Total number of comments: 1542 (since 2013-04-13 18:28:29)
Juan Cole
is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page
Website: http://juancole.com
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Solar panels are falling in price so fast that the market will kill coal, not to mention the EPA. Coal is over with. Sell your stock if you have any. By 2020 it will be largely defunct or illegal or both.
Zeynep is a smart cookie and no doubt right; but Erdogan is also trying hard to ban Twitter.
International law on these things kicks in in 1945, with more teeth as of the Rome Statute of 2002.
Personally, I think it is because when humans used to be arboreal, they only survived if they had a healthy fear of falling, so it is one of our few inherited instincts. Being on an airplane falling out of the sky is the scariest thing imaginable to tree-dwelling primates.
thanks, Frank. Big time! That course went from like 70 to at one point 220 students.
Oh, sure, it is great that she did it. I just hope it is a wake-up call for her and her colleagues.
Right, so you would have stuck with Louis XVI in 1789 because of the Vendee and the Terror and all that unpleasantness. Turns out our Marxists are actually Old Regime apologists for billionaire brats. As for Zeidan, he was in exile because Gaddafi brooked no independent thinking. You yourself would have died in Abu Salim prison if you had lived under Gaddafi.
Coming up! I got behind while in Egypt last week.
The role of the Polish foreign minister, a former AEI fellow, in trying to entice Ukraine into European zone of influence does point to a Neocon stragegy
because the US intervention in Iraq went so well
My point was not advocating the break-up of anything, but that secession has often been supported by the US when it suited US interests. Iraq wouldn't vote as a whole to let Kurdistan go, and neither would the Sudanese people have wanted to lose the south.
it depends if you focus on Crimeans seceding or what they are seceding to. If the former, the analogies hold.
the analogy is to Kosovo within Serbia/Kosovo, which was one unit.
The Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was an unprovoked act of carnage.
excellent informed comment!
Gas is only marginally cleaner than coal, especially since extracting it releases a lot of methane.
Some trade is more amenable to sanctions than others; energy and heat cannot be sacrificed.
Sorry, John. But each of these points is debatable.
1. competition over hydrocarbon resources has been a major cause of war for over a century and was implicated deeply in WW II and more recent episodes like the Iraq War.
2. EU does not benefit from natural gas, which is causing destabilizing climate change
3. Natural gas does not substitute for petroleum (oil is used for transportation, gas for electricity generation)
your historical math is bad. 62 million died in WW II alone. The number of people dying in violent conflict has been less each recent decade & there are fewer wars as time goes on
Steven Pinker has shown that violent killing has declined enormously over human history. While nuclear war cannot be completely ruled out, no two nuclear powers have gone to war and it is an unlikely policy decision to do so. That rules out further big wars among the Powers and their close allies. No India-China, India-Pakistan, no Russia-US, no France-Russia. Hence wars are an African and Middle Eastern affair for the moment; but these conflicts for the most part are small compared to the great 20th century paroxysms.
you have a simplistic view of ethnicity. Most Tatars had been Greeks who converted. However, almost everyone was Tatar in 1770s apart from urban merchant community minorities.
nicely done, amalgamating Right to Right Sector. Putin would be proud of you.
they bought Congress and got taxes on securities down to 10% then put their money in securities.
that isn't true. It is only Helmand and Qandahar that are grossly under-represented. The Eastern Pushtuns from Jalalabad etc. seem to be into it.
I think the ones who do that are called contractors.
internets say she is Sunni; more research needed
Yes, Andrew. I agree. However, some extreme nationalists did occupy the presidential palace and it does no one any good to ignore that they are one element here.
Long enough for the US to be able to invade first. On Iraq analogy, roughly 9 months. Iran will be faster than that
The breakout capacity cannot be avoided with gas centrifuge technology.
The breakthrough is Iran accepting a longer period to breakout.
My reference was to deep space, as marked by the 'outer.' But sure, orbit is different. Thanks!
It is tagged satire
Nicely done!
link to scientificamerican.com
In international law, if a military operation is so reckless, and foreseeably so, that it kills civilian targets indiscriminately, that is a war crime.
The Bible unambiguously endorses both slavery and polygamy, as well as sex slavery. You may not be aware that you are doing modern apologetics, but I regret to report to you that your discourse is completely ahistorical and anachronistic.
And, yes, Christians owned slaves over 1800 years after Philemon was penned, and moreover they universally and routinely justified owning slaves with reference to the Bible. Most slavery until the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 1500s was household slavery, but it was still slavery. Christian abolitionists were a minority until the nineteenth century.
My point is not that the Bible is bad; I said at the beginning of my post that ancient scripture can be a source of spirituality if it is taken spiritually rather than literally. My point is that it endorses specific conceptions of marriage and other social institutions that we now find abhorrent, and appealing to it for condemnation of gay marriage is frankly absurd.
Sorry, Andrew. Solomon having 300 concubines is not condemned in the Bible. Multiple wives and sex slavery are not condemned in the Bible. Indeed, the Bible encourages or commands these things. Philemon did not initiate the end of slavery and Bible-believing Christians used the Bible for the next 1863 years to uphold slavery, exactly the same way their successors use the Bible in an attempt to limit women's choice and keep gays second-class citizens. In fact, some of them would probably be glad to use the Bible to enslave us again if they thought they could get away with it. Virtually nothing you imply here is true; it is just apologetics.
The upheaval is millions of people's lives being turned upside down in Miami and other coastal cities. A tiny town in Colorado is not equivalent. As for winning people over, sometimes you can't. People have different interests. The Carbon interests are destroying the planet, and will have to be defeated to save it. As for workers, retrain them to install solar panels and care for wind turbines. Actually if energy costs go near zero (as they will since fuel is free and infrastructure will be a sunk cost), there is no reason for everyone not to be rich.
their grandchildren won't be able to live there anyway w/no water & 10 degrees hotter
The UP in Michigan used to depend on copper mining, too. Things change.
Oh, they're a bloc in parliament and are active in civil society & politics
Egypt doesn't have a rural majority any more.
thanks for this Informed Comment!
Wolfowitz said it in Congressional testimony in spring 2003
Wolfowitz wanted all by 25,000 troops out of Iraq by October 2003.
The torture used by the French in Algiers so enraged the population that by 1962 they were forced out of the country altogether. I wouldn't really call that "working."
Moreover, Cheney's torturing of Shaikh al-Libi elicited the false allegation that Saddam was training al-Qaeda in chemical warfare. It was one of the things that convinced Condi and other administration officials of the need for the Iraq War, and it was false.
I'd say that was the opposite of "working."
A separate peace that neutralized the Egyptian military and allowed crushing of Palestinians?
Saudi Arabia does not have any nuclear weapons and there is no evidence that Pakistan would let their own out of country.
Iran can't close the straits
minor code error made post invisible!
You could have just stopped after saying that 1.1 million people took home about a fifth of our national income. They aren't taxed nearly highly enough.
Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb does attack Western facilities, but typically not in the West but in Algeria etc.
Fox has air affiliates and often they reflect the same line. Plus satellite transmission is through public airwaves.
Stop trolling my site with this nonsense. Fox deliberately retails lies and deceptively edits video as a matter of daily practice and has been caught out in this over and over again. Having a strong editorial line, as the NYT or MSNBC does, is not the same thing as being dishonest as a matter of praxis.
No false equivalencies please.
Ah, facts on the ground. Soon they'll be everywhere in the WB. Come talk to me after the final status negotiations have actually concluded
What is illegal is flooding the population of the Occupier into the occupied territory. This is no longer a war time occupation but settler colonialism. Who did Sodastream buy the land from for their factory? Who really owned it
Yitzhak Rabin of Labor committed to withdrawing from the West Bank and the Right killed him. So, no.
Some people are just looney. Too much of one chemical in the brain, not enough of another.
Yeah, if you believe that I've got this bridge over to Canada I could let you have cheap.
Of course you are right. Writing while sleeping again, and thanks. I fixed it to say what I meant.
Our cause isn't helped by being so unrealistic we sound like kooks. I do bike to work 8 months of the year. I can't this month. And I can't bike to some other places I need to go. Over time we need to move people to cities and close down the suburbs and have them use green mass transit. Portland has a good plan. But at the moment a lot of people need a car and I just want them to have one that is as green as possible. As for convincing us to stop fantasizing about Porsches, good luck. I've had bad luck with religious puritans in my life, and I don't like green ones any better.
The Volt is not at its best in very cold weather. The gasoline kicks in for heating as you say, and the battery only holds a 30 mile charge. But unless it is sub-zero I'm still getting over 40 miles a gallon, or as good as an ordinary gas hybrid. But aside from a few weeks in the dead of winter, I get the 250 mg in and around Ann Arbor and fuel it off the solar panels most days. In fall I was getting 50 miles on the electric charge. It is a dream car.
pick up on Volt is great & handles like a dream
Five passenger plug-in hybrids around the corner
300,000
I'm sorry, but your thesis that all nationalism is equally bad therefore there is nothing distinctive about Zionism is Israel is analytically just not true. But this discussion is anyway over with.
and yet they are Arabs, which makes my point that it is not like the category of Jews in Israel.
Also the Palestinians reject Lebanese citizenship themselves. They want to go home.
No, you just read me wrong. I didn't say anything about mitochondrial DNA in the case of the men, where the unchanging haplotypes are rather in the Y chromosome. But you make my point-- most Ashkenazi men don't have "Jewish" maternal lines.
I stopped taking you seriously when you brought up Saudi Arabia. Not an Arab nationalist regime and irrelevant to our discussion.
But yes, an American could emigrate to Lebanon, take Lebanese citizenship, marry anyone there who'd have them, learn Arabic, and after a while he and his family would be Lebanese. In fact the Armenians did just that and many are important in Lebanese politics. The Junblatts are Kurdish and Druze and likewise important.
But not our hypothetical non-Jewish American nor the Armenians nor the Kurds could move to Israel, take Israeli citizenship (not on offer), marry an Israeli Jew in Israel (not allowed) and become Israeli. So, the Lebanese form of nationalism is ipso facto less exclusive. And for that reason you don't hear its prime minister demand that we recognize Lebanon as a Muslim state, even though it is over 70% Muslim (just as Israel is 80% Jewish and heading for 70%). That the Lebanese state is "Arab" and a member of the Arab League does not function for Lebanon the way that "Jewish" functions for Israel.
Yes, making these distinctions is important. Trying to wish them away is propaganda thinking. Not encouraged here.
The issue here is not religious endogamy. The comments quoted are clearly about racial exclusion. Otherwise they would have insisted she convert if it got serious.
Lebanon just passed a law allowing civil marriage across religious and racial lines. Israel has no such law.
Well it would be very nice to get rid of nationalism altogether. But until then, some nationalism is more exclusivist than others. I didn't say Zionism is religious-based, I said it is largely race-based, and the race-based nationalisms are worse than language-based nationalisms because more intrinsically exclusive. In countries with low rates of immigration, a linguistic base for nationalism would not inconvenience many people, who could overcome it over time. In race based nationalisms, non-members are forever outsiders. And, it is the latter that Netanyahu is demanding we formally sanctify for Israel, which is 20% non-Jewish and going toward 30%.
The Salafis do not like the new constitution, but the Salafi Nur Party asked the faithful to vote for it. Apparently few of them did.
Egypt is not yet a one-party state. It could become one, but depends on the voting and elite maneuvering this spring and summer. It is an exclusionary state in the sense that the religiously-based parties have been excluded and the Muslim Brotherhood is being attacked. But it is still politically diverse.
Polling and voting statistics suggest that the angry non-whites in the GOP are a very tiny minority, and there is a substantial gender gap in favor of men.
aggressive wars in the Middle East
1956 against Egypt
1967 against Egypt, Jordan and Syria
1980 against Iran
1982 against Lebanon
1990 against Kuwait
2003 against Iraq
Iran did not fund any of these to my knowledge. In some instances it did help locals fight back against foreign military aggression and long-term territorial Occupation.
Iran has not launched an aggressive war in modern history.
Craig is a smart cookie, but the report looks legit to me.
No evidence that Tel Aviv has a firm Syria policy.
the Repost.us syndication service is paid for by their context-sensitive ads. Frankly I use Donottrackme and don't see them. Eventually maybe I'll be able to afford just to pay for syndicated newswires.
Karl Rove and his staff passed the story to the press, which refused to bite. They were trying very hard to out her.
What difference does it make that she was not overseas in spring 2003? Everyone she'd ever recruited and been seen with at receptions for that dummy CIA corporation she used as cover was burned. We don't know if any were killed or forced to flee their homes.
Cheney should be in jail.
Bill, Valerie was in fact a NOC, undercover. And she did operate extensively overseas. You are usually better informed than this.
Joe is the one who said my objection to using the 1978 telecom metadata case and applying it to everyone in the US was legally illiterate. A Federal judge later agreed with me.
Uh, I think the President can call the DEA in and tell them to back off. In fact, Holder says he just did that re: recreational pot in Colorado.
The founders favored checks and balances not trust. There are people just as psycho as Hoover high in the government today. In fact some psychologists think power attracts narcissists and sociopaths so they are over represented at the top of gov't and corporations
You did not give any specifics of any inaccuracy, Sherifa. Also, I did not disparage the new constitution but rather have repeatedly said I think it is better than the press it is getting in the West.
However, could you tell me who elected that 50 member constituent assembly that crafted it?
And surely you are not maintaining that the referendum met international standards?
my new essays are at the very top.
New essays by others or video links are on the left top. Guest essays always have a by-line. Then as you go down on the left you get yesterday's and the day before's postings
I don't understand that reaction. I write a column or so a day, same as always, on the same subjects as always, and it is always at the top of the page. No one is forcing you to scroll down. If you want my past essays, they are on the left and don't get pushed off the page as fast. Seems like a win win to me.
Joe, it was the CIA that was surveilling Mihdar. Presumably it was the NSA that tracked the phone call to Yemen. They didn't need the phone records of 300 million Americans to solve the puzzle. They needed to stop being anal retentive and share with each other.
they had Mihdar under surveillance!
Mark, they photoshopped those so-called missiles. You shouldn't mistake bravado for military capacity. Plus, they know they cannot do a first strike, since the response would be devastating.
Probably. Netanyahu's cabinet is anti-religious.
Und nun verstehe ich was ich bin-- ein Zeithistoriker! Danke!
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The PLO complained bitterly about Sharon not consulting them on the withdrawal from Gaza, which was unilateral and poorly planned and created a vacuum.
The lobby isn't foreign, it is local.
They have to make up and play nice. The big oil fields and other resources are in the south. A Sunni Arab state would be poverty stricken and isolated.
Partitions don't solve anything. The partitioned bits just go on fighting across the new border.
You're wrong on this one Bill. The previous SOFA of 2008 only passed parliament because the legal immunity clause was specifically limited to the end of 2011. There was never any prospect that parliament would extend it.
I prefer climate instability. I said "could" because you can't tell without a few decades of serial evidence whether an extreme weather event told you something about climate, or was just weather. You can have your suspicions.
Yep.
I am not sure you are right about this. Spain's electricity imports from France just transit the country on way to Morocco, Portugal, etc Spain has even exported electricity to France.
link to theguardian.com
Well they have no fossil fuels to speak of, of their own, so it is fair to talk about what they've done with regard to domestic energy policy. Spain reduced fossil fuel imports by $1.2 bn this year, substituting local wind, and there is every prospect of of imports falling further.
Individuals putting PV panels on their rooftops will be more important for at least the next couple of years in US than utility scale solar expansion, which tells me the US is not taking seriously our 2020 deadline for holding to a 3.2 degree F increase in average temperatures, more than which will be destabilizing. We have a $16 trillion dollar economy and since we're going to lose Florida over this, it would be worth putting some real money into it. link to eia.gov
The *proportion* of US energy from renewables is tiny, and that is what matters. The US is 7 times more populous than Spain and uses much more than 7 times as much energy, and its carbon emissions are also much more than 7 times those of Spain. Proportionally speaking, its investment in renewables is laughable and also tragic and I hope it gets well and truly sued by the rest of the world for its massive irresponsibility. Spain (the current government excepted) is a much better world citizen.