Category: Government, Policy, & Politics

Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House

Source: Why the Scariest Nuclear Threat May Be Coming from Inside the White House, by Michael Lewis (2017/07/26)

“Just give me the top five risks I need to worry about right away. Start at the top.”
…
At the very top of his list is an accident with nuclear weapons … “I would encourage you to spend an hour reading about Broken Arrows.”
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“North Korea would be up there,” says MacWilliams. … the people inside the national labs are the world’s most qualified to determine just what North Korea’s missiles can do.
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“This is in no particular order,” he says with remarkable patience. “But Iran is somewhere in the top five.” He’d watched Secretary Moniz help negotiate the deal that removed from Iran the capacity to acquire a nuclear weapon. There were only three paths to a nuclear weapon. … enriched uranium … plutonium … buy a weapon … The national labs played a big role in policing all three paths. … At any rate, the serious risk in Iran wasn’t that the Iranians would secretly acquire a weapon. It was that the president of the United States would not understand his nuclear scientists’ reasoning about the unlikelihood of the Iranians’ obtaining a weapon, and that he would have the United States back away foolishly from the deal. Released from the complicated set of restrictions on its nuclear-power program, Iran would then build its bomb. It wasn’t enough to have the world’s finest forensic nuclear physicists. Our political leaders needed to be predisposed to listen to them and equipped to understand what they say.
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His more general point was that managing risks was an act of the imagination. And the human imagination is a poor tool for judging risk. … What was most easily imagined was not what was most probable. It wasn’t the things you think of when you try to think of bad things happening that got you killed, he said. “It is the less detectable, systemic risks.” Another way of putting this is: The risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don’t.
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I realized later that the fifth risk did not put him at risk of revealing classified information. To begin, he said simply, “Project management.” … the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. … It is delaying repairs to a tunnel filled with lethal waste until, one day, it collapses. … It is what you never learned that might have saved you.

It turned out no one wanted to make a serious study of the risks at Hanford. Not the contractors who stood to make lots of money from things chugging along as they have. Not the career people inside the D.O.E. who oversaw the project and who feared that an open acknowledgment of all the risks was an invitation to even more lawsuits. Not the citizens of Eastern Washington, who count on the $3 billion a year flowing into their region from the federal government. Only one stakeholder in the place wanted to know what was going on beneath its soil: the tribes. A radioactive ruin does not crumble without consequences, and yet, even now, no one can say what these are.

The Rules for Rulers

Source: The Rules for Rulers – YouTube, by CGP Grey

RE: The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (2012), by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith

No man rules alone

  1. Keep the key supporters on your side
  2. Control the treasure
  3. Minimize key supporters

Countries where farmers’ votes don’t swing elections don’t have farming subsidies.

There is still much you can do. Once in power, make it easier for your key blocs to vote, and harder for others. Establish votings systems that reduce the number of blocs you need to win the more rivals you get. Draw election borders to predetermine the results for you or your cronies, and have party pre-elections with byzantine rules to determine who blocs even can vote for. Mix and match the above for even better power perpetuation. When approval ratings couldn’t be lower yet re-election rates couldn’t be higher, you’ll know you’ve succeeded.

You could take the moral path and ignore the big keys, but you’ll fight against those who didn’t. Good luck with that.

Continue reading The Rules for Rulers

How Do We Get Out of This Mess? – George Monbiot

Source: How Do We Get Out of This Mess? – George Monbiot

it is not strong leaders or parties that dominate politics as much as powerful political narratives … the reason why, despite its multiple and manifest failures, we appear to be stuck with neoliberalism is that we have failed to produce a new narrative with which to replace it.

Those who want a kinder politics know we have, in theory at least, the numbers on our side. Most people are socially-minded, empathetic and altruistic. Most people would prefer to live in a world in which everyone is treated with respect and decency, and in which we do not squander either our own lives or the natural gifts on which we and the rest of the living world depend.

Bread and Circuses | Elaine’s Idle Mind

I never really understood the appeal of Universal Basic Income, but after reading the European parliament’s proposal for Robotic Civil Rights I think I finally get it.

By the time the Republic turned into an Empire, slaves made up 40% of Italy’s population and held all the farming and service jobs. …
The nobilis preferred to keep wealth out of the plebs’ control, and provide them with guaranteed grain rations instead.

Source: Bread and Circuses | Elaine’s Idle Mind

 

I think that UBI has quite a few advantages, most of which rely on the ‘universal’ part.

  • UBI, being universal, can be an attempt to increase the civic value of citizen’s collective communal ownership of and investment in the state. This perspective sees UBI as a continuation of village commons, state parks, and national infrastructure. (see: Alaska’s PFD)
  • UBI, being universal, can be a way to compensate those citizens who do real work but are not traditionally financially compensated for that work (parents, family caretakers, community volunteers, the unemployed seeking a job, etc.), and support those who cannot do real work. And UBI accomplishes this without threatening loss of benefits for limited engagement in remunerative work. This perspective sees UBI as an improvement of communal support and the social safety net. (see: negative income tax as UBI)
  • UBI, being universally received but necessarily paid for by progressive tax rates, would effectively be a rich-to-poor income transfer which would broaden (and likely increase) consumer spending and economic demand which should grow the economy. This perspective treats UBI as little more than another pro-growth policy tool.
  • Politically, things provided broadly are easier to get and maintain support for. (see: mortgage interest deduction, F-35 production)

Ultimately, it seems to me that support or opposition to UBI turns on how someone feels about their fellow citizens. Are they adult peers who can and should be allowed to make their own intelligent decisions about how to spend their fair share of our society’s collective productivity? Or are they children whose every choice must be limited to the “good” options lest they misbehave and harm themselves or others? Or are they strangers, best avoided and left unaided and unsupported in favor of a more local tribe?

Why Canada Is Able to Do Things Better – The Atlantic

Most of the country understands that when it comes to government, you pay for what you get.

Source: Why Canada Is Able to Do Things Better – The Atlantic

I’ve come to focus on a more mundane explanation: The United States is falling apart because—unlike Canada and other wealthy countries—the American public sector simply doesn’t have the funds required to keep the nation stitched together. A country where impoverished citizens rely on crowdfunding to finance medical operations isn’t a country that can protect the health of its citizens. A country that can’t ensure the daily operation of Penn Station isn’t a country that can prevent transportation gridlock. A country that contracts out the operations of prisons to the lowest private bidder isn’t a country that can rehabilitate its criminals.

The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), a group of 35 wealthy countries, ranks its members by overall tax burden—that is, total tax revenues at every level of government, added together and then expressed as a percentage of GDP—and in latest year for which data is available, 2014, the United States came in fourth to last. Its tax burden was 25.9 percent—substantially less than the OECD average, 34.2 percent. If the United States followed that mean OECD rate, there would be about an extra $1.5 trillion annually for governments to spend on better schools, safer roads, better-trained police, and more accessible health care.

It’s really quite simple: When Canadian governments need more money, they raise taxes.