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Файл:Speak and Write like The Economist говори и пиши как The Economist
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Science, technology, progress, history, civilization
bomb, and the scientists got their computer, a key ancestor of
all modern machines. The subsequent explosion of computing
changed the world.
Scientifi c papers do not drive messages home as convincingly as the destruction of a city.
An unmanned sampling mission to the moon is pencilled in for
2017, with the objective of gathering lunar soil and returning it to
Earth. By 2025 the goal is to send a manned mission there. Imagine
the symbolism, wrote Bruce Sterling, a science-fi ction author, if in
the coming decades a spacecraft containing several young Chinese (orIndian) astronauts were to land on the moon, where the
group would carefully fold away the American fl ag planted by Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and plant their own fl ag in its stead.
Victor Hugo: “No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”
Named after the Roman goddess of love, Venus could have been
asister planet to Earth. The two orbs are almost identical in shape,
volume and mass. Both have solid surfaces, an atmosphere and
a weather system. Even their distances from the sun are not so
different: Venus is about 108m kilometres (67m miles) from the
centre of the solar system while the Earth is about 150m kilometres out. Yet Venus is far from lovely. Probes sent to the planet
by America and the Soviet Union from the 1960s to the 1980s revealed that Venus would be deadly to humans. The atmosphere is
mostly noxious carbon dioxide, the pressure at the planet’s surface is equivalent to being almost a kilometre under water and
the temperature is a roasting 465C.
Representatives of Diageo, which owns Guinness, one of the most widely
sold brands of stout, approached Dr Lee in 2009. They wondered if he
might be able to construct a mathematical model of the formation and
growth of bubbles in stout. Dr Lee was happy to oblige. And once he had
produced the model, he started thinking more about the problem.
If the ultra-Orthodox were in heaven he would rather not go there.
Genes are acquired at conception and carried to the grave. But the same
gene can be expressed differently in different people— or at different
times during an individual’s life. The differences are the result of what
are known as epigenetic marks, chemicals such as methyl groups that
141
Часть I
are sometimes attached to a gene to tell it to turn out more of a vital protein, or to stop making that protein altogether.
George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who
controls the present controls the past.”
Electrons jump between orbits or escape nucleus altogether in attoseconds— on eattosecond is to one second what one second is to the age
of universe.
Two private fi rms are offering moon jaunts to the rich and dedicated. And even if the engineering can be perfected, it remains to
be seen how many daredevil billionaires will be willing to spend
months cooped up in a metal tube eating freeze-dried food.
He had never had enough imagination to be sacred.
Bugatti Veyron, a 1,000-horsepower monster.
Content is not just king, it is the emperor of all things electronic.
His team recently managed to cage a nitrogen atom inside
abuckyball (asphere formed from 60 carbon atoms) and use its
electrons as a single qubit.
In the southern hemisphere the moon is in the northern sky and its left
and right sides reverse. The Economist can take solace that the original
picture showing the waxing phase on the left side of the moon in Rio was
indeed correct.
Before you were trying to fi nd a needle in a haystack at least you
could see the needle gleaming. Now you have to fi nd a needle in
a million haystacks.”
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and
underestimate the effect in the long run,” observed Roy Amara, an American futurologist.
It is, allegedly, now the exclusive right of scientists to answer the
three fundamental why-questions with which the authors purport to deal in their book. Why is there something rather than
nothing? Why do we exist? And why this particular set of laws
and not some other?
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War, violence, terrorism, spying, diplomacy, crime, hunting
War, violence, terrorism, spying,
diplomacy, crime, hunting
“
Why does mankind have wars?
Mr le Carre once described Britain as a country where “failed socialism is being replaced by failed capitalism”.
Unlike Vietnam war, which is perennially relived and relitigated, the Korean war of 1950[52 is largerly forgotten in America. Yet it brought about
the utter devastation of the Korean peninsula, along with the deaths of
2.5m civilians and 1.2m soldiers, among them 34,000 Americans. After a
massive Chinese intervention, it ended with Korea as divided as it had
been before.
As George Bush junior once memorably put it, he was not prepared to “fi re a $2m missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel
in the butt”.
The Crimean war was certainly the most signifi cant confl ict of the second half of the 19th century. If deaths from disease are included, it cost
at least 750,000 lives, two-thirds of them Russian, and it triggered big
social and cultural changes in all the countries affected.
Once you have heard how Phereclus died by a spear through his
right buttock into his bladder, you won’t forget it.
Never cheer for the coup until the countercoup has failed.
When a kid points a Kalashnikov at you, do you shoot him?
America is still unequalled in hard power. At $600bn a year, its defence
spending is more than the next seven biggest spenders combined.
Had Shakespeare not memorialised the name of a small siege explosive in the phrase to be “hoist with his own petard”, meaning
a small bomb but also linked to the French word for “fart”, that
would probably be gone, too.
China’s government regards spy-catching as a game for everyone. In
April the municipal government of Beijing started offering rewards of
up to 500,000 yuan ($70,000) for fi nding one.
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Часть I
What does Islamist mean?
Antarctica is the only continent where threre has never been war.
What insight does an old soldier offer?
The job of National Security Advisor requires a cool head, a big brain,
excellent managerial skills and an even temper: few have excelled at it.
The Iroquois even separately declared war on Germany in 1941.
Serious criminals are nearly all male, which is why less than 10% of the
world’s prisoners are women.
Schumpeter has put together a battle drill on how to cope with
activists. It has four elements: know the enemy; prepare for them
to attack; smother them with sincerity; and make concessions if
you have to.
About 17 years ago, Mrs P received a caution for stealing a sandwich.
She also stole a 99p book, for which she was prosecuted. Homeless and
suffering from schizophrenia, she failed to appear in court, and so received two convictions.
How to stop people who are determined to kill?
Hannah Beech in the New Yorker likens North Korea’s prickliness to a
hedgehog’s evolutionary strategy of showing its spines to protect its
pink underbelly.
Criminals do not think ten years into the future. If they did, they
would take up some other line of work. One study found that
each extra year in prison raises the risk of reoffending by six percentage points.
Japan is almost crime-free not thanks to the police, says Yoshihiro Yasuda, a campaigning lawyer, but because people police themselves.
“When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power,” Mr Allison writes, “standard crises that would otherwise be
contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can
initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes
none of the parties would otherwise have chosen.” This is the
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War, violence, terrorism, spying, diplomacy, crime, hunting
Thucydides Trap, named after the Athenian historian who fi rst
pointed to it. The Harvard study concluded that in 12 out of the
16 historical cases in the past 500 years that it examined, the
outcome was war.
So cheap and plentiful are hand-grenades that Yemenis throw them to
celebrate weddings.
Roman soldiers, it is said, were sometimes paid in salt.
Who does not prefer the rifl e to the blunderbuss, the scalpel to the axe?
What happens to institutions and legal processes when the distinctions between war and peace become blurred and the space
between becomes the norm?
With 5,000 years of sacred history touted ad nauseam by its Communist
Party leaders, who is to deny China anything it wants?
The intelligence world is full of bluffs and double-bluffs— and
errors. Agents misbehave. Aims change over time.
The other key principles of the Obama checklist are: sustainability (avoid
commitments that cost too much to stick with); restraint (ask not what
America can do but what it should do); precision (wield a scalpel rather
than a hammer); patience (give policies the time and effort to work); fallibility (berealistic about the chances of failure and modest about what
you can achieve); scepticism (interrogate the issues and beware those
peddling easy answers to diffi cult questions); exceptionalism (the recognition that because of its enormous power and attachment to universal
values America has a unique responsibility to provide leadership in the
world that cannot be ducked).
Napoleon was impressed with Istanbul. If all the world were
asingle state, he said, this city should be its capital.
As Hitler rolled through Europe, some Americans wondered if Britain
could hold out. One military observer questioned whether the British
army could handle the “high centralisation and co-ordination demanded
by the machine age.” Britain urgently sought American aid, which often
fell short. Even before Lend-Lease, America sent Britain rifl es leftover
from 1919, still packed in grease, with bullets of the wrong calibre, which
made them useless.
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Часть I
In Indonesia and the Philippines, more than 90% of female prisoners have been charged with drug offences. In Ireland, 80% are
jailed for non-payment of fi nes. Most Kenyans prosecuted for
brewing illicit alcohol are women, perhaps because it is a crime
that can be committed without leaving the children home alone.
In Afghanistan, half the women in prison are there for “moral”
crimes such as eloping.
America will need to act as enforcer-in-chief.
An Indonesian offi cial announced he had found a way to save
money on prisons: replace guards with crocodiles. Crocodiles, he
noted, were suffi ciently ferocious and more resistant to bribery.
California’s treasurer, Bill Lockyer, is fond of saying that California will
not default unless there is thermonuclear war.
Intelligence offi cers seeking to recruit a target work on four frailties, summarised in a CIA dictum as money, ideology, compromise and ego (MICE for short).
Having taken back control of their territory in Iraq and Syria, the Kurds
have proved incapable of sharing it. The alphabet barely has enough letters to cover the acronyms of all their quarrelsome factions. A Syrian analyst counts 45 in Rojava alone. In Iraq there are almost as many. “ We’re
upholding Sykes-Picot borders,” says one of its commanders wryly.
A retired general says that nuclear command and control during
the cold war felt like “holding an angry tiger by the tail”.
The incident is yet another illustration of the perils of matching fi rstworld fi repower with third-world decision-making.
As one general puts it, the American military is becoming “a Super Walmart with everything under one roof”. Because its culture
is proudly can-do, it gets on with the demands made on it without
much complaint.
If a goat can get through, so can a man; if a man can get through, so can
a battalion.
The major lesson of the Vietnam war is: do not rely on the United
States as an ally.
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War, violence, terrorism, spying, diplomacy, crime, hunting
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
Assured peace comes only at the splintered end of a long stick.
Scratch a South Korean and he will be unsure of America’s commitment,
ready to believe that Japan might turn aggressive again, resentful that
China ignores his country’s concerns and alarmed by a dangerous North
Korea.
One community chopped off the sexual organs of another community.
As Helmuth von Moltke, a 19th-century German fi eld-marshal, put it: “No
plan survives contact with the enemy.” Or Mike Tyson, still more pithily:
“Everyone has a plan ’til they get punched in the mouth”.
Grover Cleveland even managed to dodge the draft during the civil
war by paying $150 to a Polish immigrant to act as his substitute.
The U. S. military programme needs to overcome at least fi ve critical vulnerabilities. The fi rst is that carriers and other surface vessels can now
be tracked and hit by missiles at ranges from the enemy’s shore which
could prevent the use of their cruise missiles or their tactical aircraft
without in-fl ight refuelling by lumbering tankers that can be picked off
by hostile fi ghters. The second is that defending close-in regional air
bases from a surprise attack in the opening stages of a confl ict is increasingly hard. Third, aircraft operating at the limits of their combat
range would struggle to identify and target mobile missile launchers.
Fourth, modern air defences can shoot down non-stealthy aircraft at
long distances. Finally, the satellites America requires for surveillance
and intelligence are no longer safe from attack.
If a guy has been hit by 700,000 bullets it’s hard to work out which
one of them killed him.
Wars sound horrible in plain English, so they have always generated
a smokescreen of euphemism. “Kinetic action” means “killing people”.
“Collateral damage” means “killing people accidentally”. Politicians typically use the word “kill” only to describe what our enemies do to us; not
what we do to them. In a speech in May explaining his drone warfare
policy, for example, Barack Obama spoke of “lethal, targeted action
against al-Qaeda and its associated forces”. As Orwell said, when “certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract.”
147
Часть I
We all know about Iwo Jima, but who in the West has heard of the
defence of Taierzhuang, when Chinese soldiers defeated superior
Japanese troops in hand-to-hand combat?
In “Year Zero” Ian Buruma tells these stories well, and highlights others too. He fi nds concentration-camp inmates who attacked their German nurses after liberation; a Jewish extremist who tried to poison 6m
Germans; the 137 SS offi cers who “had their testicles permanently destroyed” by American interrogators.
Unencrypted e-mails are as open as postcards and using a mobile
is the worst thing you can do. There is the data centre that the
NSA is building near Salt Lake City, Utah. It is likely to cost at least
$1.2 billion, and some expect its computers to provide fi ve trillion
gigabytes of storage. The agency did not build it to stand empty.
History suggests that, unless civil wars end in victory after 12months or
so, they tend to drag on for years.
A typical air-force stint is three to four years; some drone pilots
have been serving for over six. Morale is low and burnout, high.
Many pilots worry that their job is the object of scorn. When the
idea of medals for drone pilots was aired last year, a retired Green
Beret huffed to the Washington Times: “Isuppose now they will
award Purple Hearts for carpal tunnel syndrome.”
More than 52,000 police offi cers were assaulted in America in 2012.
That’s 142 assaults on the police each day. And people wonder why they
come across as jaded and gruff.
Mr. Obama is taking a risk. Step back too far from big sticks, and
when America speaks, it may not be heard.
Cryptography is an arms race between Alice and Bob, and Eve. These are
the names cryptographers give to two people who are trying to communicate privily, and to a third who is trying to intercept and decrypt their
conversation. Currently, Alice and Bob are ahead— just. But Eve is catching up. The most developed form of quantum cryptography, known as
quantum key distribution (QKD), relies on stopping interception, rather
than preventing decryption. Once again, the key is a huge number— one
with hundreds of digits, if expressed in the decimal system. Alice sends
this to Bob as a series of photons (the particles of light) before she sends
the encrypted message. For Eve to read this transmission, and thus ob-
148
War, violence, terrorism, spying, diplomacy, crime, hunting
tain the key, she must destroy some photons. Since Bob will certainly
notice the missing photons, Eve will need to create and send identical
ones to Bob to avoid detection. But Alice and Bob (or, rather, the engineers who make their equipment) can stop that by using two different
quantum properties, such as the polarities of the photons, to encode
the ones and zeros of which the key is composed. According to Werner
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, only one of these two properties can
be measured, so Eve cannot reconstruct each photon without making
errors. If Bob detects such errors he can tell Alice not to send the actual
message until the line has been secured.
More than 2,000 years ago Greece was torn apart by Sparta’s failure to manage the rise of Athens. A hundred years ago Europe
was torn apart by its failure to manage the rise of Germany. If the
21st century is to be more peaceful than the 20th, America and
China must learn to co-operate better.
History is littered with powerful people undone by hubris. Julius Caesar
should have ignored the cheers of the Roman crowd and paid heed to the
soothsayer.
The American revolution itself was an episode in the long confl ict
between Britain and France.
Spooks do need secrecy, but not on everything and everywhere.
There are around 250 gangs in the capital alone, selling drugs,
carrying out muggings and sometimes stabbing each other.
Gangsterism in Britain has become mundane.
The fi rst rule of modern conspiracies is that you do not talk about them
in e-mails.
The Meiji slogan fukoku kyohei: “enrich the country, strengthen
the army”.
Imagine that Apple could sell iPhones in Brazil only if it ploughed 20%
of its projected revenues there into local technology fi rms. That may
sound absurd, but this is what happens when governments buy arms
from foreign contractors. In procurement it is standard to supplement
the main deal with a side contract, usually undisclosed, that outlines additional investments that the winning bidder must make in local projects
or else pay a penalty. Welcome to the murky world of “offsets”. Take the
149
Часть I
shrimp farm set up in Saudi Arabia in 2006 with backing from Raytheon,
a maker of radar systems and missiles. Praised at fi rst as a model offset,
it reportedly struggled to keep its pools properly maintained in searing
temperatures and eventually went bust. Turkey, for instance, now meets
half its own defence needs thanks to such arrangements. Indirect (nondefence) offsets include everything from backing new technologies or
business parks to building hotels, donating to universities and even supporting condom-makers.
To a man with a hammer, Mark Twain once said, everything
looks like a nail.
He never protected himself, not with a gun, not even with a toothpick.
Was not Alfred Nobel an arms maker before he became a prizeendower?
St Augustine reported a convicted pirate’s testy exchange with Alexander the Great: “Because I have only one rickety ship, I’m called a bandit,
and because you have a large fl eet, you are called an emperor,” says the
plucky seafarer.
The British war in Afghanistan in 1842 cost £ 15m— about £ 50billion ($80 billion) in today’s money— and the lives of 40,000 people,
50,000 camels and at least one cat. That is still a bargain compared with the current confl ict, which costs America more than
$100 billion every year.
Calling for growth is like advocating world peace: everybody agrees that
it is a good thing, but nobody agrees how to do it.
Undercover agents are often most useful not when they are spying on a country’s enemies, but when they are talking to them.
Spies rarely provide solid answers, he says, but offer confusing
bits of a jigsaw puzzle of unknown size and shape. At best, secret
intelligence removes an element of surprise from foreign affairs,
but it rarely makes it clear what to do.
Chippewa morning of 9/11 Mr Bush was reading “My Pet Goat” to a class
of second-graders.
American commanders are fond of the saying that amateurs discuss tactics, while professionals discuss logistics.
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