President Trump Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian Lawmakers. Rachel Maddow, Lester Holt, others, given sedatives: https://t.co/EeHbN5fdqN
— MARK SIMONE (@MarkSimoneNY) June 13, 2018
And so it begins....https://t.co/13Nx4aIu0n
— Judith Miller (@JMfreespeech) June 13, 2018
Despite its many flaws, the Singapore summit represents the start of a diplomatic process that takes us away from the brink of war, says @VictorDCha https://t.co/n5AHQmQV4z
— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) June 12, 2018
The best deterrent to nuclear war may be to understand what a single nuclear bomb is capable of doing — and to accept that the reality would be even worse than our fears https://t.co/6pC2AwDCnz
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) June 13, 2018
One of the greatest misconceptions about nuclear bombs is that they annihilate everything in sight, leaving nothing but a barren flatland devoid of shape and life. In truth, the physical destruction inflicted by a nuclear explosion resembles that of a combined hurricane and firestorm of unprecedented proportion. Consider one example: A ten-kiloton nuclear bomb detonated on the ground in Times Square would explode with a white flash brighter than the sun. It would be seen for hundreds of miles, briefly blinding people as far away as Queens and Newark. In the same moment, a wave of searing heat would radiate outward from the explosion, followed by a massive fireball, the core of which would reach tens of millions of degrees, as hot as the center of the sun.Keep reading.
When such a bomb explodes, everyone within 100 feet of ground zero is instantaneously reduced to a spray of atoms. There are photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki showing eerie silhouettes of people cast against a flat surface, such as a wall or floor. These are not, as is sometimes claimed, the remains of vaporized individuals, but rather a kind of morbid nuclear photograph. The heat of the nuclear explosion bleaches or darkens the background surface, except for the spot blocked by the person, leaving a corresponding outline. In some cases the heat released by the explosion will also burn the patterns of clothing onto people’s skin.
Near the center of the blast, the suffering and devastation most closely conform to the fictional apocalypse of our imaginations. This is what it would look like within a half-mile of Times Square: Few buildings would remain standing. Mountains of rubble would soar as high as 30 feet. As fires raged, smoke and ash would loft into the air. The New York Public Library’s stone guardians would be reduced to pebble and dust. Rockefeller Center would be an unrecognizable snarl of steel and concrete, its titanic statue of Prometheus — eight tons of bronze and plaster clad in gold — completely incinerated.
Within a half-mile radius of the blast, there would be few survivors. Those closest to the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have described the horrors they witnessed: People with ripped sheets of skin hanging from their bodies; people whose brains were visible through their shattered skulls; people with holes for eyes. Sakue Shimohira watched her mother’s charred body crumble into ash as she tried to wake her. Shigeko Sasamori’s father cut off the blackened husk of skin all over her face, revealing pools of pus beneath.
As the fireball travels outward from the blast, people, buildings, and trees within a one-mile radius would be severely burned or charred. Metal, fabric, plastic, and clay would ignite, melt, or blister. The intense heat would set gas lines, fuel tanks, and power lines on fire, and an electromagnetic pulse created by the explosion would knock out most computers, cell phones, and communication towers within several miles.
Traveling much farther than the fireball, a colossal pressure wave would hurtle forth faster than the speed of sound, generating winds up to 500 miles per hour. The shock wave would demolish the flimsiest buildings and strip the walls and roofs off stronger structures, leaving only their naked and warped scaffolding. It would snap utility poles like toothpicks and rip through trees, fling people through the air, and turn brick, glass, wood, and metal into deadly projectiles. A blast in Times Square, combined with the fireball, would carve a crater 50 feet deep at the center of the explosion. The shock wave would reach a diameter of nearly 3.2 miles, shattering windows as far as Gramercy Park and the American Museum of Natural History.
All this would happen within a few seconds.
Mossad agent Peter Malkin embarks on a covert mission to Argentina in 1960 to track down Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who masterminded the transportation logistics that brought millions of innocent Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.
Brown Eyed Girl
Van Morrison
10:24am
All Apologies
Nirvana
10:20am
Rapture
Blondie
10:15am
Rock 'N Me
The Steve Miller Band
10:12am
Clocks
Coldplay
10:07am
Don't Stop Believin'
Journey
10:03am
The Love Cats
The Cure
9:59am
(Oh) Pretty Woman
Van Halen
9:49am
Today
Smashing Pumpkins
9:45am
One Love/People Get Ready
Bob Marley
9:43am
Set Fire To The Rain
Adele
9:34am
American Girl
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
9:22am
Whip It
Devo
9:19am
Better Man
Pearl Jam
9:15am
You Make Lovin' Fun
Fleetwood Mac
9:11am
I'm not sure I've ever agreed with anything Charles Krauthammer ever wrote (there must surely have been something) but I always admired his confidence and his clarity of thought and expression. This is very sad news. https://t.co/xynlcHclwu— David Capie (@davidcapie) June 9, 2018
Indeed... but his 1990 Unipolar Moment is a good piece. "In perhaps another generation or so there will be great powers coequal with the United States, and the world will, in structure, resemble the pre-World War I era." https://t.co/Gde7pGlFwm— Charles Labrecque (@Charles2L) June 9, 2018
Ever since it became clear that an exhausted Soviet Union was calling off the Cold War, the quest has been on for a new American role in the world. Roles, however, are not invented in the abstract; they are a response to a perceived world structure. Accordingly, thinking about post-Cold War American foreign policy has been framed by several conventionally accepted assumptions about the shape of the post-Cold War environment.RTWT.
First, it has been assumed that the old bipolar world would beget a multipolar world with power dispersed to new centers in Japan, Germany (and/or "Europe"), China and a diminished Soviet Union/Russia. Second, that the domestic American consensus for an internationalist foreign policy, a consensus radically weakened by the experience in Vietnam, would substantially be restored now that policies and debates inspired by "an inordinate fear of communism" could be safely retired. Third, that in the new post-Soviet strategic environment the threat of war would be dramatically diminished.
All three of these assumptions are mistaken. The immediate post-Cold War world is not multipolar. It is unipolar. The center of world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies. Second, the internationalist consensus is under renewed assault. The assault this time comes not only from the usual pockets of post-Vietnam liberal isolationism (e.g., the churches) but from a resurgence of 1930s-style conservative isolationism. And third, the emergence of a new strategic environment, marked by the rise of small aggressive states armed with weapons of mass destruction and possessing the means to deliver them (what might be called Weapon States), makes the coming decades a time of heightened, not diminished, threat of war.
II
The most striking feature of the post-Cold War world is its unipolarity. No doubt, multipolarity will come in time. In perhaps another generation or so there will be great powers coequal with the United States, and the world will, in structure, resemble the pre-World War I era. But we are not there yet, nor will we be for decades. Now is the unipolar moment.
There is today no lack of second-rank powers. Germany and Japan are economic dynamos. Britain and France can deploy diplomatic and to some extent military assets. The Soviet Union possesses several elements of power-military, diplomatic and political-but all are in rapid decline. There is but one first-rate power and no prospect in the immediate future of any power to rival it.
Only a few months ago it was conventional wisdom that the new rivals, the great pillars of the new multipolar world, would be Japan and Germany (and/or Europe). How quickly a myth can explode. The notion that economic power inevitably translates into geopolitical influence is a materialist illusion. Economic power is a necessary condition for great power status. But it certainly is not sufficient, as has been made clear by the recent behavior of Germany and Japan, which have generally hidden under the table since the first shots rang out in Kuwait. And while a unified Europe may sometime in the next century act as a single power, its initial disarray and disjointed national responses to the crisis in the Persian Gulf again illustrate that "Europe" does not yet qualify even as a player on the world stage.
Which leaves us with the true geopolitical structure of the post-Cold War world, brought sharply into focus by the gulf crisis: a single pole of world power that consists of the United States at the apex of the industrial West. Perhaps it is more accurate to say the United States and behind it the West, because where the United States does not tread, the alliance does not follow. That was true for the reflagging of Kuwaiti vessels in 1987. It has been all the more true of the world's subsequent response to the invasion of Kuwait.
American preeminence is based on the fact that it is the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict in whatever part of the world it chooses to involve itself. In the Persian Gulf, for example, it was the United States, acting unilaterally and with extraordinary speed, that in August 1990 prevented Iraq from taking effective control of the entire Arabian Peninsula.
Iraq, having inadvertently revealed the unipolar structure of today's world, cannot stop complaining about it. It looks at allied and Soviet support for American action in the gulf and speaks of a conspiracy of North against South. Although it is perverse for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to claim to represent the South, his analysis does contain some truth. The unipolar moment means that with the close of the century's three great Northern civil wars (World War I, World War II and the Cold War) an ideologically pacified North seeks security and order by aligning its foreign policy behind that of the United States. That is what is taking shape now in the Persian Gulf. And for the near future, it is the shape of things to come.
The Iraqis are equally acute in demystifying the much celebrated multilateralism of this new world order. They charge that the entire multilateral apparatus (United Nations resolutions, Arab troops, European Community pronouncements, and so on) established in the gulf by the United States is but a transparent cover for what is essentially an American challenge to Iraqi regional hegemony.
But of course. There is much pious talk about a new multilateral world and the promise of the United Nations as guarantor of a new post-Cold War order. But this is to mistake cause and effect, the United States and the United Nations...
Bourdain had a history of serious drug abuse. He was divorced twice, and had just been dumped by his girlfriend. Stop pretending that his suicide was mysterious, caused by some "chemical imbalance." That's bullshit.
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) June 9, 2018
Why don't you mention that the reason Bourdain killed himself was because Asia Argento recently dumped him? https://t.co/rM1bxLBfCr
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) June 9, 2018
I wrote about my pal Tony https://t.co/4STkQsUxVV
— your friend Helen (@hels) June 8, 2018
ANTHONY BOURDAIN
— ☮️ 🕊 🌎 tmarie (@Syr829) June 9, 2018
EVERYTHING SEEMED GOOD WITH GF
... Until This Week https://t.co/nJQ1UQvHHl
Here's where things get murky. We know Anthony was shooting his show in France this week -- he'd been there for at least 4 days. However, Asia was back in Rome, strolling around with a French reporter named Hugo Clément. There were photos of them holding hands and hugging, but the Italian photographer who shot the pics pulled them off the market on the heels of Anthony's death.
It's unclear if Anthony and Asia had broken up. If they did, there was no public announcement. Their last public appearance together was at an event was back in April in NYC.
White House officials lashed out at the leader of Canada, one of America’s closest allies, with extraordinary ferocity Sunday as they accused him of trying to make President Trump look weak heading into his summit with the leader of North Korea.And at the New York Times:
Two of Trump’s top economic advisors branded Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a backstabber, betrayer and double-crosser who pulled a “sophomoric political stunt” that threatened to embarrass Trump before his much-anticipated meeting with Kim Jong Un in Singapore on Tuesday.
“There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door,” White House trade advisor Peter Navarro said on “Fox News Sunday.”
The administration’s actions drew rebukes from Canada’s foreign minister as well as Democrats and some Republicans in Washington, including Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who on Twitter called out his party members after Navarro’s comments: “Fellow Republicans, this is not who we are. This cannot be our party.”
The White House anger stemmed from Trudeau’s criticism of Trump’s trade policies at a news conference Saturday after the annual Group of 7 summit, which Trudeau hosted at a resort in Charlevoix, Quebec.
Trump left the summit early, and an administration official told reporters he had joined a lengthy communiqué from the world leaders crafted on Friday and Saturday.
That night, however, Trump abruptly announced via Twitter that he would not sign the joint statement, calling Trudeau “very dishonest & weak” for his trade criticism.
Navarro sharply criticized the G-7 final statement, referring to it as “that socialist communiqué.”
Larry Kudlow, the director of the White House National Economic Council, offered a somewhat different account, saying Sunday that Trump agreed with the language in the communiqué, which Kudlow helped draft. The statement outlined a shared commitment to work on a variety of economic, social, environmental and security issues.
"All Canadians will support the prime minister in standing up to this bully," a former Canadian ambassador to the United States said. "Friends do not treat friends with such contempt." https://t.co/k5In4Fm6dC
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 11, 2018
In the wake of Kate Spade's death, I wrote about my father's suicide for the first time. Thank you to my amazing husband @SethAMandel for editing this, I don't usually submit things to him because he's brutal, but this time he was kind. https://t.co/nlgHdfBmzJ
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) June 7, 2018
To all suicide survivor kids, a note: https://t.co/d3kmxndiRA
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) June 8, 2018
