Fifty years ago, in September 1971, Lin Biao boarded a flight out of the country, only to crash in the Mongolian desert shortly afterwards. Was this the result of an aborted coup on Lin’s part? And where exactly was his plane heading? In the latest in our series on history’s biggest conundrums, historian Rana Mitter answers these questions and more about the mysterious “Lin Biao incident”.
Part 1 of our new fantasy adventure series in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. The boys star as veteran crusaders, imprisoned by the Mad King Job for refusing to take the Blood Cure. When a mysterious folk hero springs them from their dungeon, will the boys choose to join his dangerous quest to restore the rightful king to the throne?
Guided by DM Patches (@senator_gun)
Written by DM Patches & Jack Walden (@meanunclejack)
How lead producers, car makers, and Big Oil used profits to suppress US government and media. pullquote: > A century of leaded gasoline has taken millions of lives and to this day leaves the soil in many cities from New Orleans to London toxic. The leaded gasoline story provides a practical example of how industry’s profit-driven decisions—when unsuccessfully challenged and regulated—can cause serious and long-term harm. It takes individual public health leaders and strong media coverage of health and environmental issues to counter these risks.
Enlarge / A 1960s Southern California gas station being restored. (credit: FarukUlay | Getty Images)
On the frosty morning of Dec. 9, 1921, in Dayton, Ohio, researchers at a General Motors lab poured a new fuel blend into one of their test engines. Immediately, the engine began running more quietly and putting out more power.
The new fuel was tetraethyl lead. With vast profits in sight—and very few public health regulations at the time—General Motors Co. rushed gasoline diluted with tetraethyl lead to market despite the known health risks of lead. They named it “Ethyl” gas.
It has been 100 years since that pivotal day in the development of leaded gasoline. As a historian of media and the environment, I see this anniversary as a time to reflect on the role of public health advocates and environmental journalists in preventing profit-driven tragedy.
nominally about evaluating new EE curriculum @ Fontys University of Applied Science, but actually more about education-support software esp courseware (with major slam on Microsoft Teams aka Sharepoint)
Enlarge / A remote controlled volume controller. It can also raise and lower the volume to preset levels using the buttons. (credit: Chris Lee)
One of the last times I wrote anything for Ars Technica, I excitedly detailed our new electrical engineering curriculum. We were starting a pilot in February and I promised to write a follow up at the end of the academic year, which was in July. To be honest, I was so exhausted by the semester that I simply could not bring myself to write about it over the summer holiday.
Now, as we exit the Christmas holiday, I finally feel able to paint a picture. It’s not all bright colors and beautiful landscapes, but the view looks promising.
For those of you who don’t remember the earlier piece, a summary: we switched from a traditional course-based curriculum to a project-based curriculum, where the students had to choose how to show that they could use their electrical engineering knowledge. The philosophy is that being able to apply knowledge and skills in the right context is a good signal that someone understands what they've learned. That means we have to set the right context and provide the students the opportunity to acquire the right knowledge and skills.
could have been a good talk, but Merriman seemed at best distracted and at worst ... senile
Contributor(s): Professor John Merriman | John Merriman is the Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune and a recipient of the American Historical Association’s award for a career of Distinguished Scholarship.
Robin Archer is the Director of the postgraduate programme in political sociology and the Director of the Ralph Miliband Programme at LSE.
Totally skippable crossover episode of (I am not making this up) "Radio Davos"
The World Economic Forum and Scientific American team up to highlight technological advances that could change the world—including self-fertilizing crops, on-demand drug manufacturing, breath-sensing diagnostics and 3-D-printed houses.
Stav’s back for an end-of-the-year round of relationship advice. We analyze Madison Cawthorn’s failed relationship, answer Dear Prudie questions, and look at a NYT op-ed about how it’s normal and cool to hate your husband.
All things Stavvy at https://stavvy.biz/
Tickets for our Southern tour are on sale over at chapotraphouse.com/live
If you've ever wondered if Jeffrey Sachs was scummier than he might appear, this article has got the receipts. The bit about Happytalism (direct quote!) is priceless.
Starting in 2016, the men who run the United Arab Emirates went all-in on positivity. They installed a giant smiley face on the dome crowning a Dubai police station. They created a Ministry of Tolerance and a Ministry of Happiness, as if inspired by George Orwell. And they began funding research, bankrolling prominent global intellectuals to study the psychology and science of bliss.
For women living a second-class existence, activists sentenced to years in prison because of their Facebook posts, and LGBTQ+ people jailed after kissing in public, the UAE is of course not a happy place, and the branding effort might have flopped if not for the efforts of one man: renowned Columbia University economist and United Nations power broker Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs helped the UAE take its message to the world. He supercharged the happiness drive, giving speech after speech linking it to pressing global issues. He called Emirati leaders “exemplary” and “wise.” At one point, he even sat on a Dubai stage with two other white male economists and CNN anchor Richard Quest and helped lead a crowd of Emiratis and expats in a round of “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands.”
A nonprofit led by Sachs, the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, known as SDSN, has received at least $3 million from the UAE. The outlay has been used to fund work on the World Happiness Report, an annual ranking of countries’ quality of life, and on the Global Happiness Policy Report, a collection of cheery policy recommendations that accompanies the rankings. The UAE government has separately donated $200,000 to Columbia University for happiness research, according to Sachs, who provided The Intercept with the Columbia and SDSN donation figures in response to questions about their finances. Spending records from the Earth Institute, a research institute at Columbia formerly headed by Sachs, confirm that it hasreceived UAE funding, but a spokesperson for the university declined to say how much.
The happiness project might be easy to dismiss if it didn’t confer legitimacy on a repressive government. Sachs has presented on SDSN’s happiness index everywhere from Google to “Morning Joe,” and within the U.N., where he has advised three successive secretary-generals, he has tethered the happiness work to official sustainability targets. A federation of seven states where political parties are banned, the UAE often finishes ahead of some European countries in the index — results that are touted on the UAE government’s website and in the local press.
“The second you start taking money from authoritarian states to illustrate happiness indexes, dystopian doesn’t even begin to describe it.”
“It’s whitewashing,” scholar Matthew Hedges said of Sachs’s work. In 2018, while conducting research for a dissertation on the UAE’s security strategy, Hedges was detained by Emirati police. In his telling, he spent seven months in a windowless room, sedated with a cocktail of drugs, hearing screams through the walls. His captors repeatedly interrogated him, at one point for 15 hours on end. After being forced to sign a confession saying that he worked for MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, Hedges was convicted without a lawyer present and sentenced to life in prison; he was released only after the U.K. applied diplomatic pressure. “The second you start taking money from authoritarian states to illustrate happiness indexes, dystopian doesn’t even begin to describe it,” said Hedges, who is now a postgraduate scholar at the University of Exeter. “It’s more like a nightmare.”
A frequent television commentator and prolific writer who once traveled sub-Saharan Africa with Bono to advocate for poor people, Sachs is one of the world’s most famous economists. After a controversial early career as a neoliberal reformer, he remade himself as a progressive, publishing searing and accessible critiques of the U.S. government that have made him a frequent guest on cable news shows. During the 2016 presidential election, Sachs endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders, conferring legitimacy on his campaign at a time when other experts wrote him off. Sanders wrote the foreword to one of Sachs’s books. Pope Francis appointed Sachs to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Angelina Jolie made a documentary about him.
Sachs, now 67, is one of 17 celebrity U.N. Sustainable Development Goals advocates tasked by the secretary-general with promoting lofty objectives like boosting access to education, fighting the climate crisis, and ending hunger by 2030. Beyond the U.N., Sachs has been anointed an expert on a dizzying array of topics, including broadband access, energy engineering, and Covid-19. He heads a Lancet commission charged with addressing the economic and humanitarian costs of the coronavirus pandemic and, until recently, with investigating its origins.
But Sachs has another side. In 2013, he praised Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan for winning three consecutive general elections, “each time with a greater share of the popular vote,” without noting growing concerns about his repression of dissent.More recently, Sachs has downplayed concerns about China’s crackdown in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, including at a Chinese government onlineeventhosted at a “guesthouse featuring traditional Uyghur-style decorations.” And in 2020, 16 months after the dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, he flew to Riyadh to speak at a forum hosted by a Saudi investment firm.
In some cases, Sachs has long-standing relationships with the leaders he praises. SDSN has affiliated centers in the UAE and China, and the nonprofit’s leadership council includes officials from both countries, among them the vice chair of the China Development Research Foundation, which reports to China’s State Council. Sachs also holds an advisory position at Beijing’s Tsinghua University that does not appear on his CV, his public LinkedIn profile, or his bios published outside China. The position is at an institute set up to promote China’s foreign policy goals within the U.N.
“I always had the sense that Jeffrey was not a person concerned about human rights and that he was often an apologist for abusive governments,” said Aryeh Neier, former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union and co-founder of Human Rights Watch. Neier oversaw the funding of Sachs’s work in the 2000s while serving as president of Open Society Foundations, during which he said he was bothered by Sachs’s willingness to work with Ethiopia’s government, among other concerns.
“I always had the sense that Jeffrey was not a person concerned about human rights and that he was often an apologist for abusive governments.”
Sachs takes issue with such claims. He called the UAE’s financial support a “contribution to the UN effort to promote the worldwide use of happiness and well-being indicators and goals in national development policy design.” He later wrote: “If you believe that it is inappropriate for SDSN to accept funds from the Government of the UAE for academic work or for me to speak about energy decarbonization to a meeting in Saudi Arabia, then you are free to write that, though I disagree.” (Sachs declined to be interviewed by phone for this article, instead responding to a series of questions by email.)
“I speak and write very often about the importance of human rights and of the importance of the Universal Declaration and the work of the UN Human Rights Council,” he wrote, referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document adopted in 1948 that enshrines values such as nondiscrimination and freedom from arbitrary detention. He said that he was not paid for his Tsinghua position and that SDSN had not received any donations from the Chinese government, Chinese corporations, or individuals with close ties to the government. (The group received only $30,000 from “an international non-governmental organization based in Beijing devoted to decarbonization” to fund research assistants, he said.) “If there is an oversight on my CV, I will correct it,” he said. “I am proud of my cooperation with colleagues at Tsinghua University, which is a great university.” In general, he added, his work in China is driven by a desire for global peace and collaboration.
But human rights activists complain that Sachs mainly speaks about U.S. abuses, while minimizing those elsewhere in the world. SDSN has offices in New York, Paris, and Kuala Lumpur, and outposts or networks on six continents, and Sachs himself constantly appears at events across the globe. At the U.N., he has been caught up in an effort led by China to prioritize softer rights over political and civil rights.
In June 2020, as people across the United States took to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd, he posted an eloquent letter to SDSN’s website. “I thank you, colleagues, for your daily efforts for global justice,” he wrote. “This work never stops, and it is obviously more urgent than ever.” Three days later, the UAE government reported that Sachs had joined leaders for the virtual launch of the Wellbeing Academy, an institute that trains UAE government employees on how to integrate happiness into their work. Acquaintances and former colleagues of Sachs said that he is driven by a genuine desire to do good in the world. But they also say that the former neoliberal economist never quite lost his taste for power.
Jeffrey Sachs, an economist and special adviser to the U.N. secretary-general, speaks to audience in Mchinji, Malawi, on April 5, 2010.
Photo: Amos Gumulira/AFP via Getty Images
Dr. Shock and Mr. Development
Sachs has been in the public eye for decades, continually reinventing himself while showing a Teflon-like resistance to reputational damage. In the 1980s and 1990s, as a young Harvard University economist who had spent his career inside the ivory tower, he advised countries including Bolivia, Poland, and Russia to adopt a strategy known as shock therapy. These extreme market reforms helped plunge some countries deeper into collapse, later earning him the nickname “Dr. Shock.” Then in 2002, Columbia recruited him from Harvard with a plush package that included an $8 million town house on 85th Street in Manhattan. (The university bought the house but rented three of its five floors to Sachs and his family at what a spokesperson called a “normal faculty rate.”)
As the director of Columbia’s Earth Institute, Sachs shifted his attention to Africa, securing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for an effort intended to jumpstart development across the continent. The Millennium Villages project had a noble goal: to improve health outcomes and basic living standards in impoverished areas. But Sachs had little experience in the region, and his approach of pouring money into communities and then cutting the purse strings so that they could become self-sufficient struck some critics as blunt and potentially harmful.
When George Soros pledged $50 million for the Millennium Villages project through his Open Society Foundations, he sparked an uproar within the organization. Neier, the former president, was among those who opposed the decision. “The countries included some which had authoritarian regimes,” he said. “I didn’t like to see scarce resources spent in those countries.” But according to Neier, Soros had promised Sachs the money and wanted to make good on his pledge. “I lost that debate.”
Some people who worked with Sachs on the ground admired his pluck and headstrong determination to end poverty. Rebbie Harawa was hired to head the Malawi Millennium Village, a role she held until 2009. She said that Sachs had a convincing manner with government officials and other influential people. At one point, Madonna visited the village. But Sachs was overly optimistic that he could replace aid dependency in countries like Malawi with investment, said Harawa, who is now with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Kenya. “That was his dream,” she said. “But that’s not the way the world works.”
Sachs was often in the limelight, and others noted signs that to achieve his goals, he seemed willing to take funding from just about anyone. As the Millennium Villages project got underway, the writer Nina Munk tailed him on his travels, recording scenes that she eventually turned into the book “The Idealist.” At one point, Sachs urged a district commissioner in Kenya to dream big about his region’s potential. “What’s the chance of getting investors from the United Arab Emirates?” he asked the Kenyan official. At another moment, Sachs named the Chinese government and corporate donations as potential sources of funding for his development work. “The amounts required are very small,” he told Munk. “So if it ends up coming through companies, if it ends up coming through China, if it ends up coming through individual contributions … that is not really the main point. The main point is that it happens.”
Sachs told The Intercept that the Millennium Villages project did not receive funding from either the UAE or China. But it did not escape his notice that as Western nations declined to invest in his villages, China was funding desperately needed infrastructure throughout Africa. And the view he staked out during that period — that in decisions about accepting money for his projects, the end justifies the means — would follow him into his work elsewhere in the world.
After the Millennium Villages project petered out in the early 2010s, Sachs emerged as a strong progressive voice in the United States. He spoke and wrote extensively about rising inequality and the plight of migrants, and he ran for the presidency of the World Bank as a dark-horse candidate. He even showed up at the Occupy Wall Street protests, to the annoyance of activists who remembered his neoliberal past.
Sachs saw that discontent with capitalism was running high and that there was a growing recognition that traditional economic markers alone were insufficient. He became a proponent of one solution being floated at the time: measuring happiness. At first, he focused on Bhutan. The small country in the Himalayas was promoting the idea of “gross national happiness,” first proposed by Bhutan’s king in the 1970s, to reinvent itself as an idyllic paradise. In 2011, its delegates advocated for the U.N. to adopt Resolution 65/309, which proposed that member states look into measuring happiness alongside metrics of economic performance like gross domestic product. Soon after, Sachs flew to Thimphu, Bhutan’s capital, to co-chair a meeting on positivity. Bhutanese collaborations with Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and the Earth Institute ensued, as did a paean by Sachs to the Bhutanese government. In the spring of 2012, Sachs spoke at a Bhutan-led U.N. “high-level meeting” on well-being, and soon afterward the U.N. General Assembly declared March 20 the International Day of Happiness. (Sachs was hardly the only prominent intellectual to embrace the idea of measuring contentment. His Columbia colleague Joseph Stiglitz also spoke at the U.N. meeting. Stiglitz, through his assistant, declined to speak with The Intercept.)
But a happiness metric also turned out to be a brilliant marketing tool. A Bhutanese government minister boasted in a World Economic Forum publication that between 2012 and 2019, the number of tourists visiting the country tripled. The campaign also helped drown out concerns about the Bhutanese government’s discrimination against the Lhotshampa ethnic group. Gross national happiness was, New Delhi-based journalist Vishal Arora wrote in 2014, “a cover for an inadequate human rights record.” Bhutan’s example would be replicated by the UAE.
A billboard showing Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, is seen on Feb. 17, 2021, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
“You Become Complicit”
In early 2018, the daughter of Dubai’s ruler fled the UAE on a Jet Ski, aided by her Finnish capoeira coach and a former French spook. In a harrowing video, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum accused her father of locking up her sister years earlier and restricting her own basic freedoms. The episode ended in a dramatic confrontation in international waters, in which Indian commandos stormed the yacht where Latifa was hiding, captured her, and handed her over to Emirati authorities. Her Finnish friend, Tiina Jauhiainen, was detained for three weeks before being released.
For many, the incident was a wake-up call to repression in the country. But Sachs had been taking money from Sheikha Latifa’s father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, to research the very thing the princess had so desperately wanted to attain, and he continued to do so. Most of the UAE money for Sachs’s happiness work came from Sheikh Mohammed’s office and was donated to SDSN between 2017 and 2021, Sachs told The Intercept. The nonprofit names “the Prime Minister’s Office of the United Arab Emirates” as a donor on its website, along with over two dozen others. (Although electoral freedom is limited in the UAE, Sheikh Mohammed technically holds the title of prime minister.) After Sheikha Latifa’s capture, SDSN accepted at least $1 million from Sheikh Mohammed’s office.
In 2019, Sheikh Mohammed was again accused of mistreatment when one of his wives, Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein, fled to the U.K. with their two children, seeking political asylum.
Sachs does not draw a salary from SDSN, according to its tax forms, but the nonprofit has helped fund his research at Columbia, according to Earth Institute spending records and the tax filings. When asked whether he had ever raised concerns about Sheikha Latifa’s treatment, he did not reply.
Jauhiainen, who lived in Dubai for 17 years before helping Sheikha Latifa escape, finds Sachs’s involvement in the happiness drive deeply troubling. “The UAE is a police state where all your moves are monitored,” she said. “You’re scared to criticize anything in your social media because you’re scared of the consequences. How can people possibly be happy living in a society like that?”
Sachs formed SDSN in the wake of the U.N.’s 2012 summit in Rio de Janeiro, where member states discussed what would become the Sustainable Development Goals. The nonprofit’s launch was announced in a press release from then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who explained that the new network would help “business, civil society, UN agencies and other international organizations to identify and share the best pathways to achieve sustainable development.” But although it uses the U.N. name, SDSN is registered as a nonprofit in Delaware, and practically speaking, it is Sachs’s baby. Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, told The Intercept that “the UN and SDSN collaborate on a range of projects and knowledge products,” but said that the nonprofit “has no formal legal relationship with the United Nations.” For a while, SDSN’s administrative work was done at Columbia’s Earth Institute.
The U.N. goals the nonprofit was set up to promote are broad and somewhat open to interpretation, leaving a lot of leeway for SDSN in its work. Although aimed at reducing poverty and injustice, the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, avoid addressing the sort of serious structural changes that would actually reduce inequality and improve living conditions in developing countries, according to a recent report by Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and co-chair of New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. The goals also do not require commitments to specific civil and political rights, making them attractive to authoritarian regimes.
“By creating international partnerships with … individuals like Jeffrey Sachs, they’re trying to bring prestige but also establish for the UAE an international profile.”
For Emirati leaders, who have been seeking to expand the UAE’s influence globally, sustainability and happiness offer a way in at the U.N. “By creating international partnerships with respected global institutions like Columbia and with individuals like Jeffrey Sachs, they’re trying to bring prestige but also establish for the UAE an international profile,” said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Tax forms for 2017 and 2018 filed with the New York State Attorney General suggest that in those years, the UAE was SDSN’s second largest government donor, behind the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The Intercept was not able to obtain government donor lists for later years.
The Emirates Competitiveness Council, a government group, has separately funded research at the Earth Institute since at least 2013. Sachs stepped down as the institute’s director in 2016 to lead a smaller organization under its umbrella, the Center for Sustainable Development.
At first, UAE donations to the Earth Institute and SDSN went toward work on a world happiness index. The rankings are calculated using data from the Gallup World Poll. Gallup asks people from around the world to answer questions about life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10. Sachs and colleagues then attempt to explain each country’s ranking by assessing the roles played by factors including social support, life expectancy, and perceptions of corruption, and comparing the outcome against a fictional unhappy nation called Dystopia.
But while northern European countries typically top the ranking, further down the list, governments pay no apparent cost for repression, such that some actual dystopias end up doing just fine. In the most recent report, Saudi Arabia ranked ahead of Spain, Bahrain ahead of Japan.
The UAE typically finishes high as well. In one comparison from the most recent report, the country ranked at 19 out of 95 countries in overall happiness for the 2017-2019 period. For 2020, the UAE slid to 27 in the same assessment, but Sachs and his co-authors took care to explain that this was due to a drop in life satisfaction among the Emirates’ migrant workers and foreign population, who make up 88 percent of residents. The report added that “life evaluations of the locally-born increased.” Sachs did not respond to a question about potential bias in the survey. An FAQ on the index says that his team merely interprets and does not determine the results, which are based on the Gallup survey scores.
One major problem with the index lies in its design: Gallup representatives conduct lengthy interviews with people over the phone or in their homes. But they face limitations on how and where they can collect data; in China, the survey excludes residents of Tibet and, until 2020, excluded residents of Xinjiang, where there is widespread discontent with government repression. Also until 2020, Gallup’s UAE survey was only conducted in English and Arabic, leaving out South Asian migrant workers who might not be able to answer in those languages. In other places where speech is monitored or restricted, people might not always tell the truth about how happy they are.
Gallup itself has ties to the UAE that raise questions. From 2010 to 2012, the polling company had a center in Abu Dhabi funded by the Crown Prince Court. A Gallup executive told Fast Company that while Gallup maintained full editorial control over projects, Emirati leaders assisted “on topic selection.” (Gallup did not respond to emailed questions.)
Researching happiness in the UAE requires a sort of moral gymnastics, said Ulrichsen: “You have to take a position that involves turning a blind eye to a lot of internal developments in the country. And to some extent, you become complicit.”
“Close Partnerships”
Sachs’s leadership of the Global Happiness Council, the group that devises policy recommendations to accompany the annual happiness rankings, brought him still closer to the Emirati government. The UAE announced the council’s formation at U.N. headquarters in New York on the International Day of Happiness in 2017. In an interview at the event, the UAE’s then-happiness minister, Ohood bint Khalfan Al Roumi, linked the effort to the SDGs. Fully $1 million of Sheikh Mohammed’s donations to SDSN have been earmarked for the council, Sachs told The Intercept.
The council’s reports are unapologetically subjective, often praising the UAE government. At one point, the Global Happiness Council’s membership included an Emirati government official: Aisha Bin Bishr, the director general of Smart Dubai, a program that has included the installation of thousands of surveillance cameras around Dubai.
Bin Bishr was the lead author of a chapter on smart cities in the 2018 report that cited a tech-driven collaboration between Smart Dubai and local police to solicit feedback on traffic fines. The project, called HappyToPay, “not only increases transparency, but also gives people a way to voice their opinion to the city leadership,” the chapter claimed. It did not mention Smart Dubai’s expanding use of facial recognition. (Bin Bishr did not respond to The Intercept’s requests to comment.)
In the same report, Sachs wrote of the Emirati happiness drive: “It is the responsibility of scholars and moral leaders everywhere to encourage the UAE’s important initiative and help it grow.”
“The UAE’s use of surveillance technology against human rights defenders — most famously Ahmed Mansour, now in prison for exercising his right to freedom of expression — stands as a caution on its own,” said David Kaye, a law professor at University of California, Irvine and former U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. “The idea that a government with such a nefarious approach to surveillance technology would be lauded for the surveillance cities it proposes building is just preposterous.”
Kaye said that he did not have specific knowledge about Sachs’s work on happiness and the SDGs but noted: “Any human rights organization would be cautious, to put it mildly, in taking funds from the UAE or otherwise cooperating with it. Most would refuse it on principle.”
Sachs’s relationship with the UAE may not be all that singular, though. SDSN has a center in Beijing hosted at Tsinghua University’s Institute for Sustainable Development Goals, which was founded in 2017 on the sidelines of a major Chinese Belt and Road Initiative conference. Sachs chairs the institute’s international academic committee.
China’s U.N. delegation has sought to link Belt and Road, a massive effort to finance infrastructure and extend Chinese influence across more than 130 countries of all income levels, to the SDGs. China’s broader campaign to gain influence within the U.N. has thrice landed businesspeoplein prison in the United States; all three were convicted of using sustainability-linked ventures to bribe former U.N. General Assembly presidents. (One former U.N. official was charged as well, but he died in 2016 while awaiting trial, after a barbell fell on his neck.)
In at least one instance, an SDSN center like the one in Beijing was established following donations to the nonprofit. To set up the Jeffrey Sachs Centre on Sustainable Development at Malaysia’s Sunway University, property magnate Jeffrey Cheah told the Asean Post that he endowed SDSN with $20 million over five years.
Sachs confirmed Cheah’s donation, writing that some of the money went directly to SDSN and that some went to SDG-related programs in Malaysia, but said that the Beijing center is set up differently. “SDSN is a voluntary network of organizations, mainly universities,” he said. “The universities fund themselves,” adding: “There is little transfer of money to or from member institutions.”
According to its website, the Beijing center focuses on promoting “close partnerships” with the United Nations and other international organizations. Sachs recently said in a video address to the U.N. mission in China that he is a “big fan of the Belt and Road Initiative.”
As with the UAE, Sachs’s stances on human rights issues in China have baffled experts. In April, he downplayed concerns about the Xinjiang internment camps by evoking a post-September 11 narrative about terrorism. In an op-ed titled “The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified,” co-authored with the legal scholar William Schabas, he wrote that although “there are credible charges of human rights abuses … we must understand the context of the Chinese crackdown in Xinjiang, which had essentially the same motivation as America’s foray into the Middle East and Central Asia after the September 2001 attacks: to stop the terrorism of militant Islamic groups.” Schabas had represented Myanmar’s government against genocide charges in the International Court of Justice.
Sachs also recently appeared at an event hosted by No Cold War, a group that often promotes Chinese foreign policy interests, including on human rights issues. Its supporters recently clashed with Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters at an anti-racism rally in London.
“There was a saying when I was in college,” Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch, said of Sachs’s involvement with No Cold War. “You want to keep an open mind, but not so much that your brain falls out.”
Sachs says that he is merely countering Beltway hawkishness. “I have been writing and speaking on China for decades,” he wrote. “My overarching view is the importance of peace and cooperation between the US and China, not the cold-war mentality that is prevalent in Washington, and that perhaps characterizes your own thinking.”
Video still shows Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum speaking into a mobile phone camera in an unknown location.
Photo: Tiina Jauhiainen/David Haigh via AP
Happytalism
This past spring, Sachs spoke at a virtual happiness conference in conversation with Luis Gallardo, author of the book “Why Happytalism Matters for the Continued Existence of the Human Race.” Gallardo heads the World Happiness Foundation, a Florida-based nonprofit that has given awards to UAE leaders. In one breath, Sachs took easy swings at Donald Trump, who was no longer president. In the next, he complimented the Chinese government for its low Covid-19 death toll. Partway through, Gallardo asked a softball question about equity, praising Dubai leaders for their approach to happiness. Sachs took the bait. “You mentioned three places: New Zealand, Scotland, and the Emirates,” he said. “In all three, the leader of the happiness initiative is a woman.” He was referring to either the UAE’s former happiness minister, Al Roumi, or to the current minister of community development, Hessa bint Essa Buhumaid. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence.” He elaborated: “Men just seem more hard-wired for conflict, more hard-wired to find division. Women, probably, psychologically and biologically are more caring.” Happiness, he continued, “comes easier to women.”
Happiness was not coming easy for the daughter of Sachs’s primary Emirati donor. The month before, the BBC program “Panorama” had aired smuggled footage in which Sheikha Latifa said she was being held in a villa with barred windows, with no access to medical help. She also said that during her failed escape, commandos had forcibly injected her with tranquilizers before forcing her limp body onto a private jet. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights had asked the UAE government for proof that Sheikha Latifa was still alive. At the time of the happiness festival, the commissioner had not yet received it.
Images of Sheikha Latifa later surfaced, but so did evidence that her phone had been hacked with the spyware Pegasus. Last month, a British court cited her capture in a decision ordering Sheikh Mohammed to pay his ex-wife Princess Haya and her two children £554 million, or about $734 million, following their own 2019 escape.
In his riff on women at the happiness event, Sachs did not mention Sheikha Latifa or Princess Haya, or the fact that UAE law still effectively gives men control over their wives. Instead, he brought the discussion back to U.N. targets. “One thing I would recommend for all of us is more women in politics and more women in power,” he said. “And that is SDG No. 5: Gender Equality.”
A blast from the past teaches a town to embrace tradition and believe in miracles we simply can’t explain. A cynical urban professional finds kindness and purpose while traveling through the heartland. Two old flames living in the fast lane discover, amid the magic of Christmas, that they were meant for each other all along.
These loglines describe the plots of countless movies made for and broadcast by Hallmark, the famed greeting card company-turned-media conglomerate that has become synonymous with made-for-TV Christmas movies. The Hallmark Cinematic Universe is one in which the fantasies of conservatives everywhere are played out: everyone in town is part of a white nuclear family, bartenders and waiters are happy to be of service, single women are emotionally unfulfilled, police and the military are uniformly viewed as heroes, and the largesse of the wealthy brings joy to wholesome small towns.
While it’s easy, and of course fun, to dunk on Hallmark and Hallmark-inspired Christmas movies, it’s also worth examining the political currents of Christmas movie schmaltz. What ideological precepts are their themes of nostalgia meant to reinforce? And what tropes do they perpetuate behind the cozy iconography of fuzzy sweaters and snow-lined sidewalks?
On this episode, we seek to answer these questions, focusing on four movies: Journey Back to Christmas (2016), The Christmas Train (2017), Entertaining Christmas (2018), and Operation Christmas Drop (2020). We’ll dive into the ways in which nostalgia for an imaginary MAGA-style past informs their character development, settings, and plots, leaving little room for messaging other than ‘Let’s go back to the good old days.’
"Deregulation will make the economy more efficient and stimulate GDP growth," insist think tanks like the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute. "Fiscal hawks," claiming to be worried about the deficit, demand austerity measures to reign in government spending. When it comes to "entitlement programs," we hear that "there are always tradeoffs."
Time and again, the media and policymakers spew the same tired recitations meant to convey the seemingly natural, immutable laws of economics. The economy, we’re told, is thriving when business owners and hedge fund managers are making record profits, yet failing when investments in social programs have gotten too big. And that's just how it is.
Terms, phrases, and sentiments like these are part of a lexicon of economic euphemisms, cliches, and other forms of business-school speak designed to blur class lines and convince us all that our current economic system - entirely a result of policy choices largely designed to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the broader welfare - is merely a function of cold, hard science, with rules and principles no more pliable than those of physics or chemistry.
But why should we be expected to accept that a news report that “the economy” is on the upswing means the average worker is doing any better, when all evidence is to the contrary? Why should our media’s economic "experts" come from a pool of elite economics departments beholden to corporate donors and right-wing think tanks? And why must "the economy" be defined in terms of whether the Dow is up or down, rather than whether people have food, housing, healthcare, and job security?
On this episode - Part II of a two-part series - we’ll examine another five of the most popular cliches, jargon, and rhetorical thingamajigs that economists, economic reporters and pundits use to sanitize, obscure, and provide a thin gloss of Science-ism to what is little more than power flattering cruel, racist austerity ideology.
good overview on how to make the highest-{level, value} customizations on an alien and immutable desktop so as to maximize Emacs-friendliness while minimizing time spent
I cleared the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exam recently. It is an exam where one has to perform tasks on the clusters to solve the scenario based questions. In this post, I will be talking on how I used GNU Emacs in the exam environment. Though I’m referring to CKS here, this post should be helpful for other exams by Linux Foundation like CKA, CKAD, etc.
The exam environment Before we get to Emacs related details, let’s understand the CKS exam environment.
In this episode, /u/EnclavedMicrostate talks with Trevor Culley about the Cyrus Cylinder, an inscription dictated by the first ruler of the Persian Empire. Aside from the text of the cylinder and its historical context, also discussed is the use of the cylinder in modern Iranian nation-building. 48 mins.
No new Christmas special this year, but unlocking last year's special as a little gift to those who never heard it and get all our Xmas shows on the free feed.
Merry Gamesmas, our gift to you:
“Chapo Trap House presents: Try Hard”
Anna Whitelock looks back on some key moments and trends that made the historical headlines in 2021. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, she covers topics including the “history wars”, cuts to university history courses and the best books published this year.
audio link 404s, page says 'The episode was not found or is unavailable.'
Curator Jane Desborough talks to Ellie Cawthorne about a new Science Museum exhibition, Ancient Greeks: Science and Wisdom, which explores the ways in which Greek thinkers sought to understand the world around them – from the oceans and animals, to the cosmos and the human body.
SKIP! the very few jokes within are just not worth your time
It's Christmas time and that means time for some Christmas comedy! Sit back and relax to the tunes of Scott Falconbridge and comedy-from-the-vault with Shaun Majumder.
Happy Holidays and thanks for listening!
Episode two of our two-part series on cryptocurrency: political theorist Stefan Eich on how crypto fits into Hayek's old neoliberal dream of private money and why that vision emerged in a new form in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Check out We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America by Kevin Mattson global.oup.com/academic/product/were-not-here-to-entertain-9780190908232
VERY EXCELLENT--Goldfarb can be sentimental unto treacle, but when he's at his best (as here) it's audio art.
7 December 2021 marks the eightieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and with it America's entry into World War II.
Americans' war experience was substantially different from that of Britons. Michael Goldfarb's father was among the World War II generation christened "The Greatest Generation" in popular culture. He uses the stories he heard growing up from the Americans who fought the war to explore those differences both during the conflict and in the years immediately following.
Meredith Dallas was Michael's mentor, a professor of theatre and a fine actor, who spent 18 months in prison as a conscientious objector.
These are memories imperfect and embellished but they create a picture of what America was like during the war years and how the war came to be woven into America's national myth. He acknowledges just how mighty the forces were that propelled the children of these veterans away from that myth when the call came to serve in Vietnam.
For months we've been immersing ourselves in such Intellectual Property soups as Ready Player One, Space Jam: A New Legacy, and The Simpsons in Plusaversary, so we felt it was time to examine the animated hit that helped birth this new phenomenon: THE LEGO MOVIE (2014). PLUS: the return of COVID, a bad week for the Democrats, and the actual, honest-to-goodness phenomenon of official Rifkin's Festival NFTs.
In Chile's presidential election, far-right Pinochet dictatorship supporter José Antonio Kast, the son of a German Nazi, was defeated by young center-left social democrat Gabriel Boric.
Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton speak with journalist Pablo Vivanco about what this victory means, Boric's major weakness on US imperialism, and the prospects of rewriting the Pinochet-era constitution.
It started as an accidental dare. As House leaders met on November 5 in an effort to reach a final deal on both the Build Back Better Act and a bipartisan infrastructure bill, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., suggested the Congressional Black Caucus could be helpful in ending an impasse between a group of holdouts, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
The suggestion was dismissed out of hand by Gottheimer’s crew, Clyburn would later tell allies, with the Black Caucus being written off as irrelevant in a changing Congress. Once known as “the conscience of Congress,” the caucus, founded in 1971 by 13 members, drew its power from the legacy of the civil rights movement and its ability to speak with one voice and vote as a bloc. That unity had been chipped away over the past two election cycles, amid a generational and ideological struggle that played out in party primaries.
Clyburn took the diss as a challenge. After the meeting, a livid Clyburn summoned the CBC leadership, telling CBC Chair Joyce Beatty, Rep. Maxine Waters, and others about the disrespect put on the name of the caucus. It was incumbent on them to prove the doubters wrong, he said. How much disrespect was real and how much he was ginning it up to motivate the CBC is a matter of dispute, but the effect was clear. Beatty pledged the caucus would move swiftly. Shortly before 2 p.m. she, Reps. Steven Horsford, D-Nev.; Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas; and others left Clyburn’s office and told reporters that the caucus would support the effort to split the two bills, though the caucus had yet to meet on the question.
Beatty quickly scheduled a caucus meeting and urged the group to back the leadership strategy, telling members that the credibility of Clyburn and the CBC was on the line. The meeting overlapped with another gathering of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which was debating the same questions, with some members who served in both caucuses shuttling back and forth.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., made a motion that the caucus unify behind Clyburn and leadership, and Horsford, who’d also been in the Clyburn meeting, seconded it. Reps. Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and Ilhan Omar all pushed back against the strategy, asking the motion to be withdrawn, which it eventually was. No vote was held. “We were adamant that there was no agreement, but they put out a statement anyway,” said one CBC member.
Beatty journeyed from the CBC meeting to the CPC one, where the progressive caucus was still gathered. She told reporters outside in the hallway that she was acting on her own initiative, but was conspicuously accompanied by a senior aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
She stood outside awkwardly as she was refused entry under the reasoning that only CPC members could attend the meeting. “I think it was a mistake for CPC not to be in better dialogue with CBC and joint strategy. Having Joyce Beatty wait outside to address CPC was arrogant and wrong,” said one CPC member.
One nonmember was allowed to join by speaker phone, however: Joe Biden. A week earlier, after lengthy negotiations with Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin that had followed a successful CPC effort to hold the line and keep the two bills paired, the Biden administration released a new framework, which Manchin praised.
President Biden's framework is the product of months of negotiations and input from all members of the Democratic Party who share a common goal to deliver for the American people.
During the CPC meeting, Biden beseeched the caucus to give him a win on the infrastructure bill, asking them to trust that he had a commitment from Manchin to get Build Back Better done. The day before, Manchin had appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and said he was in agreement with a $1.75 trillion top line for the bill.
Progressives were also facing pressure from Democrats who blamed November election losses on the infrastructure bill’s delay, noted one progressive House staffer who requested anonymity to speak freely with The Intercept. Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia argued Terry McAuliffe, the party’s candidate, could have won the governor’s race if the framework was already signed into law.
“After the November elections, with establishment Democrats loudly blaming progressives for their losses, every faction of the party apparatus was arrayed against the CPC and determined to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill alone,” the source said.
Even after Biden’s call, according to people in the room, more than two dozen Democrats were still willing to vote no, unwilling to trust Manchin’s word. Jayapal, however, made the case that the CPC had taken it as far as it could and told those assembled that she was going to back the president’s play. Omar, the CPC whip, continued pushing for the caucus to hold the line, but with the caucus chair siding with Biden, resistance crumbled.
Whether House Democrats had the votes still remained an open question, however, and five members of the Squad — Omar, Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman — announced they would be voting no. “I’m a no,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept that evening. “This is bullshit.”
Without those five, Pelosi needed Republican votes, and GOP leadership had previously said it would force Democrats to pass the majority threshold on their own before Republicans would help. But not long after the vote opened, several moderate Republicans voted yes, assuring the bill’s passage. Rep. Ayanna Pressley ended up joining her Squad colleagues in their no votes.
In exchange for their votes, the CPC had won a commitment from Gottheimer’s crew that if a Congressional Budget Office analysis came in relatively close to the White House assessment, they would vote to move the bill to the Senate. Gottheimer’s gang made good on that pledge, and by mid-November, the bill was in the hands of the Senate. For the next month, Manchin negotiated with the White House.
Those negotiations were only made possible by House progressives holding the line, Jayapal noted, adding that the Senate had already acted without any commitment from Manchin. “The Senate passed the infrastructure bill without any commitment on the Build Back Better Act, and it fell to the progressive caucus against the push of our own leadership, political pundits and eventually the White House to hold the line,” she said.
“I want to be very clear that I believe it was our insistence on holding the line that got Senator Manchin to commit to a framework negotiated by the president that I don’t think Senator Manchin ever wanted to do in the first place,” Jayapal said. “I believe we were able to put him in a box with that framework where he would either have to uphold his commitment to the president or – and I do believe the president when he said to us and to me personally that he got a commitment from Senator Manchin – or he’d have to go back on his word.”
The job of House progressives, she said, was to get both bills through the House and get a commitment from Manchin, beyond which the responsibility lay with the president to finish it. “We held the line not just once, but twice, and even a third time for a very long day at the end to insist that we get what we needed to pass both bills through the House and pass both bills through the House we did,” she said.
On Monday morning, Manchin called Jayapal to talk. Later, in a conference call with reporters, she said that she had been blunt with Manchin. “That lack of integrity is stunning,” she said, particularly in a city where your word is everything.”
She said Manchin denied ever having made a commitment to Biden. “I don’t know what to make of that,” she said. “I still believe the president got that commitment.”
“Either the president did not have a commitment, or the senator made a commitment and went back. And I believe the president when he said he had a commitment,” she said.
“I don’t believe the senator actually wanted to pass Build Back Better.”
Asked if she regretted the decision to break the two pieces of legislation up and give away leverage, she said she has pondered it since. “This is the question I’ve gone over in my head a million times,” she said, concluding that she didn’t regret the decision because, she argued, there was no particular tactic that could have overcome what she now believes was always Manchin’s plan to walk away.
“I don’t believe the senator actually wanted to pass Build Back Better,” she said on the call. If Democrats had held the line again that evening and blocked passage of the infrastructure bill, she argued, Manchin would have used that moment as his excuse to bolt.
Ultimately, Biden and Pelosi pushed the progressive caucus to break with a two-track strategy they themselves had previously endorsed, based on a confidence in their own ability to move the final legislation through the process, born of decades of experience inside the system — experience that distorted their view of the situation and gave them an inflated sense of their own personal power absent sufficient leverage. They were successfully able to pressure Jayapal into going along, while the members of the Squad, peering in from the outside, could see the firm contours of the structure much more clearly.
It’s impossible to know what would have happened in a counterfactual situation, in which progressives would have continued to hold the infrastructure bill as leverage. Jayapal argued the leverage wouldn’t have worked on Manchin; the infrastructure bill was much more of a priority to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz. Yet the bipartisan bill was indeed something Manchin wanted, both for his state and for his reelection. Jayapal said the strategy worked as well as it could and “boxed him in” to supporting the framework, after which it was up to the president to reel him in.
“I think he was looking for a way to not do it, and that would have been the day that the Build Back Better Act died,” Jayapal said, referring to November 19, the day the infrastructure bill passed the House with majority support from the CPC.
“That would have also been the day that we turned the country against us,” she added, “so no. I don’t have regrets.”
Those who objected to the strategy in real time, however, saw Manchin’s move as the danger they predicted. “Alexandria warned it could happen,” read an email Ocasio-Cortez sent to reporters. “Yesterday, it did.”
worth the listen, but also quite weak, not least because they cover this large 20c movement in ... 38 min?
Richard Bosworth answers listener questions on the authoritarian ideology that emerged in Italy a century ago
How was Mussolini able to seize control in Italy a century ago? What differentiated Italian Fascism from Nazism? And is the term “fascist” bandied around too much today? In the latest in our series answering your questions on history’s biggest subjects, Richard Bosworth speaks to Spencer Mizen about the history of the rightwing ideology.
Michael Vann joins Long Reads for a conversation about Indonesia’s turbulent past and present. Michael is a professor of history at Sacramento State University. He specializes in the history of Southeast Asia. This is the second part of a two-part interview. The previous Long Reads episode covers events leading up to Suharto’s coup in the 1960s.
Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by Features Editor Daniel Finn.
You can find Michael's essays about Indonesian history on the Jacobin website:
return to the usual format: meh banter followed by excellent (though truncated) interview
Journalist and professor Christian Parenti’s latest NonSite (the Adolph Reed site) article, The First Privilege Walk, has, among other things, one of the greatest subtitles of all time:
How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.
The article, which Matt described as “an article after my own heart,” (to which Katie replied, “It’s like it was made in a lab for you,”) explores the way identify politics (or the weaponization of it) undermines the fight for economic (and racial) equality and looks at the origins of one of its exercises, namely “The Privilege Walk.” As Parenti explains,
Mainstream critics say the exercise propagates divisive identity politics and mock it as foundational to the Oppression Olympics. A Marxist critique would say that the Walk transmogrifies material problems into cultural ones, economic exploitation becomes the more nebulous problem of oppression.
In the same way Professor Adolph Reed criticizes Robin DiAngelo’s antiracist jumble as fake left, the new liberal “identitarian psychobabble” not only contradicts the Sandersian left, but hurts it.
Take a listen as Christian Parenti unravels the cult.
Plus, Biden won’t extend the student loan pause, McConnell is still a hypocrite, and oh god the new Jimmy Fallon/Ariana Grande/Megan Thee Stallion song. #SMH
It’s all this, and more, on this week’s episode of Useful Idiots. Check it out. And click here for the ad-free episode.
VERY EXCELLENT, not just on the history of this very brief war, but personal experience and the Yugoslav experience
Dejan Djokic reflects on the brief 1991 war that saw Slovenia secure independence and helped set in motion the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia. In conversation with Rob Attar, he explores the events both as a historian and through his own memories of being a Yugoslav conscript based in Slovenia at the time.
In 1929, a disagreement over the meaning of "nothing" exposed deep divisions in Western philosophy and erupted into a debate over whether philosophy is more art or science. Poet-philosopher Martin Heidegger's lecture about nothing excited students and divided colleagues. But the empiricist Rudolf Carnap thought all this talk of the meaning of nothing, amounted to nothing at all.
