the adjoining Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province to end the Pakistani federal government's direct and oppressive rule, which the Pakistani Taliban have exploited to expand their influence, displace the already weakened tribal authority in the region, and establish parallel courts and policing systems in several FATA agencies, including North and South Waziristan. All of this seems daunting, but there is really no other long-term alternative. And despite its many failings and weaknesses, there are reasons to be optimistic about democracy in Pakistan.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1217-19  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 04:34 PM

In fact, a strong democratic system can mitigate the baser instincts of politicians. If anything, the experience of countries such as Chile, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand in the last few decades shows that the strength and quality of democracy may be linked to the stability of the party system.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1222-25  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 04:35 PM

The most recent civilian government is only three years old, yet the much-derided political elite seems to have developed a consensus that democracy is the only game in town and has enacted constitutional reforms to curb outsized presidential powers -- an artifact of previous military regimes -- especially the power to dismiss democratically elected parliaments and prime ministers, which past military or military-backed presidents used to neuter parliament.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1247-49  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 04:39 PM

Pakistan must also reckon with the need to alleviate the economic hardships faced by its poor. Skyrocketing inflation of basic commodity prices, chronic power cuts, persistently high levels of unemployment, and general lawlessness are fueling public resentment of the current government.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1258-61  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 04:41 PM

It is worth noting that Pakistan's economic difficulties are the result not just of bad luck and poor management, and therefore they cannot be fixed with development aid alone. They are rooted in fundamental structural problems as well: military expenditures dwarf spending on development. Pakistan has one of the world's largest out-of-school populations, yet it spends seven times as much on the military every year as on education, an investment with a higher national security payoff in the long run.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1261  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 04:42 PM

sounds like the U.S.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1261-62  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 04:42 PM

Some progress toward a resolution of the Kashmir conflict could induce Pakistan to scale back its military behemoth.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1265-66  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 04:42 PM

The point is that only a strong, stable, and legitimate elected government will be able to mobilize the public opinion necessary to clinch a lasting peace with India.
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The New Yorker (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 101-2  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:01 PM

Walton, whose fortune now stands at twenty-one billion dollars, has become a powerful force in the art marketplace.
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The New Yorker (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 96-97  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:01 PM

Alice Walton and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
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The New Yorker (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 147-49  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:07 PM

she had no idea what the heck she was talking about when confronted by the words “Paul Revere.” She had Revere warning the British—“ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells.”
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The New Yorker (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 151-52  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:07 PM

Her supporters took to Wikipedia, to tweak the Paul Revere entry to suit her syntax, touching off a Bunker Hill of Wiki revision and counter-revision.
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The New Yorker (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 210-17  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:11 PM

Yet the opposite line of argument, the sophisticated-sounding “I don’t give a damn what a politician does in his private life,” doesn’t quite convince, either. Certainly, there are examples where what a person does in private tells us something worth knowing about what he does in public. That would apply when a crime is implicated, as in the case of Italy’s Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who allegedly paid a teen-age girl for sex, and of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the I.M.F., who is accused of attempting to rape a hotel maid. Weiner’s dirty pictures, small beer though they are in comparison, may suggest a problem with impulse control, which, compounded by an instinct to stonewall and to blame others, might have struck voters as relevant. On the other hand, the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger fathered a child with a member of his household staff might not matter much to anyone but his family.
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The New Yorker (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 221-22  | Added on Friday, June 24, 2011, 11:12 PM

post-Watergate era, a zeal for exposing corruption and hypocrisy of all kinds fuelled franker coverage of politicians’ sexual escapades.
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xkcd (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 68-70  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 12:18 PM

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1272-78  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 12:21 PM

With Pakistan Act of 2009, authorized the U.S. Congress to triple civilian development assistance to Pakistan, raising it to $7.5 billion between 2010 and 2014. The aid package was designed to signal a new era in the United States' relationship with Pakistan, shifting the focus of U.S. aid from the military to civilian democratic governance and social development. Continued military aid was also tied to a yearly certification by the U.S. secretary of state that the Pakistani military has refrained from interfering in politics and is subject to civilian control over budgetary allocations, officer promotions, and strategic planning. Not surprisingly, the Pakistani military balked at this affront even as the civilian government welcomed the aid. Joining with opposition parties, the military publicly decried the bill as a threat to Pakistani national security and mobilized right-wing sections of the media against U.S. meddling. In response, the bill's sponsors buckled and effectively defanged the conditionality measures.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1285-88  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 12:22 PM

But by continuing to treat the Pakistani military as a state above the state, the United States only reinforces the military's exaggerated sense of indispensability and further weakens civilian rule. If the United States had stood its ground, the Pakistani military would have eventually backed down. It is dependent on the United States for military aid and high-tech armaments, including upgrading its aging fleet of F-16 fighters.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1301-4  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:13 PM

One relatively easy way for the United States to boost economic productivity in Pakistan would be to grant Pakistan emergency duty-free access to the U.S. market for textiles. This concession would face opposition from politically powerful U.S. textile interests, but the Obama administration should pursue this legislation on at least a temporary basis because it could crucially improve the economic stability of a vital ally by increasing the revenue it gets from this important industry.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1304  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:16 PM

investig in pakistan and ethical considerations       
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1307-8  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:17 PM

it is worth the effort because the international community has a stake in ending the nuclearized Indian-Pakistani rivalry, which not only endangers global security but also has spilled into Afghanistan.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1308-12  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:17 PM

With over a hundred nuclear weapons, a war-prone rivalry with India, and the presence of some of the world's most dangerous terrorists on its soil, Pakistan is too important to be left to the devices of its generals. For too long, the United States has sacrificed democracy for order. The results have been less than ideal, especially for the people of Pakistan. Pakistan urgently needs support from the international community to help stabilize its civilian democratic institutions and bolster its economy. Only such support will ensure its stability and reliability as a U.S. partner in the region.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1308  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:19 PM

add quotes to a google map, 
include link to wiki page containing text ... protected

moving notes to a page easy bc in plain text format. copy and paste.

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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 5  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:21 PM

read. gives some very interesting and powerful ideas for fixng pakistan and not just treating it as a lost cause... identifies the stakes as global
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 922-23  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:24 PM

Much of this has to do with the end of the Cold War, a conflict that turned Latin America into a battleground between U.S. and Soviet proxies.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 923  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:25 PM

dan mentioned all the communists he had met
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 924-26  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:26 PM

At the same time as U.S. influence has diminished, Latin America's own capabilities have grown. The region has entered into an era of unprecedented economic, political, and diplomatic success. Most visibly, Brazil has emerged as an economic powerhouse, attracting foreign investment with an economy that grew 7.5 percent last year.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 929-30  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:27 PM

Santos has been known to tell visiting foreign counterparts that this will be "Latin America's century."
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 930-34  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:27 PM

Although star performers such as Brazil and Chile have recently surged ahead, Latin America has yet to realize its full collective diplomatic and political capacity. The problems that have plagued the region in the past -- income inequality, a lack of law and order, illicit trafficking networks -- still exist, threatening to derail its hard-earned successes. Guatemala, to take just one example, not only ranks among the world's poorest countries; it also has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, with 6,000 people murdered each year in a population of only 13 million.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 934  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:27 PM

map
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 936-38  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:28 PM

No one should underestimate the capacity of the Venezuela-led bloc of quasi-authoritarian leftist governments to stop the regional trend toward greater openness and democracy -- values that the bloc sees as representing a capitulation to the U.S.-controlled global system.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 943-56  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:30 PM

The era of U.S. hegemony in Latin America began over a century ago, when the United States started flexing its emerging economic and military might in Central America and the Caribbean. In the jungles and mountains of Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, American soldiers and diplomats used persuasion, coercion, and force to advance U.S. political and economic interests. During the Cold War, Washington sought to stem the threat of Soviet and Cuban communism, acting directly, for example, when it invaded Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, and indirectly, as when it provided covert funding to undermine Chilean President Salvador Allende's leftist government in the 1970s. Sometimes these efforts worked, as in Chile and Grenada, but often they did not; both the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 and U.S. efforts to overthrow by proxy the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in the 1980s were outright failures. For much of the twentieth century, there was a disconnect between Washington's lofty rhetoric of democracy and regional harmony and its demonstrated willingness to jettison these principles when its economic or geopolitical interests were at stake. Even after the Cold War, the United States was accused of peddling its "Washington consensus" of laissez-faire economic policies, such as the privatization of state-owned assets and free-trade agreements, as a sort of neoimperialism. Instead of U.S. marines or CIA agents, blame for doing the empire's bidding was now pinned on the "technocratic imperialists" from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. Treasury Department.Yet over the past decade or so, the United States' willingness and ability to exert control in the region have diminished. This has occurred in part because more important issues, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have forced Latin America down the policymaking food chain.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 958-64  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:31 PM

The United States' relationship with Bolivia provides one example of Washington's declining power in the region. Believing that it was time to pay back the Americans for their years of backing his political opponents, Bolivian President Evo Morales expelled the U.S. ambassador and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008 and suspended U.S.-funded democracy programs the following year. A decade or so ago, when Bolivia was a faithful client of the United States, it would have been unimaginable for a Bolivian government to even consider such acts, given the diplomatic and financial consequences of provoking Washington's ire. Yet even the ostensibly hard-line George W. Bush administration responded to Morales' repeated diplomatic insults largely with silence. Morales had gone eyeball to eyeball with Washington and lived to tell about it.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 966-67  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:31 PM

Yet the region struggled to convert democratic practices, such as open elections, into lasting democratic institutions, such as independent judiciaries.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 968-71  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:32 PM

Even in the 1990s, when Latin America finally began to slay inflation and replace it with impressive macroeconomic stability, countries had difficulty translating this into lasting social gains for the entire population. At times, Latin Americans used their newfound electoral power to elect "democratic populists," such as Venezuela's Chávez and Peru's Alberto Fujimori, who often governed in autocratic ways.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 975  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:32 PM

Armed revolution is now dead in the region that was once its cradle.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 975  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:33 PM

and to think how this influences people in los angeles... or even peple in china 
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 979-83  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:34 PM

It has long been said that when the United States catches a cold, Latin America catches the flu. This has certainly been true in the economic realm, where jitters in the U.S. economy could quickly undermine Latin America's chronically weak financial and fiscal fundamentals. But during the recent global economic crisis, Latin America remained relatively unscathed. At the time, many predicted that Latin American governments -- especially leftist ones suspected of being more predisposed to fiscal profligacy -- would turn to the seductive tonic of populism. But leftist governments in Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, to name a few, responded to the crisis with prudence.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 992-94  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:35 PM

Chile a level of policy flexibility during the recent global economic downturn that the United States and many other industrial economies could only envy. As Latin America's achievements suggest, the region is growing up fast. 
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 994  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:36 PM

makes me think of all the construction arund the U during the downturn......
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1000-1004  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:37 PM

In some quarters, Brazil's responses to developments such as Chávez's ongoing assault on Venezuela's democracy and even the 2009 coup in Honduras have undermined its credibility as a serious leader. (Brasília's reluctance to speak out for hemispheric democracy is particularly inexcusable for a government that includes many officials who suffered under the successive military regimes of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.) Many Latin American officials quietly reveal that they are not eager to see Brazil replace the United States as the hemisphere's hegemon. As one diplomat recently put it, "The new imperialists have arrived, and they speak Portuguese."
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1004-7  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:37 PM

Yet Brazil is learning that leadership means responsibility. Relations with its neighbor Bolivia are a case in point. After the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was kicked out of Bolivia, Brasília belatedly realized that Bolivia's cocaine exports -- most of which are destined for Brazil, Argentina, or Europe -- represented a serious challenge and so stepped up its counternarcotics cooperation with Bolivia.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1007  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:39 PM

i wonder what it was like for them to know they were dealing with a u.s. pesident who was a customr... not in the cia trafficking sense but in the direct sense.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1014-19  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:40 PM

Further evidence of Colombia's diplomatic and strategic maturity can be found in the way it has begun exporting its counterinsurgency and counternarcotics expertise to places as far away as Afghanistan. For almost half a century, the Colombian government has waged a bloody war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But it has been only in the past several years that the Colombian state, backed by billions of dollars in U.S. assistance, has gained the upper hand. Overwhelmed by this fight until recently, Colombia's security forces now use their hangars and equipment to train pilots from Mexico and Peru and counternarcotics operatives from Afghanistan.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1025-26  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:42 PM

And much to the chagrin of some in Brasília, the OAS demonstrated its importance when it helped coordinate the regional diplomatic response following the coup in Honduras in 2009, an effort that likely staved off even greater strife in the country.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1026-29  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:42 PM

The OAS also renewed its relevance during its General Assembly meeting that same year, when a debate regarding Cuba's 1962 suspension from the body produced a consensus that Cuba's return to full membership should depend on its transition to democracy. The seemingly moribund organization has shown some surprisingly gritty determination, but there is new competition in the neighborhood. 
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1029-31  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:42 PM

the region's authoritarians -- Venezuela's Chávez, Cuba's Fidel and Raúl Castro, and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega -- have taken the opportunity to expand their own influence. Chávez, the Castro brothers, and Ortega form part of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), a band of leftist governments led by Venezuela.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1031-34  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:43 PM

Contending that Latin America remains shackled by the imperial United States and its lackeys at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, members of this group remain committed to a nonaligned diplomacy and seek friendships with the governments of such countries as Iran, Russia, and, to some extent, China.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1034  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:43 PM

castro and mao?
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1040  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:44 PM

they are unwilling to confront other governments that undermine such
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1041  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:44 PM

rights.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1040-41  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:44 PM

they are unwilling to confront other governments that undermine such rights.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1044-50  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:45 PM

But these diplomatic spoilers have proved to be the biggest losers in Latin America's realignment. The Chávez model, inherited from Fidel Castro, sees the United States and global capitalism as permanent adversaries. Nothing hurts this approach more than when other Latin American governments, especially leftist democratic ones, opt for and succeed with capitalist, democratic, or U.S.-friendly policies. Indeed, the bloc has ended up enjoying less regional support than its members hoped for. A case in point is the drama surrounding a November 2010 OAS resolution that called for all Costa Rican and Nicaraguan military and security personnel to leave a disputed area on their countries' shared border. In a resounding defeat for the ALBA bloc, which wanted to isolate Costa Rica and the United States by outmaneuvering them diplomatically, 21 countries voted in favor of the resolution, and only four (including Venezuela and Nicaragua) voted against it. 
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1051-56  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:45 PM

Iran, Russia, and China have all significantly increased their economic and political footprints in the region. Tehran is seeking to reduce its diplomatic isolation, and Moscow is mostly looking for markets for its weapons industry. Beijing, by far the most significant outside player, is principally concerned with obtaining natural resources. In 2005, it imported over $21 billion worth of goods from Latin America; in 2008, that figure was $71 billion. China has also increased its military engagement with the region, expanding military exchanges and selling sophisticated military equipment. That said, Beijing has generally been cautious in its diplomatic and military outreach, preferring to focus on the more mundane issue of purchasing raw materials.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 1056  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:46 PM

lithium
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1063-64  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:47 PM

His deferential yet serious style quickly put the most conspiratorial anti-U.S. critics, such as Chávez, Morales, and Ortega, on the defensive -- where they have remained ever since.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 6  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 01:52 PM

read. this is exactly the kind of article that i subscribed to read. they all are... really great.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 627-32  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 03:15 PM

Over the last century, the Klamath's waters have been diverted for irrigation, polluted by runoff and dammed for hydropower. The number of fall-run Chinook that swim up the river and its tributaries to spawn has in some years amounted to fewer than 20,000, compared to historic populations of half a million. The plummeting levels of native fish have pitted farmers against environmentalists and tribes whose traditional cultures and diets revolved around salmon fishing. Many of the warring parties last year signed two agreements intended to bring peace to the river, which winds from southern Oregon through the Cascade and Coast ranges to California's Pacific Coast.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 649-54  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 03:17 PM

The agreements have strong critics, including the Hoopa Valley tribe, which refused to sign. "The agricultural practices that led to salmon being threatened in the system are the agricultural practices that will be continued," argued Thomas Schlosser, a Seattle attorney who represents the tribe. He cited provisions that call for the continued leasing of wildlife refuge lands for farming and substantial water diversions for irrigation. The agreements require nearly $1 billion in federal funding for water management, habitat restoration and monitoring efforts. PacifiCorp customers in Oregon and California are expected to pay $200 million more to dismantle the dams, and if necessary the state of California would provide as much as $250 million in bond money.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 763-65  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:18 PM

The request came three days after an agent in San Diego fatally shot a 40-year-old Tijuana man suspected of injuring an agent by throwing rocks and a nail-studded wooden board.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 765-67  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:19 PM

Such incidents typically lead to demands for congressional scrutiny, but Congress in recent years has not taken up the issue. The letter, addressed to congressional committees, was signed by 65 national and regional groups, including the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties and Amnesty International.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 767  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:19 PM

imperial canal district... spooky name
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 767-68  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:20 PM

Although confrontations between agents and smugglers have declined substantially in recent years, rock throwing is not uncommon in many urban areas where trafficking groups use aggressive tactics to prevent agents from arresting illegal immigrants.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 769  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:21 PM

Last year, agents in El Paso killed a teenage boy who was reportedly throwing rocks at them.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 769  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:21 PM

Last year, agents
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 769-70  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:21 PM

Last year, agents in El Paso killed a teenage boy who was reportedly throwing rocks at them. Other alleged rock throwers were killed in the Arizona towns of Nogales and Douglas within the last year, according to the ACLU. 
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 769-70  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:21 PM

Last year, agents in El Paso killed a teenage boy who was reportedly throwing rocks at them. Other alleged rock throwers were killed in the Arizona towns of Nogales and Douglas within the last year, according to the ACLU. Agents
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 769-70  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:22 PM

Last year, agents in El Paso killed a teenage boy who was reportedly throwing rocks at them. Other alleged rock throwers were killed in the Arizona towns of Nogales and Douglas within the last year, according to the ACLU.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 770-75  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:22 PM

Agents involved in fatal shooting incidents are usually cleared of wrongdoing by local and federal authorities. The agency has said deadly force is justifiable because rocks and other objects can cause disabling and sometimes fatal injuries. Numerous agents have been hospitalized over the years because of head wounds, authorities said. Critics argue that countering rocks with bullets amounts to an unacceptable and disproportionate use of force and should be stopped. "Deadly force should always be an action of last resort and only used if an imminent risk of death is present … to shoot stone throwers is exceptionally disproportionate and inhumane," the letter states.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 776-78  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:23 PM

been caught trying to cross the border 17 times since the 1990s. Citing official sources, the newspaper reported that the man worked as a mechanic and was also suspected of being a human smuggler.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 791-93  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:23 PM

James "Whitey" Bulger's image seemed set in stone. He was a Boston "Southie," a street punk who climbed out of the projects on a ladder of crime — petty larceny, then burglary, then bank robbery, then at least 21 murders, according to authorities, one in which a man standing in a phone booth was shot so many times his torso was nearly severed from his legs.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 793-95  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:23 PM

Savvy and feared, Bulger seized control of a mob empire, running rackets, shakedowns and drug deals over 40 years, officials say, before fleeing Boston in December 1994 on the eve of a federal indictment.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 796  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:23 PM

Even as he rose to No. 2 on the most-wanted list, right behind Osama bin Laden, he appeared to be living as an untouchable bon vivant.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 798  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:26 PM

MAP THIS
show liyong
date it... show it with our trip... how close is santa onica? thats basically where we were at, vienna beach

even mom anddad tonight asked me aout the weirdos at vienna beach

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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 803-5  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:42 PM

His apartment was a half a mile from the ocean at 1012 3rd St. But it was rent-controlled, perhaps 800 square feet, and faced the other direction, toward a truck rental shop and a nursing home. An exit sign cast a green hue over his door, and the dim overhead lights in the hall emitted a constant hum.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 805-8  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:45 PM

Most days, other residents said, he was cloistered inside apartment 303 — where he hoarded 30 guns and about $800,000 in cash, sources said. When he ventured out, he still put on an elegant jacket. But he'd turned 81 in September, and his mind appeared to be descending into dementia and paranoid rage, residents said. When his younger, gregarious girlfriend smiled and greeted neighbors, he'd begun barking at her: "Shut up! Don't talk!"
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 814-15  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:46 PM

He will also face state murder charges in Florida and in Oklahoma, where he has long been wanted in connection with the slayings of two businessmen.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 815-16  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:46 PM

Both states have indicated that they are exploring the possibility of seeking the death penalty; the federal charges would not carry the possibility of a death sentence.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 820-21  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:46 PM

"I never thought they'd capture him alive or in the country," said Michael Donahue, 42, who was 13 in 1982, when his father was gunned down, allegedly by Bulger.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 821-23  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:47 PM

The elder Michael Donahue had agreed to give a man a ride home from a bar. The man turned out to be an FBI informant; Bulger and an accomplice were waiting outside, and Donahue was killed along with the informant, authorities said.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 826-27  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:48 PM

Then on Monday, the FBI launched an unusual media blitz to find the couple — this time, aimed not at him, but at his companion.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 832-35  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:48 PM

Greig also had an extensive beauty regimen, which authorities suggest may have been the couple's undoing. A former dental hygienist, she reportedly underwent monthly teeth-whitening sessions and regularly got her hair done, sometimes bringing in her own dye if she found a particular shade she fancied. Authorities also speculated that she had undergone a number of plastic surgery procedures.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 839  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:49 PM

A surveillance team moved in Wednesday afternoon and spotted the couple a short time later.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 845-47  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:50 PM

"He wasn't a real good kid," saidJohn Baker, 84, who grew up in the Dorchester neighborhood, a block away from the house where the Bulgers lived before moving to nearby South Boston.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 847  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:50 PM

tats a loooong timefor an impression to stick
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 847-50  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:51 PM

Bulger reportedly started hijacking delivery trucks in the 1950s and then did a nine-year prison term for a bank robbery, a portion of which he served at Alcatraz after allegedly plotting an escape from custody. After his release, he joined the Winter Hill Gang, the most powerful gang in South Boston. In the 1970s, an arrest at the top of the gang provided an opening. Bulger seized control and became the most notorious gangster in Boston, according to authorities.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 859-60  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:52 PM

paying $1,145 in rent each month, always on time and always in cash.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 875-77  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:52 PM

Our Lady of Guadalupe mysteriously appeared in Encinitas a few days before Easter, not on a piece of toast, but riding a surfboard with her palms joined in prayer and an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 877  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:53 PM

She arrived seemingly out of thin air — beautifully
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 877-81  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:53 PM

She arrived seemingly out of thin air — beautifully rendered in a 10-foot-square mosaic of stained glass and stone that had been attached to a concrete railroad bridge without anyone noticing. Mother Mary's stance in the tube of a Tahitian-sized wave indicated she was no amateur. Her right foot forward on the board made her a goofy foot. Who knew? "Save the Ocean" was spelled out down the artwork's left side. Locals in this funky San Diego County beach town called her the Surfing Madonna. Pilgrims paid tribute, taking photos and leaving flowers and the occasional votive candle.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 881-83  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:53 PM

City officials, though, labeled the work graffiti and began the process of having it removed. The affair was reported on locally and eventually went viral, with Facebook and Twitter pages rallying to save the Surfing Madonna.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 883-85  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:53 PM

"I didn't expect the kind of reaction it got. We put it up at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, so it's not like I was sneaking around," said Mark Patterson, a 58-year-old long-time local who came forward earlier this month to claim authorship. "I've driven past that railroad bridge a million times. It always looked to me like a perfect frame."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1532-34  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:57 PM

An invitation-only conference of wealthy conservative activists organized by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch will convene just outside Vail, Colo., this weekend.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1536-37  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:57 PM

The groups have urged their followers to arrive with signs that read, "UnVail the Kochs," "Corporations are not people," and "Stop the War on the Middle Class."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1544-46  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:58 PM

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell will attend. In the past, attendees have included GOP leaders and commentator Glenn Beck. House Republican leader Eric Cantor of Virginia attended the Palm Springs event in January.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1546-48  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:58 PM

Koch spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer, in an interview in Palm Springs in January, said the event, "brings together some of America’s greatest philanthropists and job creators…who share a common belief that the current level of government spending in our nation is simply unsustainable.”
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 1547  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 10:59 PM

scary
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1568-69  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:18 PM

Afterward, a lightning-fast photo opportunity saw Khama and Obama pose side-by-side by the U.S. flag and the a blue, black and white flag of Botswana, which won its independence from the British in 1966.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1588-90  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:20 PM

"If the president believes that missile strikes and drone operations taking place in Libya are critical, it is his responsibility to explain [that] to the American people and to seek authorization from this Congress. Because the president has failed to do that ... we are here today," House Speaker John Boehner said from the floor before the vote.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1590-92  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:20 PM

The White House argues that because the United States is acting as a part of NATO, its engagement does not meet the definition of "hostilities" that requires congressional authorization under the War Powers Act.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2212-14  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:34 PM

Las Vegas: Bright lights, dance city With all its pool parties and nightclubs, the desert landmark is fast overtaking Ibiza, Spain, as the electronic dance music capital of the world. The Electric Daisy Carnival is only the latest proof.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2223-25  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:35 PM

It was Memorial Day weekend 2010 and the internationally famous American DJ Kaskade was standing in his hotel room on the 35th floor of the Encore hotel in Las Vegas looking down on the pool of the just-opened Encore Beach Club.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2225-26  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:36 PM

"There were thousands of people inside, and I could see thousands of people trying to get in," said Kaskade, whose real name is Ryan Raddon, by phone recently from Brazil, where he was due to spin that night. "When it was over, we were grinning ear to ear."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2228-29  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:36 PM

electronic dance music capital of the world, beating even Ibiza, the Spanish island long known for its hedonistic nightlife and top-name talent.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2230-32  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:36 PM

the nightclub business has floated Vegas during the recession and has grown by as much 20% annually over the last five years. Vegas is adding between three and five major nightclubs per year and now has more than 50.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2232-34  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:37 PM

According to Nightclub & Bar Magazine and the food service industry research and consulting firm Technomic Inc., which produce an annual list of the nation's leading nightclubs, bars and lounges, Vegas nightclubs account for 12 of the top 20.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2235-39  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:37 PM

And Vegas nightclubs are multimillion-dollar, multilevel temples to revelry. Take this year's hottest new club, Marquee at the Cosmopolitan hotel, a $50-million, 60,000-square-foot palace with coliseum-style seating and two dance floors. "The layout of the entire room is focused on the DJ," says co-founder Jason Strauss, adding that Marquee was the first club on the Las Vegas Strip to commit to electronic music programming on both Friday and Saturday nights.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2240-42  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:38 PM

the Electric Daisy Carnival, comes to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. It will feature more than 150 artists with attendance projected to top 250,000, according to Pasquale Rotella, chief executive and founder of Insomniac Events, which produces the festival.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2245-50  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:38 PM

The boom in electronic music isn't all sizzling dance moves, however. The genre has long been known to attract a young crowd that is prone to experiments with drugs, particularly Ecstasy. A 19-year-old died at the Electric Daisy Carnival in Dallas this month, and a 15-year-old died of an Ecstasy overdose at last year's event at the Coliseum in Los Angeles, although Rotella says that "as tragic of a situation as that was, it wasn't why we took EDC to Vegas." Meanwhile, Las Vegas police said they will bring extra vigilance to the festival, deploying undercover narcotics officers to augment the more than 1,000 private security personnel.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2250-53  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:39 PM

Whatever happens this weekend, however, it's not likely to hinder the Vegas challenge to European hot spots as a dance capital. Clubs here are now part of the regular circuit of globe-trotting DJs such as Tiësto, Paul van Dyk, David Guetta, Dirty South, Kaskade, Deadmau5 and Armin van Buuren. Veterans of the club scene here trace the rise to 2008, when British DJ Paul Oakenfold began a long-term residency at the Palm's nightclub Rain.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2254-57  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:39 PM

"The casinos are spending a lot of money marketing their nightclubs and branding the DJs with them," says Zimmerman. And because Vegas is a transient market, "if you do more volume in Vegas over a period of time, you hit a humungous population base, which is the reason we would actually say to an artist, 'Why don't you play in Vegas 20 times this year?'"
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2258-62  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:40 PM

Christie, who in addition to his role at Encore Beach Club is also an operating partner of Surrender nightclub at Encore, where Steve Aoki is the resident DJ and musical director, says that this year's Memorial Day weekend was the biggest the city has ever seen in terms of nightclubs and pool parties. "As a whole, it was the most traffic I've seen coming into town. Outside of major festivals, I don't know that there has been that kind of collection of talent in one city in America. We had pretty much every major DJ in one town."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2275-78  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:41 PM

skirting traditional shipping lanes to avoid air pollution curbs, prompting California officials Thursday to extend the state's clean-fuel zone beyond the Channel Islands. The unanimous vote by the California Air Resources Board came after strong protests from the U.S. Navy that the jump in commercial ship traffic across the Point Mugu Sea Range was "seriously jeopardizing successful completion of vital Department of Defense testing and training missions."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2278-79  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:41 PM

California's clean-fuel zone, which took effect in July 2009, is the toughest ship pollution rule in the world, requiring oceangoing vessels to substitute less-polluting oil for the bunker fuel they commonly use.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2281-83  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:41 PM

But shippers began to travel beyond the islands — motoring through the 36,000-square-mile area where the Navy conducts tests involving missiles, ships, submarines and aircraft. Since the clean-fuel zone took effect, the number of ship transits through Navy waters jumped from an average of two a day to as many as 15 a day, according to the Navy.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2285-86  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:42 PM

More than 40% of U.S. imports travel through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2292-99  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:43 PM

Using the longer route outside the Channel Islands has saved shippers about $6,000 per round-trip, according to the air board, because bunker fuel is cheaper than cleaner alternatives. The two industry officials who testified Thursday, Dan Krokosky of Chevron Shipping and Henry Pak of Hanjin Shipping, did not object to the extension. Instead, they urged the board to delay until 2015 the next phase of clean-fuel rules, which require a transition from fuel with 1% sulfur content to fuel with 0.1% sulfur content. "It is unlikely that anyone is going to sell this 0.1% fuel," Krokosky said, adding that the fuel's viscosity had created safety issues. "One of the dangers is that a ship will not start," he said. Air board officials acknowledged that 2% of vessels using the lowest sulfur fuel have experienced propulsion failures. But they said the technical issues are being resolved.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2393-95  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:44 PM

The Obama administration announced Thursday that it planned to release 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as part of a coordinated international effort to drive down high crude prices and revive the flagging economic recovery in the world's most industrialized countries.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2395-96  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:45 PM

decision sparked a plunge in crude oil prices in the U.S. and Europe.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2398-99  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:45 PM

The oil will be released over the next 30 days, according to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, constituting half the 60 million barrels that the nations in the International Energy Agency plan to bring to market.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2401-4  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:45 PM

FOR THE RECORD: Oil prices: An earlier online version of this article stated that crude oil prices had stayed at or above $100 a barrel since February. Prices have been below $100 a barrel recently, and crude oil closed at $95.41 on Wednesday. Crude oil prices, which peaked at $113.93 a barrel on April 29, have slid as the economy has shown more signs of weakness.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2405-7  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:45 PM

Fighting in Libya has caused a loss of about 1.5 million barrels of oil per day from global markets, according to the Energy Department. Despite the absence of Libyan oil, there is no shortage of oil in the world. But nervousness about unrest spreading to other Arab oil producers, speculative investment in the oil markets and the revival of the Chinese and Indian economies have pushed crude prices to painful levels.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 2407  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:46 PM

even a relatively small scale supplier like libya exhibits enormous control over the world economy...
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2456  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:50 PM

Dr. Denise Faustman of Massachusetts General Hospital
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2485-89  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:51 PM

NASA's pioneering Dawn spacecraft, a year late in being launched and 20% over budget, is slowly creeping up on the protoplanet Vesta and is expected to enter orbit around it about July 16, the first stop on a remarkable journey that will later take the craft to the larger dwarf planet Ceres. The craft, the largest probe ever launched by NASA, is about half-way through its three-month approach phase to Vesta, 96,000 miles away and closing in at the sedate speed of about 260 mph.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2489-91  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:51 PM

The whole procedure is happening so slowly, in terms of normal asteroid flybys and planetary encounters, that scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge will not be able to calculate precisely when the craft entered orbit until after the fact.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2491-92  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:52 PM

The craft's visit to Vesta will be the first prolonged encounter with an object in the main asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter and the first trip to a protoplanet, a large body that almost became a planet.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2497-98  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:53 PM

said Carol Raymond of JPL, deputy principal investigator for Dawn. Learning about it "will give us better tools to understand the thousands of fragments that are out there in the asteroid belt."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2499-2500  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:53 PM

Those problems also raised the cost of the mission from a planned $373 million to $446 million at launch.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2500-2503  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:54 PM

Dawn is a unique craft and mission on a variety of accounts. For one, it is not powered by a conventional rocket engine but by three ion engines. Electrical fields produced by two 27-foot solar panels accelerate xenon ions to high speed, expelling them out the three engines and providing a thrust about the same as "a single piece of paper pressing down on your hand," according to JPL's Robert Mase, the Dawn project manager.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2503-4  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:54 PM

That may not seem like much, but by the time the craft has used up its load of 937 pounds of xenon, the engines will have provided 24,000 mph of velocity change.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2508-10  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:55 PM

10,000 miles high, but it will spiral in, eventually getting as close as 120 miles above the surface, where it should produce breathtaking pictures of the craters. Spectrometers on the craft will also map minerals on the surface and in the craters, which should lead to a clearer picture of how Vesta formed.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2516-17  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:55 PM

Recent research suggests that the 606-mile-wide dwarf planet may hold a buried ocean under a thick layer of ice. Some estimates suggest that Ceres might even have more water than Earth itself.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2571-73  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:56 PM

The Supreme Court gave the pharmaceutical industry a pair of victories, shielding the makers of generic drugs from most lawsuits by injured patients and declaring that drug makers have a free-speech right to buy private prescription records to boost their sales pitches to doctors. In
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 2573  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:56 PM

whaaaaaaat
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2576-77  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:57 PM

But in a 5-4 decision, the high court said this same legal duty to warn patients of newly revealed dangers did not extend to the makers of copy-cat generic drugs.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2587-89  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:58 PM

But the dissenters, led by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said the generic drug maker should have alerted the FDA to the danger and then updated its warning label. "This outcome makes little sense," she wrote. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan agreed.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2594-95  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:59 PM

Several data-mining firms have made a billion-dollar business out of buying and selling the prescription data to drug makers and researchers.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2595-98  | Added on Saturday, June 25, 2011, 11:59 PM

Writing for the court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said that "information is speech," and that under the 1st Amendment, the government usually cannot restrict speech because it does not approve of the message. "If pharmaceutical marketing affects treatment decisions," he said, it does so because doctors find it persuasive.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2600-2602  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 12:00 AM

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, criticized the decision for having "overturned a sensible Vermont law that sought to protect the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2617-19  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 12:01 AM

On Thursday, Kimberley Process Chairman Mathieu Yamba said Zimbabwe would be allowed to export rough diamonds from Marange under a system of minimal human rights oversight, participants said. The regulatory group's decisions are supposed to be made by consensus, but the United States, Canada and the European Union swiftly protested.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2623-27  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 12:02 AM

The Kimberley Process was created by the United Nations in 2003 to ensure that the trade in diamonds did not contribute to human rights abuses. But Thursday's decision calls into question its effectiveness. The Process grew out of the trade in blood diamonds that financed brutal rebel groups in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Many member countries and diamond-industry representatives argue that the Process was not meant to address state-sponsored violence, like that in Zimbabwe.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2646-47  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 12:03 AM

Children, mothers and grandparents have fled to Tunisia to escape the batteries of missiles launched from the valley below by military forces loyal to the longtime Libyan strongman.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2649-53  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 12:04 AM

centered on Tripoli and the large rebel-held cities of Benghazi and Misurata, the uprising is also playing out in rugged mountain communities in the west, near the Tunisian border, where Libya's long-oppressed Berber minority sees its own chance to shake off Kadafi's four-decade rule. The fighters here, who are increasingly in contact with rebels in Benghazi and elsewhere, also view it as an opportunity to help stretch Kadafi's forces: the more troops tied down in the west, the fewer available to control Tripoli or attack other rebel-held areas, primarily in eastern Libya.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2653  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 12:04 AM

Kadafi's forces, meanwhile, see Nalut as strategically important for cutting off supply lines from Tunisia
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2672-75  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 12:05 AM

Kadafi's forces have prevented residents from tending to their fields and have killed off livestock on farms at the foot of the mountains, denying them access to food save for expensive imports from Tunisia. Kadafi has also stopped gasoline supplies and cut off the city's utilities. "There's no electricity and there's no water," said Mohammad Naluti, 21, a university student who volunteers as a liaison between the city's military and media committees. "Who would want to live here?"
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 790-94  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 02:30 PM

But such bailouts are only stop-gap measures. Portugal and Spain, and to a lesser extent Belgium and Italy, remain vulnerable to pressure from bondholders. Portugal is likely to receive 50-100 billion euros over the next few months. But should Spain also need a bailout -- which could cost as much as 600 billion euros -- the 750 billion euro European Financial Stability Facility would soon be exhausted. In that event, the main euro creditors, primarily British, French, and German banks, might have to accept so-called haircuts, substantial cuts in the principals of their loans.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 801-2  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 02:31 PM

Germany had already incorporated such a cap into its own constitution, one that severely restricts any government deficit spending, including the kind that might benefit the country's long-term growth.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 807-8  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 02:45 PM

version of the gold standard, which wreaked economic havoc in the 1920s and led to a toxic political fallout.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 817-21  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 02:47 PM

As they begin to adopt Germany's model, or something along those lines, the other eurozone states will find it nearly impossible to use fiscal stimulus in times of crisis. And with monetary policy already in the hands of the dogmatically anti-inflationary European Central Bank, their only means of adjusting to crises will be to stand by as wages fall and unemployment soars. Ireland -- with its collapsed tax revenues, massive cuts in government spending, shrinking wages, and skyrocketing unemployment -- is the unhappy exemplar of rigid austerity measures in the new Europe.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 822-25  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 02:47 PM

Today, they are more suspicious. And if they come to think that further European integration is causing more economic hardship, their suspicion could harden into bitterness and perhaps even xenophobia. Ireland's new finance minister, Michael Noonan, has told voters that the EU is a game rigged in Germany's favor; editorials in major Irish newspapers warn of Germany's return to racist imperialism. As economic shocks hit other EU countries, politicians in those states will also look for someone to blame.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 837-39  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 02:51 PM

Instituting effective long-term reforms will be a harder sell. Germany adopted its own large-scale fiscal stimulus in 2009, but it returned to its traditional anti-Keynesian stance as soon as the danger of total systemic collapse had passed. Yet Keynesianism, at least properly understood, is the only way forward.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 845-50  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 02:52 PM

If anything, "hard" Keynesianism suggests that the problem with the macroeconomic rules governing the euro is not that they are too tough and too detailed but that they are not tough or detailed enough. States in the eurozone should not be allowed to run moderate budget deficits in boom years, the Keynesian argument goes; instead, they should be compelled to run budget surpluses. The surpluses could then be saved in rainy-day funds or used to pay down government debt or, if the country had reached a satisfactory debt-to-GDP ratio, spent as a fiscal stimulus in the event of a crisis. Unlike the kind of budget management advocated by the German government, this approach does not seek to eliminate or minimize governments' leeway to conduct fiscal policy. It gives governments up-front the means to manage demand whenever they might need to.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 625-27  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 03:08 PM

Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund predicts that by mid-decade, in terms of GDP, India will have exceeded Germany, Brazil will have outpaced France and the United Kingdom, Mexico will have passed Canada, and Indonesia and Turkey will have superseded Australia.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 693-97  | Added on Sunday, June 26, 2011, 06:31 PM

Granted, the phenomenon of bilateral and regional trade agreements has been the result in part of a vicious cycle. Countries have pursued these agreements because Doha is faltering and bilateral and regional agreements can deliver commercial results; Doha is faltering in part because some countries think they can avoid difficult decisions by opting for easier bilateral or regional talks instead. But as the Doha talks meander, the international community may be reaching a tipping point, where the pursuit of these lesser agreements becomes the preferred option.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 7  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 01:52 AM

read
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 379-83  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 01:55 AM

The ICC needs a new leader who has not only the necessary prosecutorial, diplomatic, and managerial skills but also a keen sense of the importance of this moment in the development of the still fledgling institution. To achieve the ICC's promise as a global court, the parties to the Rome Statute must select a prosecutor who can meet the court's most serious challenges: concluding trials; convincing governments to arrest fugitives; conducting credible investigations in difficult places, such as Libya and Sudan; and expanding the ICC's reach beyond Africa. This may be a lot to ask for, but the future of the ICC depends on it.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 416-18  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 01:59 AM

China, Russia, and the United States have chosen not to join it, for instance, for fear that it might one day take aim at their own nationals. Washington has slowly been softening its position, but it remains wary. Earlier this year, in an unprecedented show of support for the court, it voted for the Security Council's referral of the Libya situation.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 471-75  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 02:07 AM

But with all its formal investigations targeting African states -- the Central African Republic, Congo, Kenya, Libya, Sudan, and Uganda -- the court has also invited the charge that it is an agent for postcolonial Western interests. This is unfortunate. For one thing, Africa is the setting for innumerable atrocities, and international attention to them should be welcomed, not shunned. For another, the ICC has been conducting preliminary examinations (inquiries that may or may not turn into formal investigations) outside Africa, including in Afghanistan, Colombia, Georgia, Honduras, and the Palestinian territories.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 519-20  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 02:12 AM

When it comes to the LRA file, the main challenge for the next prosecutor will be to continue to press for arrests without appearing powerless in the face of ongoing atrocities.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 7  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 02:17 AM

read
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 209-14  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 02:18 AM

For much of its history, the United States drew on the strength of its citizens in times of crisis, with volunteers joining fire brigades and civilians enlisting or being drafted to fight the nation's wars. But during the Cold War, keeping the threat of a nuclear holocaust at bay required career military and intelligence professionals operating within a large, complex, and highly secretive national security establishment. The sheer size and lethality of U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals rendered civil defense measures largely futile. By the time the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, two generations of Americans had grown accustomed to sitting on the sidelines and the national security community had become used to operating in a world of its own.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 252-58  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 02:24 AM

On the surface, it seems sensible to avoid releasing information about vulnerabilities or security measures that potential adversaries could exploit. But this insularity often undermines the defense of critical infrastructure, such as seaports, dams, and waterworks. In determining the best way to protect a suspension bridge, for example, the bridge's chief engineer is likely to have ideas that would not occur to a law enforcement or military professional working in the Department of Homeland Security. But government officials frequently fail to consult that engineer. They will share security information only with vetted company security officers, who in turn are barred from passing this information on to senior executives and managers who do not hold active security clearances. As a result, investment and operational decisions are often made with scant attention paid to the potential security stakes.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 258-72  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 02:25 AM

The U.S. government should increase its transparency with the broader public as well. Many policymakers believe that candor about potential dangers may generate excessive public fear. Yet the secrecy reflex often contributes to public anxiety. People are most frightened when they sense their vulnerability to threats but feel powerless to address them. U.S. officials have stated for nearly a decade that terrorism is a clear and present danger, but they have given citizens little information about how to cope with that hazard. Instead, citizens are told to proceed with their daily routines because the government is hard at work protecting them. The psychological effect of this is similar to that of a doctor telling a patient that she is suffering from a potentially life-threatening illness but providing only vague guidance about how to combat it. No one wants to receive disturbing news from his physician, but a prognosis becomes less stressful when doctors provide patients with all the details, a clear description of the available treatments, and the opportunity to make decisions that allow the patient to assert some personal control over the outcome. In the same way, the U.S. government can decrease fears of terrorism by giving the American public the information it needs to better withstand, rapidly recover from, and adapt to the next major terrorist attack. Flight attendants routinely tell passengers that they may need to use their seat cushions to stay afloat in the event of an emergency water landing. Although escaping a plane in the water is a frightening scenario, this safety instruction does not generate panic among passengers. Similarly, there is no reason why civilians should not be told what bombs and detonators look like, on the very remote chance that someone like the "Christmas Day bomber" ends up seated next to one of them on a plane. Having better-informed airport workers, flight crews, and passengers could prove a far more effective safeguard than deploying hundreds of new body scanners at airports.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 304-5  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 02:30 AM

Building societal resilience requires a bottom-up, open, and participatory process -- that is, the exact inverse of the way U.S. policymakers have approached homeland security to date.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 340-42  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 02:36 AM

The approaching tenth anniversary of September 11 will provide Obama with an opportunity to recalibrate the nation's approach to homeland security. While honoring the enormous sacrifice of the U.S. armed forces and those who have been working to protect the U.S. homeland, he should ask citizens to step forward and assume their own unique role.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 348-50  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 02:37 AM

It is long past time for Washington to stop treating civil society as a child to be sheltered and to acknowledge the limits and counterproductive consequences of relying so heavily on protective measures. In good times and bad, the greatest asset of the United States has always been its people.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 7  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 02:37 AM

read
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 144-45  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:18 AM

Totalitarianism is a twentieth-century enterprise that would have been impossible to realize in premodern, nonindustrialized societies.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 176-79  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:22 AM

in post-Baathist Iraq, boxes of files containing hundreds of pages of correspondence from the Office of the President providing guidance on the minutiae of wall posters and paintings and murals and monuments made in Baghdad under Saddam, even as he was waging wars with Iran, Kuwait, and the United States: this is the true measure of totalitarian culture, not what this or that Iraqi artist said about art before Saddam even came to power. 
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 8  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:24 AM

read
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 8  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:29 AM

read. at progress and the pat in latin america. eated to a jan/feb article.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 8  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:29 AM

read. on progress and the past in latin america. eated to a jan/feb article.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 8  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:29 AM

read. on progress and the past in latin america. related to a jan/feb article.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 29-32  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:30 AM

Although Altman and Haass expect markets to remain calm "possibly for two or three years," the rising price of gold suggests otherwise. Gold has risen from $460 per ounce to $1,400 per ounce in the last five years -- representing a 67 percent devaluation of the U.S. dollar per unit of gold. As former U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan has said, gold is "the ultimate means of payment."
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 33-35  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:31 AM

At 4.6 years, the average maturity of the U.S. federal debt held by the public (debt that now totals $9.1 trillion) is tight relative to, for instance, the average maturity of 13.5 years for British government debt. According to the International Monetary Fund, the maturing debt of the U.S. government will equal 18.1 percent of U.S. GDP during 2011 alone.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 35-38  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:31 AM

Altman and Haass rightly note that the U.S. government's annual interest expense will rise dramatically as its stock of debt increases and interest rates inevitably rise. Further debt increases would substantially darken the fiscal outlook for the federal government. And even a relatively small rise in interest rates would have a significant impact.
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 9  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:34 AM

read
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May-Jun 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 9  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:34 AM

read. cary perspectiveof rising gold prices and consequence of future debt
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Foreign Affairs (Subcription or (free) Registration) (calibre)
- Bookmark on Page 74 | Loc. 1134  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:36 AM


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Foreign Affairs (Subcription or (free) Registration) (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 1 | Loc. 4-6  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:36 AM

With European NATO allies drastically reducing their defense spending, there were legitimate fears as to whether they could still afford to respond to such complex crises.
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Foreign Affairs (Subcription or (free) Registration) (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 1 | Loc. 10-12  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:37 AM

The mission in Libya has revealed three important truths about military intervention today. First, to those who claimed that Afghanistan was to be NATO's last out-of-area mission, it has shown that unpredictability is the very essence of security.
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Foreign Affairs (Subcription or (free) Registration) (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 1 | Loc. 12-15  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:37 AM

Second, it has proved that in addition to frontline capabilities, such as fighter-bombers and warships, so-called enablers, such as surveillance and refueling aircraft, as well as drones, are critical parts of any modern operation. And third, it has revealed that NATO allies do not lack military capabilities. Any shortfalls have been primarily due to political, rather than military, constraints.
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The Philosophers' Magazine (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 199-202  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:43 AM

Hume left for posthumous publication a work that remains as important and as urgent today as when it was first written: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. It should be (but, alas, is not) read by anyone who even thinks of inferring from the remarkable order and arrangement of the observable world as we know it the presence of an intelligent design of a concerned creator of the universe.
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The Philosophers' Magazine (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 215-23  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:45 AM

It is for Hume’s sympathetic attention to the complexity of human nature, and for his trying to do justice to it at the deepest levels of philosophical reflection, that we should honour his memory. He was a great philosopher who made lasting contributions to a subject fundamental to the understanding of human life. But for all his philosophical greatness, he was also, as a philosopher, a great man, an admirable human being. And for this too he should be honoured today, as he was at the time of his death. His life-long friend Adam Smith wrote in retrospect not only of Hume’s writings and achievements, which he admired above all others, but of Hume’s “temper [which] … seemed more happily balanced than that perhaps of any other man I have ever known … that gaiety of temper, so agreeable in society, … was in him certainly attended with the most severe application, the most extensive learning, the greatest depth of thought, and a capacity in every respect the most comprehensive. Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.”
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02 The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Douglas Adams)
- Highlight Loc. 538-39  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 10:47 AM

This was the gist of the notice. It said "The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate."
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2823-26  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:23 PM

Today, the United States lacks the resources to continue as the primary provider of global public goods. Europe is fully occupied for the moment with saving the eurozone. Japan is likewise tied down with complex political and economic problems at home. None of these powers’ governments has the time, resources, or domestic political capital needed for a new bout of international heavy lifting.
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2826-28  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:23 PM

Meanwhile, there are no credible answers to transnational challenges without the direct involvement of emerging powers such as Brazil, China, and India. Yet these countries are far too focused on domestic development to welcome the burdens that come with new responsibilities abroad.
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2828-29  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:23 PM

We are now living in a G-Zero world, one in which no single country or bloc of countries has the political and economic leverage -- or the will -- to drive a truly international agenda.
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2834-37  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:24 PM

In 1997, the U.S.-dominated G-7 became the U.S.-dominated G-8, as U.S. and European policymakers pulled Russia into the club. This change did not reflect a shift in the world’s balance of power. It was simply an effort to bolster Russia’s fragile democracy and help prevent the country from sliding back into communism or nationalist militarism.
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2839-41  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:25 PM

In September 2008, fears that the global economy stood on the brink of catastrophe hastened the inevitable transition to the G-20, an organization that includes the world’s largest and most important emerging-market states.
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2863-67  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:28 PM

In fact, global defense policy has always been essentially a zero-sum game, as one country or bloc of countries works to maximize its defense capabilities in ways that (deliberately or indirectly) challenge the military preeminence of its rivals. International commerce is a different game; trade can benefit all players. But the divergence of economic interests in the wake of the financial crisis has undermined global economic cooperation, throwing a wrench into the gears of globalization.
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2869-71  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:28 PM

combination of Washington’s declining international clout, on the one hand, and sharp policy disagreements, on the other -- both between developed and developing states and between the United States and Europe -- has created a vacuum of international leadership just at the moment when it is most needed.
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2890-92  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:32 PM

Asset and financial protectionism are on the rise, too. A Chinese state-owned oil company attempted to purchase the U.S. energy firm Unocal in 2005, and a year later, the state-owned Dubai Ports World tried to purchase a company that would allow it to operate several U.S. ports: both ignited a political furor in Washington.
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2904-11  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:35 PM

Following previous crises in emerging markets, such as the Asian financial meltdown of the late 1990s, policymakers in those economies committed themselves to maintaining weak currencies, running current account surpluses, and self-insuring against liquidity runs by accumulating huge foreign exchange reserves. This strategy grew in part from a mistrust that the IMF could be counted on to act as the lender of last resort. Deficit countries, such as the United States, see such accumulations of reserves as a form of trade mercantilism that prevents undervalued currencies from appreciating. Emerging-market economies, in turn, complain that U.S. fiscal and current account deficits could eventually cause the collapse of the U.S. dollar, even as these deficits help build up the dollar assets demanded by those countries accumulating reserves. This is a rerun of the old Triffin dilemma, an economic observation of what happens when the country that produces the reserve currency must run deficits to provide international liquidity, deficits that eventually debase the currency’s value as a stable international reserve.
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2914-17  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:35 PM

Nor is it likely that China’s yuan will soon supplant the dollar as a major reserve currency, because for the yuan to do so, Beijing would have to allow its exchange rate to fluctuate, reduce its controls on capital inflows and outflows, liberalize its domestic capital markets, and create markets for yuan-denominated debt. That is a long-term process that would present many near-term threats to China’s political and economic stability.
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2922-26  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:37 PM

From 1945 until 1990, the global balance of power was defined primarily by relative differences in military capability. It was not market-moving innovation or cultural dynamism that bolstered the Soviet bloc’s prominence within a bipolar international system. It was raw military power. Today, it is the centrality of China and other emerging powers to the future of the global economy, not the numbers of their citizens under arms or the weapons at their disposal, that make their choices crucial for the United States’ future. This is the core of the G-Zero
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Note Loc. 2  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:39 PM

read. depressing aticle about power vacuum in world.
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2696-98  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:42 PM

By the end of the decade, a vast national network of service providers had emerged to administer these courses and other services -- at a cost of some 140 million euros ($186 million) a year. (The U.S. government, in comparison, spent $18 million last year to facilitate integration.)
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Mar-Apr 2011 (CharlesMartinReid.com)
- Bookmark Loc. 2705  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 06:46 PM


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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 952-55  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 08:16 PM

Many of the Chinese migrants who came to California to work on the railroads — and later in agriculture — were farmers who brought with them specialized knowledge of oranges, a fruit that originated in China. They were able to efficiently pick and pack oranges for mass consumption in the U.S., Akin said. "It was the Chinese laborers who carried the horticultural knowledge of citrus that was responsible for making Riverside the center of the citrus industry," she said.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1420-21  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 08:46 PM

TSA spokesman Nico Melendez said that the security measures are based "on what we have learned from intelligence and the tactics used by our adversaries."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note on Page 93 | Loc. 1421  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 08:46 PM

what the fuuuuck
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 2053-55  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 08:51 PM

By 1990, work had shut down. The site sat fenced off for most of the decade as the pair battled in court — and were sued in turn by business partners who said they had been stiffed, including the noted golf course designer Robert Trent Jones Jr. When
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note on Page 134 | Loc. 2055  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 08:52 PM

what a bunch of good for nothing human trash. non contributing zeroes.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 2059-61  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 08:52 PM

Marsch's dealings with San Diego's power elite went back decades: He had sold a Breckenridge, Colo., ski condo in 1979 to a group including Roger Hedgecock, a county supervisor and later San Diego mayor who wound up convicted for his role in a campaign-finance scandal.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note on Page 135 | Loc. 2061  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 08:53 PM

again. human trash.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 2069  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 08:55 PM

taxes owed on earnings from the Bridges.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note on Page 135 | Loc. 2069  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 08:55 PM

i did nt know tha a corporation can pay for your taxes
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 2084-86  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 08:58 PM

"Does it really take me dragging Lennar through trial … to end up as James Cameron did collecting what is owed to me and showing Lennar's accounting to be the fraud that it is?" Marsch wrote.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2098  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 09:02 PM

Petrocelli,
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note on Page 137 | Loc. 2098  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 09:02 PM

ummmmm wtf
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 51-53  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 09:13 PM

After government-backed protests in Hanoi demanded that China respect Vietnam’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, the two countries conducted a joint naval patrol in disputed waters. China urged America to avoid getting involved in the dispute.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 48-50  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 09:13 PM

China released Ai Weiwei on bail from detention, after the artist and human-rights activist admitted evading tax. Mr Ai was arrested in April as he boarded a flight for Hong Kong, and was held in secret without access to a lawyer. China said it released Mr Ai for “his good attitude in confessing his crimes” and because of a chronic illness.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 54-58  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 09:14 PM

Pakistan arrested Brigadier Ali Khan for his ties to Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a banned Islamist group. The most senior Pakistani army officer to be taken into custody in a decade, Brigadier Khan was detained shortly before India’s foreign secretary flew to Islamabad for talks with her Pakistani counterpart. Both sides started a dialogue in February for the first time since the Mumbai attacks of 2008, in which Pakistani officers are accused of involvement.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 58-60  | Added on Monday, June 27, 2011, 09:15 PM

Barack Obama proposed withdrawing 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of next summer, with 68,000 remaining to support the transition of responsibility for security to the Afghans by 2014.
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 56-58  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:30 AM

Wrobel could have stayed on until retirement -- he said he loves Nevada -- but since becoming department chairman in June 2008 all he has been able to do is watch in dismay as state support for higher education was repeatedly reduced, including a 15 percent cut due Friday.
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 59-60  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:30 AM

What bothers me is the attacks by some people on state employees. It is like people transferred their anger from illegal immigrants to state employees."
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 65  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:31 AM

And as a result, the public suffers through longer waits in offices and less efficient and productive agencies,
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 63-64  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:31 AM

When people like Rocha retire or like Wrobel just leave, state government loses trained and skilled workers who cannot be replaced quickly,
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 82  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:34 AM

school teachers in Nevada -- who earn 5 percent less than the national average
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 88-90  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:35 AM

Wrobel said UNLV has a "highly mobile" and attractive faculty. Many professors can and will find jobs elsewhere, hurting the university's attempt to attract a higher quality faculty. He said 48 professors just recently took buyouts rather than continuing to teach.
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 96-99  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:36 AM

Subramaniam is tired of people who believe state employees are well-paid, lazy fat cats. Because of its average pay, too often state government has become a training ground for young people and college graduates, he said. Once they gain experience, he said, they transfer to better paying jobs with Clark and Washoe counties or the cities of Reno and Las Vegas.
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 99-100  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:36 AM

"The problem with so many state workers retiring is we have the lowest number (on a per capita basis) of state workers in the country,"
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 446-47  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:59 AM

prejudice against Mormons has held steady over the years despite its growth in the United States to 5.5 million members and around the world with another 7.5 million members.
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 447-49  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:59 AM

Opposition to having a Mormon as president has been about 20 percent across America since 1967, when Gallup first began to measure it, the polling organization said.
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 500-504  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:04 AM

"As far as I'm concerned, this is a very worthwhile and good program that's kept a lot of people out of jail who didn't need to be in jail," said Jim Carmany, Las Vegas' Municipal Court administrator. Bond companies have had to cut jobs and hours, but there is more to the complaints than just loss of business, Ceballos said. He argued that marshals are collecting bail when they accept a partial payment and let a defendant go, and state law bars law enforcement officers from being bail agents or bail enforcement agents as a wall against corruption.
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 555-57  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:08 AM

If politics is allowed to control the process, the dominant party could get more seats in the Legislature and Congress than its population merits, and that could shift government policies in ways that most Nevadans don't support. This
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 557  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:08 AM

This
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 555-57  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:08 AM

If politics is allowed to control the process, the dominant party could get more seats in the Legislature and Congress than its population merits, and that could shift government policies in ways that most Nevadans don't support.
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 572-73  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:10 AM

The hyperpartisanship seen in the Legislature simply does not exist on the state high court, and it shouldn't, he said.
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Las Vegas Review Journal (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 630-32  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:15 AM

In 1981 he was named special hearing master for the MGM Grand Hotel fire litigation. Eighty-five people were killed in that fire. Cherry was also named special master of the Las Vegas Hilton fire litigation. That fire occurred just three months after the MGM Grand blaze, killing eight.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 106-8  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 11:15 AM

Once considered to be the hottest wireless device around, the BlackBerry has not gained much from the growing demand for smartphones; its share of the market in North America has shrunk to 17% from around 50% just two years ago.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 109-11  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 11:16 AM

An annual survey estimated that the combined wealth of the world’s 10.9m rich people (27% of whom are women) stood at $42.7 trillion in 2010, more than in 2007, the year the financial crisis was brewing. More than half of the monied classes live in the United States, Japan and Germany, though Asia has more in total than Europe for the first time.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note on Page 8 | Loc. 110  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 11:16 AM

meaning financial crisis cased shift in wealth?
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 139-40  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 11:20 AM

As the climate gets more poisonous and elections approach in France, Germany and Greece itself, the risk of a disastrous accident—anything from a disorderly default to a currency break-up—is growing.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 151-53  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 11:21 AM

While the EU’s leaders are trying to deny the need for default, a rising chorus is taking the opposite line. Greece should embrace default, walk away from its debts, abandon the euro and bring back the drachma (in a similar way to Britain leaving the gold standard in 1931 or Argentina dumping its currency board in 2001).
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 153-58  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 11:22 AM

That option would be ruinous, both for Greece and for the EU. Even if capital controls were brought in, some Greek banks would go bust. The new drachma would plummet, making Greece’s debt burden even more onerous. Inflation would take off as import prices shot up and Greece had to print money to finance its deficit. The benefit from a weaker currency would be small: Greece’s exports make up a small slice of GDP. The country would still need external finance, but who would lend to it? And the contagion risk would be bigger than from restructuring alone: if Greece left, why not Portugal or even Spain and Italy? If the euro zone were to break up it would put huge pressure on the single market.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 160  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 11:22 AM

It would hardly be a shock to the markets, which have long expected a default (an important difference from Lehman).
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 176  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:39 PM

the Chinese Communist Party marks its 90th birthday on July 1st
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 187-89  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:42 PM

However, the love affair between a party that calls itself the vanguard of the proletariat and its actual, middle-class supporters is now under threat. At the root of this is an inevitable slowing in economic growth.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 190-95  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:42 PM

A sudden crash is not impossible: there could be a botched attempt to tackle either the property bubble or what the prime minister calls the “uncaged tiger” of inflation (now at 5.5%, its highest level in nearly three years). But an immediate upset is still unlikely: inflation is not yet out of control, still far below the 27.7% it reached in 1994. The danger is more in the medium term: growth will inevitably slow over the next decade, as China settles into its status as a middle-income country, and the burden of caring for an ever larger number of elderly people in a slower economy may make middle-class life far more uncomfortable.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 195-97  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:43 PM

To compensate, the party will have to usher in wrenching change. It is struggling to shift China away from the current unsustainable model, where growth is propelled by vast investment and export-led manufacturing, towards one where domestic consumption plays a bigger role.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 197-98  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:43 PM

build health-care, pension and social-security systems to reassure citizens: all of these are necessary to persuade the middle class to save less.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 198-200  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:43 PM

China’s state-owned businesses have an insatiable appetite for capital, which many of them waste. Curbing state companies means taking on all of the well-connected people who ride on their coat-tails,
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 201-3  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:44 PM

an official report in 2008 said that, of new applicants for membership, by far the biggest category comprised university students over the age of 18. Although the decision by these young careerists to sign up shows the party’s clout, they have very different ambitions from those of the old ideologues.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 204-7  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:45 PM

attracting underemployed young rural residents to urban jobs. But the supply is beginning to slow. It would help if farmers could sell or mortgage their rural land and use the money to help gain a stronger foothold in the cities. But the party remains overly fearful of privatising farmland, partly for atavistic fears of a destitute peasantry, and partly for ideological reasons.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 208-9  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:45 PM

Of the tens of thousands of protests each year, most are still rural, typically by farmers
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 213-15  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:46 PM

Here it runs up against the middle class most directly. To give migrants the same housing and other benefits as urban hukou holders, and to build a proper social safety-net will be expensive. And if more tax is the solution, then the middle class could well begin demanding a greater political say. That is a day the party dreads.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 222-24  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:47 PM

The most recent leadership transition, in 2002, went smoothly. But every previous generational shift in the party’s 90 years has been chaotic, and, a decade on, the tasks faced by the leaders who took over in 2002 look almost easy by comparison with today’s.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note on Page 15 | Loc. 224  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:47 PM

so true...
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 229-30  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:48 PM

marked an end to the mission that took 100,000 troops to a distant and dismal part of the world. Afghanistan will cost America roughly $120 billion this year.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 234-36  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:48 PM

The middle ground is often good politics; it is less comfortable in warfare. In this case, history will probably judge that Mr Obama took out too many soldiers too early.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 245-47  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:49 PM

Even with the best outcome there, women will suffer discrimination, poppies will flourish and corruption will eat away at daily life. But any hope of a decent life there depends on peace. Avoiding a full-blown civil war is crucial for Afghans.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 245  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:49 PM

It will continue to be plagued by violence and insurgency.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 17 | Loc. 253-54  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 01:50 PM

Such doubts will make Afghans less likely to reckon on the government enduring—and hence more likely to fight it.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 269-70  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 02:07 PM

Take Egypt. Outside agriculture, over 40% of the economy is in state hands,
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 328-29  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 02:40 PM

It all sounds suspiciously like the subprime mortgage boom, when banks parked illiquid assets in off-balance-sheet vehicles. The problem is not on the same scale: synthetic ETFs and ETNs are a small proportion of the industry. But the subprime market also started small.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 331-34  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 02:40 PM

The exact nature of the collateral should be disclosed on a regular basis, like the main investments in a mutual fund’s portfolio. Investors ought to be told that the market for ETFs may not always be as liquid as they would like. And the industry should look to its own self-interest: it would be a shame if reckless expansion spoiled a good innovation.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 415-19  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 02:47 PM

Regarding Germany’s decision to reduce nuclear power output, I can only say that we have all gone collectively insane in Europe (“Nuclear? Nein, danke”, June 4th). There were only a few deaths resulting from the Fukushima nuclear incident in Japan and about a dozen people were treated for minor burns and released from hospital. Deaths from the latest E. coli outbreak in Germany, blamed on organic bean sprouts, number at least 35; more than 3,000 people have been taken ill with different levels of exposure to the bacteria.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 420-21  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 02:47 PM

Uncharacteristically, it is the French who are showing remarkable common sense so far and will likely reap the rewards through their nuclear-power industry in the form of increased demand from both Germany and Italy.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 30 | Loc. 455-58  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 02:50 PM

Minutes before the vote the opposition walked out because of a noisy, petty argument over whether “democracy” had returned to Greece in 1974, when the military dictatorship fell, or in 1981 when the first left-of-centre administration was elected. Mr Papandreou managed to coax his opponents back by pointing out what an appalling impression such squabbles make on the rest of the world at such a grave hour in the country’s history.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 32 | Loc. 490-91  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:15 PM

In a passionate speech during the confidence vote, he caught public attention by saying that whatever the numbers might show, the government understood how desperate things were for many ordinary folk.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 542-45  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:24 PM

Across the entire financial system these CDS exposures largely net off, Barclays reckons, and collateral and margin-calls should have reduced the outstanding exposures to relatively small amounts. However, not everyone will end up with a net position close to zero. It is reasonable to suppose that there would be some large losses (and some large gains) on CDS contracts if Greece stopped paying its bills. Quite where these would emerge is causing some worry in markets.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 547-48  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:26 PM

Were panic to seize the banking system, regulators could do much to restore calm by releasing information they have collected in the past three months as part of “stress tests” of Europe’s banks.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 37 | Loc. 561-65  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:31 PM

First and second in line would be the next-wobbliest members of the euro zone: Ireland, whose government has debts of around €150 billion, and Portugal, which owes €160 billion. Partly because they have also reduced their holdings of Irish and Portuguese bonds, European banks should be able to cope if these countries joined Greece in default or in restructuring their debts. However, if contagion were to spread to Spain or Italy, and banks had to accept losses on their governments’ bonds, the sums would look grim even for some banks outside the affected countries (see chart 2). Italy owes €1.8 trillion, or 120% of a far bigger GDP than Greece’s, Ireland’s or Portugal’s. Spain’s debts amount to €640 billion.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 575-77  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:34 PM

The ECB could counter money-market flight, for instance, by supplying more liquidity, as the Fed did after Lehman crashed. It could also reopen the foreign-exchange swaps set up with the Fed during the crisis.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 577-78  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:34 PM

Some good ideas are already being discussed. One is to conduct credible stress tests and recapitalise banks that fail.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 583-86  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:35 PM

Some policies, though, might cause trouble. The ECB has threatened not to accept Greek government bonds as collateral if the country’s debt were restructured. If it carried out that threat, a liquidity crisis in Greece, bank runs and other mayhem could ensue. “It would be almost like an act of war,” says a senior executive at a Greek bank. “I don’t think that they’d pull the plug.”
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 601-2  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:38 PM

Television images of Greeks haranguing their government over reforms do not help. The protests make it “very difficult for MPs to explain the rescue measures to voters”, says Klaus-Peter Flosbach, the CDU’s fiscal-policy spokesman in the Bundestag.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 40 | Loc. 601-3  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:38 PM

Television images of Greeks haranguing their government over reforms do not help. The protests make it “very difficult for MPs to explain the rescue measures to voters”, says Klaus-Peter Flosbach, the CDU’s fiscal-policy spokesman in the Bundestag. Nearly half the electorate favours throwing Greece out of the euro, according to a recent poll.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 635-38  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:46 PM

Much is at stake in Egypt economically, as well as politically. Like other Arab economies, the country has what might be called a patriarchal economy, with a weak private sector dependent on a dominant state one. Such an economy is the counterpart to autocracy, and in the economic sphere, just as much as in the political one, Egypt is a test for the Arab world. If it can prosper, others can too.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note on Page 42 | Loc. 638  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:46 PM

economist reading... this is a test
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 657-63  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:50 PM

The task of managing the mess has fallen to an interim government of technocrats, former opposition politicians and a few Mubarak holdovers. The circumstances look inauspicious. Though the government says it is laying the foundations for reform over three to five years, in reality it is only a stopgap administration, in office until elections planned for later this year. Though needing to make changes, it is cramped by hostility to the market reforms launched in the last years of the Mubarak regime. And though supported by demonstrators from Tahrir Square, it has no real mandate. It does not even seem to have the full backing of the military council that has the ultimate say over things in Egypt. The secretive generals—so far as one can tell—are mostly concerned with keeping the peace and deterring anyone who wants to stop them resuming their former position back-seat-driving the country. The result has been a government that is risk-averse to a fault.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 665-66  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:50 PM

and is low enough not to destroy jobs
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note on Page 44 | Loc. 666  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:51 PM

why would a minimum wage destroy jobs?
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 672-73  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:52 PM

if you include all the various promises from Gulf states, the grand total could be over $20 billion—a remarkable vote of confidence in Egypt.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 672-73  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:52 PM

raising $11 billion from foreign governments and international financial institutions. In fact, if you include all the various promises from Gulf states, the grand total could be over $20 billion—a remarkable vote of confidence in Egypt.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 675-78  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:53 PM

It came to power at a heady moment of change, when Egyptians were ready to accept painful measures as well as handouts. Its freedom of manoeuvre was greater than it seemed. It did not have to please a constituency of supporters, nor did it have to look for votes in a future election. At the very least, it had a chance to come clean about some of the hard choices facing the country. That chance was lost.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 683-86  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:53 PM

But its worst failure is over what Mr Heikal calls the elephant in the room: fuel subsidies. For years the government has sold every kind of fuel at below—often well below—world market prices, and paid the difference. It also subsidises bread and other staples. The direct costs are soaring (see chart 1): food subsidies now account for 2% of GDP; fuel consumes 8%. In all, subsidies cost almost three times the size of the education budget.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 46 | Loc. 699-700  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 03:55 PM

The government could and should have done better than this. It avoided the worst, and bought democracy some time. But it postponed decisions that need to be taken if Egypt’s economic problems are not to worsen.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 708-9  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:00 PM

If this demographic dividend is to be cashed, and if democracy is to take root, then living standards will have to improve.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 711  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:01 PM

(its GDP per head at purchasing-power parities was $5,500; Egypt’s is $6,300 at PPP).
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note on Page 47 | Loc. 711  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:01 PM

what is PPP?
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 714-15  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:02 PM

If Egypt is to catch up, it will have to do what Turkey did: reduce the overweening power of the state and provide an environment in which private firms, especially long-suffering small and medium ones, can thrive.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 720-21  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:03 PM

Yet where a strong government is needed—as regulator, enforcer of contracts and guarantor of competition—it is weak.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 731  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:05 PM

Educational failures cast a shadow over the quality of the workforce.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note on Page 48 | Loc. 731  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:05 PM

how well educated is the u.s. in comparison? how could you compare spending versus quality of education?
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note on Page 49 | Loc. 741  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:07 PM

all has signed up... sic?
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 745-47  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:08 PM

On balance, if the politics stays stable, the economy should do well enough to consolidate democracy eventually. But that is a big if. As Mr Heikal says: “If we get things right, we could be Turkey in ten years. If we get them wrong, we could be Pakistan in 18 months.”
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 746-47  | Added on Tuesday, June 28, 2011, 04:08 PM

As Mr Heikal says: “If we get things right, we could be Turkey in ten years. If we get them wrong, we could be Pakistan in 18 months.”
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 931-34  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:00 AM

For the first time since 1933, the (Democrat-controlled) state legislature has the power to enact a budget with a simple majority, thanks to a ballot measure voters approved last year. So it passed a budget on June 15th, meeting the constitutional deadline—also for the first time in years. But the next day Governor Jerry Brown, himself a Democrat, vetoed that budget—apparently the first such veto in California’s history. The budget was not balanced, he said, and contained “legally questionable manoeuvres”.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 936  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:00 AM

the state’s independently elected state controller, John Chiang, decided to stop paying legislators.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 947-50  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:01 AM

In January, facing what was then a deficit of more than $25 billion, Mr Brown proposed to solve half the problem by cutting spending and the other half by extending some temporary taxes. For the cuts, he expected support from his fellow Democrats. For the revenues, he did not ask for support from hostile Republicans, merely for their consent to put that question before voters in a special election, which requires a two-thirds majority in the legislature.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 954-56  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:01 AM

Meanwhile, the economy and tax receipts have grown just enough to make Mr Brown’s argument look weaker and to shrink the remaining budget hole—to about $10 billion—but not nearly enough to solve the problem.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 963-64  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:03 AM

Barack Obama is a formidable campaigner and fund-raiser. In 2008 his campaign raised a record $745m; this time his haul may exceed $1 billion.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note Loc. 964  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:03 AM

hooooly shit
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 980-83  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:05 AM

Defenders of the more cautious approach—and there were many—may be motivated less by love than by fear. Mr Obama may not be perfect, but even gloomy progressives realise he is better than the alternative. “Imagine the enforcement and regulating of the Affordable Care Act under President Rick Perry,” cautioned Eve Gittelson, a blogger from New York, at a panel on health reform.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 993-95  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:06 AM

In a weak and divided field—it is hard to imagine a supporter of Mr Paul succumbing to Mr Santorum’s religiosity, or a fan of Mr Romney’s country-club Republicanism finding much to like in Mrs Bachmann’s pitchfork populism—room exists for an all-things-to-all-men candidate such as Mr Perry.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1032-36  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:10 AM

AMERICA thinks of itself as having not only liberty, but “justice for all”, as the Pledge of Allegiance has it. The World Justice Project disagrees, releasing a report on June 13th on the status of the rule of law in 66 countries around the world. America ranked in the top echelon in many categories. For example, it got high marks for open government, limits on government powers and “order and security”. But on access to civil justice, America did badly: it came 21st, just behind the Czech Republic and just ahead of Jordan. The cost of the system was the most important thing dragging America’s score down.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1039  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:10 AM

The worst problem comes in the pre-trial phase known as discovery.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1042-43  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:11 AM

The right to discovery has been used by aggressive lawyers not just to find pieces of information, but to exhaust and impoverish adversaries through endless motions for more.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1051  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:11 AM

Even the stronger party in a case has a strong incentive to settle, to avoid the time and cost.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1052-53  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:12 AM

the ratio of federal trials to initial filings in 2009 was a twelfth of what it was in 1962.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1071-72  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 03:01 PM

Data from the Census Bureau show that married couples, for the first time, now make up less than half (45%) of all households.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1072-75  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 03:02 PM

In every state the numbers of unmarried couples, childless households and single-person households are growing faster than those comprised of married people with children, finds the 2010 census. The latter accounted for 43% of households in 1950; they now account for just 20%. And the trend has a potent class dimension. Traditional marriage has evolved from a near-universal rite to a luxury for the educated and affluent.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1086-89  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 03:03 PM

Americans with a high-school degree or less (who account for 58% of the population) tell researchers they would like to marry, but do not believe they can afford it. Instead, they raise children out of wedlock. Only 6% of children born to college-educated mothers were born outside marriage, according to the National Marriage Project. That compares with 44% of babies born to mothers whose education ended with high school.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note Loc. 1089  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 03:03 PM

wow...
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1090-92  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 03:04 PM

She and other researchers have linked as much as half of the income inequality in America to changes in family composition: single-parent families (mostly those with a high-school degree or less) are getting poorer while married couples (with educations and dual incomes) are increasingly well-off.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1098-99  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 03:05 PM

“I VENTURE to say that no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.” Edmund Burke should be alive today. None of America’s several wars is popular.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1110-11  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 03:06 PM

Now the Republicans’ own wobbles, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the public’s spreading war fatigue and the transfer of the gung-ho General David Petraeus from Afghanistan to the CIA have given the president unexpected flexibility.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1123-24  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 03:07 PM

With no vital American interest at stake, argues Michele Bachmann, another of the Republicans’ presidential candidates, the “Obama doctrine” has set a precedent for American intervention in “one country after another”.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1134-35  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 06:00 PM

until one of Mr Obama’s advisers was quoted as describing it as “leading from behind”.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1136-38  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 06:01 PM

Since its publication in the New Yorker, “leading from behind” has become a prime exhibit in the Republicans’ scornful excoriation of Mr Obama’s foreign policy. The president now finds himself accused of being both a warmonger for entering the war and a wimp for his lame prosecution of it.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1144-45  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 06:02 PM

He is making a good fist of extricating America from the big wars he inherited from George Bush. But the tiny one he entered so cautiously himself, in which not a single American soldier has died, has brought him disproportionate grief. Even
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1184-85  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 06:08 PM

So far this year the Guatemalan government has seized guns, drugs and cash worth 9% of its annual GDP. (In 2010 the figure was 5% for the whole year.)
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1190-91  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 06:09 PM

Most foreign aid and loans for security still go to individual countries, rather than to regional efforts. That may now change a bit.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1232-33  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 06:21 PM

since the mid-1980s, when Chileans braved General Pinochet’s water cannon to demand a return to democracy.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1247-48  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 06:23 PM

Chile, with little oil and gas, faces an energy shortage, especially if the economy continues to grow by 6% a year.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1411-14  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 06:39 PM

At present 35 of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors are shut, mostly for routine safety inspections. Yet since March 11th local governments have refused to reopen them until there are credible safety assessments. It is conceivable that by next March all 54 could be out of action, since there are fresh inspections every 13 months (see map). That would in effect strip Japan of about 24% of its pre-March 11th power-generation capacity.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1416-17  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 06:40 PM

The Kansai Institute for Social and Economic Research says a mere 5% drop in energy consumption this summer would wipe out the region’s expected GDP growth of 0.5% in this fiscal year.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1418-19  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 06:40 PM

Japan Centre for Economic Research estimates that, without nuclear power, GDP in 2012 would be 1.6% lower than it would otherwise be.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1428-30  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 06:41 PM

So sour is the prevailing mood that this really might put a nail in the nuclear coffin. Repression in China No
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1434-36  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 06:58 PM

Officially, Mr Ai is “on bail”. China’s state-owned news agency, Xinhua, said he had been freed because of his “good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease he suffers from” (he has diabetes and high blood pressure).
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1575  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:14 PM

The once docile middle, weighing up options as the unrest persists, is no longer finding it easy to be neutral.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1582-83  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:15 PM

Those in the middle are wary, not just because they fear violence. Hounded as it is by the regime, the opposition has yet to reassure ordinary Syrians of their credentials as future rulers.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1612-13  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:18 PM

Few Bedouin say they want to rid Sinai of Egyptian rule altogether, though the more wistful wonder whether Western powers might yet set up a Bedouin dynasty in Sinai as they did with the House of Saud in the Arabian peninsula.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note Loc. 1613  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:18 PM

huh?
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1638-39  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:21 PM

when a mission from the Fund cheered the Islamic Republic’s economy earlier this month, heaping praise on the policies of its ruthless government, eyebrows spiked upwards as in a comic scene in a Persian miniature.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1642-44  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:21 PM

This is not because Iran’s economy is performing brilliantly. Whereas other big oil exporters have boomed on the back of high prices, Iran has grown sluggishly, nudging upwards only last year to 3.5%. That is not enough to dent a rising unemployment rate, which is now close to 15%.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1644-45  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:21 PM

The reason for the praise is Iran’s exemplary execution of a task dear to the IMF’s heart: structural reform.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1646-47  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:21 PM

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared this to be the “year of economic jihad”.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1657-59  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:24 PM

Until December, economists estimated the annual cost of subsidies on food, fuel and electricity at $60 billion-100 billion, a quarter of Iran’s GDP and equal to or greater than the value of annual energy exports.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1657-60  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:24 PM

Until December, economists estimated the annual cost of subsidies on food, fuel and electricity at $60 billion-100 billion, a quarter of Iran’s GDP and equal to or greater than the value of annual energy exports. Most of this burden was carried as an implicit subsidy to domestic energy consumers, with the price of diesel fuel, for example, set at the equivalent of two American cents a litre, and petrol selling for less than bottled water.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1661-63  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:25 PM

Iranian governments have long grappled with this problem. Mr Ahmadinejad’s liberal-leaning predecessor, Muhammad Khatami, was stymied by a squeamish, conservative parliament.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1664-66  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:25 PM

Ironically, it may have been international sanctions, intended to punish Iran for its suspect nuclear programme, that at last persuaded its opponents of the need to scrap subsidies. Lacking the refining capacity to meet domestic demand, Iran found itself vulnerable to a sudden cut-off in petrol imports.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1672-75  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:26 PM

The government cleverly doled out two months’ worth of family cash transfers, amounting to some $90 per person, before unleashing its shock. When the first tranche of price rises hit, quadrupling the cost of some kinds of bread and shooting diesel prices up by 2,000%, among other things, there was barely a peep from the public. Iranians have rapidly got used both to paying a lot more for some things and to having more money to spend as they wish.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1683-85  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:27 PM

Trouble brews in the kingdom, too. King Abdullah is 89 or so and weak with age. Crown Prince Sultan, his anointed successor, is 87 and ailing. The next in line, Prince Nayef, the feared interior minister, is 78 and badly diabetic. The young grow restless and impertinent.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1689-90  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:27 PM

The money showered on them by the state still buys individual complacency and the complicity of big business and big religion.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1698-1700  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:28 PM

Saudi Arabia may ramp up oil production by 500,000 barrels a day (b/d), snubbing calls by other OPEC members to curb supplies and keep prices high. Investment in new oilfields and infrastructure suggest that the Saudis can sustain production at a hefty 10m b/d—worth around $1 billion at current prices—for some time to come.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1726-28  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:30 PM

the result of toppling Mr Berlusconi, as Mr Bossi reminded the crowd at Pontida, would probably be to let in the left. Since the League’s leader has steered his party so far to the right, it would have enormous difficulty in forging any alliance with the opposition—and that is assuming the party would win enough seats to be of any use.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note Loc. 1732  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:31 PM

wha is diff. btwn president and prime minister...
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1745  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:32 PM

Harold Wilson’s aphorisms. “I know what’s going on,” he told a rally in 1969 as he faced a similar crisis. “I’m going on.”
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1762-64  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:33 PM

As much as three years ago, some of Warsaw’s finest political brains were invited to contribute ideas for the presidency. Experts such as Pawel Swieboda, a former bureaucrat and now head of DemosEuropa, a think-tank, have identified the best and worst practices in past presidencies (Sweden’s 2009 stint is seen as an exemplar, whereas Spain and Hungary, the current president, are said to have stumbled).
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1767-68  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:33 PM

This week Poland showed its teeth by vetoing moves to set a higher target for cutting EU carbon-dioxide emissions by 2020.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1778-81  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:35 PM

In 1988 leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory populated mainly by ethnic Armenians, demanded a transfer from Soviet Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia. The Kremlin refused and a nasty war between Azeris and Armenians followed. As Thomas de Waal, an author on the Caucasus, writes, “it was the first stone in an avalanche that swept away the entire multinational construction of the Soviet Union.”
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1783-84  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:35 PM

Worryingly, Azerbaijan has poured energy revenues into its army—it spends $3 billion a year (5% of GDP).
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1823-24  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:39 PM

Others, such as the Committee of Statistical Confidentiality, or the Strategic Committee for Intensive Calculation, are less so.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note Loc. 1839  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:40 PM

whaaaaa is that a cypress hill reference??
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note Loc. 1841  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:41 PM

ha ha blazing
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note Loc. 1841  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:41 PM

ha ha rolling
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1848-49  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:42 PM

Mr Bergman fears the emergence of a new criminality, such as illegal trade in membership passes or street dealing, which could increase exposure to hard drugs.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1852-54  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:42 PM

A potentially precedent-setting case was initiated by a coffee-shop owner from Maastricht, a southern Dutch city, against an earlier decision by the city’s mayor to impose a membership scheme for residents only. After wrangling in Dutch and EU courts (which allowed an apparent breach of the single market on health grounds), the case is now being considered by the Council of State, the highest Dutch appeal body.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1870-71  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:44 PM

The dilemma is summed up by Keynes’s adage: “If I owe you a pound, I have a problem; but if I owe you a million, the problem is yours.”
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note Loc. 1871  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:45 PM

niiiiiice
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1885-90  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:46 PM

But even if ultimate salvation is possible, Greece could fall into plenty of immediate traps. One is the mood at home, with almost daily mass protests outside parliament, interspersed with riots. What if Mr Papandreou cannot get a majority for unpopular reforms? Another is the sternness of the IMF, which says it cannot release next month’s tranche of money before it knows that the euro zone will fully fund Greece next year. A third is the mood of creditor countries such as Germany, which have been insisting on a “substantial” contribution by private bondholders. After much argument, this is now supposed to be done “voluntarily” by rolling over the debt at maturity. But nobody really knows how much room this can create.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1892-94  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:47 PM

Even if Greece can be salvaged, attention is turning to the long-term survival of the euro. To Eurosceptics, notably British ones, it should be given up as a bad job. The tragedy of Greece is the inevitable outcome of EU leaders’ hubris in imposing a single currency and a single interest rate on incompatible economies.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2168  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:49 PM

PANELS of experts assessing scientific investigations tend to be messy affairs,
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2168-70  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:50 PM

PANELS of experts assessing scientific investigations tend to be messy affairs, particularly when their customers are governments. People with expertise in one field, such as renewable energy, may have a bias towards it. Summaries of their work are the result of political negotiations. And findings are further boiled down in an attempt to win media coverage.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2171-73  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:50 PM

Possible conflicts of interest, revealed by Steve McIntyre, a blogger, have led to another controversy about the panel—only 18 months after its embarrassment over an incorrect claim about the imminent demise of the Himalayas’ glaciers.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2183-84  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:51 PM

What is more, a Greenpeace publication based on this scenario was graced by a foreword written by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC’s chairman.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2187-91  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:52 PM

it is not necessarily the most worrying conflict of interest. Environmentalists are concerned about the number of “pro-dam” people on the team of authors reporting on hydropower. And it is not just the authors that may be conflicted. Each chapter of an IPCC report goes through a review process to ensure that all comments have been addressed satisfactorily. One of the two editors overseeing this process for the chapter on wind energy was Christian Kjaer, the boss of a lobbying group, the European Wind Energy Association.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2197-98  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 09:54 PM

the summary glosses over the problem, for instance by not mentioning that, although renewables have accounted for almost half the world’s new generating capacity in the past two years, the other half has probably generated a lot more electricity.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2200-2201  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:18 PM

The lesson of the latest IPCC row is that its authors and organisers must fight harder against groupthink—and speedily implement the new conflict-of-interest policy.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2209-10  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:19 PM

Climatic conditions still dictate where some drugs are grown. Virtually all the world’s cocaine comes from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. Three-quarters of global opium production is in Afghanistan,
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2212-14  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:20 PM

Likewise, synthetic drugs—amphetamine, methamphetamine and ecstasy, plus a growing list of new potions—can be cooked up in factories anywhere (and increasingly with harmless ingredients: researchers at Harvard University are trying to make lysergic acid, the basis for LSD and many other pharmaceuticals, from baker’s yeast).
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2215-16  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:21 PM

In America, where cannabis consumption had been falling, the UNODC has spotted a “resurgence”. More than three in ten 18-year-olds and more than one in eight 14-year-olds now use it.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2223-26  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:21 PM

This new localism has made life more comfortable for dealers, because they have been able to shorten their supply chains. Most cannabis is now grown in its country of consumption, according to the report. In Japan the number of arrests for domestic cannabis cultivation increased by 17% in 2009, whereas the number of arrests for importing fell by almost half. Sixty countries now report synthetic-drug factories on their territory. More than 10,000 were shut down in 2009,
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2228-30  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:22 PM

This industrialisation of production brings new problems. Cultivating cannabis in factories tends to improve its quality, which partially explains why stronger varieties have become more widespread. In America average concentrations of tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient, doubled in the 1990s, as growers focused on
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2228-30  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:22 PM

This industrialisation of production brings new problems. Cultivating cannabis in factories tends to improve its quality, which partially explains why stronger varieties have become more widespread. In America average concentrations of tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient, doubled in the 1990s, as growers focused on stronger, more expensive cannabis. Synthetic-drug
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2233-34  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:23 PM

If gringos switch from cocaine to home-grown drugs, many in Latin America will breathe a sigh of relief.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2238  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:23 PM

the global army of between 50m and 100m domestic workers, most of them women
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2269-70  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:26 PM

Last year China became the world’s biggest manufacturer, displacing America from a position it had held for more than a century. In less than a decade it could become the world’s largest economy.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2271-72  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:26 PM

China’s rapid recovery from the global financial crisis, and the West’s continuing malaise, have had a profound psychological impact on many Chinese.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2273-74  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:26 PM

What is great about socialism, crowed the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in March last year, is that it enables China “to make decisions efficiently, organise effectively and concentrate resources to accomplish large undertakings”.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2275-76  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:26 PM

A big parade of missiles, tanks and goose-stepping soldiers in central Beijing in October 2009, the capital’s first such display in a decade,
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2303-6  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:30 PM

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences struck a rare note of modesty in a report last October. It rated China a mere 17th in a global league of “national competitiveness”. But it pointed out that the country had risen from 73rd place in 1990 and had left India, which was ranked 42nd, in the dust. China’s aim, the report said, should be to reach the top five by 2020 and be second only to America by 2050.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2310-13  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:32 PM

they appear more nervous now than at any time for over a decade. They have massively increased spending on domestic security, which in this year’s budget has overtaken that on defence for the first time. The government has been reviving a Maoist system of neighbourhood surveillance by civilian volunteers. In the past few months the police have launched an all-out assault on civil society, arresting dozens of lawyers, NGO activists, bloggers and even artists. The Arab revolutions have spooked the leadership.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2314-18  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:33 PM

Late next year, probably in October, the party will hold a national congress, the 18th since its founding 90 years ago. This meeting, a smaller one of the party’s central committee immediately afterwards and a session of the legislature in March 2013 will endorse the biggest shuffle in China’s leadership for a decade. The president, Hu Jintao, and Mr Wen will step down from the pinnacle of power, the nine-member standing committee of the Politburo. A younger generation will begin to take over.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2321-22  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:34 PM

new leadership will not have such an easy ride with the economy, which on average has grown by over 10% a year since 2002,
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2327-29  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:35 PM

China’s leaders will find it enormously difficult to rebalance China’s economy so that growth is led by consumption rather than by exports and investment. Their efforts will be hampered by the growing clout of state-owned businesses. In the past decade these have risen from the ashes of tens of thousands of government-owned enterprises dismantled in the 1990s.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2329-30  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:35 PM

their economic and political influence is enormous and growing.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2331-32  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:35 PM

Banks are still almost entirely in government hands. Their profligate lending to other parts of the state empire, in order to keep the economy booming after the financial crisis, will revive a bad-debt problem that China thought it had licked years ago.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2334-37  | Added on Wednesday, June 29, 2011, 11:36 PM

China is likely to disappoint those who believed that the country’s embrace of globalisation would usher in greater political freedoms over the next few years. James Mann, an American journalist, gave warning of this in a 2007 book, “The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China”, suggesting that a quarter of a century from now China’s “current system of modernised, business-supported repression could well be vastly more established and entrenched”.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2345-46  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 01:54 AM

Like every other Chinese politician since 1949, he avoids stating his ambitions openly,
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2351-53  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 01:54 AM

Hu Jintao’s posts of president, party chief and military commander are almost certain to go to Xi Jinping, the vice-president, and Wen Jiabao’s job as prime minister is likely to be taken by Li Keqiang, his senior deputy. But Mr Bo could well be offered the portfolio of China’s internal security chief, currently held by Zhou Yongkang, with whom he is believed to have close ties.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2382-84  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 01:57 AM

social democrats who want a fairer distribution of wealth. Many in this camp believe that China is far from enjoying the golden age now being proclaimed by some. The country is too divided between rich and poor to be experiencing a shengshi.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2408-10  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:00 AM

Chongqing officials proudly note that the municipality, which ranked 19th among Chinese provinces by value of its state assets in 2003, has since moved up to number four, thanks to a more than sevenfold increase in their worth to 1.25 trillion yuan ($192 billion).
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2414-15  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:01 AM

as this special report will argue, if China’s state-owned enterprises enjoy a renaissance under China’s new leaders, it will be to the detriment of competition and increased consumption as a new driver of growth.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2421-23  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:02 AM

CHINA’S LEADERS ARE usually shy of telling things as they are, but the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, put it bluntly when he described China’s economy in 2007 as “unstable, unbalanced, unco-ordinated and unsustainable”.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2430-34  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:03 AM

China has foreign-exchange reserves of more than $3 trillion and ran a modest budget deficit of 2.5% of GDP last year. Its worries are longer-term. The economy will certainly begin to slow in the next few years after three decades of nearly 10% average annual growth. Exports will be constrained by depressed Western markets, and investments in fixed assets will produce diminishing returns. But the slowdown will be less pronounced if the government succeeds in boosting consumption as a new growth engine.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2457-58  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:06 AM

But even though it rose to 5.5% in May, considerably above the government’s 4% target for the year, it shows little sign as yet of returning to previous highs of about 20% in 1988 and more than 25% in 1994.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2459-60  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:06 AM

America’s Treasury says that because of the higher inflation rate in China, the yuan is in effect appreciating against the dollar by more than 10% a year.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2467-69  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:07 AM

Some worry that China could be approaching a Japanese-style crisis: a boom in exports and investment along with bubbly property markets, followed by many years of stagnation. In China’s case the added sting would be that it has not yet got rich. Officials and experts debate endlessly whether the country is slowly heading towards a “middle-income trap”.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2483-84  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:10 AM

number of people in relative poverty (with 50% or less of the median income) grew from 12.2% of the population to 14.6% between 2002 and 2007,
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2491-92  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:11 AM

It promises 36m new “affordable housing” units, more than Britain’s entire housing stock.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2493-94  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:11 AM

government has pledged to ramp up spending on health, education and other social-welfare programmes. Eventually too this could encourage people to save less and consume more.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2494-95  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:12 AM

government also wants the high-speed railway network, already the world’s longest at 8,300km, to quintuple in length by 2015.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2496-97  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:12 AM

These investments, officials hope, will help to boost urban growth, and with it consumption.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2499-2500  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:14 AM

believes that investments are becoming increasingly inefficient and that China is heading towards a “brick wall” of government debt. Growth, he says, will remain high in the early half of the decade but could drop off sharply thereafter as loans turn sour.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2501-3  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:14 AM

looming debt problem, exacerbated by the recklessness of local governments during China’s stimulus-spending spree. Not being allowed to borrow directly, many of them set up companies to borrow on their behalf, using land as collateral. “There is a hidden danger of an asset bubble
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2513-15  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:15 AM

In 1980 one-fifth of China’s people lived in urban areas. Today the figure is 49.7%. Very soon the country will become predominantly urban, with over 51.5% forecast to be living in urban areas by the end of the five-year plan.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 12-14  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 10:56 AM

Students at the University of California and Cal State University systems are likely to face a second round of tuition hikes this fall in response to deeper funding cuts in the new state budget,
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 14-15  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 10:56 AM

Discussions are underway for tuition increases of at least 10%. That hike would come on top of an 8% increase at UC and a 10% boost at Cal State that already are set to take effect this fall.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 18-19  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 10:57 AM

A decade of increases has more than tripled tuition to about $11,000 a year at UC and $4,884 at Cal State, not including room, board and other fees.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 19-20  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 10:57 AM

this again represents the ongoing disinvestment in higher education in California," said Christopher Chavez, outgoing president of the Cal State Student Assn.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 23-24  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 10:58 AM

"The general sentiment seems to be that my generation and those that follow mine don't deserve an accessible and affordable university," he said.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 28-29  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 10:59 AM

the 10-campus university might need more to help pay for growing pension and healthcare costs, he said. The costs of graduate and professional school programs are expected to rise as well.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 29  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 10:59 AM

23-campus Cal State system
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 32  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 10:59 AM

uh..... from where?
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 36-37  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 11:00 AM

The $650-million reduction represents a cut of about 25% from last year's state support,
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 37  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 11:01 AM

really? cutting funding that much for some of the best schools in the country?
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 37-38  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 11:01 AM

At UC, the $650-million reduction represents a 21% drop in state funds. UC's overall budget is $20 billion,
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 41-43  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 11:02 AM

At UC Riverside, administrators said they were unable to win the stable state funding that an accreditation agency required before giving the proposed medical school its stamp of approval.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 62  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 11:05 AM

wha areeconomic impacts of this?

and why should the state get a slice of online sales? its not like they actually do anything in particular to acilitate the transaction. no more than any other sttae btwn amazons distribution center and your home state.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 69  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:22 PM

yea tha menas big economic impact
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 73-74  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:37 PM

California's basic sales tax rate also will drop to 7.75% on Friday when a 2-year-old temporary increase expires.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 78-79  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:38 PM

"You can't give one segment of retail a 10% discount every day. It's just not fair,"
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 85-86  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:39 PM

California's new law was drafted to circumvent a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that sellers can't be forced to collect sales taxes unless they have a physical presence in the state.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 102-3  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:40 PM

"These are bills that Congress ran up," President Obama said at a news conference. "They took the vacation. They bought the car. Now they're saying, 'Maybe we don't have to pay.'"
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 103  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:41 PM

its about time the president explains who is responsible
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 107  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:42 PM

moving the debt talks out of the realm of closed-door Washington meetings and into full public view,
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 112  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:44 PM

this is realy the crux of the debate... higher taxes or less spending

sounds like the WH recognizes a solution must include both. top republicans dont.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 112  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:47 PM

this is realy the crux of the debate... higher taxes or less spending

sounds like the WH recognizes a solution must include both. top republicans dont.

ridiculous. all of this so they dont get chastized for compromising. like jon huntsman for being ambassador and mitt romney for providing healthcare for MS.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 112  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:47 PM

this is realy the crux of the debate... higher taxes or less spending

sounds like the WH recognizes a solution must include both. top republicans dont.

ridiculous. all of this so they dont get chastized for compromising. like jon huntsman for being ambassador and mitt romney for providing healthcare for MA.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 112-14  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:48 PM

The news conference represented a rare instance of Obama using the presidential megaphone to defend his position. In the past, the president has been prone to delivering lengthy answers in a professorial tone, relying on abstract ideas. By contrast, Obama on Wednesday laid out his arguments in simple, everyday terms, echoing an ex-president that he has been studying: Ronald Reagan.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 114  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:48 PM

wow... very interesting
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 127-28  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:49 PM

Obama cited the high-profile tax break offered to owners of corporate jets several times in the news conference, even though it would bring in only an estimated $3 billion over 10 years.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 128  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:50 PM

ONLY???
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 128  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:50 PM

ONLY??? how many kids could eat lunch or go to college or get new textbooks for that amount?
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 134-35  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:51 PM

federal officials warn that maneuvers to continue paying the nation's bills will be exhausted by Aug. 2, risking a default on federal obligations.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 148-49  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 02:53 PM

we've got to make some tough choices here if we want to reduce our deficit."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 261-62  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 03:03 PM

"I defer to medical doctors," U.S. District Judge Larry A. Burns said at an emergency hearing requested by the defense. "I have no reason to disagree with doctors. I didn't go to medical school."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 267-68  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 03:04 PM

Reuben Cahn, one of Loughner's attorneys, said his client "has a right not to be medicated."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 295-96  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 03:06 PM

delay enforcement of the state's complex carbon trading program until 2013,
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 688  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:40 PM

This will be only the sixth time in the last 25 years that a budget has been enacted by the start of the fiscal year,
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 691-92  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:40 PM

That means Democrats can ignore Republicans and not spend all summer trying to buy their votes with various versions of pork while the cash-strapped state stiffs small business vendors, drives its credit rating further into the basement and embarrasses itself.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 702-3  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:41 PM

German politician Otto Von Bismarck, who famously observed: "Politics is the art of the possible."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 712-15  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:43 PM

Republicans are "wrapped up in cut, cut, cut," says Czyzyk, chairman and chief executive of Mercury Air Group. "Cutting only works as a stopgap measure. It's not going to solve our problems. Our problems have to do with getting jobs. And you're not going to get jobs until the private sector says, 'The place to reinvest in is California.' That's not going to happen until we get regulatory reform.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 715  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:43 PM

true of many more places than CA i think
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 715-17  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:44 PM

"As in business, you can always cut expenses, but if you don't increase sales you're not going to make it. Cutting doesn't grow you. We've done the cutting. We can't continue to cut in places that completely harm the state. We need to create jobs."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 722-23  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:44 PM

in case that money doesn't materialize, he and Democrats agreed on "trigger cuts" to higher education, K-12 schools, libraries, prisons and services for the needy and disabled.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 727-28  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:45 PM

It may have been the best budget possible. But it wasn't befitting a great state and its needs in an increasingly competitive world.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 727-29  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:45 PM

It may have been the best budget possible. But it wasn't befitting a great state and its needs in an increasingly competitive world. Point No. 4: We need a Son of Prop. 25 — a ballot measure that reduces the vote requirement for raising taxes to a simple majority. Allow the majority party to function and hold it accountable.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 729  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:46 PM

this is a great philosophy to have... but maybe only in theory. i ca see how a freehand to rase taxes could potentally wreak havoc
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 897-98  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:50 PM

What Bush used to call "the global war on terrorism" is neither, in Obama's view, Brennan said. "This does not require a 'global' war," he said. "But it does require a focus on specific regions."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 900-901  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:50 PM

"We intentionally do not use the term 'war on terrorism, global war on terrorism'.... Terrorism is a tactic. We're in a war with Al Qaeda."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 901  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:52 PM

wow. so nice to finally hear the government outright saying what their policy is AND it making sense. and also it being a reversal of idiotic past mistakes.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 903  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:53 PM

expansion of rone strikes likely to be in anticpation of troop draw downs...

and plus if drones work here they can also work in yemen or somalia or libya or etc etc
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 1021  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 09:58 PM

holy crap... if he is a hick compared to bush... woooooooooooieee
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 1043  | Added on Thursday, June 30, 2011, 10:00 PM

so basically a super conservative george bsh
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July

Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1907-9  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 08:40 AM

The imminent departures of the three — all members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences — has unsettled leaders of the UC system. Officials say a worsening UC budget picture is emboldening other schools, particularly top private institutions, to recruit UC faculty and may prompt other professors to leave.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1911  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 08:40 AM

18,000 faculty members.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1910  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 08:41 AM

increasingly include overseas universities.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1926-28  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 08:43 AM

The most common destinations were Stanford, NYU, USC, Columbia and Harvard — private schools that tend to pay more — and the University of Michigan, a top public university.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1930-31  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 08:43 AM

Private research universities increasingly pay professors more than public institutions, with the gap growing from an 8% advantage in 1980 for full professors at private doctoral-granting schools to about 25% this
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1945-46  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 08:45 AM

At Rice, their funding will also include a $10-million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, created with a $3-billion state bond issue approved by voters in 2007.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1950-52  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 08:46 AM

UCLA and UC Berkeley reported no significant change in outside recruiting this year and some experts said that because the two campuses are seen as the most prestigious in the UC system, faculty may be more reluctant to leave.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2140-45  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 10:52 AM

A team of UC Berkeley physicists and statisticians that set out to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming recently reported that its data-crunching effort produced results nearly identical to those underlying the prevailing view on climate change. Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller, a longtime critic of government-led climate studies who launched the reexamination, told a congressional hearing in April that the work of the three principal groups that have analyzed temperature trends underlying climate science was "excellent.... We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2252-54  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 10:58 AM

Animal rights groups, arguing that finning is an inhumane practice, have joined with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the California Academy of Sciences and environmental groups to lobby for a ban.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2276-77  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 10:59 AM

Concrete river channels, dams and pollution caused by urban runoff have played roles in the suckers' decline,
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2614-16  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 11:04 AM

Sudan is a map of enduring crises. Southern Sudan, after decades of civil war that took more than 2 million lives, gains independence July 9. About 75% of Sudan's oil reserves are in the south and Bashir's north could lose billions of dollars a year in revenue. He is also attempting to crush separatist ambitions in South Kordofan, Blue Nile state and the Darfur region, where the ICC has accused him of genocide.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2619-21  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 11:04 AM

The south, which is controlled by the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, needs the north's pipelines to transport the oil. The two sides have yet to reach an agreement to share revenue from the country's production of about 500,000 barrels a day. Bashir has threatened to shut off the pipelines if the emerging independent south does not pay substantial fees.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2622-24  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 11:05 AM

"President Bashir knows very well that the survival of his regime depends on oil, and the oil is going to be lost. He knew he needed to indulge himself in a war with the south," said Alhajj Hamad, a political analyst. "Now he is getting only 37% of the oil revenues. That is barely enough to pay the staff. Food prices are soaring in the north and the mood in the streets is heading toward revolt."
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2630-31  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 11:06 AM

China National Petroleum Corp. already pumps much of southern Sudan's oil. The
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2631-32  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 11:06 AM

although Beijing is "maintaining traditional ties with the north of Sudan, China has worked to develop friendly exchanges and expand mutually beneficial cooperation" with the south.
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Note Loc. 2632  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 11:07 AM

same thing i noticed before... beijing stance is to be everyones friend unless they are very powerful. or the u.s.a. 
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Los Angeles Times (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2860-62  | Added on Friday, July 01, 2011, 06:34 PM

But many analysts are skeptical that Athens will have the political will or muscle to enforce its new austerity regime in the teeth of growing public opposition. A large state sector and government ownership of assets remain articles of faith for many Greeks; so is civil disobedience against unpopular policies.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2545-49  | Added on Saturday, July 02, 2011, 11:01 AM

The slaughter of many thousands of landlords (not including Liu, who died of natural causes) by officials and vengeful peasants shortly after the communist takeover resulted in profound changes in the system of rural land ownership. Peasants got the land Mao promised them, but only briefly. In the late 1950s the party took it back again and forced farmers into collectively owned “people’s communes”. The legacy of that disastrous decision, which contributed to a famine that left tens of millions dead, still weighs heavily on rural China. So too does a decision to confer hereditary status on peasants, who would be all but barred from cities to stop them rushing in to find work.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2551-54  | Added on Saturday, July 02, 2011, 11:03 AM

The system has been much eroded since the Mao era because of the need for cheap labour to fuel China’s manufacturing boom. But its lingering impact, combined with the still collective ownership of rural land, will retard China’s urbanisation in the years ahead just when the country is most in need of its consumption-boosting benefits.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2578-82  | Added on Saturday, July 02, 2011, 11:58 AM

In the name of building a “new socialist countryside” (a slogan launched in 2005), local governments have been corralling farmers into new apartment blocks in order to free up land which they can use for profitable purposes. Officials have justified the practice as a way of reducing incentives for local governments forcibly to appropriate farmland and sell it to developers. Two million peasants a year have lost their land this way in the past five years, a senior government adviser in north-east China said in March.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2588-89  | Added on Saturday, July 02, 2011, 12:00 PM

Thoroughgoing land reform, of the sort that would enable farmers to cash in on the value of their farmland and establish permanent and prosperous lives in cities (and at the same time encourage larger-scale farming), thus remains stuck.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2594-95  | Added on Saturday, July 02, 2011, 12:01 PM

As many as 20m workers returned to the countryside when the crisis broke in 2008 and China’s exports slumped.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2596  | Added on Saturday, July 02, 2011, 12:01 PM

As officials often say in China, “stability trumps everything.”
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The Economist (calibre)
- Note Loc. 2596  | Added on Saturday, July 02, 2011, 03:10 PM

do they emphasize importance of domestic stability over international stability? 
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2599-2601  | Added on Saturday, July 02, 2011, 03:11 PM

Though the hukou divide is widely resented, peasants have often been reluctant to give up their rural status for fear of losing their land, as well as the added benefit in the countryside of being able to have two children rather than one. In effect, Chongqing and Chengdu have created a new class of urban residents who enjoy the best of both worlds.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2617-20  | Added on Saturday, July 02, 2011, 03:17 PM

For the past two decades or more, urbanisation in China has come relatively easily. As the country proudly claims, slums and shantytowns are rare compared with other developing countries. But ensuring a continuing net inflow of migrants into the cities as the youngest cohort shrinks will mean giving workers from the countryside more incentives to stay permanently (such as affordable housing and schooling). More money is being spent on these, but not yet enough. Too much responsibility is devolved to local governments that usually try hard to shirk it.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2730-32  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2011, 11:51 AM

James McGregor of APCO Worldwide, a consultancy, described the government’s strategy in a report last year as a “massive and complicated plan” to turn China into a technology powerhouse by 2020 and a global leader by 2050. He said it was “steeped in suspicion of outsiders” and constituted “a blueprint for technology theft” on a large scale.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2727-32  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2011, 11:51 AM

Far more worrying to foreign businesses is a more overt form of government intervention involving support for Chinese companies that develop new technologies and discrimination against their foreign competitors. Complaints about this began to surface five or six years ago but have been growing much louder in the past two years. James McGregor of APCO Worldwide, a consultancy, described the government’s strategy in a report last year as a “massive and complicated plan” to turn China into a technology powerhouse by 2020 and a global leader by 2050. He said it was “steeped in suspicion of outsiders” and constituted “a blueprint for technology theft” on a large scale.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2745-46  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2011, 11:54 AM

any further reform would affect the interests of people in the top echelons of the party as well as their families, who have extensive connections with state-owned firms.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2760-61  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2011, 11:56 AM

Over the next few years China will undergo a huge demographic shift. The share of people over 60 in the total population will increase from 12.5% in 2010 to 20% in 2020. By 2030 their number will double from today’s 178m.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2779-81  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2011, 11:57 AM

Wang Feng of the Brookings Institution notes that China’s primary-school enrolment dropped from 25.3m in 1995 to 16.7m in 2008. Revoking the one-child policy would probably not make a big difference. Chinese couples have small families mainly because children are expensive, Mr Wang argues.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2803-6  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2011, 01:06 PM

Young urban couples, many of them without siblings, will find themselves with four parents to look after and will themselves have only one child (known as the 4-2-1 phenomenon). If they are sensible, they will save hard to prepare for such a future, which will not help the government’s efforts to shift China towards more consumption-led growth.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2812  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2011, 01:07 PM

The people’s will is almost as much of an obstacle to reform in China as the party’s.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2815-21  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2011, 01:10 PM

FOR A PRINCELING and former chairman of a state-owned company, Qin Xiao is far from typical. Instead of retiring quietly or taking up a party-funded sinecure, the gaunt one-time apparatchik has emerged in recent months as the standard-bearer of a liberal force in Chinese politics that refuses to be subdued by chest-thumping supporters of the “China model”. He believes there is no such thing, only “universal values”. Mr Qin caused a stir in July last year when, in a speech at one of China’s most prestigious universities, Tsinghua, he accused the China modelists of trying to replace enlightenment values of democracy, freedom and individual rights with “Chinese” ones, such as stability and the interests of the state.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2849-51  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2011, 01:11 PM

Zhang Weiwei, a scholar and proponent of Chinese exceptionalism, wrote in March that China’s evolution was “as if the Roman empire had never collapsed and had survived to this day, turning itself into a modern state with a central government and modern economy, combining all sorts of traditional cultures into one body and with everyone speaking Latin.”
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2851-53  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2011, 01:12 PM

the vocal nationalist left is having a similar effect on China’s Communist Party as America’s tea-party movement is having on the Republican Party: pushing it towards inward-looking conservatism. Statism is becoming the new ideological fashion,
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2858-59  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2011, 01:12 PM

David Shambaugh, an American scholar, wrote in the Washington Quarterly that 2009 and 2010 “will be remembered as the years in which China became difficult for the world to deal with”.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 2868-70  | Added on Sunday, July 03, 2011, 01:14 PM

a brooding animosity towards competitors that erupts occasionally into self-destructive rage. Spats last year with Japan and South-East Asian countries over maritime territorial issues badly tarnished China’s image in the region.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 99-100  | Added on Wednesday, July 06, 2011, 09:39 PM

News Corporation finally managed to sell off its troubled Myspace social-networking site in a deal that values the business at $35m. News Corp paid $580m for it in 2005.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 485  | Added on Wednesday, July 06, 2011, 10:01 PM

A company selling car-engine oil has seen sales drop by 80%. “And this is not a luxury product,” says one of the owners.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 486-88  | Added on Wednesday, July 06, 2011, 10:02 PM

unemployment has doubled this year from about 10%. Officials worry that grain supplies are low and food shortages could come soon. Trade is down between 30% and 70%, depending on where you are, and that was before a new round of sanctions imposed by the European Union, Syria’s biggest trading partner.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 694-99  | Added on Thursday, July 07, 2011, 08:34 PM

As well as providing financial firepower and a network for sourcing deals, private-equity firms can shroud the identity of publicity-shy investors. They are also well equipped to structure the fiddlier bits of deals and to guide the integration of partners from different cultures. Getting that sort of thing right is undoubtedly hard for Chinese firms with limited experience of international deals—witness the bafflement of one firm at foreigners’ habit of taking time off for holidays. Europeans, of course, have plenty of experience of cross-cultural deals. According to one Briton, the Chinese are no worse than the neighbours. “The French are way more difficult than the Chinese,” he says.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 969-70  | Added on Sunday, July 10, 2011, 01:12 PM

Even Reagan, a supply-sider persuaded by Arthur Laffer’s pretty curves that his tax cuts would pay for themselves, raised taxes when they did not.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 974-77  | Added on Sunday, July 10, 2011, 01:13 PM

To non-partisans, the idea of taming the deficit by spending cuts alone flies against both common sense and arithmetic. America’s tax-take is not high either by international or its own historical standards. One commission after another has advocated mixing spending reductions and revenue increases. Without the latter, entitlement programmes will have to be eviscerated, even if, as now looks possible, the defence budget takes a share of the pain. But the Republicans will not budge from their dogma.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 988-91  | Added on Sunday, July 10, 2011, 01:15 PM

For example, the blue-collar whites who make up 40% of the electorate are fed up with Mr Obama, but also wary of sudden change and attached to entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security (pensions). As Henry Olsen of the American Enterprise Institute notes, this group has handed power to the Republicans before, only to defect when the party threatened the welfare state.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 999-1001  | Added on Sunday, July 10, 2011, 01:16 PM

Since 2001 average income growth per person has been below 1% a year, one of the lowest rates in the world. Whereas the drug war has raged mainly along the cocaine trail, with two-thirds of its estimated 40,000 killings occurring in just 3% of the country’s municipalities, economic hardship has touched nearly everyone.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1001-4  | Added on Sunday, July 10, 2011, 01:16 PM

security is now a greater concern for Mexicans than the economy is. That is partly because GDP is growing again: last year it rose by 5.5%. But it is also because the violence caused by the crackdown on gangs continues to spread. Last year the government recorded more than five times as many mafia-linked murders as in 2007.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1479-82  | Added on Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 11:05 AM

The UAE is by many standards a contented place. Its citizens, who account for less than a fifth of the country’s 8.2m residents, are among the world’s most pampered. They enjoy cradle-to-grave welfare lavished by the oil-rich state and the advantages of what has long been the Gulf’s most open and tolerant way of life. No wonder many Emiratis think it churlish to demand such things as full political rights and free speech.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1745-47  | Added on Saturday, July 16, 2011, 02:11 PM

No German institution is among the leaders in global rankings, and money is part of the problem. The United States spends nearly twice as much per student as Germany does. Two-thirds of American universities’ revenues come from private sources, compared with just 15% in Germany.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1747-48  | Added on Saturday, July 16, 2011, 02:11 PM

The federal government is pumping in money through programmes like the “excellence initiative”, which promotes mainly research at a few select universities. But it so far has done little to improve teaching, which is what students tend to care about.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1755-57  | Added on Saturday, July 16, 2011, 02:12 PM

In most states they pay €500 ($720) per term—nothing like the mortgage-sized sums levied on American, and soon British, students. Fees produced €1.2 billion for German universities in 2008, a modest but useful sum compared with their total spending of €36 billion.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1427-31  | Added on Saturday, July 23, 2011, 12:34 PM

so far Egypt’s courts have largely shielded the biggest fish from punishment, including Mr Mubarak himself and the security officers responsible for widespread torture, as well as the killing of hundreds of people during the revolution. “In 1952 we had a coup that turned into a revolution,” grumbles a young activist in Cairo, referring to the army putsch that overthrew King Farouk and then replaced his liberal democracy with a socialist dictatorship. “This time we seem to have had a revolution that turned into a coup.”
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1453-55  | Added on Saturday, July 23, 2011, 12:36 PM

On the tricky question of Islam and the state, the likely outcome may be a sort of fudge, with the state described as “civil” rather than secular, and Islamic law being accepted as an underlying principle for legislation rather than a literal prescription.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1464-65  | Added on Saturday, July 23, 2011, 12:37 PM

foresees a return to the regional politics of the 1960s, when Saudi Arabia sparred with revolutionary republics in what some dubbed an Arab cold war.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1467-71  | Added on Saturday, July 23, 2011, 12:39 PM

$120 billion in new social spending, while slapping extra restrictions on its press and tightening police control of public gatherings. Some of that cash may subtly undermine reforms elsewhere. While welcome, given Egypt’s squeezed finances, a generous Saudi pledge of $4 billion in aid raises Egyptian fears that strings may be quietly attached. Private Saudi funding, often filtered through lavishly government-supported charities, bolsters Salafists in Egypt who believe that Muslims should blindly obey their rulers and deride democracy as “man-made law”.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1480-81  | Added on Saturday, July 23, 2011, 12:40 PM

A gap in outlook yawns between young people attuned to the world and an older generation restrained by deference to power and tradition.
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1482-84  | Added on Saturday, July 23, 2011, 12:40 PM

In a few years countries such as Saudi Arabia could find themselves surrounded by fellow Arab states whose citizens gleefully express their entitlement to accountable government. Some may prove models of constitutional monarchy that look easily applicable elsewhere. Others may evolve ways of accommodating Islamic rules within a consensual context of tolerance and pragmatism. The question then would be, why not here?
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The Economist (calibre)
- Highlight Loc. 1489-91  | Added on Saturday, July 23, 2011, 12:41 PM

Yet the overall trend towards democratisation is no more stoppable in the Arab world than it has been elsewhere. “You have to understand that this is not a bunch of different revolutions,” explains a sunken-eyed Syrian student, taking a breather in Lebanon from weeks of protest-organising in Damascus. “This is one big revolution for all the Arabs. It will not stop until it reaches 

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October

The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 1914-22  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:10 AM

The principal purposes to be answered by union are these the common defense of the members; the preservation of the public peace as well against internal convulsions as external attacks; the regulation of commerce with other nations and between the States; the superintendence of our intercourse, political and commercial, with foreign countries. The authorities essential to the common defense are these: to raise armies; to build and equip fleets; to prescribe rules for the government of both; to direct their operations; to provide for their support. These powers ought to exist without limitation, BECAUSE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO FORESEE OR DEFINE THE EXTENT AND VARIETY OF NATIONAL EXIGENCIES, OR THE CORRESPONDENT EXTENT AND VARIETY OF THE MEANS WHICH MAY BE NECESSARY TO SATISFY THEM. The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed. This power ought to be coextensive with all the possible combinations of such circumstances; and ought to be under the direction of the same councils which are appointed to preside over the common defense.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 1925-27  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:11 AM

intrusted with the care of the common defense, is a question in the first instance, open for discussion; but the moment it is decided in the affirmative, it will follow, that that government ought to be clothed with all the powers requisite to complete execution of its trust.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 1960-62  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:15 AM

Every view we may take of the subject, as candid inquirers after truth, will serve to convince us, that it is both unwise and dangerous to deny the federal government an unconfined authority, as to all those objects which are intrusted to its management.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 1962-63  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:15 AM

the people, to see that it be modeled in such a manner as to admit of its being safely vested with the requisite powers.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2026-36  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:26 AM

Though a wide ocean separates the United States from Europe, yet there are various considerations that warn us against an excess of confidence or security. On one side of us, and stretching far into our rear, are growing settlements subject to the dominion of Britain. On the other side, and extending to meet the British settlements, are colonies and establishments subject to the dominion of Spain. This situation and the vicinity of the West India Islands, belonging to these two powers create between them, in respect to their American possessions and in relation to us, a common interest. The savage tribes on our Western frontier ought to be regarded as our natural enemies, their natural allies, because they have most to fear from us, and most to hope from them. The improvements in the art of navigation have, as to the facility of communication, rendered distant nations, in a great measure, neighbors. Britain and Spain are among the principal maritime powers of Europe. A future concert of views between these nations ought not to be regarded as improbable. The increasing remoteness of consanguinity is every day diminishing the force of the family compact between France and Spain. And politicians have ever with great reason considered the ties of blood as feeble and precarious links of political connection. These circumstances combined, admonish us not to be too sanguine in considering ourselves as entirely out of the reach of danger.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2038-51  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:29 AM

These garrisons must either be furnished by occasional detachments from the militia, or by permanent corps in the pay of the government. The first is impracticable; and if practicable, would be pernicious. The militia would not long, if at all, submit to be dragged from their occupations and families to perform that most disagreeable duty in times of profound peace. And if they could be prevailed upon or compelled to do it, the increased expense of a frequent rotation of service, and the loss of labor and disconcertion of the industrious pursuits of individuals, would form conclusive objections to the scheme. It would be as burdensome and injurious to the public as ruinous to private citizens. The latter resource of permanent corps in the pay of the government amounts to a standing army in time of peace; a small one, indeed, but not the less real for being small. Here is a simple view of the subject, that shows us at once the impropriety of a constitutional interdiction of such establishments, and the necessity of leaving the matter to the discretion and prudence of the legislature. In proportion to our increase in strength, it is probable, nay, it may be said certain, that Britain and Spain would augment their military establishments in our neighborhood. If we should not be willing to be exposed, in a naked and defenseless condition, to their insults and encroachments, we should find it expedient to increase our frontier garrisons in some ratio to the force by which our Western settlements might be annoyed. There are, and will be, particular posts, the possession of which will include the command of large districts of territory, and facilitate future invasions of the remainder. It may be added that some of those posts will be keys to the trade with the Indian nations. Can any man think it would be wise to leave such posts in a situation to be at any instant seized by one or the other of two neighboring and formidable powers? To act this part would be to desert all the usual maxims of prudence and policy.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Bookmark Loc. 2084  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:31 AM


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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2080-88  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:32 AM

Reasons have been already given to induce a supposition that the State governments will too naturally be prone to a rivalship with that of the Union, the foundation of which will be the love of power; and that in any contest between the federal head and one of its members the people will be most apt to unite with their local government. If, in addition to this immense advantage, the ambition of the members should be stimulated by the separate and independent possession of military forces, it would afford too strong a temptation and too great a facility to them to make enterprises upon, and finally to subvert, the constitutional authority of the Union. On the other hand, the liberty of the people would be less safe in this state of things than in that which left the national forces in the hands of the national government. As far as an army may be considered as a dangerous weapon of power, it had better be in those hands of which the people are most likely to be jealous than in those of which they are least likely to be jealous. For it is a truth, which the experience of ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2090-91  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:33 AM

The truth is, that the existence of a federal government and military establishments under State authority are not less at variance with each other than a due supply of the federal treasury and the system of quotas and requisitions.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2095-2102  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:34 AM

When armies are once raised what shall be denominated ``keeping them up,'' contrary to the sense of the Constitution? What time shall be requisite to ascertain the violation? Shall it be a week, a month, a year? Or shall we say they may be continued as long as the danger which occasioned their being raised continues? This would be to admit that they might be kept up IN TIME OF PEACE, against threatening or impending danger, which would be at once to deviate from the literal meaning of the prohibition, and to introduce an extensive latitude of construction. Who shall judge of the continuance of the danger? This must undoubtedly be submitted to the national government, and the matter would then be brought to this issue, that the national government, to provide against apprehended danger, might in the first instance raise troops, and might afterwards keep them on foot as long as they supposed the peace or safety of the community was in any degree of jeopardy. It is easy to perceive that a discretion so latitudinary as this would afford ample room for eluding the force of the provision.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2095-2110  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:35 AM

When armies are once raised what shall be denominated ``keeping them up,'' contrary to the sense of the Constitution? What time shall be requisite to ascertain the violation? Shall it be a week, a month, a year? Or shall we say they may be continued as long as the danger which occasioned their being raised continues? This would be to admit that they might be kept up IN TIME OF PEACE, against threatening or impending danger, which would be at once to deviate from the literal meaning of the prohibition, and to introduce an extensive latitude of construction. Who shall judge of the continuance of the danger? This must undoubtedly be submitted to the national government, and the matter would then be brought to this issue, that the national government, to provide against apprehended danger, might in the first instance raise troops, and might afterwards keep them on foot as long as they supposed the peace or safety of the community was in any degree of jeopardy. It is easy to perceive that a discretion so latitudinary as this would afford ample room for eluding the force of the provision. The supposed utility of a provision of this kind can only be founded on the supposed probability, or at least possibility, of a combination between the executive and the legislative, in some scheme of usurpation. Should this at any time happen, how easy would it be to fabricate pretenses of approaching danger! Indian hostilities, instigated by Spain or Britain, would always be at hand. Provocations to produce the desired appearances might even be given to some foreign power, and appeased again by timely concessions. If we can reasonably presume such a combination to have been formed, and that the enterprise is warranted by a sufficient prospect of success, the army, when once raised, from whatever cause, or on whatever pretext, may be applied to the execution of the project. If, to obviate this consequence, it should be resolved to extend the prohibition to the RAISING of armies in time of peace, the United States would then exhibit the most extraordinary spectacle which the world has yet seen, that of a nation incapacitated by its Constitution to prepare for defense, before it was actually invaded.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2110-12  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:35 AM

the presence of an enemy within our territories must be waited for, as the legal warrant to the government to begin its levies of men for the protection of the State. We must receive the blow, before we could even prepare to return it.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2115-23  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:36 AM

Here I expect we shall be told that the militia of the country is its natural bulwark, and would be at all times equal to the national defense. This doctrine, in substance, had like to have lost us our independence. It cost millions to the United States that might have been saved. The facts which, from our own experience, forbid a reliance of this kind, are too recent to permit us to be the dupes of such a suggestion. The steady operations of war against a regular and disciplined army can only be successfully conducted by a force of the same kind. Considerations of economy, not less than of stability and vigor, confirm this position. The American militia, in the course of the late war, have, by their valor on numerous occasions, erected eternal monuments to their fame; but the bravest of them feel and know that the liberty of their country could not have been established by their efforts alone, however great and valuable they were. War, like most other things, is a science to be acquired and perfected by diligence, by perserverance, by time, and by practice. All violent policy, as it is contrary to the natural and experienced course of human affairs, defeats itself.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2146-50  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:27 PM

A failure in this delicate and important point is the great source of the inconveniences we experience, and if we are not cautious to avoid a repetition of the error, in our future attempts to rectify and ameliorate our system, we may travel from one chimerical project to another; we may try change after change; but we shall never be likely to make any material change for the better. The idea of restraining the legislative authority, in the means of providing for the national defense, is one of those refinements which owe their origin to a zeal for liberty more ardent than enlightened.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2168-73  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:32 PM

As incident to the undefined power of making war, an acknowledged prerogative of the crown, Charles II. had, by his own authority, kept on foot in time of peace a body of 5,000 regular troops. And this number James II. increased to 30,000; who were paid out of his civil list. At the revolution, to abolish the exercise of so dangerous an authority, it became an article of the Bill of Rights then framed, that ``the raising or keeping a standing army within the kingdom in time of peace, UNLESS WITH THE CONSENT OF PARLIAMENT, was against law.'' In that kingdom, when the pulse of liberty was at its highest pitch, no security against the danger of standing armies was thought requisite, beyond a prohibition of their being raised or kept up by the mere authority of the executive magistrate.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2182-87  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:35 PM

Even in some of the States, where this error was not adopted, we find unnecessary declarations that standing armies ought not to be kept up, in time of peace, WITHOUT THE CONSENT OF THE LEGISLATURE. I call them unnecessary, because the reason which had introduced a similar provision into the English Bill of Rights is not applicable to any of the State constitutions. The power of raising armies at all, under those constitutions, can by no construction be deemed to reside anywhere else, than in the legislatures themselves; and it was superfluous, if not absurd, to declare that a matter should not be done without the consent of a body, which alone had the power of doing it.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2196-2201  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:37 PM

Let us examine whether there be any comparison, in point of efficacy, between the provision alluded to and that which is contained in the new Constitution, for restraining the appropriations of money for military purposes to the period of two years. The former, by aiming at too much, is calculated to effect nothing; the latter, by steering clear of an imprudent extreme, and by being perfectly compatible with a proper provision for the exigencies of the nation, will have a salutary and powerful operation. The legislature of the United States will be OBLIGED, by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2228-32  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:41 PM

Few persons will be so visionary as seriously to contend that military forces ought not to be raised to quell a rebellion or resist an invasion; and if the defense of the community under such circumstances should make it necessary to have an army so numerous as to hazard its liberty, this is one of those calamaties for which there is neither preventative nor cure. It cannot be provided against by any possible form of government; it might even result from a simple league offensive and defensive, if it should ever be necessary for the confederates or allies to form an army for common defense. But it is an evil infinitely less likely to attend us in a united than in a disunited state;
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2233-36  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:41 PM

It is not easy to conceive a possibility that dangers so formidable can assail the whole Union, as to demand a force considerable enough to place our liberties in the least jeopardy, especially if we take into our view the aid to be derived from the militia, which ought always to be counted upon as a valuable and powerful auxiliary. But in a state of disunion (as has been fully shown in another place), the contrary of this supposition would become not only probable, but almost unavoidable.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 2236  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:42 PM

wow. really? that seems really naive.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2245-47  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:44 PM

I believe it may be laid down as a general rule that their confidence in and obedience to a government will commonly be proportioned to the goodness or badness of its administration. It must be admitted that there are exceptions to this rule; but these exceptions depend so entirely on accidental causes,
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2249-56  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:45 PM

Various reasons have been suggested, in the course of these papers, to induce a probability that the general government will be better administered than the particular governments; the principal of which reasons are that the extension of the spheres of election will present a greater option, or latitude of choice, to the people; that through the medium of the State legislatures which are select bodies of men, and which are to appoint the members of the national Senate there is reason to expect that this branch will generally be composed with peculiar care and judgment; that these circumstances promise greater knowledge and more extensive information in the national councils, and that they will be less apt to be tainted by the spirit of faction, and more out of the reach of those occasional ill-humors, or temporary prejudices and propensities, which, in smaller societies, frequently contaminate the public councils, beget injustice and oppression of a part of the community, and engender schemes which, though they gratify a momentary inclination or desire, terminate in general distress, dissatisfaction, and disgust.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 2256  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 03:45 PM

ever been to utah?
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2298-2302  | Added on Friday, October 07, 2011, 08:46 PM

THAT there may happen cases in which the national government may be necessitated to resort to force, cannot be denied. Our own experience has corroborated the lessons taught by the examples of other nations; that emergencies of this sort will sometimes arise in all societies, however constituted; that seditions and insurrections are, unhappily, maladies as inseparable from the body politic as tumors and eruptions from the natural body; that the idea of governing at all times by the simple force of law (which we have been told is the only admissible principle of republican government), has no place but in the reveries of those political doctors whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2330-37  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:51 AM

If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual state. In a single state, if the persons intrusted with supreme power become usurpers, the different parcels, subdivisions, or districts of which it consists, having no distinct government in each, can take no regular measures for defense. The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource; except in their courage and despair. The usurpers, clothed with the forms of legal authority, can too often crush the opposition in embryo. The smaller the extent of the territory, the more difficult will it be for the people to form a regular or systematic plan of opposition, and the more easy will it be to defeat their early efforts.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2358-61  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:19 PM

When will the time arrive that the federal government can raise and maintain an army capable of erecting a despotism over the great body of the people of an immense empire, who are in a situation, through the medium of their State governments, to take measures for their own defense, with all the celerity, regularity, and system of independent nations? The apprehension may be considered as a disease, for which there can be found no cure in the resources of argument and reasoning. PUBLIUS.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 2361  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:19 PM

so the whole system is founded on mistrust
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2401-6  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:24 PM

To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss. It would form an annual deduction from the productive labor of the country, to an amount which, calculating upon the present numbers of the people, would not fall far short of the whole expense of the civil establishments of all the States. To attempt a thing which would abridge the mass of labor and industry to so considerable an extent, would be unwise: and the experiment, if made, could not succeed, because it would not long be endured.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 2406  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:25 PM

this is kind of like a tirade against insurance
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2408-16  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:26 PM

``But though the scheme of disciplining the whole nation must be abandoned as mischievous or impracticable; yet it is a matter of the utmost importance that a well-digested plan should, as soon as possible, be adopted for the proper establishment of the militia. The attention of the government ought particularly to be directed to the formation of a select corps of moderate extent, upon such principles as will really fit them for service in case of need. By thus circumscribing the plan, it will be possible to have an excellent body of well-trained militia, ready to take the field whenever the defense of the State shall require it. This will not only lessen the call for military establishments, but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist.''
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2436-39  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:32 PM

If there should be no army, whither would the militia, irritated by being called upon to undertake a distant and hopeless expedition, for the purpose of riveting the chains of slavery upon a part of their countrymen, direct their course, but to the seat of the tyrants, who had meditated so foolish as well as so wicked a project, to crush them in their imagined intrenchments of power, and to make them an example of the just vengeance of an abused and incensed people?
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 2439  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:33 PM

not if the military is run like the military...
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2443-44  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:33 PM

If we were even to suppose the national rulers actuated by the most ungovernable ambition, it is impossible to believe that they would employ such preposterous means to accomplish their designs.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 2444  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:33 PM

oh sure. like syria.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 2453  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:36 PM

nowi am confused. i thought he was advocating a militia
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2456-66  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:37 PM

Money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic; as that which sustains its life and motion, and enables it to perform its most essential functions. A complete power, therefore, to procure a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as the resources of the community will permit, may be regarded as an indispensable ingredient in every constitution. From a deficiency in this particular, one of two evils must ensue; either the people must be subjected to continual plunder, as a substitute for a more eligible mode of supplying the public wants, or the government must sink into a fatal atrophy, and, in a short course of time, perish. In the Ottoman or Turkish empire, the sovereign, though in other respects absolute master of the lives and fortunes of his subjects, has no right to impose a new tax. The consequence is that he permits the bashaws or governors of provinces to pillage the people without mercy; and, in turn, squeezes out of them the sums of which he stands in need, to satisfy his own exigencies and those of the state. In America, from a like cause, the government of the Union has gradually dwindled into a state of decay, approaching nearly to annihilation. Who can doubt, that the happiness of the people in both countries would be promoted by competent authorities in the proper hands, to provide the revenues which the necessities of the public might require?
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 2588-89  | Added on Saturday, October 08, 2011, 12:49 PM

It should not be forgotten that a disposition in the State governments to encroach upon the rights of the Union is quite as probable as a disposition in the Union to encroach upon the rights of the State governments.
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Highlight Loc. 1687  | Added on Monday, October 10, 2011, 12:18 PM

To the People of the State of New York:
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 1687  | Added on Monday, October 10, 2011, 12:18 PM

notes
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The Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay)
- Note Loc. 1687  | Added on Monday, October 10, 2011, 12:18 PM

notes
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Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 2502-5  | Added on Sunday, October 16, 2011, 10:39 AM

The argument between Jesry and his brother decayed into sporadic sniper fire across the table, suppressed by glares and arm-squeezings from exasperated females who had wordlessly squared up into a peacekeeping force. Jesry’s brother had decided that with our hair-splitting debates about how many Tetrarchs there were, we’d shown ourselves to be a lot of insignificant pedants. Jesry informed him that this was an iconography that dated back to before the founding of the city-state of Ethras.
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Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 3242-48  | Added on Sunday, October 16, 2011, 09:10 PM

“Ylma is having you work it out in the most gruesome way possible,” I said, “using Saunt Lesper’s Coordinates, so that when she teaches you how it’s really done, it’ll seem that much easier.” Barb was dumbfounded. I went on, “Like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer—it feels so good when you stop.” This was the oldest joke in the world, but Barb hadn’t heard it before, and he became so amused that he got physically excited and had to run back and forth across the kitchen several times to flame off energy. A few weeks ago I would have been alarmed by this and would have tried to calm him down, but now I was used to it, and knew that if I approached him physically things would get much worse. “What’s the right way to do 
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Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 3231-66  | Added on Sunday, October 16, 2011, 09:10 PM

“You want to know what’s stupid?” “Sure, Barb. Lay it on me,” I said, hauling a fistful of vegetable trimmings up out of the drain against the back-pressure of twenty gallons of dammed-up dishwater. The drain gargled and began to empty. “Any sline could stand out on the meadow at night and see some satellites in polar orbits, and other satellites in orbits around the equator, and know that those were two different kinds of orbits!” he exclaimed. “But if you work out the xs and ys and zs of it, guess what?” “What?” “They just look like a lot of xs and ys and zs, and it is not as obvious that some are polar and some are equatorial as it would be to any old dumb sline looking up into the sky!” “Worse than that,” I pointed out, “staring at the xs and ys and zs doesn’t even tell you that they are orbits.” “What do you mean?” “An orbit is a stationary, stable thing,” I said. “The satellite’s moving all the time, of course, but always in the same way. But that kind of stability is in no way shown by the xs and ys and zs.” “Yeah! It’s like knowing all of the theorics only makes us stupider!” he laughed excitedly, and cast a theatrical glance over his shoulder, as if we were up to something incredibly mischievous. “Ylma is having you work it out in the most gruesome way possible,” I said, “using Saunt Lesper’s Coordinates, so that when she teaches you how it’s really done, it’ll seem that much easier.” Barb was dumbfounded. I went on, “Like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer—it feels so good when you stop.” This was the oldest joke in the world, but Barb hadn’t heard it before, and he became so amused that he got physically excited and had to run back and forth across the kitchen several times to flame off energy. A few weeks ago I would have been alarmed by this and would have tried to calm him down, but now I was used to it, and knew that if I approached him physically things would get much worse. “What’s the right way to do it?” “Orbital elements,” I said. “Six numbers that tell you everything that can be known about how a satellite is moving.” “But I already have those six numbers.” “What are they?” I asked, testing him. “The satellite’s position on Saunt Lesper’s x, y, and z axes. That’s three numbers. And its velocity along each one of those axes. That’s three more. Six numbers.” “But as you pointed out you can look at those six numbers and still not be able to visualize the orbit, or even know that it is an orbit. What I am telling you is that with some more theorics you can turn them into a different list of six numbers, the orbital elements, that are infinitely easier to work with, in that you can glance at them and know right away whether the orbit goes over the poles or around the equator.” “Why didn’t Grandsuur Ylma tell me that to begin with?” I couldn’t tell him, because you learn too damned fast. But if I tried to be overly diplomatic, Barb would see through it and plane me. Then I had an upsight: it was my responsibility, just as much as it was Ylma’s, to teach fids the right stuff at the right time. “You are now ready to stop working in Saunt Lesper’s Coordinates,” I announced, “and begin working in other kinds of spaces, the way real, grown-up theors do.” “Is this like parallel dimensions?” said Barb, who apparently had been watching the same kinds of speelies as I had before coming here. “No. These spaces I’m talking about aren’t like physical spaces that you can measure with a ruler and move around in. They are abstract theorical spaces that follow different rules, called action principles. The space that cosmographers like to use has six dimensions: one for each of the orbital elements. But that’s a special-purpose tool, only used in that discipline. A more general one was developed early in the Praxic Age by Saunt Hemn…” And I went on to give Barb a calca* about Hemn spaces, or configuration spaces, which Hemn had invented when he, like Barb, had become sick of xs and ys and zs.
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Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 3375-83  | Added on Sunday, October 16, 2011, 09:20 PM

“I spent almost all of Apert extramuros,” Orolo said with a sigh, as if he had finally been run to ground. “I was expecting that it would be a wasteland. A cultural and intellectual charnel house. But that’s not exactly what I found. I went to speelys. I enjoyed them! I went to bars and got into some reasonably interesting conversations with people. Slines. I liked them. Some were quite interesting. And I don’t mean that in a bug-under-a-microscope way. They have stuck in my mind—characters I’ll always remember. For a while I was quite seduced by it. Then one evening I had an especially lively discussion with a sline who was as bright as anyone within this concent. And somehow, toward the end, it came out that he believed that the sun revolved around Arbre. I was flabbergasted, you know. I tried to disabuse him of this. He scoffed at my arguments. It made me remember just how much careful observation and theorical work is necessary to prove something as basic as that Arbre goes around the sun. How indebted we are to those who went before us. And this got me to thinking that I’d been living on the right side of the gate after all.”
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Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 3416-26  | Added on Sunday, October 16, 2011, 09:23 PM

Whatever his name, that boy was going to save me. There was a lot he didn’t know, but nothing he was afraid to ask about, and ask about, and ask about, until he understood it perfectly. I decided to make him my fid. People would think I was doing it to be charitable. Maybe some would even think I was getting ready to fall back, and was making the care of Barb my avocation. Let them think so! In truth it was mostly self-interest. I had learned more theorics in six weeks, simply by being willing to sit next to Barb, than I had in six months before Apert. I saw now that in my desire to know theorics I had taken shortcuts that, just like shortcuts on a map, turned out to be longcuts. Whenever I’d seen Jesry get it quicker than me, I had misread equations in a way that had seemed easier at the time but made things harder—no, impossible—later. Barb didn’t have that fear that others were getting it faster; because of how his brain was set up, he couldn’t read that in their faces. And he did not have the same desire to reach a distant goal. He was altogether self-centered and short-sighted. He wanted only to understand this one problem or equation chalked on the slate before him now, today, whether or not it was convenient for the others around him. And he was willing to stand there asking questions about it through supper and past curfew.
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Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 5210-16  | Added on Tuesday, October 18, 2011, 09:16 PM

“The aliens are jamming the nav satellites,” I announced. “Or maybe they just shot them down!” said Barb. “Let’s buy a sextant, then,” suggested Fraa Jad. “Those have not been made in four thousand years,” I told him. “Let’s build one then.” “I have no idea of all the parts and whatnot that go into a sextant.” He found this amusing. “Neither do I. I was assuming we would design it from first principles.” “Yeah!” snorted Barb. “It’s just geometry, Raz!”
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Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 5210-29  | Added on Tuesday, October 18, 2011, 09:17 PM

“The aliens are jamming the nav satellites,” I announced. “Or maybe they just shot them down!” said Barb. “Let’s buy a sextant, then,” suggested Fraa Jad. “Those have not been made in four thousand years,” I told him. “Let’s build one then.” “I have no idea of all the parts and whatnot that go into a sextant.” He found this amusing. “Neither do I. I was assuming we would design it from first principles.” “Yeah!” snorted Barb. “It’s just geometry, Raz!” “In the present age, this continent is covered by a dense network of hard-surfaced roads replete with signs and other navigational aids,” I announced. “Oh,” said Fraa Jad. “Between that and this”—I waved the cartabla—“we can find our way to Saunt Tredegarh without having to design a sextant from first principles.” Fraa Jad seemed a little put out by this. A minute later, though, we happened to pass an office supply store. I ran in and bought a protractor, then handed it to Fraa Jad to serve as the first component in his homemade sextant. He was deeply impressed. I realized that this was the first thing he’d seen extramuros that made sense to him. “Is that a Temple of Adrakhones?” he asked, gazing at the store. “No,” I said, and turned my back on it and walked away. “It is praxic. They need primitive trigonometry to build things like wheelchair ramps and doorstops.” “Nonetheless,” he said, falling behind me, and looking back longingly, “they must have some perception—” “Fraa Jad,” I said, “they have no awareness of the Hylaean Theoric World.” “Oh. Really?” “Really. Anyone out here who begins to see into the HTW suppresses it, goes crazy, or ends up at Saunt Edhar.” I turned around and looked at him. “Where did you think Barb and I came from?” Once we had gotten clear as to that, Barb and Jad were happy to follow me and discuss sextants as I led them on a wide arc around the west side of Saunt Edhar to the machine hall.
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Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 5242-70  | Added on Tuesday, October 18, 2011, 09:20 PM

“Do you think he is going to physically assault me? Because I know a little vlor. Not as much as Lio but—” “That would be an unusual way to handle it. Out here it would be a legal dispute. But you guys have your own separate law, so he can’t touch you. And it sounds like the Powers That Be are leaning on him to let this thing happen. He’ll negotiate with them for compensation. He’s also negotiating with the insurance company to make sure that none of this voids his policy.” “Wow. Things are complicated out here.” Cord looked in the direction of the Praesidium and sniffled. “And they’re not…in there?” I thought about that for a while. “I guess my disappearance on Tenth Night probably looks as weird to you as your boss’s insurance policy looks to me.” “Correct.” “Well, it wasn’t personal. And it hurt me a lot. Maybe as much as this mess hurts you.” “That is unlikely,” Cord said, “since ten seconds before you walked in here I got fired.” “That is wildly irrational behavior!” I protested. “Even by extramuros standards.” “Yes and no. Yes, it’s crazy for me to get fired because of a decision you made without my knowledge. But no, in a way it’s not, because I’m weird here. I’m a girl. I use the machines to make jewelry. I make parts for the Ita and get paid in jars of honey.” “Well, I’m really sorry—” “Just stop,” she suggested. “If there’s anything I can do—if you’d like to join the math—” “The math you just got thrown out of?” “I’m just saying, if there’s anything I can do to make it up to you—” “Give me an adventure.” In the moment that followed, Cord realized that this sounded weird, and lost her nerve. She held up her hands. “I’m not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I’m old.” Now for the first time I reviewed everything that had happened in the last twelve hours. It made me a little dizzy. “Raz?” she said, after a while. “I can’t predict the future,” I said, “but based on what little I know so far, I’m afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing.” “Great!” “Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.” That quieted her down a little bit. But after a while, she said: “Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?” “Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.” “Okay, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.” “That’d be great.” “See you here at noon. If they’ll let me back in, that is.” “I’ll see to it that they do. Hey, Cord—” “Yeah?” “This is probably the wrong time to ask…but could you do me one favor?”
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Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 5432-36  | Added on Tuesday, October 18, 2011, 09:35 PM

Before leaving town we stopped, or rather slowed down, at a place where we could get food without spending a lot of time. I remembered this kind of restaurant from my childhood but it was new to the Hundreders. I couldn’t help seeing it as they did: the ambiguous conversation with the unseen serving-wench, the bags of hot-grease-scented food hurtling in through the window, condiments in packets, attempting to eat while lurching down a highway, volumes of messy litter that seemed to fill all the empty space in the mobe, a smell that outstayed its welcome.
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Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
- Bookmark Loc. 8678  | Added on Saturday, October 22, 2011, 01:33 PM


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Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
- Bookmark Loc. 12744  | Added on Thursday, October 27, 2011, 10:18 PM


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<pre>

==November==

<pre>
Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Bookmark Loc. 6638  | Added on Monday, November 14, 2011, 11:59 PM


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Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 6904-10  | Added on Wednesday, November 16, 2011, 12:01 AM

Dropping his bag on the floor and looking around at the room, he cursed aloud. To have to be in Burroughs in person— as if one’s physical presence made any difference these days! It was an absurd anachronism, but that’s the way people were. Another vestige of the savannah. They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds. Slusinski came in. Though his accent was pure New York, Frank had always called him Jeeves, because he looked like the actor in the BBC series. “We’re like dwarves in a waldo,” Frank said to him angrily. “One of those really big waldo excavators. We’re inside it and supposed to be moving a mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we’re leaning out of a window and digging with teaspoons. And complimenting each other on the way we’re taking advantage of the height.”
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Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 7012-20  | Added on Wednesday, November 16, 2011, 12:12 AM

In a few months’ time, when the elevator was maneuvered into its remarkable orbit, Pavonis Mons was going to become the hub of Mars, superceding Burroughs as Burroughs had once superseded Underhill. And as the elevator’s touchdown was not far off, signs of the area’s coming predominance were already everywhere. Paralleling the train piste as it ascended the steep eastern slope of the volcano were two new roads and four thick pipelines, as well as an array of cables, a line of microwave towers, and a continuous litter of stations, loading tracks, warehouses, and dumps. And then, on the last and steepest upcurve of the volcano’s cone, there was a vast congregation of tents and industrial buildings, thicker and thicker until up on the broad rim they were everywhere, and between them immense fields of insolation-capture sheets, and receivers for the energy microwaved down from the orbiting solar panels. Each tent along the way was a little town, stuffed with little apartment blocks, and each apartment block was stuffed with people, their laundry hanging from every window. The tents nearest the piste had very few trees in them, and looked like commercial districts. Frank caught quick glimpses of food stands, video rentals, open-front gyms, clothing stores, laundromats. Litter piled in the streets.
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Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
- Highlight Loc. 35-41  | Added on Saturday, November 19, 2011, 12:33 AM

Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which was (more or less) an extrapolation of the ideas in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, applied to a galaxy-wide empire in some far future time. The novel set me, not to dreaming, but to thinking, which is Asimov’s most extraordinary ability as a fiction writer. What would the future be like? How would things change? What would remain the same? The premise of Foundation seemed to be that even though you might change the props and the actors, the play of human history is always the same. And yet that fundamentally pessimistic premise (you mean we’ll never change?) was tempered by Asimov’s idea of a group of human beings who, not through genetic change, but through learned skills, are able to understand and heal the minds of other people.
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Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
- Highlight Loc. 43-46  | Added on Saturday, November 19, 2011, 12:34 AM

Those were some of the ideas that played through my mind as I read Foundation, curled on my bed—a thin mattress on a slab of plywood, a bed my father had made for me—in my basement bedroom in our little rambler on 650 East in Orem, Utah. And then, as so many science fiction readers have done over the years, I felt a strong desire to write stories that would do for others what Asimov’s story had done for me.
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Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
- Highlight Loc. 60-65  | Added on Saturday, November 19, 2011, 12:36 AM

Far more deeply rooted in my mind was my experience, five or six years earlier, of reading Bruce Catton’s three-volume Army of the Potomac. I remembered so well the stories of the commanders in that war—the struggle to find a Union general capable of using McClellan’s magnificent army to defeat Lee and Jackson and Stuart, and then, finally, Grant, who brought death to far too many of his soldiers, but also made their deaths mean something, by grinding away at Lee, keeping him from dancing and maneuvering out of reach. It was because of Catton’s history that I had stopped enjoying chess, and had to revise the rules of Risk in order to play it—I had come to understand something of war, and not just because of the conclusions Catton himself had reached. I found meanings of my own in that history.
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Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
- Highlight Loc. 66-69  | Added on Saturday, November 19, 2011, 12:37 AM

I learned that history is shaped by the use of power, and that different people, leading the same army, with, therefore, approximately the same power, applied it so differently that the army seemed to change from a pack of noble fools at Fredericksburg to panicked cowards melting away at Chancellorsville, then to the grimly determined, stubborn soldiers who held the ridges at Gettysburg, and then, finally, to the disciplined, professional army that ground Lee to dust in Grant’s long campaign. It wasn’t the soldiers who changed. It was the leader.
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Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
- Highlight Loc. 600-602  | Added on Saturday, November 19, 2011, 01:02 AM

“With Ender, we have to strike a delicate balance. Isolate him enough that he remains creative—otherwise he’ll adopt the system here and we’ll lose him. At the same time, we need to make sure he keeps a strong ability to lead.” “If he earns rank, he’ll lead.”
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Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
- Highlight Loc. 1647-55  | Added on Saturday, November 19, 2011, 02:27 AM

“Why?” asked Ender. “I’ve watched your practice sessions with the Launchies. I think you show some promise. Bonzo is stupid and I wanted you to get better training than Petra could give you. All she can do is shoot.” “I needed to learn that.” “You still move like you were afraid to wet your pants.” “So teach me.” “So learn.” “I’m not going to quit my freetime practice sessions.” “I don’t want you to quit them.” “Rose the Nose does.” “Rose the Nose can’t stop you. Likewise, he can’t stop you from using your desk.” “I thought commanders could order anything.” “They can order the moon to turn blue, too, but it doesn’t happen. Listen, Ender, commanders have just as much authority as you let them have. The more you obey them, the more power they have over you.”
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Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
- Highlight Loc. 2039-40  | Added on Saturday, November 19, 2011, 02:53 AM

“Peter, you’re twelve.” “Not on the nets I’m not. On the nets I can name myself anything I want, and so can you.”
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Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
- Bookmark Loc. 4608  | Added on Saturday, November 19, 2011, 03:36 PM


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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 1230-32  | Added on Sunday, November 20, 2011, 03:23 PM

“Continuous expansion is a fundamental tenet of economics. Therefore one of the fundamentals of the universe itself. Because everything is economics. Physics is cosmic economics, biology is cellular economics, the humanities are social economics, psychology is mental economics, and so on.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 1262-66  | Added on Sunday, November 20, 2011, 03:28 PM

“We understand the world through paradigms. The change from empty-world economics to full-world economics is a major paradigm shift. Max Planck once said that a new paradigm takes over not when it convinces its opponents, but when its opponents eventually die.” “And now they aren’t dying,” Art said. Fort nodded. “The treatments are keeping people around. And a lot of them have tenure.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 1442-48  | Added on Sunday, November 20, 2011, 03:46 PM

“For development! Mars isn’t just an empty world, Randolph— in economic terms, it’s nearly a nonexistent world. Its bioinfrastructure has to be constructed, you see. I mean one could just extract the metals and move on, which is what Subarashii and the others seem to have in mind. But that’s treating it like nothing more than a big asteroid. Which is stupid, because its value as a base of operations, as a planet so to speak, far surpasses the value of its metals. All its metals together total about twenty trillion dollars, but the value of a terraformed Mars is more in the neighborhood of two hundred trillion dollars. That’s about one third of the current Gross World Value, and even that doesn’t make proper assessment of its scarcity value, if you ask me. No, Mars is bioinfrastructure investment, just like I was talking about. Exactly the kind of thing Praxis is looking for.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2353-55  | Added on Sunday, November 20, 2011, 11:33 PM

“To figure things out,” he said. “But terraforming is not figuring things out.” “Terraforming isn’t science. I never said it was. It’s what people-do with science. Applied science, or technology. What have you. The choice of what to do with what you learn from science. Whatever you call that.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2407-13  | Added on Sunday, November 20, 2011, 11:39 PM

She did not reply. It was distressing, it really was. Once, in an attempt to understand Ann, to be able to talk to her, he had done research in the philosophy of science. He had read a fair amount of material, concentrating particularly on the land ethic, and the fact-value interface. Alas, it had never proved to be of much help; in conversation with her, he had never seemed able to apply what he had learned in any useful manner. Now, looking down at her, feeling the ache in his joints, he recalled something that Kuhn had written about Priestley— that a scientist who continued to resist after his whole profession had been converted to a new paradigm might be perfectly logical and reasonable, but had ipso facto ceased to be a scientist. It seemed that something like this had happened to Ann, but what then was she now? A counterrevolutionary? A prophet?
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2476-81  | Added on Sunday, November 20, 2011, 11:50 PM

The formula governing the number of possible relationships in a group was n(n-1)/2 where n is the number of individuals in the group; so that, for the 1,000 people at Biotique Burroughs, there were 499,500 possible relationships. This seemed to Sax well beyond anyone’s ability to comprehend— even the 4,950 possible relationships in a group of 100, the hypothesized “design limit” of human group size, seemed unwieldy. Certainly it had been at Underhill, when they had had a chance to test it. So it was important to find a smaller group at Biotique, and Sax set about doing so.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2571-76  | Added on Monday, November 21, 2011, 12:00 AM

He breathed in a cold rush of the gas, held it briefly, exhaled, and felt all the weight go out of him— that was the subjective impression. It was fairly humorous to see how responsive mood was to chemical manipulation, despite what it implied about the precarious balance of one’s emotional equanimity, even sanity itself. Not on the face of it a pleasant realization. But at the moment, not a problem. In fact it made him grin. He looked over the rail at the rooftops of Burroughs, and noticed for the first time that the new neighborhoods to the west and north were shifting to blue tile roofs and white walls, so that they were taking on a Greek look, while the old parts of town were more Spanish. Jessica was definitely making an effort to keep their upper arms in contact. It was possible her balance was impaired by mirth.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2669-73  | Added on Monday, November 21, 2011, 09:52 PM

And so he worked on, trying to incorporate into the calculation skylight radiance intensities, Chandrasekhar’s radiative transfer equation, chromaticity scales, aerosol chemical compositions, Legendre polynomials to evaluate the angular scattering intensities, Riccati-Bessel functions to evaluate the scattering cross sections, and so on— occupying the better part of the drive to Arena Glacier, concentrating hard and steadfastly ignoring the world around him and the situation in which he now found himself.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 3123-33  | Added on Tuesday, November 22, 2011, 01:17 AM

And it occurred to him that this vision was not a matter of accident (the lensing of tears over his cornea, for instance) but the result of a new and growing conceptual understanding of the landscape. It was a kind of cognitive vision, and he could not help but remember Ann saying angrily to him, Mars is the place you have never seen. He had taken it as a figure of speech. But now he recalled Kuhn, asserting that scientists who used different paradigms existed in literally different worlds, epistemology being such an integral component of reality. Thus Aristoteleans simply did not see the Galilean pendulum, which to them was a body falling with some difficulty; and in general, scientists debating the relative merits of competing paradigms simply talked right through each other, using the same words to discuss different realities. He had considered that too to be a figure of speech. But thinking of it now, absorbing the hallucinatory clarity of the ice, he had to admit that it certainly described what his conversations with Ann had always felt like. It had been a frustration to both of them, and when Ann had cried out that he had never seen Mars, a statement that was obviously false on some levels, she had perhaps meant only to say that he hadn’t seen her Mars, the Mars created by her paradigm. And that was no doubt true.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 3925-33  | Added on Tuesday, November 22, 2011, 11:10 PM

“Power,” Desmond said. “Power and gain.” “Ah.” Sax had always been so uninterested in those things that it was hard for him to understand why anyone else would be. What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one’s options, and reduce one’s freedom. One became a servant of one’s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one’s time protecting it. So that properly seen, the freedom of a scientist with a lab at his command was the highest freedom possible. Any more wealth and power only interfered with that. Desmond was shaking his head as Sax described this philosophy. “Some people like to tell others what to do. They like that more than freedom. Hierarchy, you know. And their place in the hierarchy. As long as it’s high enough. Everyone bound into their places. It’s safer than freedom. And a lot of people are cowards.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 4093-95  | Added on Tuesday, November 22, 2011, 11:27 PM

So that human beings were miraculous indeed— conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiously, wondering as he looked at their often innocuous exteriors what kind of new Paracelsus or Isaac of Holland stood before him, and whether they would turn lead to gold, or cause rocks to 
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 4566-73  | Added on Thursday, November 24, 2011, 01:42 AM

Maya was clearly in a foul mood, Nirgal recognized the look from childhood, although this one was worse, her face hard and her mouth set in a downturned sickle. “I killed Phyllis,” she told Coyote. There was silence. Nirgal’s hands went cold. Suddenly, looking around at the others, he saw that they all felt awkward. It was the sole woman among them who was the killer, and for a second there was something strange in that which they all felt, including Maya— who drew herself up, scornful of their cowardice. None of this was rational or even conscious in them, Nirgal saw as he read their faces, but rather something primal, instinctive, biological. And so Maya only stared them down the more, contemptuous of their horror, glaring at them with an eagle’s alien hostility. Coyote stepped to her side and went on his toes to peck her on the cheek with a kiss, meeting her glare foursquare. “You did good,” he said, putting a hand to her arm. “You saved Sax.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 5369-72  | Added on Friday, November 25, 2011, 02:40 AM

Maya was at their table, and she looked at Art as suspiciously as she had in Echus Chasma. “It isn’t possible,” she declared. She looked much better than she had when they had parted, Nirgal thought— rested, tall, rangy, graceful, glamorous. She seemed to have shrugged off the guilt of murder as if it were a coat she didn’t like.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 5990-95  | Added on Friday, November 25, 2011, 10:53 PM

“No. But would they fight without orders from their leaders?” “Some might. It’s their job, after all.” “Yes, but they have no great stake beyond that,” Nadia said, thinking it out as she spoke. “Without nationalism or ethnicity, or some other kind of home feeling involved, I don’t think these people will fight to the death. They know they’re being ordered around to protect the powerful. Some more egalitarian system makes an appearance, and they might feel a conflict of loyalties.” “Retirement benefits,” Maya mocked, and people laughed again.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 5986-95  | Added on Friday, November 25, 2011, 10:53 PM

“Mandatory retirement?” Maya suggested acidly. People laughed, and Nadia glared at her old friend. “Forced disemployment,” Art said loudly from the back, where he had just appeared. “You mean a coup,” Maya said. “Not to fight the entire population on the surface, but just the leadership and their bodyguards.” “And maybe their armies,” Nirgal insisted. “We have no sign that they are disaffected, or even apathetic.” “No. But would they fight without orders from their leaders?” “Some might. It’s their job, after all.” “Yes, but they have no great stake beyond that,” Nadia said, thinking it out as she spoke. “Without nationalism or ethnicity, or some other kind of home feeling involved, I don’t think these people will fight to the death. They know they’re being ordered around to protect the powerful. Some more egalitarian system makes an appearance, and they might feel a conflict of loyalties.” “Retirement benefits,” Maya mocked, and people laughed again.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 6167-71  | Added on Friday, November 25, 2011, 11:10 PM

Nadia would have expected Coyote to be among those arguing with him, but in fact he said, “We have to argue all of it! Even if you want no state, or a minimal state, then you still have to argue it point by point. Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you— anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. No! If you want to make the minimum-state case, you have to argue it from the ground up.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 6210-15  | Added on Friday, November 25, 2011, 11:14 PM

“You will only repeat the socialist catastrophe!” Vlad shrugged. “Don’t be too hasty to judge that period. The socialist countries were under assault from capitalism without and corruption within, and no system could survive that. We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need. Earth is in the grip of the system that defeated socialism, and it is clearly an irrational and destructive hierarchy. So how can we deal with it without being crushed? We have to look everywhere for answers to this, including the systems that the current order defeated.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 6259-63  | Added on Friday, November 25, 2011, 11:19 PM

So out they went, ready to work, two sharp young men and one blunt old woman. It was strange, Nadia thought, to see who emerged as leaders in situations like these. It wasn’t necessarily the most brilliant or well-informed, as Marina or Coyote would serve to show, though both qualities helped, and those two people were important. But the leaders were the ones people would listen to. The magnetic ones. And in a crowd of such powerful intellects and personalities, such magnetism was very rare, very elusive. Very powerful. . . .
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 6378-80  | Added on Friday, November 25, 2011, 11:32 PM

Coyote came by and said to Art, “Don’t tell me about how different Praxis is. That’s the oldest dodge in the book. If only the rich would behave decently, then the system would be okay. That’s crap. The system overdetermines everything, and it’s the system that has to change.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 6491-6510  | Added on Friday, November 25, 2011, 11:45 PM

“Work points for a Martian government!” He peered over the screen at the crowd, and they subsided into an attentive silence. “One. Martian society will be composed of many different cultures. It is better to think of it as a world rather than a nation. Freedom of religion and cultural practice must be guaranteed. No one culture or group of cultures should be able to dominate the rest. “Two. Within this framework of diversity, it still must be guaranteed that all individuals on Mars have certain inalienable rights, including the material basics of existence, health care, education, and legal equality. “Three. The land, air, and water of Mars are in the common stewardship of the human family, and cannot be owned by any individual or group. “Four. The fruits of an individual’s labor belong to the individual, and cannot be appropriated by another individual or group. At the same time, human labor on Mars is part of a communal enterprise, given to the common good. The Martian economic system must reflect both these facts, balancing self-interest with the interests of society at large. “Five. The metanational order ruling Earth is currently incapable of incorporating the previous two principles, and cannot be applied here. In its place we must enact an economics based on ecologic science. The goal of Martian economics is not ‘sustainable development’ but a sustainable prosperity for its entire biosphere. “Six. The Martian landscape itself has certain ‘rights of place’ which must be honored. The goal of our environmental alterations should therefore be minimalist and ecopoetic, reflecting the values of the areophany. It is suggested that the goal of environmental alterations be to make only that portion of Mars lower than the five-kilometer contour human-viable. Higher elevations, constituting some thirty percent of the planet, would then remain in something resembling their primeval conditions, existing as natural wilderness zones. “Seven. The habitation of Mars is a unique historical process, as it is the first inhabitation of another planet by humanity. As such it should be undertaken in a spirit of reverence for this planet and for the scarcity of life in the universe. What we do here will set precedents for further human habitation of the solar system, and will suggest models for the human relationship to Earth’s environment as well. Thus Mars occupies a special place in history, and this should be remembered when we make the necessary decisions concerning life here.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 6691-6726  | Added on Saturday, November 26, 2011, 12:05 AM

In psychology we believe we have scientifically identified a certain pathology in which a person needs to know everything because he is afraid of not knowing. It’s a pathology of monocausotaxophilia, as Pöppel called it, the love of single causes that explain everything. This can become fear of a lack of causes. Because the lack might be dangerous. The knowledge-seeking becomes primarily defensive, in that it is a way of denying fear when one really is afraid. At its worst it isn’t even knowledge-seeking, because when the answers arrive they cease to be of interest, as they are no longer dangerous. So that reality itself doesn’t matter to such a person. Everyone tries to avoid danger. But motivations are always multiple. And different from action to action. Time to time. Any patterns are a matter of— observer’s speculation. Psychology is a science in which the observer becomes intimately involved with the subject of observation. That’s one of the reasons I don’t think it’s a science. It is certainly a science. One of its tenets is, if you want to know more, care more. Every astronomer loves the stars. Otherwise why study them so? Because they are mysteries. What do you care about? I care about truth. The truth is not a very good lover. It isn’t love I’m looking for. Are you sure? No surer than anyone else who thinks about— motivations. You agree we have motivations? Yes. But science cannot explain them. So they are part of your great unexplainable. Yes. And so you focus your attention on other things. Yes. But the motivations are still there. Oh yes. What did you read when you were young? All kinds of things. What were some of your favorite books? Sherlock Holmes. Other detective stories. The Thinking Machine. Dr. Thorndyke. Did your parents punish you if you got upset? I don’t think so. They didn’t like me making a fuss. But I think they were just ordinary in that respect. Did you ever see them get upset? I don’t remember. Did you ever see them shout, or cry? I never heard them shout. Sometimes my mom cried, I think. Did you know why? No. Did you wonder why? I don’t remember. Would it matter if I had? What do you mean? I mean, if I had had one kind of past. I could still have turned into any kind of person. Depending on my reaction to the— events. And if I had had another kind of past. The same variations would have followed. So that your line of questioning is useless. In that it has no explanatory rigor. It’s an imitation of the scientific method. I consider your conception of science to be as parsimonious and reductive as your scientific activities. Essentially you are saying we should not study the human mind in a scientific manner because it is too complex to make the study easy. That’s not very bold of you. The universe outside us is complex too, but you don’t advise avoiding that. Why so with the universe inside? You can’t isolate factors, you can’t repeat conditions, you can’t set up experiments with controls, you can’t make falsifiable hypotheses. The whole apparatus of science is unavailable to you. Think about the first scientists for a while.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 6769-74  | Added on Saturday, November 26, 2011, 12:08 AM

he had understood people speaking to him, his thinking had been much the same as far as he could tell, and he had had no trouble with the spatial and other nonlinguistic tests. But when he tried to talk, sudden betrayal— in the mouth and in the mind. Things lost their names. Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the six surfaces of revolution symmetrical around an axis, the plane, the sphere, the cylinder, the catenoid, the unduloid, and the nodoid; shapes without the names, but the shapes alone were like names. Spatializing language. But it turned out that remembering without words was hard.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 6776-77  | Added on Saturday, November 26, 2011, 12:09 AM

And in each place an object. Or another place. On one counter, all the Acheron labs. On top of the refrigerator, Boulder, Colorado. And so he remembered all the shapes he thought by their location in the mental lab.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 7362-65  | Added on Saturday, November 26, 2011, 01:16 AM

He raised a finger admonishingly. “Your anger will help, but it can’t be everything. Frank was nothing but anger, remember? And you see where it got him. You have to fight not only against what you hate, but for what you love, you see? And so you have to find what it is you love. You have to remember it, or create it.” “Yes yes,” she said, suddenly irritated. “I love you, but shut up now.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 7473-78  | Added on Saturday, November 26, 2011, 11:32 AM

found a photo of Frank at age twenty-three, in the beginning of his work with the NSC: a dark-haired kid with a sharp confident smile, looking at the world as if he were ready to tell it something it didn’t know. So young! So young and so knowing. At first glance Maya thought it was the innocence of youth to look so knowing, but in fact the face did not look innocent. His had not been an innocent childhood. But he was a fighter, and he had found his method, and was prevailing. A power that couldn’t be beaten, or so the smile seemed to say. But kick the world, break your foot. As they said in Kamchatka.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 8038-44  | Added on Sunday, November 27, 2011, 01:09 AM

Very few nisei or sansei or yonsei ever came to visit him, however, which surprised him. “No doubt it is a good sign for the long-term prospects of Martian habitation,” he said one evening as he came up from a quiet day in his office on the bottom floor. Maya shrugged. “They could be crazy and not know it. It looked like it might be that way to me, when I went around the basin.” Michel eyed her. “Do you mean crazy or just different?” “I don’t know. They just seem unaware of what they’re doing.” “Every generation is its own secret society. And these are what you might call areurges. It is their nature to operate the planet. You have to give them that.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 8115-19  | Added on Sunday, November 27, 2011, 01:18 AM

“Hmm,” Maya said. She couldn’t remember. She recalled instead the looks on the faces of the people at that night’s meeting. It was true, they had revealed everything— they had been like masks expressing exactly the sentences their owners had spoken. The metanats are out of control. They’re screwing things up. They’re selfish, they only care about themselves. Metanationalism is a new kind of nationalism, but without any home feeling. It’s money patriotism, a kind of disease. People are suffering, not so much here, but on Earth. And if it doesn’t change it will happen here too. They will infect us.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 8166-77  | Added on Sunday, November 27, 2011, 02:24 AM

Michel was in there cleaning up, making room for people to sleep on the floor. It was going to be an irritating evening. The next morning when she got up early to go to the bathroom, feeling hung over, Art was already up. Over the sleeping bodies on the floor he whispered, “Want to go out and get breakfast?” Maya nodded. When she was dressed they walked down the stairs and out, through the park and along the corniche, which was lurid in the horizontal beams of dawn sunlight. They stopped in a café that had just washed down its section of sidewalk. On the dawn-stained white wall of the building, a sentence had been painted with the help of a stencil, so that it was neat and small, and brilliantly red: YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK “My God,” Maya exclaimed. “What?” She pointed at the graffito. “Oh, yeah,” Art said. “You see that painted all over Sheffield and Burroughs these days. Pithy, eh?” “Ka wow.” They sat in the chill air by a small round table, and ate pastries and drank Turkish coffee. The ice on the horizon blinked like diamonds, revealing some movement under the ice. “What a fantastic sight,” Art said.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 8199-8203  | Added on Sunday, November 27, 2011, 02:27 AM

Maya said, “But these metanationals are squabbling all the time yes?” “That’s right.” “The thing to do would be to start a big fight between some of them.” Art’s eyebrows shot up. “A dangerous plan!” “For who?” “For Earth.” “I don’t give a damn about Earth,” Maya said, tasting the words on her tongue. “Join the crowd,” Art said ruefully, and she laughed again.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 8728-33  | Added on Sunday, November 27, 2011, 12:49 PM

She handed out the teacups, and as Spencer came in and had the story told to him, she got a robe and draped it over Michel’s shoulders, excoriating herself for the miserable timing of her assault on him. She sat by him, squeezing his thigh, trying to tell him by touch that she was there, that she was his family too, and that all her games were over, to the best of her ability— no more treating him as pet or punching bag. . . . That she loved him. But his thigh was like warm ceramic, and he obviously didn’t notice her hand, was scarcely even aware she was there. And it came to her that it was precisely in the moments of greatest need when people could do the least for each other.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 8970-72  | Added on Sunday, November 27, 2011, 01:14 PM

there were more and more incidents of sabotage in the cities, which caused a corresponding increase in police surveillance, until it seemed very possible that things could break wide open.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Note Loc. 8972  | Added on Sunday, November 27, 2011, 01:15 PM

monkey wrench gang.......... on mars
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 8985-87  | Added on Sunday, November 27, 2011, 01:17 PM

This kind of work, and the destruction of the southern sanctuaries, had created what looked from a distance like a sort of war fever in Dorsa Brevia, and Maya was worried by that too. Sax, at the heart of it, was a stubborn secretive brilliant brain-damaged loose cannon, a bona fide mad scientist.
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 9195-97  | Added on Sunday, November 27, 2011, 03:55 PM

“We’ve got to let the Transitional Authority know how widespread the resistance is, so that when the moment comes, they don’t try to crush us out of ignorance, see what I mean? At this point we need them to feel disliked and outnumbered. Hell, mass numbers of people in the streets are about the only thing that scare governments, if you ask me.”
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Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 9397-9401  | Added on Sunday, November 27, 2011, 04:15 PM

Another July revolution, then, and another October revolution too. A decade past the bicentennial of the Bolshevik revolution, she seemed to remember. Which was another strange thought. Well, but they too had tried. All the revolutionaries, all through history. Mostly desperate peasants, fighting for their children’s lives. As in her Russia. So many in that bitter twentieth century, risking all to make a better life, and even so it had led to disaster. It was frightening— as if history were a series of human wave assaults on misery, failing time after time.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 195-204  | Added on Tuesday, November 29, 2011, 01:14 AM

Ann walked on. As she walked she felt more and more uneasy, without knowing why. This is how people change— in little quantum jumps when struck by outer events— no intention, no plan. Someone says “the look in people’s eye,” and the phrase is suddenly conjoined with an image: a face glowing with passionate conviction, another phrase: you can’t just do what you want! And so it occurred to her (the look on that young woman’s face!) that it was not just the cable’s fate they were deciding— not just “should the cable come down,” but “how do we decide things?” That was the critical postrevolutionary question, perhaps more important than any single issue being debated, even the fate of the cable. Up until now, most people in the underground had operated by a working method which said if we don’t agree with you we will fight you. That attitude was what had gotten people into the underground in the first place, Ann included. And once used to that method, it was hard to get away from it. After all, they had just proved that it worked. And so there was the inclination to continue to use it. She felt that herself. But political power . . . say it did come out of the look in people’s eye. You could fight forever, but if people weren’t behind you. . . .
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 760-67  | Added on Tuesday, November 29, 2011, 11:41 PM

So he talked it over with the Da Vinci space scientists, who had effectively taken over control of the mirrors. The lab rats, people called them behind their backs, and his (though he heard anyway); the lab rats, or the saxaclones. Serious young native Martian scientists, in fact, with just the same variations of temperament as grad students and postdocs in any lab anywhere, anytime; but the facts didn’t matter. They worked with him and so they were the saxaclones. Somehow he had become the very model of the modern Martian scientist; first as white-coated lab rat, then as full-blown mad scientist, with a crater-castle full of eager Igors, mad-eyed but measured in manner, little Mr. Spocks, the men as skinny and awkward as cranes on the ground, the women drab in their protective noncoloration, their neuter devotion to Science. Sax was very fond of them. He liked their devotion to science, it made sense to him— an urge to understand things, to be able to express them mathematically. It was a sensible desire. In fact it often seemed to him that if everyone were a physicist then they would be very much better off.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 1254-63  | Added on Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 01:54 AM

formulate a first approximation constitution, a working draft.” Maya shook her head. “That won’t be easy, with this crowd.” “Take the constitutions of the twenty or thirty most successful Terran countries,” Sax suggested, thinking out loud, “and see how they work. Have an AI compile a composite document, perhaps, and see what it says.” “How would you define most successful?” Art asked. “Country Futures Index, Real Values Gauge, Costa Rica Comparisons— even Gross Domestic Product, why not.” Economics was like psychology, a pseudoscience trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyperelaboration. And gross domestic product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British thermal unit, that ought to have been retired long before. But what the hell—”Use several different sets of criteria, human welfare, ecologic success, what have you.” “But Sax,” Coyote complained, “the very concept of the nation-state is a bad one. That idea by itself will poison all those old constitutions.” “Could be,” Sax said. “But as a starting point.”
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2187-91  | Added on Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 10:32 PM

“It’s dangerous,” Charlotte said when Art brought this matter up in the nightly meeting with Nadia. “When you have a country formed out of a lot of groups that don’t trust each other, with one a clear majority, then you get what they call ‘census voting,’ where politicians represent their groups, and get their votes, and election results are always just a reflection of population numbers. In that situation the same thing happens every time, so the majority group has a monopoly on power, and the minorities feel hopeless, and eventually rebel. Some of the worst civil wars in history began in those circumstances.”
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2225-80  | Added on Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 11:25 PM

Antar spoke often for this last group, with Jackie sitting right next to him, obviously in support. This along with his ties to the Arab community gave his statements a kind of double weight, and people listened. “This new economy that’s being proposed,” he declared one day at the table of tables, repeating his theme, “is a radical and unprecedented intrusion of government into business.” Suddenly Vlad Taneev stood up. Startled, Antar stopped speaking and looked over. Vlad glared at him. Stooped, massive-headed, shaggy-eyebrowed, Vlad rarely if ever spoke in public; he hadn’t said a thing in the congress so far. Slowly the greater part of the warehouse went silent, watching him. Art felt a quiver of anticipation; of all the brilliant minds of the First Hundred, Vlad was perhaps the most brilliant— and, except for Hiroko, the most enigmatic. Old when they had left Earth, intensely private, Vlad had built the Acheron labs early on and stayed there as much as possible thereafter, living in seclusion with Ursula Kohl and Marina Tokareva, two more of the great first ones. No one knew anything for certain about the three of them, they were a limit-case illustration of the insular nature of other people’s relationships; but this of course did not stop gossip, on the contrary, people talked about them all the time, saying that Marina and Ursula were the real couple, that Vlad was a kind of friend, or pet; or that Ursula had done most of the work on the longevity treatment, and Marina most of the work on eco-economics; or that they were a perfectly balanced equilateral triangle, collaborating on all that emerged from Acheron; or that Vlad was a bigamist of sorts who used two wives as fronts for his work in the separate fields of biology and economics. But no one knew for sure, for none of the three ever said a word about it. Watching him stand there at the table, however, one had to suspect that the theory about him being just a front man was wrong. He was looking around in a fiercely intent, slow glare, capturing them all before he turned his eye again on Antar. “What you said about government and business is absurd,” he stated coldly. It was a tone of voice that had not been heard much at the congress so far, contemptuous and dismissive. “Governments always regulate the kinds of business they allow. Economics is a legal matter, a system of laws. So far, we have been saying in the Martian underground that as a matter of law, democracy and self-government are the innate rights of every person, and that these rights are not to be suspended when a person goes to work. You”— he waved a hand to indicate he did not know Antar’s name—”do you believe in democracy and self-rule?” “Yes!” Antar said defensively. “Do you believe in democracy and self-rule as the fundamental values that government ought to encourage?” “Yes!” Antar repeated, looking more and more annoyed. “Very well. If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should people give up these rights when they enter their workplace? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom of movement, choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue— control of our lives, in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear. We no longer insist on them. And so for most of the day we return to feudalism. That is what capitalism is— a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labor, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.” “Business leaders work,” Antar said sharply. “And they take the financial risks—” “The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the privileges of capital.” “Management—” “Yes yes. Don’t interrupt me. Management is a real thing, a technical matter. But it can be controlled by labor just as well as by capital. Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past laborers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few. There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them. There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest that we produce. No! The system called capitalist democracy was not really democratic at all. That is why it was able to turn so quickly into the metanational system, in which democracy grew ever weaker and capitalism ever stronger. In which one percent of the population owned half of the wealth, and five percent of the population owned ninety-five percent of the wealth. History has shown which values were real in that system. And the sad thing is that the injustice and suffering caused by it were not at all necessary, in that the technical means have existed since the eighteenth century to provide the basics of life to all. “So. We must change. It is time. If self-rule is a fundamental value, if simple justice is a value, then they are values everywhere, including in the workplace where we spend so much of our lives. That was what was said in point four of the Dorsa Brevia agreement. It says everyone’s work is their own, and the worth of it cannot be taken away. It says that the various modes of production belong to those who created them, and to the common good of the future generations. It says that the world is something we all steward together. That is what it says. And in our years on Mars, we have developed an economic system that can keep all those promises. That has been our work these last fifty years. In the system we have developed, all economic enterprises are to be small cooperatives, owned by their workers and by no one else. They hire their management, or manage themselves. Industry guilds and co-op associations will form the larger structures necessary to regulate trade and the market, share capital, and create credit.” Antar said scornfully, “These are nothing but ideas. It is utopianism and nothing more.” “Not at all.” Again Vlad waved him away. “The system is based on models from Terran history, and its various parts have all been tested on both worlds, and have succeeded very well. You don’t know about this partly because you are ignorant, and partly because metanationalism itself steadfastly ignored and denied all alternatives to it. But most of our microeconomy has been in successful operation for centuries in the Mondragon region of Spain. The different parts of the macroeconomy have been used in the pseudometanat Praxis, in Switzerland, in India’s state of Kerala, in Bhutan, in Bologna Italy, and in many other places, including the Martian underground itself. These organizations were the precursors to our economy, which will be democratic in a way capitalism never even tried to be.” A synthesis of systems. And Vladimir Taneev was a very great synthesist; it was said that all the components of the longevity treatment had already been there, for instance, and that Vlad and Ursula had simply put them together. Now in his economic work with Marina he was claiming to have done the same kind of thing. And although he had not mentioned the longevity treatment in this discussion, nevertheless it lay there like the table itself, a big cobbled-together achievement, part of everyone’s lives. Art looked around and thought he could see people thinking, well, he did it once in biology and it worked; could economics be more difficult?
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2404-10  | Added on Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 11:40 PM

They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring the congress to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single world line of history. The future becoming the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential was so delicious— the way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all good governments of all time, combined magically into some superb, as-yet-unseen synthesis— or throw all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of just government. . . .To go from that to the mundane problematic of the constitution as written was an inevitable letdown, and instinctively people put it off.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2438-43  | Added on Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 11:53 PM

This expansion of the judiciary satisfied what desire they had for a strong global government, without giving an executive body much power; it was also a response to the heroic role played by Earth’s World Court in the previous century, when almost every other Terran institution had been bought or otherwise collapsed under metanational pressures; only the World Court had held firm, issuing ruling after ruling on behalf of the disenfranchised and the land, in a mostly ignored rearguard and indeed symbolic action against the metanats’ depredations; a moral force, which if it had had more teeth, might have done more good. But from the Martian underground they had seen the battle fought, and now they remembered.
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December

Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2559-65  | Added on Thursday, December 01, 2011, 10:26 AM

“She is counting on history to take its usual course,” Maya said as they sat in the baths watching the news. “Power is like matter, it has gravity, it clumps and then starts to draw more into itself. This local power, spread out through the tents—” She shrugged cynically. “Perhaps it’s a nova,” Nirgal suggested. She laughed. “Yes, perhaps. But then it starts clumping again. That’s the gravity of history— power drawn into centers, until there is an occasional nova. Then a new drawing in. We’ll see it on Mars too, you mark my words. And Jackie will be right at the middle of it—” She stopped before adding the bitch, in respect for Nirgal’s feelings. Regarding him with a curious hooded gaze, as if wondering what she might do with Nirgal that would advance her never-ending war with Jackie. Little novas of the heart.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2585-87  | Added on Thursday, December 01, 2011, 10:29 AM

They were taking the north fork, down to Trinidad. From their elevator car they looked down on most of the Western Hemisphere, centered over the Amazon basin, where brown water veined through the green lungs of Earth.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2657-67  | Added on Friday, December 02, 2011, 12:22 AM

“Mars is a mirror,” he said in the microphone, “in which Terra sees its own essence. The move to Mars was a purifying voyage, stripping away all but the most important things. What arrived in the end was Terran through and through. And what has happened since there has been an expression of Terran thought and Terran genes. And so, more than any material aid in scarce metals or new genetic strains, we can most help the home planet by serving as a way for you to see yourselves. As a way to map out an unimaginable immensity. Thus in our small way we do our part to create the great civilization that trembles on the brink of becoming. We are the primitives of an unknown civilization.” Loud cheers. “That’s what it looks like to us on Mars, anyway— a long evolution through the centuries, toward justice and peace. As people learn more, they understand better their dependence on each other and on their world. On Mars we have seen that the best way to express this interdependence is to live for giving, in a culture of compassion. Every person free and equal in the sight of all, working together for the good of all. It’s that work that makes us most free. No hierarchy is worth acknowledging but this one: the more we give, the greater we become. Now in the midst of a great flood, spurred by the great flood, we see the flowering of this culture of compassion, emerging on both the two worlds at once.”
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2904-7  | Added on Friday, December 02, 2011, 10:36 AM

So in every meeting he was painfully focused, and fairly coherent and engaged, especially compared to his deep abstraction during the voyage to Earth. And Sax Russell was after all The Terraformer Of Mars, the current living avatar of The Great Scientist, a very powerful position in Terran culture, Nirgal thought— something like the Dalai Lama of science, a continuing reincarnation of the embodiment of the spirit of science, created for a culture that only seemed to be able to handle one scientist at a time.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2909-15  | Added on Friday, December 02, 2011, 10:37 AM

As all these things, his odd halting style actually helped to build the Terrans’ image of him. Simple verbal difficulty turned him into a kind of oracle; the Terrans seemed to believe that he thought on such a lofty plane that he could only speak in riddles. This was what they wanted, perhaps. This was what science meant to them— after all, current physical theory spoke of ultimate reality as ultramicroscopic loops of string, moving supersymmetrically in ten dimensions. That kind of thing had inured people to strangeness from physicists. And the increasing use of translation AIs was getting everyone used to odd locutions of all types; almost everyone Nirgal met spoke English, but they were all slightly different Englishes, so that Earth seemed to Nirgal an explosion of idiolects, no two persons employing the same tongue.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2935-45  | Added on Friday, December 02, 2011, 10:41 AM

“It’s going to be all right,” he said, looking at as many of them as he could. “Every moment in history contains a mix of archaic elements, things from all over the past, right back into prehistory itself. The present is always a melange of these variously archaic elements. There are still knights coming through on horseback and taking the crops of peasants. There are still guilds, and tribes. Now we see so many people leaving their jobs to work in the flood-relief efforts. That’s a new thing, but it’s also a pilgrimage. They want to be pilgrims, they want to have a spiritual purpose, they want to do real work— meaningful work. They won’t tolerate being stolen from anymore. Those of you here who represent the aristocracy look worried. Perhaps you will have to work for yourselves, and live off that. Live at the same level as anyone else. And it’s true— that will happen. But it’s going to be all right, even for you. Enough is as good as a feast. And it’s when everyone is equal that your kids are safest. This universal distribution of the longevity treatment that we are now seeing is the ultimate meaning of the democratic movement. It’s the physical manifestation of democracy, here at last. Health for all. And when that happens the explosion of positive human energy is going to transform the Earth in just a matter of years.”
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2935-67  | Added on Friday, December 02, 2011, 10:44 AM

“It’s going to be all right,” he said, looking at as many of them as he could. “Every moment in history contains a mix of archaic elements, things from all over the past, right back into prehistory itself. The present is always a melange of these variously archaic elements. There are still knights coming through on horseback and taking the crops of peasants. There are still guilds, and tribes. Now we see so many people leaving their jobs to work in the flood-relief efforts. That’s a new thing, but it’s also a pilgrimage. They want to be pilgrims, they want to have a spiritual purpose, they want to do real work— meaningful work. They won’t tolerate being stolen from anymore. Those of you here who represent the aristocracy look worried. Perhaps you will have to work for yourselves, and live off that. Live at the same level as anyone else. And it’s true— that will happen. But it’s going to be all right, even for you. Enough is as good as a feast. And it’s when everyone is equal that your kids are safest. This universal distribution of the longevity treatment that we are now seeing is the ultimate meaning of the democratic movement. It’s the physical manifestation of democracy, here at last. Health for all. And when that happens the explosion of positive human energy is going to transform the Earth in just a matter of years.” Someone in the crowd stood and asked him about the possibility of a population explosion, and he nodded. “Yes of course. This is a real problem. You don’t have to be a demographer to see that if new ones continue being born while the elderly are not dying, population will quickly soar to incredible levels. Unsustainable levels, until there will be a crash. So. This has to be faced now. The birth rate simply has to be cut, at least for a while. It isn’t a situation that has to last forever. The longevity treatments are not immortality treatments. Eventually the first generations given the treatment will die. And therein lies the solution to the problem. Say the current population on the two worlds is fifteen billion. That means we’re already starting from a bad spot. Given the severity of the problem, as long as you get to be a parent at all, there is no reason to complain; it’s your own longevity causing the problem after all, and parenthood is parenthood, one child or ten. So say that each person partners, and the two parents have only a single child, so that there is one child for every two people in the previous generation. Say that means seven and a half billion children out of this present generation. And they are all given the longevity treatment too, of course, and cosseted until they are no doubt the insufferable royalty of the world. And they go on to have four billion children, the new royalty, and that generation has two, and so on. All of them are alive at once, and the population is rising all the time, but at a lower rate as time passes. And then at some point, maybe a hundred years from now, maybe a thousand years from now, that first generation will die. It may happen over a fairly short period of time, but fast or slow, when the process is done, the overall population will be almost halved. At that point people can look at the situation, the infrastructure, the environments of the two worlds— the carrying capacity of the entire solar system, whatever that might be. After the biggest generations are gone, people can start having two children each, perhaps, so that there is replacement, and a steady state. Or whatever. When they have that kind of choice, the population crisis will be over. It could take a thousand years.” Nirgal stopped to look outside of himself, to stare around at the audience; people watching him rapt, silent. He gestured with a hand, to draw them all together. “In the meantime, we have to help each other. We have to regulate ourselves, we have to take care of the land. And it’s here, in this part of the project, that Mars can help Earth. First, we are an experiment in taking care of the land. Everyone learns from that, and some lessons can be applied here. Then, more importantly, though most of the population will always be located here on Earth, a goodly fraction of it can move to Mars. It will help ease the situation, and we’ll be happy to take them. We have an obligation to take on as many people as we possibly can, because we on Mars are Terrans still, and we are all in this together. Earth and Mars— and there are other habitable worlds in the solar system as well, none as big as our two, but there are a lot of them. And by using them all, and cooperating, we can get through the populated years. And walk out into a golden age.”
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 2979-80  | Added on Friday, December 02, 2011, 10:47 AM

“There are values higher than economic values,” Vlad had insisted back in the congress on Mars, and Nirgal saw now how there were people on Earth who had always believed that, at least in part.

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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 4863-73  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 05:16 PM

So she did the job. But all the time she wanted off Pavonis. Art saw her patience get shorter by the day; she knew by his look that she was becoming crochety, crabby, dictatorial; she knew it, but could not help it. After meetings with frivolous or obstructionist people she often unleashed a torrent of vicious abuse, in a steady low cursing voice that Art obviously found unnerving. Delegations would come in demanding an end to the death penalty, or the right to build in the Olympus Mons caldera, or a free eighth spot on the executive council, and as soon as the door closed Nadia would say, “Well there’s a bunch of fucking idiots for you, stupid fools never even thought about tie votes, never occurred to them that taking someone else’s life abrogates your own right to live,” and so on. The new police captured a group of Red ecoteurs who had tried to blow up the Socket again, and in the process killed a security guard out of his position, and she was the hardest judge they had: “Execute them!” she exclaimed. “Look, you kill someone, you lose your right to live. Execute them or else exile them from Mars for life— make them pay in a way that really gets the rest of the Reds’ attention.” “Well,” Art said uneasily. “Well, after all.” But on she raged. She couldn’t stop until she felt less angry. And Art could see that it was getting harder every time.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 5447-48  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 11:05 PM

No, Nirgal had no desire for nostalgia— the meaning of life lay not in the past but in the present, not in resistance but in expression.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 5555-58  | Added on Sunday, December 04, 2011, 11:54 PM

People came in wanting to talk about something else, and Nirgal withdrew to the window, near the nurse and the infant. He was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it— it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That’s politics, Jackie would say. And it was clear she enjoyed it. But Nirgal did not. It was strange; he had worked all his life for this situation, ostensibly, and now that it was here, he did not like it.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 5651-57  | Added on Monday, December 05, 2011, 12:02 AM

seeing everything as if through the wrong end of a telescope, a telescope consisting of the question Is this the life I want to lead? This distancing and somehow miniaturizing question kept returning to him, spurring him by day as he banked in the sunlight, haunting him at night in sleepless hours between the timeslip and dawn. What was he to do? The success of the revolution had left him without a task. All his life he had wandered Mars talking to people about a free Mars, about inhabitation rather than colonization, about becoming indigenous to the land. Now that task was ended, the land was theirs to live on as they chose. But in this new situation he found he did not know his part. He had to think very specifically about how to go on in this new world, no longer as the voice of the collective, but as an individual in his own private life.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 5659-62  | Added on Monday, December 05, 2011, 12:03 AM

It was hard to give up being a revolutionary. Nothing seemed to follow from it, either logically or emotionally. But something had to be done. That life was past. In the midst of a banking slow dive in his blimpglider, he suddenly understood Maya and her obsessive talk about incarnations. He was twenty-seven m-years old now, he had crisscrossed all Mars, he had been to Earth, he had returned to a free world. Time for the next metempsychosis.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Bookmark Loc. 5662  | Added on Monday, December 05, 2011, 12:03 AM


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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 6627-30  | Added on Monday, December 05, 2011, 02:47 AM

After repeated experiments it had become clear— on Mars at least— that all these sometimes contradictory goals could be best achieved in polyarchy, a complex system in which power was distributed out to a great number of institutions. In theory this network of distributed power, partly centralized and partly decentralized, created the greatest amount of individual freedom and collective good, by maximizing the amount of control that an individual had over his or her life.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 6818-20  | Added on Monday, December 05, 2011, 10:40 AM

“Like those people who think they’ve seen Hiroko,” he murmured tentatively, to see what Michel would say. “Ah yes,” Michel said. “Magical thinking— it’s a very persistent form of thinking. Never let your rationalism blind you to the fact that most of our thinking is magical thinking.
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 6889-95  | Added on Monday, December 05, 2011, 08:32 PM

The mathematician said, “Travel times will change so radically. Three weeks from Mars to Uranus. Ten days from Mars to Jupiter. From Mars to Earth, three days. Three days!” She looked around at the others, frowning. “It will make the solar system something like Europe in the nineteenth century. Train trips. Ocean liners.” The others nodded. The engineer said, “Now we’re neighbors with people on Mercury, or Uranus, or Pluto.” The head adviser shrugged. “Or for that matter Alpha Centauri. Let’s not worry about that. Contact is a good thing. Only connect, the poet says. Only connect. Now we will connect with a vengeance.” He raised his cup. “Cheers.”
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Blue Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)
- Highlight Loc. 7144-46  | Added on Monday, December 05, 2011, 08:54 PM

Once two adults got in a fight and afterward they had to present their cases to the four kids, who decided against one of them. The butcher woman explained to Nirgal: “We teach them, they judge us. They’re hard but fair.”
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