no-fly zone

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Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks

business process, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, Isaac Newton, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Jeff Huber, the operations officer aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, thought through his doubts about the no-fly mission. "Given that no-fly zones don't make any sense in any traditional airpower context, how can we determine whether one is succeeding?" he asked. It was impossible to tally "Kurds/Shia Moslems not bombed," he noted. He wound up giving the mission a tepid approval. "Many look at the no-fly zone this way: Yeah, it's pretty stupid, but it beats letting international scumbags get away with anything they want and doing nothing about it." The overall cost of the two no-fly zones was roughly $1 billion a year. Other U.S. military operations, such as exercises in Kuwait, added another $500 million to the bill.

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It was all about internal consumption. If they had wanted to be more serious, even with their weakened military, they could have." In that sense, Saddam's ambiguous stance on the no-fly zones paralleled what we now know to be his handling of weapons of mass destruction. He got rid of his chemical and biological stocks, but wouldn't let international inspectors prove that he had done so, probably in order to intimidate his neighbors and citizens. Likewise, with the no-fly zones, his words were more threatening than his actions, but the U.S. government didn't pick up that signal. Wolfowitz out of power One day in 1996, Paul Wolfowitz toured Gettysburg with a group of specialists in military strategy from Johns Hopkins University's school of international studies, where he became dean after his service under Cheney at the Pentagon. 16 FIASCO Late in the afternoon, as the sun dipped toward Seminary Ridge, Wolfowitz stood at the center of the battlefield, near the spot where the soldiers of Pickett's charge had hit the Federal line and were thrown back by point-blank cannon blasts.

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It was the kind of slip that can occur in any new administration, but it wound up overshadowing the first foreign trip of a president with notably little overseas experience. "A routine mission was conducted to enforce the no-fly zone," Bush said that day in San Cristobal, Mexico. "And it is a mission about which I was informed, and I authorized. But I repeat, it's a routine mission, and we will continue to enforce the no-fly zone until the world is told otherwise." The U.S. military deemed the strikes essential because the Iraqis were installing a fiber optic communications network in their air defense system that would have greatly increased the threat to U.S. pilots operating in the southern nofly zone.

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

And then, around seven thirty, we all returned to our seats in the Situation Room, a new set of maps and papers in front of us, a stark menu of options in front of Obama: Bomb Gaddafi’s forces on the ground to stop their advance on Benghazi; put a no-fly zone in place; or do nothing, leaving any action to others. We reconvened for a second meeting, taking the same seats we’d occupied a couple of hours ago. Obama was briefed on the new options, which included a no-fly zone and a more aggressive option to go after Gaddafi’s forces on the ground. At the end of the meeting, Obama told us he’d made a decision. We wouldn’t support the French resolution for a no-fly zone. Instead, Susan would put forward a U.S. resolution that went beyond a no-fly zone, calling for “all necessary measures” to protect civilians on the ground, a euphemism for war.

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Because the world could now digest the brutal advance of Gaddafi’s forces in real time, whatever happened was on our watch. Members of Congress started to call for a no-fly zone over Libya, so that Gaddafi’s planes would be grounded. Reporters asked us how many more people had to die before Barack Obama did something. Most people in government didn’t want to do anything. The military made it clear that Libya wasn’t a priority—they had two wars to deal with and little desire for a third. A no-fly zone wasn’t just a talking point, it was a complex undertaking that involved eliminating all of Gaddafi’s air defenses and patrolling the skies over Libya indefinitely.

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When the U.S. government wants to avoid doing something, it avoids producing the options to do something. And so as the days went by, no option for a no-fly zone made its way to Obama, even though it was being debated across Washington and other capitals around the world. Arab leaders told Hillary Clinton that they were prepared to be part of an effort to punish Gaddafi. In Europe, the spotlight-loving French president Nicolas Sarkozy signaled that he was going to push for a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a no-fly zone. Soon we would have to take a position one way or another, so Obama convened a meeting of his National Security Council on March 15 to decide where we would stand at the UN.

Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

At the same time as the Obama administration cautioned the various revolutionaries in different countries to “show restraint” and said there was “no place for violence,” the president praised the “unique capabilities” of the United States when it comes to enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya.17 Tariq Ali, in a recent article, calls Libya “another case of selective vigilantism by the West.”18 First of all, we should be clear that there was no Libyan no-fly zone. UN Resolution 1973 did call for a no-fly zone, but the three traditional imperial countries—Britain, France, and the United States—immediately disregarded the resolution and instantly turned to participation on the side of the rebels. So they were not imposing a no-fly zone over the rebel advances. In fact, they were encouraging them and supporting them.

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We don’t have information from Saudi Arabia—it’s a very closed society—but that’s what it looks like. What about Libya? In Libya, there was an uprising. Then came, actually, two Western interventions. The first intervention was under the rubric of Security Council Resolution 1973, which called for a no-fly zone, a cease-fire, and protection of civilians. That intervention lasted maybe five minutes. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) powers, meaning the traditional imperial powers—Britain, France, the United States—immediately joined the rebel forces and became their air force. No cease-fire, no protection to civilians.

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no-fly zone, 50–52 Lippmann, Walter, 81 Madison, James, 84, 85 Magna Carta, 59, 72, 116 Mandela, Nelson, 71 Manning, Bradley, 113, 114 Marcos, Ferdinand, 17 market system, 80–81 Marx, Karl, 173, 175 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 13, 37, 105, 122, 134, 136, 149 mathematics, 137, 138 McCain, John, 103 McCarthyism, 24 McKiernan, Kevin, 95 media, 32, 66, 150, 151 mental slavery, 34–35, 101–25 Mexico, 11, 152–53, 162, 175 Middle East, 17, 44–64, 89–100, 111 Arab Spring, 44–55, 60–64, 67, 112–13, 168 oil, 21, 49–55 Turkish-Israeli relations, 92–94 uprisings, 44–64 military, 5, 98 Arab Spring, 44–55, 60–64 detention, 70–73 police, 119–20 U.S. bases in Latin America, 6–7 Mobutu Sese Seko, 17 Mondragon, 171 Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor, 23 Morgenthau, Hans, 63–64 The Purpose of American Politics, 64 Morocco, 46 Mubarak, Hosni, 45, 47, 62 Nader, Ralph, 150 NAFTA, 163, 175 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 61 National Defense Authorization Act, 70 Native Americans, 22 natural 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46 Palmer raids, 68 Pamuk, Orhan, 91 Panama, 7 Panetta, Leon, 114 Pashtuns, 99 Patterson, Anne W., 99, 110 Paul, Rand, 157, 162, 163 Paul, Ron, 75, 124–25, 157, 163 pensions, 12, 22, 24, 26 Peres, Shimon, 93 Peshawar, 16 pharmaceutical companies, 107–8 Philippines, 4, 17 Pinochet, Augusto, 61 piracy, 107–8 political Islam, 49, 61 Political Science Quarterly, 82 police repression, 119–20 politics, 32, 41, 57, 59, 121, 142–45, 171 electoral, 102–3, 117–19 labor demonstrations and, 41–43 poverty, 6, 66, 82, 84 Powell, Colin, 115 Powell, Lewis, 150–51 Powell memorandum, 150–51 power systems, 34–35, 69 aristocrats and democrats, 160–78 chains of submission and subservience, 34–43 global shift, 5–13, 58, 76–77 language and education, 126–59 mental slavery, 101–25 new American imperialism, 1–33 uprisings, 44–64 privatization, 11, 38, 39, 40, 156–57, 167 Progressive Labor (PL), 73 propaganda system, 35–40, 66, 80, 82, 102, 119, 122–24 property rights, 84, 85 public, power of the, 78–81 public 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157 social media, 105, 107, 145–47 Social Security, 39, 156–57 solidarity, 38–41, 146–47, 159 South Africa, 21, 50–51 apartheid, 71 South America, 6, 7, 57, 60, 161 Southeast Asia, 4, 60 South Korea, 9, 17 Spain, 4, 6, 33, 87 sports, college, 154–55 Stack, Joseph, 25–26, 29 Stalin, Joseph, 61 Stohl, Bev, 105 Stop Online Piracy Act, 107 strategic hamlets, 2 student activism, 73–74 submission and subservience, chains of, 34–43 Summit of the Americas (2012), 160–61 sunbelt, 11, 12 Sunnis, 52–53 Supreme Court, U.S., 70, 150 Buckley v.

Work! Consume! Die! by Boyle, Frankie

Boris Johnson, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, heat death of the universe, Jeffrey Epstein, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, millennium bug, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, open immigration, pez dispenser, Piper Alpha, presumed consent, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, the medium is the message, trade route, WikiLeaks

Well, we sent him into an unnecessary war with inferior equipment and a breathtaking ignorance of historical precedent, so it was probably pretty easy. I really don’t understand the no-fly zone in Libya. How can we designate a no-fly zone and then whizz about it in our planes? It has all the logic of a parent in McDonald’s telling their kids they’re embarrassing them. Presumably the reason coalition forces have been blowing up tanks and buildings is because they’re worried they might take to the skies like migrating geese. Instead of a no-fly zone, Cameron should just parachute in whoever was running Britain’s transport network last winter. British Typhoons reduced some schools and hospitals to barely functioning messes.

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People may be wondering where Britain is getting all these free mobile phones from that we are handing to the young radical Muslims in Libya. They’re mainly confiscated from the young radical Muslims that we put in Belmarsh. An American fighter plane crashed in a field near Benghazi. If you ask me, that was enforcing the no-fly zone a bit too strictly. What a laugh it would have been if it had landed on the house of Lockerbie bomber al-Megrahi. Not that he’d have been in; he spends most afternoons waterskiing. The Scottish Parliament still argue they did stringent checks that al-Megrahi definitely had a note from his mum asking for him to be excused from prison.

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My sketch idea is about Peter Kay taking a heroic dose of magic mushrooms and becoming a politically conscious comedian. He then has to do his stand-up to huge stadiums of folk expecting jokes about the types of biscuits your nan buys, but feels compelled to deliver groundbreaking anarchist routines. He berates Cameron for Libya. ‘No fly zone? We’re targeting people who clearly can’t fly and blowing them 15 feet into the air!’ he yells with trademark camp exasperation. The punters get bored and heckle helpfully with stuff like: ‘Garlic bread, Peter! Come on, pal! Garlic bread!’ ‘Garlic bread? Garlic bread? We’re fighting three fucking wars here, mate!’

Interventions by Noam Chomsky

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Monroe Doctrine, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, old-boy network, Ralph Nader, Thorstein Veblen, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, éminence grise

A special “spike” started in late August (for a September total of 54.6 tons). “In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq,” Smith wrote. The bombing was presented as defensive action to protect coalition planes in the no-fly zone. Iraq protested to the United Nations but didn’t fall into the trap of retaliating.1 For U.S.-U.K. planners, invading Iraq was a far higher priority than the “war on terror.” That much is revealed by the reports of their own intelligence agencies. On the eve of the allied invasion, a classified report by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the intelligence community’s center for strategic thinking, “predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict,” Douglas Jehl and David E.

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It is a rational calculation, on the assumption that human survival is not particularly significant in comparison with short-term power and wealth. And that is nothing new. These themes resonate through history. The difference today in this age of nuclear weapons is only that the stakes are enormously higher. NOTES 1. On the illegality of the no-fly zones, and the grim effects on civilians in earlier years, see von Sponeck, A Different Kind of War (2006). The Legacy of Hiroshima and the Present Terror AUGUST 2, 2005 This month’s anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompts somber reflection and fervent hope that the horror may never be repeated.

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., 14 National Security Strategy 2002, 21, 26, 27, 36, 177 nationalism, 7 as U.S. enemy, 143 NATO, 108 natural gas, 169, 170, 171 Nazi philosophy, 142 echoed in the White House, 106 Necessary Illusions (Chomsky), xviii–xix Negroponte, John, 89–92, 115–116 “neoliberalism” neither new nor liberal, 194 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 82 New Generation Draws the Line, The (Chomsky), 179 New Orleans flooding, 2005, 147–149 New York Times, xi–xiii, xvii–xx New York Times Syndicate, xiv newspapers, xi–xxi syndicates, xiv–xv Nicaragua, xix U.S. covert war against, 90–91 9/11 terrorist attacks. See September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Nixon, Richard, 68, 204 “no-fly zones,” 135, 136 Norris, John, 179 North Korea, 14, 36, 45–50, 73 and Israel, 48–49 Northeast Asia, 46–47 Northern Ireland, 32 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, 125–126, 137–138, 174 and Iran, 183, 185 flouted by U.S.-India agreement, 172–173 U.S. refuses to fulfill obligations, 138 nuclear power Iran, 181–182, 183 Nuclear Suppliers Group, 174 Nuclear Terrorism (Allison), 139 nuclear weapons, 36, 125–128, 137–140, 181–186 forecast strike on U.S., 139, 173 India, 172–173 Iran, 182, 184, 209 Iraq, 117 not mentioned in UN charter, 112 North Korea, 48 public opinion, 185–186 Russia, 127 and terrorism, 137 U.S., 88, 138–139 Nunn, Sam, 127, 139 Nuremberg war crime trials, 57, 106, 177–178 ocean salinity balance threatened by melting ice sheets, 153 Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), 87 oil, 1, 8, 10, 25, 112, 208 discounts for low-income communities, 155 international trade 169–170 Iran, 181 Iraq, 79, 85–86, 135, 162, 202 no more important than pickles, we’re to believe, 162 Northeast Asia, 46 Saudi Arabia, 163 South America, 156 Venezuela, 155–156, 171, 198 UN Oil-for-Food program, 60 U.S. and “Middle East energy resources,” 47, 208 Olmert, Ehud, 33–34 oped pages, xi–xx Oren, Amir, 29 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 129 Orwell, George, 142 and naming of acts of Congress, 172 Owen, Taylor, 203–204 Oxford Research International, 78 PDVSA, 155 Page, Benjamin, 217 Page, Clarence, xx Pakistan, 1–2, 20 earthquake, 2005, 171–172 nuclear weapons, 128 Palestine, 2, 4, 25 elections, 165–168 Israeli occupation, 29–34, 63–66, 81–84 Palestine Liberation Organization, 187–188, 190 Palestinian-Israeli conflict, 29-34, 63-66, 81–84, 165–168, 187–192 American public opinion, 66, 84 binational state feasibility, 83 Israeli public opinion, 84 Sharon-Abbas cease-fire (2005), 117, 118 two-state settlement (proposed), 81, 83–84, 166, 189 and U.S., 81, 84, 165–166 paramilitary forces, 69 Patterson, Thomas, 94 peace movement, 20–21 Pedatzur, Reuven, 178 people the “great beast,” 105 “disruptive special interests,” 215 “substantial citizens,” 131 See also intellectuals; poor people; rich people; women; working-class people Perilous Power (Achcar and Chomsky), 168 Perry, William, 139 Persian Gulf War, 27 pharmaceutical industry political power, 93 Philippines, 53 Pinochet, Augusto, 143–144, 197 political parties U.S., 75, 95, 87 pollution best “done in the country with the lowest cost” (Summers), 119–120 poor people political involvement, 94–95 reliance on Social Security, 131 Posada Carriles, Luis, 70–71 Postel, Sandra, 148 poverty statistics, 149 Powell, Colin, 57, 58 power, 213–218 presidential elections Bolivia (2004), 194–195 U.S. (2004), 75–76, 93–100, 194–195 presidential sovereignty, 105–107 presidential speechwriters plagiarize epics and children’s tales, 37 “preventive war,” 19, 26, 36, 177 euphemism for aggression at will, 74 prisons Israel, 188, 192 Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), 43, 75, 121, 154, 164, 185 propaganda, 20–21, 36 anti-Chávez, 159 and elections, 97 and Social Security, 129–130 protests and demonstrations, 74, 88, 105 newspaper coverage, xviii Summit of the Americas, 2005, 155 public relations industry and political candidates, 97 Rashid, Ahmed, 1–2 Report on Israeli Settlements, 34 Reynolds, Barbara, xv Rice, Condoleezza, 8, 102 rich people benefit from medical system, 131 Robertson, Pat, 99 Robbins, CarlaAnne, 89 Romero, Oscar, 122 Rove, Karl, 129 Roy, Sara, 64 Rubin, James, 61 Rudman, Warren, 15 Rumsfield, Donald, 16, 57, 58, 182 Russell, Bertrand, 128 Russia, 73, 173 arms-race revival, 87–88 nuclear weapons, 127 Saad-Ghorayeb, Amal, 190, 191 Sadat, Anwar, 29 Safire, William, xiii Said, Edward, 176, 213 sanctions, economic against Iraq, 3, 14, 59–61, 74 against Syria, 86 as genocide, 59–60 Sandinistas, xix, 90 Sanger, David E., 135 Saudi Arabia and China 169–170 and Iraq, 112, 163 Scheer, Robert, xv Scheuer, Michael, 5 Schlesinger, Arthur, 36, 68, 138 Schmitt, Carl, 106 science and public policy, 151–154 Scowcroft, Brent, 25, 177 “security fences,” West Bank, 29, 33, 63–66, 82 September 11, 1973, coup d’état, 143–144, 198 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 1-5, 7–8 and Afghanistan, 38 alleged Saddam Hussein involvement, 36 Arab public opinion, 144 forecast by FEMA, 147 international reaction, 35 media coverage, xviii Serbia, 176.

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

And the West didn’t want Gadhafi to enhance his power and independence by crushing the rebellion. The United States joined in the U.N. Security Council authorization of a “no-fly zone” and measures to protect civilians, to be implemented primarily by France, the United Kingdom and the United States, the three traditional imperial powers (though we may recall—Libyans presumably do—that after World War I, Italy conducted virtual genocide in eastern Libya). The no-fly zone prevented a likely massacre, but the U.N. resolution was immediately rejected in practice by the triumvirate and interpreted as authorizing direct participation in support for the rebels.

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., 221 McCoy, Alfred, 147 McGlynn, John, 80 McGwire, Michael, 103 McKinney, Cynthia, 158 Merkel, Angela, 177 Meron, Theodor, 243 Merrill, John, 297 Meshal, Khaled, 42–43 Mexico, 21–24 Miliband, David, 99–100 military bases, 167–170 military coups, 22, 159, 185–187 military spending, 196 Mill, John Stuart, 148 Milne, Seamus, 88 missile defense system, 39–40, 78–79 Mitchell, George, 131, 134, 203 Mogadishu, 46–47 Mohamed El-Baradei, 26 Monitor Group, 265 Morales, Evo, 137, 167, 169 Morocco, 268 Morris, Benny, 94, 96–97 Mottaki, Manouchehr, 26 Muasher, Marwan, 254, 256 Mubarak, Hosni, 253–254, 259–260, 262 Mullen, Michael, 216 Munck, Ronaldo, 269 My Lai massacre, 148 The Myth of American Exceptionalism (Hodgson), 146 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 23 National Democratic Institute (NDI), 186 National Intelligence Estimate, 68 National Liberation Front (NLF), 222 National Peace Jirga, 121 National Security Council, 138, 167 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 77–78, 102–103, 118, 142, 164–165, 228 NDI (National Democratic Institute), 186 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 127, 201–203, 204 New York Times, 185, 287 Nicaragua, 184–185 Nicholson, Larry, 222 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 224 NLF (National Liberation Front), 222 Nobel Peace Prize, 171, 174 no-fly zone, 267 Non-Aligned Movement, 219 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 19, 93–94, 172, 218 Conference (May 2010), 219 Iran and, 67, 76 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 23 North Atlantic Treaty Organization. see NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) North Korea, 17–21 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). see Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) nuclear proliferation, 27, 37–40, 89–90 nuclear weapons, 73–75, 304 in Iran, 171 Iran and, 27–28, 95–98, 171, 173–174 Israel and, 94 nuclear-weapons-free zones (NWFZs), 75–76, 96, 103 Nuremberg Tribunal, 52, 64–65 Obama, Barack administration of, 115, 241 Afghanistan and, 102, 120–123 cycle of violence and, 117–123 economy and, 111 financial institutions and, 196–198 Hamas and, 69–70, 133–134 health care system and, 116 Honduras coup (2009) and, 159, 185–187 Iran and, 66–68, 215–219 Iraq and, 117–118 Israel-Palestine conflict and, 69–70, 125–129, 131–132, 151–153 meetings with Netanyahu and, 202 Middle East and, 117 nuclear weapons and, 95–96 Pakistan and, 119–120, 170, 278 peace efforts of, 171–175 rejectionism, U.

Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution by Richard Whittle

Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, operational security, precision agriculture, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Yom Kippur War

Perhaps the most exciting initiative after all those undertaken for the CIA was an experiment in which Big Safari put Stinger antiaircraft missiles, which are normally shoulder-fired, on a Predator in late 2002. The modification was an attempt to stop supersonic Iraqi MiG fighters that were hunting the drones as they flew surveillance of no-fly zones over Iraq. After several inconclusive engagements with Iraqi fighter planes over the no-fly zones, an Air Combat Command crew, with Swanson instructing them, lost in an exchange of missiles with an Iraqi MiG-25 Foxbat on December 23, 2002, the Predator’s last air-to-air engagement. Two years after that, Swanson left Big Safari for another green door assignment, and in 2007 he retired from the Air Force.

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In league with ethnic Serb insurgents eager to carve their own republic out of Bosnian territory, Serbia’s military laid siege to Bosnia’s capital in 1992; by early 1993 they had been shelling Sarajevo’s citizenry with all manner of weaponry for months. The siege led the United Nations to send peacekeeping troops to the Sarajevo airport, declare a “no-fly zone” over Bosnia, and begin airlifting aid to the beleaguered population. Undeterred, the Serbs began firing on UN troops as well. Clinton wanted to break the Serb blockade, and he was both shocked and chagrined to find out how little his military and intelligence agencies could tell him about what was actually happening on the ground around Sarajevo.

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He quickly won approval to operate it over Bosnia, the former Yugoslav republic whose ethnic war had been a catalyst for developing the drone in the first place. Things were reaching a boiling point in the Balkans, where UN peacekeeping troops had been deployed since 1992. NATO warplanes had been enforcing a no-fly zone over Bosnia since 1993, and tensions had escalated considerably over the following two years. When Rutherford came calling, commanders in Germany were happy to try tracking Serb weapons and activities with an unmanned drone. They were happier still to have the unmanned Predator after June 2, when a Serb missile shot down U.S.

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

American and British warplanes were bombing radar and command-and-control facilities around Baghdad in response to what the military considered an escalated threat to aircraft patrolling no-fly zones. Bush was stunned. How had this happened without his knowing in advance? Heading to a news conference with Fox, Bush knew the questions would now be about Iraq. Aides advised him not to let on that he did not know about it and to use the word “routine” to describe it. Bush followed the advice, informing the world that “a routine mission was conducted to enforce the no-fly zone.” From there, the president flew to his Texas ranch. On television were scenes of bombing in Baghdad. “I’m going to call Dick,” the restless president said.

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It could give Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, a green light to send the Israeli army into Palestinian territories and escalate the situation. Cheney countered that Bush was right and should not waste his time. The conversation turned to Iraq, where a decade after the end of the Gulf War, American forces still enforced two no-fly zones and the United Nations program of sanctions had been terribly corrupted. As Rice put it later, “Almost from the very beginning, Iraq was a preoccupation of the national security team.” Official U.S. policy, set by Congress and signed by Clinton, called for regime change, but there was no obvious route to achieve that, and no one at this point was advocating war.

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“Give the man a break, Mother,” said Euan, the Blairs’ son. BACK IN WASHINGTON, Rumsfeld was trying to force a broader reassessment of Iraq policy. In a four-page memo marked “Secret” that he sent to Cheney, Rice, and Powell on the afternoon of July 27, the defense chief proposed meeting to discuss three options: give up the no-fly zones and sanctions since they were no longer effective; approach “our moderate Arab friends” to explore “a more robust policy” aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein; or open a dialogue with Hussein to see if he was ready “to make some accommodation.” Rumsfeld painted a picture of gathering danger. “Within a few years the U.S. will undoubtedly have to confront a Saddam armed with nuclear weapons,” he wrote.

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias by Kevin Cook

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, crisis actor, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, friendly fire, index card, Jones Act, no-fly zone, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, wikimedia commons

His reference to a bird came from the book of Isaiah, a chapter predicting a cataclysm: “Calling a ravenous bird from the east … I bring near my righteousness; it shall not be far off, and my salvation shall not tarry.” * * * Within hours the Federal Aviation Administration declared the area around Mount Carmel a no-fly zone. All civilian aircraft, including TV helicopters, were banned from the area. ATF agents kept TV, radio, and newspaper reporters hundreds of yards from the scene. Koresh and Martin stayed in touch with Lynch and the raiders by phone. They worked out an agreement: if radio station KRLD broadcast a message from Koresh, he would send out some of the children the ATF was calling his “hostages.”

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Doyle and Thibodeau recalled Perry Jones’s wounding and Neal Vaega’s shooting Jones and Peter Hipsman. Davidian survivors recalled Annetta Richards’s dressing Koresh’s wounds. Tabor and Gallagher recounted Koresh’s conversation with KRLD’s Charlie Serafin in Why Waco? The Tribune-Herald and other sources reported the FAA’s no-fly zone over Mount Carmel. The Department of Justice’s 1993 report detailed the February 28 release of Angelica and Crystal Sonobe and Renae and Nahara Fagan. The Houston Chronicle reported Vic Feazell’s comments (“The feds are preparing to kill them…”) on March 2, 1993. 10. DAVID AND GOLIATH The New York Times quoted an ATF agent at Mount Carmel (“Inexcusable…”) and noted ATF agent Cavanaugh’s role in the February 28 raid on March 28, 1993.

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burials during siege at child abuse charges and children released by children released by, at Methodist Home children’s deaths at conspiracy theories and cult accusations and curiosity seekers and daily life at Danforth inquiry into deaths at, during raids DeGuerin as defense lawyer and diagram of drug charges vs. early history and founding by Houteffs FAA declares no-fly zone over FBI negotiations and siege at FBI raid and fire of April 19, at finances and fire safety problems and George Roden battles vs. mother Lois over leadership of guns and Hillary Clinton blamed for inquiries into FBI raid and Jesse Amen arrives at Koresh arrives at, and becomes lover of Lois Roden Koresh battles vs.

Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, Chelsea Manning, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Slavoj Žižek, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Security Council the African position on the attack—in reality, bombing by their traditional imperial aggressors: France and Britain, joined by the United States, which initially coordinated the assault, and marginally some other nations. It should be recalled that there were two interventions. The first, under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, adopted on March 17, 2011, called for a no-fly zone, a cease-fire and measures to protect civilians. After a few moments, that intervention was cast aside as the imperial triumvirate joined the rebel army, serving as its air force. At the outset of the bombing, the African Union called for efforts at diplomacy and negotiations to try to head off a likely humanitarian catastrophe in Libya.

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That comes as no surprise: Africans are “unpeople,” to adapt George Orwell’s term for those unfit to enter history. On March 12, the Arab League gained the status of people by supporting U.N. Resolution 1973. But approval soon faded when the League withheld support for the subsequent Western bombardment of Libya. And on April 10, the Arab League reverted to unpeople by calling on the U.N. also to impose a no-fly zone over Gaza and to lift the Israeli siege, virtually ignored. That too makes good sense. Palestinians are prototypical unpeople, as we see regularly. Consider the November/December issue of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, which opened with two articles on the Israel-Palestine conflict. One, written by Israeli officials Yosef Kuperwasser and Shalom Lipner, blamed the continuing conflict on the Palestinians for refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state (keeping to the diplomatic norm: States are recognized, but not privileged sectors within them).

The Generals: American Military Command From World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks

affirmative action, airport security, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, hiring and firing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Yom Kippur War

It was not a full-blown war, but it certainly was not a state of peace. First, in April 1991, not long after Schwarzkopf’s ceremony at Safwan, the United States imposed a no-fly zone, covering all Iraqi aircraft, including helicopters, in the north of Iraq in order to protect Kurds fleeing an Iraqi offensive. Then, to ensure that the refugees did not settle in Turkey, it sent in Army and Marine units to protect them as they returned to Iraq. In August 1992, the United States declared a similar but far larger no-fly zone for southern Iraq. It conducted air strikes in January and June 1993 in response to actions by Saddam Hussein. It deployed troops to Kuwait in 1994 when he appeared to be threatening to invade again.

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Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein could not understand why he was being given the gift of a ceasefire, which he interpreted as a victory for Iraq. That is, he had been assaulted by the Americans but lived to tell about it. So began two decades of American fighting with Iraq—first, twelve years of patrolling “no-fly zones,” followed by eight years of fighting on the ground. But the ragged outcome of the war was more the fault of American civilian leaders than that of generals. Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who mishandled the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is seen by many in the Army as a mistake or aberration, someone promoted well past his level of competence.

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On the issue of the effects of the 1991 war, one question about which surprisingly little is known even now is whether the way in which the war ended gave Iran entrée into Iraqi affairs, with its Revolutionary Guards also encouraging Iraqi Shiites to rise against Saddam. On the captured tapes of his meetings, Saddam complains that the Iranians “imposed on our land” after the 1991 war, especially in Diyala Province. Woods, Palkki, and Stout, The Saddam Tapes, 206. the United States imposed a no-fly zone: Michael Knights, “The Long View of No-Fly and No-Augmentation Zones,” in Michael Knights, ed., Operation Iraqi Freedom and the New Iraq: Insights and Forecasts (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004), 41. 26. THE POST–GULF WAR MILITARY “above average”: Linn, Echo of Battle, 229. “Basking in the glow of victory”: Maj.

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, dual-use technology, Farzad Bazoft, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, IFF: identification friend or foe, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, music of the spheres, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, Transnistria, unemployed young men, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The growing regularity of attacks on Iraq did more than dull the senses of journalists; it gave a continuity to their story, so when the United States and Britain, the sole surviving allies of the 1991 war—the French had wisely pulled out of the “no-fly” zone bombardments—attacked Iraqi “military positions” over the next decade, their actions became routine, part of a pattern, a habit which, as the years went by, ceased to be a “news story” at all. The southern “no-fly” zone was supposed to protect the Shiites from Saddam, even though the Shiite insurgents of 1991 were long in their mass graves or still hiding in their refugee camps over the border in Iran. In the north, the “no-fly” zone was supposed to protect the Kurds from similar aggression; but the “safe haven” created by the allies of 1991 at least still existed there, even if it was not enough to save the Kurds of Irbil when Saddam sent his tanks into the city to break up a CIA-run operation in 1996.

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Almost two years after they celebrated victory in the 1991 Gulf War, the conflict’s three principal Western allies—the United States, Britain and France— launched a series of air strikes against Iraq’s supposed violation of the southern no-fly zone and its seizure of Silkworm anti-ship missiles from the United Nations. On 12 January 1993, six British Tornado bombers and a squadron of French Mirage jets based in Saudi Arabia joined a much larger force of American planes from the carrier Kitty Hawk in attacking targets inside Iraq, most of them missile sites and radar bases. For more than a week, the United States had protested at Iraq’s positioning of SAM anti-aircraft missile batteries inside the “no-fly” zones. Yet if the Americans needed a regular crisis in the Gulf, Saddam also wanted to provoke tension.

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House of Representatives proposed an Armenian Genocide Resolution in 2000, asking President Clinton in his annual Armenian commemoration address to refer to the killings as genocide—it had the votes to pass—Turkey warned Washington that it would close its airbases to American aircraft flying over the Iraqi “no-fly” zones. The Turkish defence minister, Sabahattin Çakmakoğlu, said that Turkey was prepared to cancel arms contracts with the United States. The Israeli foreign ministry took Turkey’s side and President Bill Clinton shamefully gave in and asked that the bill be killed in the Senate. It was. All across the United States, this same pressure operates.

Beautiful Visualization by Julie Steele

barriers to entry, correlation does not imply causation, data acquisition, data science, database schema, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, index card, information retrieval, iterative process, linked data, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, power law, QR code, recommendation engine, semantic web, social bookmarking, social distancing, social graph, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, the long tail, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler

Flight paths over the north Atlantic show some anomalies in the data If you look carefully at the visualization, you will notice some interesting features. One obvious example is the restricted no-fly zones over Nevada (Figure 6-13). It doesn’t appear as if these no-fly zones are completely restricted, though: a tiny number of flights crossing this dark space are just discernable. Figure 6-13. A closeup look at no-fly zones in the southwest United States Every time you work with large, organic datasets, you will find errors and anomalies, and I think it’s important to consider how to handle them.

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control by Medea Benjamin

air gap, airport security, autonomous vehicles, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, drone strike, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Jeff Hawkins, Khyber Pass, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, performance metric, private military company, Ralph Nader, WikiLeaks

With drone warfare, there is no need to unite the country behind a conflict, no need to call for shared sacrifice, no need for grueling debates in Congress. That was certainly the case with President Obama’s decision to get involved militarily in the overthrow of the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. On March 17, 2011 the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1973 sanctioning the establishment of a no-fly zone and the use of “all means necessary” to protect civilians within Libya.252 Just weeks later, President Obama approved the use of Predator drones, armed with Hellfire missiles, to pound Qaddafi’s compound and his loyalist troops. Six months later, Qaddafi was captured and killed. While the National Transitional Council nominally took control, warlords, Islamists, tribal leaders and would-be democrats were all vying for power.

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/CUBA: Justice Not So Blind in Politically Charged Cases,” IPS Inter Press Service, January 29, 2008. 247 “Collateral damage,” Wikipedia. 248 David Rohde, “The Drone War,” Reuters Magazine, January 17, 2012. 249 Washington Post-ABC News Poll, The Washington Post, February 8, 2012. 250 P.W. Singer, “Wired for War,” Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2009. 251 Teri Schultz, “Meet the Pilots who Fly America’s Drones,” GlobalPost, December 16, 2011. 252 “No-fly zone” Wikipedia. 253 Barack Obama, “Letter from the President on the War Powers Resolution,” The White House, June 15, 2011. 254 “United States Activities in Libya,” Foreign Policy Files, June 15, 2011. 255 C. J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt, “Scores of Unintended Casualties in NATO War in Libya,” The New York Times, December 18, 2011. 256 Joshua Foust, “Unaccountable Killing Machines: The True Cost of U.S.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

It’s hard to say. Perhaps there might emerge international requirements that surveillance drones be easily distinguishable from bomber drones. Some states might join together in a sort of “drone shield,” not unlike the nuclear alliance of the Cold War, in which case we would see the world’s first drone-based no-fly zone. If a small and poor country cannot afford to build or buy its own bomber drones, yet it fears aerial attacks from an aggressive neighbor, it might seek an alliance with a superpower to guarantee some measure of protection. It seems unlikely, however, that states without drones will remain bereft for long: The Sentinel spy drone held by the Iranians cost only around $6 million to make.

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This would be a popular idea within intervention policy circles—it’s a natural extension of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) doctrine, which the U.N. Security Council used to authorize military action (including air strikes) in Libya in 2011 that NATO subsequently carried out. It’s very possible that we will see NATO members contribute drones to enforce the world’s first unmanned no-fly zone over a future rebel stronghold, which would not involve sending any troops into harm’s way. Beyond formal institutions like NATO, the pressure for action will find other outlets in the form of ad hoc coalitions involving citizens and companies. Neither individuals nor businesses are able to muster military force for a ground invasion, but they can contribute to the maintenance of the vitally important communications network in a conflict zone.

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In other instances, the virtual front will act as a constraining force, leading aggressors to second-guess the degree of their aggression on the physical front. And as we will see even more clearly in the following pages, the mere existence of a virtual front paves the way for intervention options that are still robust, but minimize or reduce altogether the need to send troops into harm’s way. Drone-patrolled no-fly zones and robotic peacekeeping interventions may be possible during a conflict, but such steps are limited. When the conflict is over, however, and the reconstruction effort begins, the opportunities for technology to help rebuild the country are endless. 1 If such an exception was made for the Israeli ultra-Orthodox on religious grounds, what kind of precedent would it set?

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

One of the new colonialists’ main tasks is therefore to take down the leaders who are medieval in the worst sense of the term. We often forget that, from Yugoslavia to Sudan, the descent into civil war and genocide is often not about genuine grievances and mass movements, but rather the megalomania of one single leader. During the 1990s, the northern and southern no-fly zones imposed on Iraq left it in a geopolitical gray zone with Saddam Hussein still in charge of whatever his Baathist regime could reach. Sanctions between the two Gulf wars cost five hundred thousand Iraqi children their lives due to pneumonia and other preventable illnesses. Zimbabwe was once sub-Saharan Africa’s second largest economy behind South Africa, but President Robert Mugabe’s violent seizure of land from white farmers and paranoid politics plunged what was once “Africa’s breadbasket” into desperation, with hyperinflation requiring $500 million notes to be issued (enough for eight loaves of bread).

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Revoking recognition, freezing bank accounts, and imposing travel bans can curb the spending habits of rulers who enjoy lavish shopping in London and Dubai while their people starve. Flipping defecting officers and bribing junior ones are more aggressive ways to make it less fun for despots to enjoy their perch. Patrolling no-fly zones, jamming radio and TV signals, blockading weapons imports and lucrative exports, and building up rebel defenses are other ways outsiders can isolate thuggish regimes. Flooding countries such as North Korea or Myanmar with money, mobile phones, and targeted food aid could also destabilize foul regimes from within.

The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, always be closing, California gold rush, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, kremlinology, load shedding, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, the long tail, trade route, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

R2P must play as large a role as realistically possible in the affairs of state. But it cannot ultimately dominate. Syria is the current and best example of this. U.S. power is capable of many things, yet putting a complex and war-torn Islamic society’s house in order is not one of them. In this respect, our tragic experience in Iraq is indeed relevant. Quick fixes like a no-fly zone and arming the rebels may topple Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, but that might only make President Barack Obama culpable in midwifing to power a Sunni-jihadist regime, even as ethnic cleansing of al-Assad’s Alawites commences. At least at this late juncture, without significant numbers of Western boots on the ground for a significant period—something for which there is little public support—the likelihood of a better, more stable regime emerging in Damascus is highly questionable.

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He would have emerged as the new Nasser of the Sunni faithful, from Morocco to Pakistan, even as he continued to murder in desultory fashion thousands of people per month in his police state. As a footnote, sooner or later an American Navy or Air Force aviator would have been shot down patrolling the no-fly zones and paraded through the streets of Baghdad, thus providing immense propaganda value. Truly, a world with Saddam still in power is awful to contemplate, as I can personally attest, having visited Iraq several times in the 1980s, the worst years of Saddam’s tyranny. Yet, there is a problem with this line of reasoning: How do all these might-have-beens, as frightfully convincing as they seem, stack up against the very real, violent deaths of more than four thousand Americans and tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis, as a result of our invasion—not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the war that could have been used to meet other threats to our national interests?

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haass

access to a mobile phone, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, global pandemic, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, immigration reform, invisible hand, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, open economy, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

For a number of reasons—principally uncertainty as to the political goals and consequences of the rebellions and concern over the difficulties of designing and implementing a military intervention in such confused circumstances—the United States held back. But as the humanitarian situation in the north deteriorated and waves of civilians headed toward the Turkish border, U.S. military forces established a no-fly zone (so that Iraqi government aircraft could not attack civilians) and provided food and other necessities, saving hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives in the process. The Bush administration was motivated by the humanitarian plight, but also because it was under pressure from its partner and ally Turkey to do so.

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Calls for Western military intervention mounted, motivated by a desire both to prevent any massacres and to oust a regime correctly viewed as a serial abuser of human rights. On March 17, 2011, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973, authorizing member states to both “take all necessary measures . . . to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” and establish a no-fly zone over the whole of the country.5 Soon after, a “humanitarian intervention” was carried out by a coalition of NATO members led by the Europeans, with the United States “leading from behind.”6 There were any number of problems with all this. First, it is far from certain that the situation on the ground warranted a humanitarian intervention.

Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn

airport security, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, drone strike, Edward Snowden, friendly fire, Google Earth, license plate recognition, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, RAND corporation, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, Teledyne, too big to fail, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

Also hit were businesses belonging to President Milošević’s friends; strategists assumed that “crony targeting” would generate enough pressure on the Serbian leader to cave. As Deptula, by now a brigadier general, later remarked, particular targets had been attacked “to achieve a specific effect within the parent system.” Deptula himself was away in Turkey commanding the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, but as an admiring biographer stresses, “Deptula’s ideas guided planning and execution, though he was not present in the command structure.” Stealth bombers were once again given a leading role although one was shot down and another badly damaged (Serb radar could track it after all), along with every available tool of ISR, which now included a growing fleet of Predator drones.

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See also specific agencies and methods automation of analysis budget investigations of WWII and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) intelligence authorization bill (1998) Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation (ICEX) international law Internet Relay Chat Iran Iran-Contra affair Iraq bombing of 1991 cell phones and Gulf War of 1990–91 IEDs and no-fly zones war of 2003–11 Iraqi army Irish Republican Army (IRA) Iryani, Abdul Ghani al- Isacson, Adam ISAF press releases ISIS Islah party Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan Israel Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Israeli Aircraft Industries Israeli Supreme Court “Israel’s Lessons for Fighting Terrorists” (Dicter and Byman) Italy ITT Jabar, Maulvi Jaber, Salim bin Ali Jaber, Walid bin Ali Jackson, Michael Jahangir, Asma James, Larry Jan, Ahmed Janko, Abdul Rahim al- Japan Jasons Johnson, Lyndon B.

Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge

Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, European colonialism, failed state, friendly fire, Golden arches theory, IFF: identification friend or foe, jobless men, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, old-boy network, operational security, Potemkin village, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, walking around money

Defense Department officials and diplomats had negotiated overflight rights, access to airstrips, and refueling stops in remote locations along the southern rim of the former Soviet empire. I had boarded the Afghanistan-bound C-17 at Incirlik Air Force Base, an American base in southeastern Turkey that was the home to aircraft enforcing Operation Northern Watch, the no-fly zone over northern Iraq. Incirlik was a well-established base. The Air Force had occupied the place since the Cold War, and the base was laid out in a neat suburban grid. It looked like Abilene, Texas. I arrived at Incirlik on a Civil Reserve flight, a commercial airliner chartered by the military. As the plane taxied in at Incirlik, the arriving U.S. troops puzzled over their travel orders, trying to get a fix on their final destination.

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When allied forces and relief workers scouted the region in early April 1991, they estimated that as many as a thousand people a day were dying of disease and exposure in the mountains along the Turkish border. Garner led an improvised task force of NATO troops to help protect the civilians, deliver food aid, and set up refugee camps. It was a muscular model of postwar disaster relief. U.S. military aircraft enforced a no-fly zone overhead, keeping Iraqi government forces in check and delivering relief supplies by air. Garner, then a major general, led Joint Task Force–Bravo, a multinational contingent built around the Twenty-fourth Marine Expeditionary Unit, to the town of Zakho.* His task was to prepare the town for an influx of Kurdish refugees coming down from the mountains.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

The economy, sluggish since the Asian crisis of 1998, continued to idle along, which only added to the political tension. As elections approached in July 2011, the thinking in Bangkok was that if the red shirts prevailed, the military would intervene again, setting off another cycle of confrontation. Thailand—the 1990s darling of global investors—had become a financial no-fly zone. A colleague of mine described the staples of the stagnant Thai economy as “rice, tapioca, and massage,” and he wasn’t entirely joking. No one saw the new regime coming. Just a month before the 2011 elections, Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin’s younger sister, wasn’t even on the political radar. A businesswoman and major player in Thaksin’s party, she had insisted she would not be a prime-ministerial candidate.

…

It is working to bring the vast swaths of formerly rebel-held territory back into play, and to exploit the country’s long-standing strengths, including a highly literate population and an advantageous location along key shipping routes to India and China. Most economists tend to ignore war because their data sets don’t capture it. The numbers may say a lot about prices and debt, but on the subject of what body counts or no-fly zones can do to growth they are usually silent. Markets are especially bad at foreseeing the financial implications of war—the most famous example, of course, is World War I, which took most investors entirely by surprise, leaving many with heavy losses despite the highly visible buildup of standing armies across Europe.

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, centre right, critical race theory, DeepMind, disinformation, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, kremlinology, liberal world order, light touch regulation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, the scientific method, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

After the humiliating defeat in Kuwait, they assumed the Iraqi army would seize the radio stations and install a sensible general. They waited, and kept on waiting because once a totalitarian regime is secure its totalitarian methods prevent its overthrow. With Saddam clearly going nowhere, the US, UK and France tried other remedies. No-fly zones were established. They helped the Kurds in the north escape Baathist rule, but brought no good to the rest of the country. Sanctions were imposed which wiped out legitimate businesses while allowing black marketeers to flourish. The United Nations tried to relieve the suffering by establishing an ‘oil-for-food’ programme.

…

In his speeches he declared that it was foolish to regard Iraq as a sovereign nation whose internal affairs were its own business, and not only because of the crimes against humanity the Baathists had committed. Iraq’s political system was now the responsibility of the international community, he argued. The United Nations had imposed sanctions and no-fly zones but had left Saddam Hussein in power. Iraqis were ruled by the Baathists, and punished because the Baathists ruled them. His audiences tut-tutted and offered what sympathy they could. Few had the faintest idea what to do. At the end of a talk in Washington DC, a well-dressed middle-aged man with a lined face and an intense gaze approached Makiya and offered him an apology.

Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage by Jeff Guinn

Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

The Branch Davidians assumed it was another fleet of ATF gunners. In fact, they were helicopters from TV stations maneuvering for close-ups. It took some time for Lynch to reassure Martin that it was the media, rather than a fresh assault by ATF. The FAA promptly declared the skies over and around Mount Carmel to be a no-fly zone. ATF’s retreat had not been entirely complete. Agent Robert White assigned a few volunteers to set up perimeters, mostly around the southwest corner of the Mount Carmel property. It was intended as a first line of defense should the Branch Davidians launch an armed attack somewhere in the direction of Waco’s city limits.

…

* * * The news media, penned up two miles from the Branch Davidian property, could see very little of the action. “But you knew what was happening,” Carlton Stowers recalls. “We all knew that it wouldn’t end pretty.” Some cable and major news networks had long-range cameras on the ground and helicopters hovering on the edges of the Mount Carmel no-fly zone, so Americans all over the country were able to have a relatively unobstructed view of the chaotic proceedings. * * * About 9 a.m., bugs picked up Steve Schneider saying that he wanted to tell the FBI about Koresh’s progress in crafting the Seven Seals manuscript. Even with clouds of gas permeating much of Mount Carmel, the Branch Davidians still held some hope that if the FBI understood that Koresh was working hard and keeping his promise, agents might relent and keep their promise to wait until his writing was complete.

The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

A U.N. resolution passed in November 2002 stated that Saddam had been in ‘‘material breach’’ of every agreement since the end of the first Persian Gulf War. From time to time, it looked like the troops might be headed back. After Saddam was evicted from Kuwait in 1991, the United States pursued a policy of aggressive containment. U.S. and British warplanes flew sorties and bombed targets over two no-fly zones established in the north to protect the Kurds and in the south to protect the Shiite Muslims. With the war over, the United Nations became concerned about deteriorating famine and diseases in the country, with catastrophe a real possibility. The thought was that domestic unrest would lead to Iraqis rising up to throw off the yoke of Saddam Hussein.

…

He continued to manipulate the Oil-for-Food program for his own gain, and used it to create divisions in the French, British, and Russian delegations to the United Nations to get economic sanctions lifted. He was amazingly successful in persuading the international community that his intents were peaceful. In Washington, George W. Bush was unconvinced. The president was not interested in economic embargos. The antiseptic notion of launching a cruise missile or having fighter pilots bomb in the no-fly zone was an option he categorically rejected. While the president was at Camp David with his senior advisors to discuss the Afghanistan war plans, Iraq was part of the agenda, and no meeting adjourned without discussion of the regime of Saddam Hussein and his role in the support of worldwide terrorism.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

They do this by stocking the news organizations with retired generals playing the role of “Military Analysts” that just so happen to also sit on the Board of Directors for some of these large weapons manufacturers. They speculate about the different ways of removing a certain dictator from power, clearing a batch of “terrorists” from a particular region, or imposing a “No Fly Zone” on a country that is not doing what the United States has instructed them to do. The media then leverages the implied trust that this former General has with the viewing audience to create a list of potential options that must be considered, then the permanent puppets that man the anchor desks close the doors to the echo chamber and pound away at these very limited options until the insanity starts to wear off and the concept of invading a country that has done nothing to the United States starts to seem like not only a reasonable option but a priority that needs to be put into action immediately.

…

Her response was what one would expect from a Globalist hellbent on redrawing the Middle East while thinning the herd and trying to justify their imperialist ambitions. A reprehensible statement that underscores the mentality of empire builders that operate under the philosophy that the ends always justify the means. Placing sanctions on countries and imposing “No-Fly Zones” is a passive- aggressive way of declaring war without actually doing so, and neither of those things makes Americans safer. Just stop and ask how placing sanctions on Syria makes the United States safer? It does not, and the suggestion that somehow it does is ludicrous. America has been involved in some kind of war during 225 out of the nation’s total 242 years of existence.

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, information security, Internet Archive, John Perry Barlow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

There were, however, other less alarmist yet cogent reasons for going to war that the administration could have emphasized that would have left it in a better political position after the war. The first and most important had to do with the untenability of the prewar sanctions regime and the costs it was incurring. Maintenance of no-fly zones over Iraq required a continuing U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia long after the time that Dick Cheney, as President George H. W. Bush's defense secretary, had promised U.S. forces would be withdrawn. It was the American presence that Osama bin Laden seemed to mind to a much greater extent than support for Israel or other Arab regimes.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

‘I think it is a very hard choice,’ Albright replied; nevertheless, she went on, ‘we think the price is worth it’.16 Sanctions were not the only steps taken against Iraq following the ceasefire. No-fly zones were imposed to the north of the 33rd parallel and to the south of the 36th parallel soon after the ceasefire was agreed – patrolled by nearly 200,000 armed overwatch sorties flown by US, French and British warplanes in the 1990s.17 These no-fly zones, which between them covered more than half of Iraqi territory, were ostensibly established to protect the Kurdish minority in the north and the Shīite population in the south.

…

Lambeth, The Unseen War: Allied Air Power and the Takedown of Saddam Hussein (Annapolis, 2013), p. 61. 18For an overview here, see C. Gray, ‘From Unity to Polarization: International Law and the Use of Force against Iraq’, European Journal of International Law 13.1 (2002), 1–19. Also A. Bernard, ‘Lessons from Iraq and Bosnia on the Theory and Practice of No-Fly Zones’, Journal of Strategic Studies 27 (2004), 454–78. 19Iraq Liberation Act, 31 October 1998. 20President Clinton, ‘Statement on Signing the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998’, 31 October 1998, PPPUS: William J. Clinton, 1998, pp. 1938–9. 21S. Aubrey, The New Dimension of International Terrorism (Zurich, 2004), pp. 53–6; M.

Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129 by Norman Polmar, Michael White

cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Maui Hawaii, no-fly zone, Seymour Hersh

The Soviet Navy had some knowledge of these capabilities, enough to realize that the SOSUS array connected by seafloor cable to the NavFac at Adak, Alaska, could detect a Petro-based submarine traveling eastward.10 Accordingly, the K-129 sailed south along 162°E to the 40th parallel and then turned eastward about March 3–4, toward her “holding” position some 1,000 nautical miles northwest of Oahu. The 40th parallel was significant because the U.S. Navy had established a “no-fly zone” between latitudes 39°N and 41°N, i.e., a distance of about 120 nautical miles. This zone was to avoid interference between P-3 Orion ASW/patrol aircraft flying out of Adak and Barber’s Point. The regular use of the 40th parallel for the east-west movement of Soviet diesel-electric submarines indicated that Soviet planners were aware of this restriction on U.S. airborne surveillance.

And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East by Richard Engel

East Village, friendly fire, invisible hand, Mohammed Bouazizi, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, satellite internet, Skype, Yom Kippur War

I remember sitting at home in February 2001, with a pile of newspapers in front of me, thinking that it was a month of grim foreboding. On February 6, Sharon trounced Barak in the Israel elections. Ten days later, President Bush sent twenty warplanes to attack five air defense installations in Baghdad because of increased targeting of allied planes policing “no-fly” zones over Iraq that were imposed after the 1991 Gulf War. Bush had been in office less than a month, and 9/11 was still seven months away. Arab nations accused him of focusing on Iraq when the real Middle East crisis was the bloody showdown between the Israelis and Palestinians. By this time, even before Sharon formally took office on March 7, 2001, the Second Intifada was gaining ugly momentum.

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Having alienated virtually everyone outside his country, Libyan strongman Muammar Gadhafi took to the radio one February evening to alert the citizens of Benghazi, in the east of the country, that his soldiers were advancing on the city in search of rebels. “Prepare yourselves for tonight. We will find you in your closets,” he warned. Fearing that Gadhafi was about to massacre huge numbers of his own people, the Arab League called for establishment of a no-fly zone over the country. The United States and its European allies seized the opportunity to push Resolution 1973 through the UN Security Council, a declaration that allowed Western powers to use “all necessary measures” to protect the Libyan people.4 That proved a broad enough mandate to allow NATO the political cover it needed to eventually bomb Gadhafi from power.

Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson

company town, Exxon Valdez, Fermat's Last Theorem, gravity well, hiring and firing, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, lateral thinking, no-fly zone, Occam's razor, Turing test, Zeno's paradox

Which was only appropriate; but Val had judged him on their first meeting to be a typical Washington politician, not really interested in the ice itself. She liked it that he seemed impressed. And had tried to drink from Don Juan Pond! The pilots could have flown up and over the peaks of the Olympus Range directly to their destination, but as the destination was a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a no-fly zone, the whole complex of Balham Valley, McKelvey Valley, the Insel Ridge (another Dais-like mid valley ridge), and Barwick Valley was off-limits to normal scientific investigation, all fly-overs, and all adventure treks. This was to try to keep a part of the Dry Valleys as uncontaminated as possible, for baseline comparisons with the other more intensively studied and therefore polluted valleys.

…

"Those are Pliocene diatoms, and they grew here. " He raised a mug to toast them. "Here in this cold frozen hell. " The conversation shifted to the day's work in the field, and a long discussion of what they would do the following day. Wade and Val would be hiking out in the afternoon, to make their rendezvous with a helicopter on the edge of the no-fly zone. The scientists would hike downvalley partway with them. Harry said, "We'll either find some Sirius above Lake Vashka, or else just have a day of shits and giggles. " "Shits and giggles?" Wade said. "Recreation, " Misha explained. "I hate that expression, " Val announced firmly. "As if if you're not doing science you're not doing anything.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, rolodex, Silicon Valley, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

His insurrectionary zeal was directed toward the United States, not toward his homeland. Many Saudis shared his hostility to the continuing American presence in the Kingdom, especially after Dick Cheney’s well-known pledge that they would leave. Ostensibly, the troops remained in order to enforce the UN-mandated no-fly zone over Iraq. By 1992, however, and certainly by 1993, there were enough new basing agreements in the region that the Americans could have withdrawn without jeopardizing their mission. But the Saudi bases were convenient and well appointed, and there didn’t seem to be a sufficiently pressing need to leave.

…

O’Neill went out to play a round of golf on the Quantico course. Suddenly everyone’s beepers went off. There had been a catastrophic explosion in Saudi Arabia, at the Khobar Towers military-housing complex in Dhahran. The building served as the barracks for the 4404th Airlift Wing, which was enforcing the no-fly zone in Iraq. Nineteen American soldiers had died and nearly four hundred other people were injured. O’Neill assembled a team of more than a hundred agents, support personnel, and members of various police agencies. The next day they were on an Air Force transport plane to Saudi Arabia. A few weeks later, O’Neill himself joined them, along with the director of the FBI, Louis Freeh.

The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease by Marc Lewis Phd

behavioural economics, deep learning, delayed gratification, helicopter parent, impulse control, language acquisition, meta-analysis, no-fly zone, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Walter Mischel

I had to score beforehand when I was about to visit my daughter. So a four-hour visit would become a two-hour visit.” Megan wouldn’t freak out: she was used to it. Then, back in the car, the question was whether to have another hit right now. It was so present, so inviting, in its neat plastic gift wrap. And it would be his last chance before entering the no-fly zone, Vera’s territory. But he was already really high, and he didn’t want to be too hyper. Being with Megan . . . that should be a mellow time, not laced with breathtaking ideas, talking a mile a minute. And Vera would be watching him until she finally went shopping or whatever it was she did. Better call her.

Home Grown by Joan Smith

autism spectrum disorder, Boris Johnson, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Columbine, Donald Trump, drone strike, G4S, ghost gun, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, no-fly zone, operational security, post-materialism, Shamima Begum, Skype

Salman attended a local boys’ school where he is remembered as a far from outstanding pupil, bullied by other kids and nicknamed ‘Dumbo’ for his protuberant ears. When the Arab Spring reached Libya in 2011, Ramadan returned to his home country, where rival rebel groups were fighting to overthrow Gaddafi. In March that year, a coalition of NATO countries, including the UK, began military intervention in Libya, imposing a no-fly zone amid claims that the regime was committing crimes against humanity. The dictator went on the run but was captured by rebels near the city of Sirte and murdered in a particularly brutal way in October 2011. Ramadan Abedi has always denied being a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a banned Islamist organisation, but the ISC report considers it ‘highly likely that Salman and Hashem’s extremist views were influenced by their father Ramadan and fostered by other members of their immediate family’.76 Ramadan had brought his children up in a strict Muslim household but Salman underwent a transformation in his father’s absence, drinking, smoking and going to parties.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer

crowdsourcing, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, no-fly zone, pre–internet, trade route, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks

Qaddafi claimed that Osama bin Laden had put “hallucinogenic drugs” in Libyans’ Nescafé to turn them into rebels, and vowed not to step down until he had cleaned Libya house by house of the “rats” and “cockroaches.” At other times he vowed to die like a “martyr.” NATO forces, acting on a United Nations Security Council resolution, enforced a no-fly zone in Libyan airspace and attacked Qaddafi’s army. NATO bombs pulverized barracks, TV stations, communications towers, and Qaddafi’s residential compound in Tripoli. Haidara was astonished by the reversal of Qaddafi’s fortunes. Five years earlier the Libyan leader had made a state visit to Timbuktu—a three-day affair at the height of Qaddafi’s regional influence that had served as a showcase of his most erratic and megalomaniacal tendencies.

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton

Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Madoff, business climate, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, impulse control, iterative process, John Nash: game theory, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, place-making, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game

, Karim discovered that the application of a technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)5 to the part of the brain implicated in moral decision making, the anterior prefrontal cortex, elevated participants’ lying quotient. It gave them a higher Lie Q. Precisely why this should be the case is not immediately obvious, and researchers are considering their options. But one possibility is that TMS-induced inhibition of the anterior prefrontal cortex implements the restriction of a neural no-fly zone over conscience, sparing the liar the distractions of moral conflict. Such a hypothesis is consistent with research on psychopaths. We know from previous studies, for instance, that psychopaths have reduced gray matter in the anterior prefrontal cortex—and recent analysis using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI),7 conducted by Michael Craig and his coworkers at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, has also revealed reduced integrity of the uncinate fasciculus: the axonal tract (a kind of neural aqueduct) connecting the prefrontal cortex and amygdala.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

The rule of thumb in civil aviation is that a typical air accident is the result of seven human errors. Each mistake on its own may be harmless, even trivial, but string them together and the net effect can be lethal. Flying modern fighter jets, with their fiendishly complex computer systems, is an especially risky business. While enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya in 2011, a US F-15E crashed outside Benghazi after a mechanical failure. A month earlier, two F-16s from the Royal Thai air force fell from the sky during a routine training exercise. What was surprising about the Typhoon incident over the North Sea was not that it happened but how Patounas reacted: he told everyone about his mistake.

Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, War Photographer by Alan Huffman

blood diamond, British Empire, friendly fire, illegal immigration, no-fly zone, satellite internet, Skype

I’m grateful to my literary agent, Patty Moosbrugger, who helped me work through many iterations of the proposal for this book and enthusiastically represented it; to Morgan Entrekin at Grove Atlantic, who is everything a writer fantasizes a publisher to be, and who got what this book is about; to my editor Peter Blackstock, who is a pleasure to work with, in every way; to associate publisher Judy Hottensen, director of publicity Deb Seager, and senior publicist Jodie Hockensmith, all at Grove Atlantic; to my fact-checker, April Simpson; and to my publicist, Scott Manning. Finally, I’m grateful to friends and family who encouraged and supported me, put me up during my travels, fed my dog, fretted over me while I was gone, and respected the no-fly zone during the time I was sequestered at home, writing the book: Marcia and David Abbott; Daniel Allmon; Luke and Missy Bartkiewicz; Jessica Crawford; Irem Durdag; Stu Davey; Mike Davey; Robbyn Footlick; Lee and Dick Harding; Paul and Libby Hartfield; Les and Corinne Hegwood; Ryan Nave; Tritta Neveleff and Hamp Shive; John McLeod; Ozgur Oral; Neil and Catherine Payne; Judy and John Seymour; Pam and Buzz Shoemaker; Andy and Jimmye Sweat; Chris Walker; Scottie and Melissa Harmon.

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial rule, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Donald Trump, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Earth, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

He invaded Kuwait in 1990, earning the condemnation of the United Nations. In January 1991, there was a military response from an international coalition led by the United States, including Egypt, France, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom. Saddam was forced out of Kuwait. Internationally, Iraq was humiliated: slapped with no-fly zones and ruinous sanctions, banned from developing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Internally, it was stricken with rebellions. Saddam put these down brutally. As president, Saddam modelled himself partially on Joseph Stalin. Both were peasant outsiders who, with exceptional ruthlessness, had made their way to the top.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

* It is not a subject for this book, but I was in favor of the effort to oust Saddam Hussein, though I argued from the start for a much larger force and an internationally sanctioned intervention and occupation. My reasoning was mostly related to the fact that Western policy toward Iraq had collapsed—sanctions were leaking, countless civilians were dying because of the embargo, Al Qaeda was enraged by our base in Saudi Arabia, from which we operated the no-fly zone—and I believed that a more modern and moderate Iraq in the middle of the Arab world would help break the dysfunctional political dynamics of the Arab world. I opposed, from the first few weeks, Washington’s occupation policies. In retrospect, I underestimated not merely the administration’s arrogance and incompetence but also the inherent difficulty of the task.

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, antiwork, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, emotional labour, feminist movement, gentrification, hiring and firing, immigration reform, independent contractor, informal economy, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, new economy, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, precariat, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, The Chicago School, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, women in the workforce

If workers at nursing homes not selected by the employer called 775 and wanted help forming a union, the union would be bound to decline. New Labor has a term for agreeing to create large geographic areas (an entire state, or perhaps a region of the U.S.) in which workers have no right to form a union, even if workers want one: establishing no-fly zones. In Washington, Rolf embraced the deal immediately, although it would take another year or two before the final “Agreement to Advance the Future of Nursing Home Care in Washington” could be ironed out. Bigger states, such as California, were a priority for the employers (and therefore for Stern).18 In 2005 the union and Rolf set to work implementing the agreement, and the deal was finalized between Local 775 and Washington state nursing-home employers in 2006.19 That same year, not coincidentally, 775 lobbied hard for, and secured, sufficient increases in nursing-home funding to make it possible under the secret accord to unionize nursing homes, under what was called Phase I of the employer agreement.

After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine by Antony Loewenstein, Ahmed Moor

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, drone strike, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, land reform, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, one-state solution, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, young professional

Writing in April 2011, an analyst in Gaza argued: The raising of the Palestinian flag in Tahrir Square in front of the Israeli embassy in Cairo was an important reason why the recent [March 2011] aggression on the Gaza Strip stopped after it became clear to the Israeli government that Egypt, its leadership and people, reject any Israeli aggression on Gaza. Also the role played by the Egyptian Foreign Ministry in curbing the attacks was very important as well as the decision made by the Arab League asking the UN Security Council for a no-fly zone over Gaza.63 He later wrote that during the March 2011 offensive on Gaza, Egypt sent a message to Tel Aviv through the EU, which stated the following: “Gaza is the backyard of Egyptian national security. Therefore we consider any attack on Gaza now as a direct threat to Egypt. ... War on Gaza is not allowed anymore.”64 Egyptian intervention also ended Israel’s retaliatory attack against Gaza in August after eight Israelis were killed and another thirty wounded in an attack by militants in southern Israel.

Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World by Nicholas Schou

airport security, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fixed income, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, index card, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, no-fly zone, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea

So many people had converged on Laguna Canyon that by the end of the first day there was no food left. Shields tried to hire a helicopter to deliver food at the concert, but after calling every airport in Southern California, he concluded that the Federal Aviation Administration had declared Laguna Beach a no-fly zone. “They probably did that because of the plane that dropped all the acid,” he says. “We needed food, so I drove up to L.A. and bought a bunch of veggie burgers and avocados and tomatoes and fruit. With Fred Lewis’s help, Shields spoke with the National Guard, loaded up two or three trucks and drove around the blockades.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

Yet the dreams of science fiction readers hardly mattered to the people who controlled the space program. This was no time for the United States, at that moment enjoying a period of global hegemony, to lose its ability to get to orbit. The military desperately wanted access to space, especially in its new role as something of a global police force in the post-Soviet, pre-9/11 era. Enforcing a no-fly zone over Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the most active military mission at the time, relied on satellite communications and imaging and positioning technology. Without the ability to maintain a constellation of satellites in orbit, the United States would be in no position to project military force around the world.

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

The precious conference badge gives attendees access to restricted and highly secured areas. During the WEF, Davos is the number-one terrorist target in the world: 5,000 heavily armed police officers and soldiers guard the village and man barbed-wired checkpoints. Masked snipers parole the rooftops, and fighter jets sit on alert to protect the no-fly zone. The security team controls the chaos with Swiss precision. Only officially credentialed participants are granted access, all of whom—except heads of state—must leave their bodyguards at the door and wait in line with everyone else. There is no preferential treatment for the upper echelons here.

Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

The parliamentary inquiry into the ongoing atrocities supported lavishly by Washington perhaps received oblique acknowledgment in a report by New York Times bureau chief Stephen Kinzer on Turkey’s current progress, shown by the military’s willingness to permit films that “portray the torture that was widespread in military prisons” in the early 1980s.5 Nevertheless, despite the great success achieved by some of the most violent state terror of the 1990s, military operations continue, while Kurds are still deprived of elementary rights.6 On April 1, 2000, 10,000 Turkish troops began new ground sweeps in the regions that had been most devastated by the US-Turkish terror campaigns of the preceding years, also launching another offensive into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish guerrilla forces (PKK)—in a no-fly zone where Kurds are protected by the US air force from the (temporarily) wrong oppressor. Asked about the renewed operations in Iraq, State Department spokesperson James Rubin said that US “policy remains the same. We support the right of Turkey to defend itself against PKK attacks, so long as its incursions are limited in scope and duration and fully respect the rights of the civilian inhabitants of the region”; he declined to answer the question whether Turkey had been “attacked,” stating only that the US had no “independent confirmation” of Turkish military operations in this region of intense surveillance and regular US bombardment.7 As the renewed Turkish campaigns were beginning, Secretary of Defense William Cohen addressed the American-Turkish Council, a festive occasion with much laughter and applause, according to the government report.8 He praised Turkey for taking part in the humanitarian bombing of Yugoslavia, apparently without embarrassment, and announced that Turkey had been invited to join in co-production of the new Joint Strike Aircraft, just as it has been co-producing the F-16s that it used to such good effect in approved varieties of ethnic cleansing and atrocities within its own territory, as a loyal member of NATO.

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climategate, collapse of Lehman Brothers, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, immigration reform, microaggression, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, obamacare, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, source of truth, systems thinking

None of us can amass sufficient expertise on such a range of topics. Political parties are shortcuts. The APSA report called them “indispensable instruments of government,” because they “provide the electorate with a proper range of choice between alternatives of action.” We may not know the precise right level for taxes, or whether it makes sense to create a no-fly zone over Syria, but we know whether we support the Democratic, Republican, Green, or Libertarian Party. The act of choosing a party is the act of choosing whom we trust to transform our values into precise policy judgments across the vast range of issues that confront the country. “For the great majority of Americans,” the authors write, “the most valuable opportunity to influence the course of public affairs is the choice they are able to make between the parties in the principal elections.”

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

At Amazon Prime Air, which has offices in Seattle, Tel Aviv, Cambridge, England, and Paris, Roth and his team are building a wholly automated system—no air traffic controllers—to keep the drones out of the way of planes and helicopters and other drones. The system will also allow the FAA to track the drones and to create no-fly zones during emergencies. If drones start frequenting the skies, Amazon can expect serious blowback from local communities. Some worry about privacy—are the cameras on the drones being used to spy on people? Drone makers say the cameras are low resolution and only meant to aid in navigation and to improve the drone’s performance.

Reaper Force: The Inside Story of Britain’s Drone Wars by Dr Peter Lee

crew resource management, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital map, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, QWERTY keyboard, Skype

With a combination of a degree of talent, patient instructors, good fortune, struggling through the difficult sorties and repeating a record number, and being in the right place at the right time, he came through and, in 1997, was flying Tornado GR1 ground attack fast jets. Johnny was soon combat ready, followed by an immediate deployment to Turkey where he would fly over Northern Iraq and help to enforce the No-Fly Zone against Saddam Hussein’s regime. At least he would have gone immediately to Turkey if he hadn’t been bitten by Eric, the squadron’s pet Rock Python. More interesting stuff happened to him over the next few years, including his involvement in the 1999 Kosovo air campaign. But anyone daft enough to be bitten by a Rock Python (twice) doesn’t deserve to have all the details told.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Only now was he ready to dig out the cockpit video and tell me what really happened. * * * ON THE MORNING of April 4, 1994, my dad took off from an air base at the foot of the Dolomites. He was dreading the flight. It was his last sortie. He had been sleeping in a tent for three months, enforcing the no-fly zone over Bosnia. But in a few days his F-18 squadron was fixing to go home without having fired a shot, and not for lack of targets; Serbs were slaughtering Muslims in the foggy villages below. My dad and his wingman flew southeast, over the town of Goražde. Serb tanks and armored personnel carriers had swept into the town from the south, shelling Muslims living north of the bridge.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

Later, when colleagues on that same trip went after Kerry for reacting after Matt Drudge published an unsubstantiated rumor that Kerry had a mistress, I made the mistake of asking other reporters on the plane why we were giving this story life without first doing any work to see if it was true. Reporters took in the treacherous fact that I was doing a story on us with varying degrees of fury. “This,” one reporter said to me, waving a hand across the press seats in the Kerry campaign plane, “is a fucking no-fly zone, dude.” After that incident, the Kerry campaign (which had been victim to the Drudge bumrush) acquiesced to demands from other trail reporters, and had me sent to the back of the plane with the techies and documentarian Alexandra Pelosi. This should have struck me as a vivid demonstration of the unnatural relationship between campaigns and press corps, and of the group policing instinct that also led campaign reporters to school candidates in various unwritten political rules about “nuance” and “likability.”

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

Some parties opt to hire groups of aerostats for parties, docking them to increase the space for their guests, but most guests prefer to spend their time alone, contemplating the white peaks. The combination of a staggeringly high price tag, the near-complete physical isolation from civilization, and a rigorously enforced no-fly zone surrounding the area has resulted in High Dragon becoming the favored destination of the ultra-rich on Earth (but perhaps not off it). Of course, the fact that rising sea levels have placed the remaining desirable island resorts under UN stewardship hasn’t harmed High Dragon’s prospects. Only the richest 0.05 percent in the world could reasonably afford to visit High Dragon.

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton

bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, crack epidemic, Edward Snowden, fake news, gentrification, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, Ross Ulbricht, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the market place, trade route, Travis Kalanick, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

But what choice did he have? It wasn’t like he could go out west to Silicon Valley and get a job at a start-up. After the bubble had popped a few years earlier, companies that had been built on a wing and a prayer had siphoned people’s retirements into thin air and collapsed, leaving San Francisco a metaphorical no-fly zone. What about going east? Wasn’t there opportunity on Wall Street for someone as clever as Ross? No way. The banks were collapsing from the housing market crash. And he certainly couldn’t settle down and live happily ever after with his girlfriend; his dream of marriage and a white picket fence had been bulldozed by several other men.

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

bread and circuses, carbon footprint, clean water, commons-based peer production, failed state, impulse control, machine translation, megaproject, negative equity, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, semantic web, sexual politics, social software, space junk, starchitect, stem cell, supervolcano, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

George was a merchant and a fixer, never the kind of man she liked. Yet George, for all his countless demerits, had a definite rapport for ubiquitous systems. George had a positive genius for handling border delays, security compliances, fuel costs, detours on the planet’s weather-shattered roads and bridges, documentation hurdles, no-fly zones and confiscatory carbon-footprint taxes, port congestion, cargo security, regulations both in-state and offshore, liaisons with manufacturers, out-sized and overweight shipping modules … Boring things, dull things. Yet George could ship things to her, and that mattered. Bravery mattered much less.

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

availability heuristic, behavioural economics, book value, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equal pay for equal work, experimental economics, experimental subject, feminist movement, game design, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, index card, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, Linda problem, loss aversion, market bubble, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, no-fly zone, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Potemkin village, power law, price anchoring, price discrimination, psychological pricing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, social intelligence, starchitect, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, ultimatum game, working poor

Perhaps they didn’t much in the world of our distant ancestors. But things have changed in the past few millennia (a blink of the eye in evolutionary terms). Inventions like writing, numbers, law, and money have introduced new types of challenges. Today’s conflicts are resolved by committing to a number—a price, a wage, a boundary, a no-fly zone—that casts a shadow far into the future. In these situations, we can have cause to regret the arbitrary in our choosing and pricing. As Tversky and Kahneman wrote, “Incoherence is more than skin deep.” Ward Edwards lived long enough to see his reputation eclipsed by those of his former students.

Halting State by Charles Stross

augmented reality, book value, Boris Johnson, call centre, forensic accounting, game design, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, Ken Thompson, lifelogging, Necker cube, no-fly zone, operational security, Potemkin village, RFID, Schrödinger's Cat, Vernor Vinge, zero day

Then you fiddle with the menus in the MilSpec glasses Kemal gave you until you dredge up a local CopSpace overlay so you can see what the hell’s going on. Your earlier diagnosis of a traffic clusterfuck is confirmed: Flashing red diversion routes are springing up all over the north side of the city like chicken-pox. Overhead, a vast swirly cylinder delineates a no-fly zone—they’re diverting flights in and out of Turnhouse, airliners that would normally be on final approach over the Firth of Forth. You wince, involuntarily. What do they think— Whoops. You’re halfway along the block, behind Liz, and now you notice a bunch of support vehicles parked just round the corner: fire engines, a fire brigade support truck, a couple of ambulances, and the big mobile HQ from Fettes Row.

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

What they don’t consider is the degree to which the West has become dependent on the internet and automation—vastly more than adversaries like North Korea or even Russia. “As one of the most connected nations, we’re more dependent and more exposed,” Corman said. “And we stand to lose much more.” Instead of a full Geneva-style answer, though, Corman advocates a narrower set of rules: no cyberattacks on hospitals, for instance—what he calls a “cyber no-fly zone” around medical targets. “Fine, just say hacking hospitals, deliberately or otherwise, constitutes a war crime,” Corman said. “Cyber’s gonna cyber, but you better be damn flawless in your execution. You fuck up and hit a hospital, you get the international war crime, you’re going to The Hague.” Of course, any debate over those diplomatic measures remains academic.

War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line by David Nott

Desert Island Discs, Kickstarter, Live Aid, no-fly zone, Skype

The Americans promised to supply arms to the FSA but insisted on vetting the groups who’d be receiving the weapons – nervous that high-tech hardware such as anti-aircraft missiles might end up in the hands of extremists. As a result, very few weapons got through, and Assad’s warplanes and helicopter gunships could continue to rain down missiles onto civilian areas and rebel bases. The international community also refused to enforce a no-fly zone over the areas of northern Syria held by the rebels. Assad had pulled a clever trick. In denouncing the protests against him in spring 2011, he claimed they were the work of radical Islamic extremists rather than ordinary Syrians who felt they should have the right to choose their own government.

Effendi by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

clean water, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, no-fly zone, sensible shoes

Instantly the camera crews moved closer, unleashing a firestorm of flashguns and shouted questions. “Not like that,” Raf said as he slapped down the gun. “Get on the wire and ground that piece of shit.” “Sure thing,” said Ahmed, tapping his throat mike. “What do I tell them, Boss?” “Tell them that, as of now, airspace over El Iskandryia is a no-fly zone. No overflights, nothing. Tell the pilot if he’s not landed in one minute we’ll blast him out of the sky. Final warning.” “No overflights . . . What about the airport?” “Close it.” The flash and arc lights didn’t bother Raf, he just recalibrated his vision and kept walking towards the blank-eyed cameras.

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed by Ben R. Rich, Leo Janos

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business climate, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

During Operation Desert Storm, the U-2 overflights monitored Iraqi tank movements, and its side-band radar proved effective in revealing the presence and configuration of enemy mine fields. In January 1993, when the outgoing Bush administration decided to bomb Saddam Hussein’s missile batteries in the southern “no-fly” zone, the U-2 was once again providing the vital intelligence data preliminary to the bombing. On the day before the bombing raid, I received a call at home from an official of the CIA. “Ben,” he said, “we just got a call from President-elect Clinton. He wants to know the altitude of the U-2. No one at this end is sure, so I thought I’d go straight to the horse’s mouth.”

A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout by Carl Safina

addicted to oil, big-box store, book value, carbon tax, clean water, cognitive dissonance, energy security, Exxon Valdez, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jones Act, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Piper Alpha, Ronald Reagan

My sister’s been helping, too, and her e-mails are getting kicked back to her. I’m not paranoid, but what if somebody’s interfering with our communications? Do you know how I could find out? Since the day the president came through, my phone really hasn’t worked very well. I don’t know. But that’s what’s happened.” “Every time the oil moves, they change the no-fly zone. They don’t want us to see.” “How many notebooks do you fill up before you have a book?” “Karen’s trying to get her kids out of town. There’s nothing for them to do. Everything we do is sailin’, crabbin’, boatin’, shrimpin’, surfin’.” “I’m really worried about Lori; these dolphins are like her children.”

Discover Maui by Lonely Planet

California gold rush, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, land reform, Maui Hawaii, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, sustainable-tourism, trade route

It looks damn hard and certainly takes stamina, but if you already know how to ride a board, there’s a good chance you’ll master it quickly. According to surf legend Robby Naish, who pioneered kitesurfing, it’s the most accessible of all extreme sports. There’s no better place to learn than on Maui’s Kite Beach, at the western end of Kanaha Beach Park. Visiting kitesurfers need to check with locals to clarify the no-fly zones. Get the lowdown from the Maui Kiteboarding Association (www.mauikiteboardingassociation.com) and Maui Kitesurfing Community (www.mauikitesurf.org) . Outrigger Canoeing Polynesians were Hawaii’s first settlers, paddling outrigger canoes across 2000 miles of open ocean – so you could say canoeing was Hawaii’s earliest sport.

In the Company of Heroes by Michael J. Durant, Steven Hartov

Adam Curtis, back-to-the-land, friendly fire, job satisfaction, no-fly zone, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, trade route, urban sprawl

Between the No Fly Line and the DMZ is a strip, varying in width, into which unmarked air corridors are cut. If we had to, we could fly up into those corridors, just teasing the DMZ, and execute evacuations. There were many of these corridors laid out all across the peninsula. Every medevac pilot had to memorize the corridor layout, be able to cruise the No Fly Zone, fly up into each corridor, and return unscathed. There were no red flags or warning signs marking the DMZ below. If you crossed the point of no return, the South Koreans were supposed to fire warning shots across your nose. But if you were off your game, the North Koreans would happily let you come across, shoot you down, and take you, your crew, and your chopper captive—providing you survived the crash.

One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer by Fick, Nathaniel C.(October 3, 2005) Hardcover by Nathaniel C. Fick

clean water, defense in depth, double helix, dual-use technology, friendly fire, John Nash: game theory, Khyber Pass, no-fly zone, Silicon Valley

Dozens of white tents stood in rows. No electricity, no hot food, and no showers for at least another week. We stood outside the tents, bemoaning our loss of Commando’s comforts, when an F-16 fighter jet screamed overhead waggling its wings. The jet was returning from a patrol over Iraq’s southern no-fly zone, and the pilot decided to motivate us. It worked. We started carving out a place for ourselves at Matilda and planning our training for the coming weeks. I woke up early one morning a week later, enjoying the silence in the tent. The platoon lived together in its own tent, while Gunny Wynn lived separately with the other staff NCOs, and I lived with the junior officers.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

In July 2014, escalating conflicts in Iraq involving ISIS led Emirates to stop overflying Iraq; other major airlines continue to do so but at increased heights. Wheeler, cited in Sunshine Coast Daily, 18 July 2014, sunshinecoastdaily.com. 2Political theorist Mark Neocleous, remarking on the importance of the no-fly zone in contemporary policing and counter-insurgency war, observes that ‘one of the remarkable features of contemporary official discourse concerning air power is that it openly looks back and seeks to learn from the use of air power in colonial pacification campaigns of the 1920s.’ Mark Neocleous, ‘Police Power, All the Way to Heaven’, Radical Philosophy 182, November/December 2013, p. 5. 3In 2011, fully 24 per cent of the world’s 125,000 construction cranes were in the Gulf region. 4Geraldine Bedell, ‘Burj Khalifa: A Bleak Symbol of Dubai’s Era of Bling’, Observer, 10 January 2010. 5Ibid. 6Like most words describing status, quality, power or achievement, ‘supreme’ is itself a vertical metaphor.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It is the unusual story of one country with two currencies, or, perhaps more accurately, a country divided into two halves, one of which had a government and a badly run currency and the other, which had no government but a stable currency. At the time of the First Gulf War in 1991, the Iraqi currency was the dinar. Following the war, Iraq was divided into two parts that were politically, militarily and economically separate from each other: southern Iraq was under the control of Saddam Hussein, and northern Iraq, protected by a no-fly zone north of the 36th Parallel, became a de facto Kurdish protectorate. In the south, Saddam’s regime struggled to cope with UN sanctions, and resorted to printing money to finance growing budget deficits. Unable to import notes printed abroad because of sanctions, the official Iraqi government started to print new notes that bore Saddam’s image.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins

barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Columbine, content marketing, deskilling, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, game design, George Gilder, global village, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, no-fly zone, profit motive, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SimCity, slashdot, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, the market place, Y Combinator

I f W K L P is firmly resolved on the 11/10 episode we will all be in for a huge let down. Even those who guessed right will only celebrate and gloat briefly and then be left empty inside." Television would have to become more sophisticated if it wanted to keep up with its most committed viewers. space because the security-conscious Burnett negotiates a "no fly zone" policy over the location. D a n uses the C o m Sat (Communications Satellite) images and sophisticated topographical maps to refine his understanding of the core locations. Meanwhile, Wezzie researches the ecosystem and culture. Everything she learns ends u p on Survivor maps and becomes a resource for the fan community.

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Even the Soviet Union condemned Saddam, with Gorbachev remarking that the weapons it had sold to Iraq were intended for its defense, not to invade its neighbors.2 Saddam remained afloat for over a decade by manipulating the UN oil for food program while sanctions degraded the public health system and prevented an opposition from incubating. Western containment was more like “infanticide masquerading as politics.”3 The U.S.-imposed northern and southern no-fly zones effectively cut Saddam off from those resource-rich regions, whose current struggle to return to a pre-Iraq past through a sovereign future is playing itself out in a repeat of what Sir Arnold Wilson described as Mesopotamia’s “anarchy plus fanaticism…with little or no nationalism.”4 Since individual Iraqis pledge their loyalty to clan, ethnicity, or sect over state, the promises of federalism failed to stem the civil war that has accelerated the country’s re-Balkanization—including ethnic cleansing, mass emigration, and population exchange—through which a Kurdistan, Shi’astan, and Sunnistan are gradually coming to life.

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

He introduced Bokan to Montenegro’s leading politicians and businessmen, including the ambitious young prime minister, Milo Djukanovic. Linked by an entrepreneurial spirit, the two men were soon exploring possible areas of cooperation. The Black Pirate, as Bokan was known, had recently acquired two Ilyushin 76 transporter planes. At first, this looked like a poor investment, as NATO had imposed a no-fly zone over Serbia and Montenegro. But Bokan had uncovered a loophole that allowed planes to land in Montenegro “for technical purposes.” With help from his new Montenegrin friends, Bokan came up with his billion-dollar idea—selling untaxed cigarettes to the Italian Mafia. Bokan filled his cavernous Ilyushins with cigarettes imported to one of the free trade zones in Europe direct from the factories of all major tobacco manufacturers in America and Western Europe.

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

Operations undertaken by Western military forces are much more expensive than UN operations drawing on troops from poorer countries. In 1999, costs to deploy Western European NATO forces in Kosovo exceeded $125,000 per soldier per year, and for each American soldier, $200,000 per year. In Libya in 2011, a NATO-enforced no-fly zone cost more than $100 million just for the opening volley of cruise missiles. Russia and the other members of the CIS, which loosely ties together most of the former Soviet republics, have run four major peacekeeping operations—in Moldova, Tajikistan, and two in Georgia. These latter two cannot be considered successes, since the status quo there broke down in 2008 with a brief but intense war between Russia and Georgia.

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

The Balkans Business Bonanza Similar to the experience of MPRI, a major boost to BRS came from the crisis in former Yugoslavia. Brown and Root's initial business exposure to the Balkans war came in early 1995, when it deployed in support of Operation Deny Flight, under which U.S. planes patrolled the no-fly zone over Bosnia. BRS provided support services to the U.S. troops operating out of Aviano air base in Italy, with the contract amount running to S6.3 million.30 The biggest contract in the sector's history came later in 1995, when over 20,000 U.S. soldiers deployed to the region as part of the NATO IFOR peacekeeping mission.

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Recent activities undertaken by or with the assistance of AFRICOM include, for instance, the construction of school classrooms in Chad; research on “the Association of Sexual Violence and Human Rights Violations with Physical and Mental Health in Territories of the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo”; cattle vaccination in Uganda, designed to provide healthy cattle to internally displaced civilians returning to their homes; activities to combat drug trafficking through the West Africa Cooperative Security Initiative; and the construction of closed wells with solar power pumps in Senegal.10 Other AFRICOM initiatives included the establishment of an East African Malaria Task Force to combat “one of the biggest killers on the continent: the mosquito”;11 the creation of a news and information website aimed toward local audiences in the Maghreb, featuring “analysis, interviews and commentary by paid Magharebia correspondents”;12 the construction of a maternal and pediatric care ward at a Ugandan hospital; collaboration with Botswana’s military to “promote Botswana’s national program of education, HIV screening and male circumcision surgeries”; cooperation with the Sierra Leone Maritime Wing and Fisheries Ministry, “resulting in the apprehension of an illegally operating fishing vessel”;13 and, of course, counterpiracy efforts in collaboration with host country governments through the Africa Partnership Station (APS) and Africa Maritime Law Enforcement Partnership (AMLEP).14 AFRICOM also conducts or facilitates a wide range of other activities, some of them more traditional, including various counterterrorism programs run through “Operation Enduring Freedom—Trans Sahara” and a range of efforts to help capture Lord’s Resistance Army leaders in Central and East Africa. In 2011, AFRICOM coordinated its first large-scale military operation when President Obama approved Operation Odyssey Dawn, which aimed to enforce the U.N.-sanctioned no-fly zone in Libya and eliminate the Libyan government’s ability to threaten civilians.15 Whether AFRICOM represents a viable model for the future of the U.S. military naturally depends on your point of view. To traditionalists within the military, the AFRICOM approach is downright dangerous: it’s a slide away from the military’s core competencies, and the very apotheosis of mission creep.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

In other words, the dream of a tax reform that leaves “99 percent of the taxpayers with a lower tax bill” would guarantee that the United States continues to be unable to redistribute much to those falling behind. Tax reform needs to apply not solely to the ultra-rich, but also the merely rich and even the middle class. As things stand, this is a no-fly zone for US politicians on the left and the right. Proposing to raise taxes on (almost) everyone is not popular. In our survey, 48 percent of respondents thought small business owners paid too much in taxes, and less than 5 percent thought they paid too little. The same was true for salaried workers.4 The hardest part may be to persuade the average taxpayer in the United States to pay more and get more public services.

Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

different worldview, gravity well, independent contractor, Kuiper Belt, no-fly zone, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition

Embarrassed, he zipped back up. “Those ships don’t make any sense to me, Boss,” Alex said. “A half dozen ships flyin’ kamikaze missions with nukes strapped to their hulls might make a dent in a battlewagon like the Donnie, but not much else would. She opens up with her point defense network and rail guns, she can create a no-fly zone a thousand klicks across. They could be killin’ those six ships with torpedoes already, ’cept I think they’re as confused about who they are as we are.” “They’ll know they can’t catch us before the Donnager picks us up,” Holden said. “And they can’t take her in a fight. So I don’t know what they’re up to.”

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq by Peter R. Mansoor, Donald Kagan, Frederick Kagan

Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, HESCO bastion, indoor plumbing, land reform, no-fly zone, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, zero-sum game

Turkish officials announced that as many as ten thousand troops could be sent, a significant addition to the coalition force structure. The big question, however, was where the troops would be deployed. Turkey shares a 220-mile border with Iraq. U.S. aircraft operating from Turkey had launched air strikes against Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, and during the 1990s aircraft operating from Turkey had enforced the northern no-fly zone, which had ensured Kurdish autonomy. A Turkish ground force operating in Iraq, however, was a significantly different and politically much more delicate matter. The Turkish government wanted its forces to operate in the north in areas adjacent to its borders. This deployment would certainly ease logistical constraints on the Turkish army, but its real purpose undoubtedly was to enable Turkey to fight guerrillas from the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or pkk, on Iraqi soil.

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Some 25 to 30 million Kurds are scattered through those countries and eastern Turkey, and have long been discriminated against by governments in Ankara, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tehran. Kurds make up the largest ethnic group in the world without a country of their own. “Protecting” the Kurds was a major rationale for Washington’s pre-invasion embargo of Iraq, and from 1992 to the invasion in 2003 the US enforced a “no-fly zone” over Kurdish areas in Iraq’s north. It is therefore unexpected to read that the US has also actively aided the Turkish government’s counter-insurgency against the Kurds—a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people: The PKK [Kurdistan Workers Party], which seeks to carve off the primarily Kurdish portion of Eastern Turkey by force of arms has intensified its terrorist campaign in Turkey: over 150 Turkish security forces have died so far in 2006, a dozen in the past week alone.

The Gun by C. J. Chivers

air freight, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, G4S, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, Transnistria

Mahmoud was shot in spring 2002 in northern Iraq, a region that had been an all-but-forgotten seam in the wars in the Middle East. No one much noticed that day, though a new war was gathering. The American military had chased the Taliban from Kabul several months before, and President George W. Bush’s administration had switched focus. The northern portion of Iraq, loosely protected by a no-fly zone, was a semiautonomous Kurdish enclave, a statelet within a state, where Washington was quietly renewing engagement with the Kurds, seeking allies for the war ahead. Ryan Crocker, an American diplomat, had come to Sulaimaniya, capital of the eastern portion of the Kurdish zone, to meet with the officials of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, one of two principal Kurdish parties.

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, Columbine, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, independent contractor, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, multilevel marketing, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Seymour Hersh, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh, urban planning, vertical integration, zero-sum game

After shouting at her, Kelly recalled, the man calmed down and offered her tea at his home. To her, that was evidence that “even in Fallujah, there might have been a chance to build fair and friendly relations, in spite of the suffering inflicted on ordinary Iraqis. But those chances were increasingly squandered by maintenance of economic sanctions and eventual bombing of the no-fly zones.” When U.S. Forces rolled into Iraq in April 2003, it didn’t take long for them to pour gasoline on the already volatile anti-American rage born in Fallujah at least twelve years earlier. U.S. Special Forces took Fallujah in April, early on in the invasion, but soon left the city.12 Local Iraqis said they agreed to surrender the conservative Sunni city without a fight on the condition that U.S. troops would not occupy it for more than two days.13 As in many Iraqi communities, the people of Fallujah began to organize themselves and to take stock of the consequences of the earth-moving developments in their country.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

On this score, the Economist did not always give Barack Obama the credit he deserved, grumbling that he was too hesitant to use the hard power at his disposal. In Libya, all went well. When Arab Spring protests gave way to an armed rebellion against Muammar Qaddafi in February 2011, the paper called for a NATO-enforced no-fly zone from the start. Soon it was demanding aerial bombardments, a naval blockade and regime change – to guard ‘against the threat of butchery in Benghazi’ and give ‘a region of 350 million Arabs stuck in poverty and dysfunctional politics’ a ‘chance to come alive’. Such an attack was ‘unarguably legal’, based on a ‘helpfully elastic’ UN resolution ‘endorsing “all necessary measures” to protect civilian life’, opposed only by ‘the pacifist brigade’.112 Some 17,000 air sorties later, it was ‘a good war’ for NATO: admirably restrained, its pilots ‘keeping collateral damage to a minimum’, and with Europe supposedly in the lead of an operation essentially conducted by the US, a ‘template for future operations’.113 Concerning Syria, however, the president was a disappointment.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

Merely the appearance of a hostile intent to attack is enough; for example, they argue that if a radar targets a plane, the pilot can fire first, rather than simply waiting to be blown out of the sky. This expanded right of self-defense was used by the United States in the Gulf of Tonkin incident prior to the Vietnam War, the air battles with the Libyans in the Gulf of Sidra in the 1980s, and during the decade of airstrikes from 1991 to 2002 while enforcing the “no-fly zone” against Iraq. This question gets fuzzy, though, when the “self ” in self-defense is not a person but an unmanned system. Take the above incidents and substitute robotic drones for the planes piloted by humans. If an unmanned plane flying near the border of another nation is fired on, does it have the right to fire back at that nation’s missile sites and the humans behind them, even in peacetime?

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, centre right, deindustrialization, demand response, Desert Island Discs, endogenous growth, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, global village, greed is good, inflation targeting, lateral thinking, means of production, millennium bug, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, period drama, post-war consensus, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Britain, and the EU more generally, she said, ‘were like an accomplice to massacre’. The defence secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, dismissed her comments as ‘emotional nonsense’. Instead the British government steadfastly refused to become embroiled in the conflict. In international circles, the creation of a force to defend Croatia was proposed, a no-fly zone in Bosnia was suggested, air strikes against Bosnian Serbs were put forward. Britain objected to all, with the foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, singled out as the stumbling block to further intervention. ‘Any time there was a likelihood of effective action,’ observed Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the former Polish prime minister and now a UN emissary to Bosnia, ‘a particular Western statesman intervened to prevent it.’

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

Corvallis wondered if the authors of this hoax had waited for a cloudy day in Moab before pulling the trigger. He went up to the cockpit so that he could look out the windshield over the pilots’ shoulders. The weather was generally clear, but clouds were stuffed like cotton into low places in the landscape, including the valley of a prominent river that Corvallis assumed was the Colorado. No-fly zone or not, people could fly over Moab all day long and not be able to come back with a definitive answer as to whether it still existed. “We need to land,” Corvallis announced. “The Moab airport is closed,” Frank told him. Without thinking, Corvallis said what Dodge would have said: “I didn’t say anything about an airport.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Altogether, unfolding events throughout the region had demonstrated that social instability had become a critical factor for energy security. In Libya protests turned quickly into a civil war that divided the country between rebels in the east and Ghaddaffi forces in the west. As Ghaddaffi’s forces advanced on Benghazi and what seemed likely to be a bloodbath, the Arab League called for a no-fly zone, and U.S. and European forces, operating under U.N. and NATO authorization, intervened on the side of the rebels. By March of 2011, virtually all of Libya’s oil production was disrupted, removing about 1.5 percent of supplies from the market. But that, combined with rising demand, started to narrow once again spare capacity.