Of all the unresolved conflicts that erupted as the Soviet Union broke up, the one between Armenians and Azerbaijanis over Nagorno-Karabakh has always been the most menacing.
Now Armenians, Azerbaijanis and the wider world have been reminded that this conflict is a tinderbox that can still ignite to disastrous effect. The 1994 ceasefire has been shattered. The main victims amongst several dozen dead are the young conscripts who serve in the armed forces on either side.
Threats constantly change, yet our political discourse suggests that our vulnerabilities are simply for lack of resources, commitment or competence. Sometimes, that is true. But mostly we are vulnerable because we choose to be; because we've accepted, at least implicitly, that some risk is tolerable. A state that could stop every suicide bomber wouldn't be a free or, let's face it, fun one.
In the video segment, I note how the evolution and erosion of the nuclear winter hypothesis (which two climate scientists, Stephen H. Schneider and Starley Thompson, later concluded would be more like a “nuclear autumn”) fit a cycle often seen in consequential science:
There’s a pattern to how some phenomena and stories play out. The first idea is very stark and then the scientific process is like piranhas that nibble away at the soft stuff and whatever is left is the hard skeleton of the ideas – the enduring part.
The video also explores the relationship of nuclear winter studies to one way to “geoengineer” a cooler climate — lofting sun-blocking sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere.
Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary. The total value of asset forfeitures was more than one-third of the total value of property stolen by criminals in 2014. That represents something of a sea change in the way police do business — and it's prompting plenty of scrutiny of the practice.
By one estimate -- based on data from the World Bank, IMF, UN, and central banks of 139 countries -- between $21 and $32 trillion is hiding in tax havens, more than the United States’ national debt. That study didn’t even attempt to count money from fraud, drug trafficking and other criminal transactions whose perpetrators gravitate toward the same secret hideouts.
...a new trove of secret information is shining unprecedented light on this dark corner of the global economy. Fusion analyzed an archive containing 11.5 million internal documents from Mossack Fonseca’s files, including corporate records, financial filings, emails, and more, extending from the firm's inception in 1977 to December 2015. The documents were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with Fusion and over 100 other media outlets by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as part of the Panama Papersinvestigation. The massive leak is estimated to be 100 times bigger than Wikileaks. It's believed to be the largest global investigation in history.
In recent years, government investigations have centered on how major banks are used to move, hide, and launder money by the wealthy. But the new Panama Papers trove shows the role of often-overlooked lawyers and incorporation agents in the process. The results of the yearlong investigation encompass 214,488 corporate entities – among them companies, trusts, and foundations –controlled by everyone from heads of state, politicians, Forbes-listed billionaires, to drug lords, businesses blacklisted by the US government, scammers, and FIFA officials. There’s a common thread between members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, the man who laundered money from a record-setting robbery in the U.K., and a drug trafficker convicted of killing a U.S. DEA agent: They have all used companies created by Mossack Fonseca.
Eleven million documents were leaked from one of the world's most secretive companies, Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.
They show how Mossack Fonseca has helped clients launder money, dodge sanctions and evade tax.
The company says it has operated beyond reproach for 40 years and has never been charged with criminal wrong-doing.
The documents show links to 72 current or former heads of state in the data, including dictators accused of looting their own countries.
Gerard Ryle, director of the ICIJ, said the documents covered the day-to-day business at Mossack Fonseca over the past 40 years.
"I think the leak will prove to be probably the biggest blow the offshore world has ever taken because of the extent of the documents," he said.
This is how vulnerability research is supposed to work.
Vulnerabilities are found, fixed, then published. The entire security community is able to learn from the research, and -- more important -- everyone is more secure as a result of the work.
The FBI is doing the exact opposite. It has been given whatever vulnerability it used to get into the San Bernardino phone in secret, and it is keeping it secret. All of our iPhones remain vulnerable to this exploit. This includes the iPhones used by elected officials and federal workers and the phones used by people who protect our nation's critical infrastructure and carry out other law enforcement duties, including lots of FBI agents.
This is the trade-off we have to consider: Do we prioritize security over surveillance, or do we sacrifice security for surveillance?
Parliamentary democracy is often tumultuous, but like a slippery fault system, the turmoil tends to release pent-up tension gradually, in regular small bursts, rather than catastrophically, all of a sudden. To become prime minister, a politician needs to climb the ranks through the system— a process that tends to weed out reactionaries and radicals. To remain in power, a prime minister needs to nurture the respect of the coalition that promoted her or him in the first place. Should the parliament lose confidence in the prime minister, it selects another, or parliament is dissolved and the country holds a general election.
Presidential systems impose no similarly moderating influences on ambitious demagogues. Linz recognized that by forcing two different, popularly elected branches of government to share power—like twin princes fighting for the throne—presidential systems give rise to legitimation crises almost by design. A few years before Linz died, this observation was borne out dramatically by the consecutive U.S. elections of 2008 and 2010, when voters installed a Democratic president by a landslide, then a Republican House of Representatives by another landslide. The question of which branch of the government was the more legitimate voice of the people pitted Congress and the White House against each other in dangerous brinkmanship. Within months of the 2010 midterms, the government nearly ceased functioning twice, the second time amid a threat by the GOP majority to undermine the supposedly inviolable validity of U.S. debt.
That crisis, which courted global economic calamity, was resolved at the last minute when President Obama largely acceded to House Speaker John Boehner’s demands. But the episode raised an alarming question: What happens when we have a president who refuses to be so accommodating?
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It is no great stretch to interpret Trump’s rise as a phenomenon driven by disgruntled masses abandoning democracy in favor of autocracy—as part of the natural progression of Linzian decay. But it’s also possible that American democracy really is unusually resistant to systemic breakdown and can endure even the unprecedented challenges that Trump could pose. Maybe, despite the potential for crisis that’s baked into our way of governing, we can relieve these systemic tensions in other ways: through party realignments, through sheer institutional robustness, or through popular insistence that we uphold our constitutional traditions. In that more optimistic light, Trump looks less like doom for the republic than doom for the Republican Party.
If Trump were to govern with a more even keel than he’s led us to expect, his presidency could conceivably serve as a weird remedy to the constitutional problems we’re already experiencing—and end up being powerful evidence of the political anti-gravity that keeps our democracy from succumbing to ideological polarization.