unknown
AR O for a winter break
with warm wind and sun

Laura Williams Photography
Dirty laundry — where?

Georgy Kurasov
Jolabokaflod

AR My festive binge this
season is reading Purity
by Jonathan Franzen

www.bijanstudio.com
Conservative identity:
cool and conformist
(sample size 1)

Jennifer Lawrence

Minuteman III
LGM-30 Minuteman Launch
Logic Earth
(5:43)

"That's what the world
needs now: a POTUS
who tweets about
nuclear policy."
Sam Harris

Twitter
Paris Hilton in paradise

AR We might join her
there all too soon.

Getty
David Bowie's widow Iman, 61

The God Meme

Evolution and the Big Bang
are real and God is not a
magician with a magic wand,
declared Pope Francis to the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Experts say his comments put
the kybosh on the pseudo-
theories of creationism
and intelligent design.



Admirable history
of an Asian millennium
of triumph and tragedy
— my Amazon review of
Lost Enlightenment
by S. Frederick Starr

POTUS 45 elected

Rogue One

US Electors vote today for
POTUS 45. Trump trails in the popular vote by over 2.5 million
— the third-worst vote margin among winning candidates
since 1824.









AR
Privatize the military
and see how we like the
social consequences of
their funding drives.

Deepest Mandelbrot Set Zoom
Animation: 10^275

Hardest Mandelbrot Zoom
Ever In 2014: 10^198

Mandelbrot Set Back Story

2016 New Year's Eve

Happy New Tweet

Donald J. Trump

Great move on delay (by V. Putin) — I always knew he was very smart!

AR We all look forward to a new era of harmonious progress.

American Democracy

Fareed Zakaria

In the West, liberty and law on the one hand and popular participation on the other created liberal democracy. This culture of liberal democracy is waning in the United States today.

The Founding Fathers conceived of America as a republic to mitigate some of the dangers of illiberal democracy. The United States developed a democratic culture, formed in large part by a series of informal buffers that weakened the sway of the majority. A professional elite ensured that US society and government would focus on the national interest.

The two prevailing dynamics in US society over the past few decades have been toward greater democratic openness and market efficiency. We are about to see what American democracy looks like without buffers in the way of populism and demagoguery.

AR Liberal humanism as we know it is past its best-before date.
 

2016 December 30

Israeli Intransigence

The New York Times

Differences between Israel and the United States have boiled over into a diplomatic confrontation. Israeli policy, under the government of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has evolved away from an acceptance of a negotiated two-state resolution with the Palestinians.

A UN Security Council resolution condemned Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Obama administration chose to abstain from the vote rather than to block it.

Under any negotiated solution, Israelis expect their capital to be Jerusalem. But Palestinians also want Jerusalem as their capital, as well as access to the Muslim holy sites.

This is the cynical logic of the settlement movement: When the world is silent, Israel can build settlements; when the world objects, Israel must build settlements. Under any scenario, the possibility of a two-state solution will recede.

The Palestinians are divided and their leaders malicious or hapless. Hamas rules in the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Authority governs in the West Bank. The settlements are an obstacle.

US secretary of state John Kerry warned that without a two-state solution, Israel faces a choice between being a Jewish state and a democracy. If Israel annexes the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Palestinians become the majority in greater Israel. Israelis can either let them vote and lose its identity or deny them and lose its democracy.

The Israeli far right imagines a different one-state solution. Egypt takes over the Gaza Strip, Israel holds most of the West Bank, Jordan takes most former West Bank residents, and Jerusalem comes entirely under Israeli control.

AR A Palestinian state is not a viable solution in the present political climate. Hard though it seems, Israel must prevail against Islamist opposition.

Syrian Civil War

David Greenberg

Americans see the carnage in Syria as a humanitarian disaster. But the humanitarian crisis is just one of the consequences of the US approach to the Syrian civil war:

1 Barack Obama says Syria is of no great strategic importance to the United States. This breaks with decades of geostrategic thinking. If Russia displaces US power in the Mideast, it will affect US influence across the region.

2 Europe has struggled for decades to assimilate Muslim arrivals from the Mideast and Africa. But the new waves of Syrian refugees have created a crisis. Several EU states are in turmoil.

3 The Obama administration was slow to counter the gathering strength of Daesh. The terrorist outfit is on the defensive now, but it continues to plot and spur terrorism in the West.

4 The delay on Daesh also forced the United States to change its strategy in Syria. Obama directed US military power to the fight against Daesh, turning his attention from Assad.

5 Obama said in 2012 that if Assad were to use chemical weapons, he would cross a red line and trigger US military intervention. A year later, when evidence showed that Assad had used them, Obama backed down from reprisals.

Obama avoided another quagmire but went too far. His approach neither strengthened American influence nor helped to make a safer world.

AR Blame the Nobel Peace Prize committee for giving him an ideal to live up to.

British Dirty Laundry

Ben Judah

Billions of dollars are laundered through the London real estate market every year, contributing to an estimated annual total of $125 billion laundered in Britain.

British law is on the side of the kleptocrats. An autocrat on the run can create a shell company to hide his identity and the source of his illicit wealth, and then use this instrument to purchase property incognito. London bankers, brokers, and lawyers will ask no awkward questions as they take their commissions.

Such anonymous companies now own nearly 40,000 London properties. Some of these purchases may be legitimate and innocent, but Transparency International found this technique had been used for three-quarters of properties whose owners were investigated for corruption in Britain.

The London Laundromat is destroying the country's reputation. Across the former Soviet Union, Britain is now seen as a partner in corruption, not democracy.

AR An amendment now in parliament can fix this, but only with zealous application of the law. I fear that Brexiteers may seek to indulge the kleptocrats in order to boost British finances.

Austrian Word of the Year

Der Standard

Bundespräsidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung

AR Wunderbar!
 

2016 December 29

Western Civilization

Nigel Biggar

The Chinese are keen to understand the West and its success. They think Christianity has something to do with it. They perceive that Western civilization has enduring characteristics to which Christianity has made a signal contribution and which are quite distinct from traditional Chinese civilization and modern communist culture.

Within the West, some draw exaggerated contrasts between Christendom and the Islamic world in the medieval period, between imperial Europe and Asia in the 19th century, between liberal democracies and the Soviet empire in the 20th, and between the West and the rest now.

Westerners have found much to admire in other cultures and have borrowed liberally from them. Algebra from the Islamic world, cuisine from India, paper and gunpowder from China, and fine arts from Japan are just the highlights. Members of other cultures can grasp and appropriate Western ideas too — Africans and Asians are sometimes better humanists than contemporary Westerners.

Truth, goodness, and beauty transcend time and place. No one culture has a monopoly of wisdom, but some values are more at home in one culture than another. The primacy of the individual over the state is arguably more entrenched in those Western cultures shaped by Christianity than in those eastern ones shaped by Confucianism.

Christian Europe was well acquainted with individualism, democracy, political liberty, and rationality. The prominence of the individual in the West stems from the Christian notion of the prophet called to stand up for individual justice. Christian social roots anchored an institutional separation of church and state in the West, which created space for a flourishing civil society generally lacking in the Islamic world.

Pre-modern Christendom was no stranger to reason. Scholastic theologians pushed natural science in an empirical direction by affirming the biblical contingency of the created world against Aristotelian necessity. What could have been other than it is in fact can only be known by observation, not speculation.

AR The Christian individual is a person guided by an inner light. This light is reason for a Hellenic soul and revelation for a Judaic one, but the Christian concept merged the two in a synthesis that survived until communists subverted it and forced the evolution of modern humanism. We are now seeing the emergence of a cyborg environmentalism that merges humans with technology and individualist thinking with planetary consciousness — Globorg.
 

2016 December 28

Bounded Rationality

Daniel Engber

Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky argued in 1971 that belief in generalizations based on overly small sample sizes was a bias of cognition. They went on to show that mistakes in human judgment are not exceptions but the rule. Kahneman went on to win a Nobel Prize in 2002, and his 2011 book
Thinking, Fast and Slow became a huge success.

Now many of the findings Kahneman cited in the book appear to be fragile, even spurious. Studies mentioned there started to dissolve as scientists tried and failed to reproduce the original results. The problem was the one he had identified in 1971: The researchers were fooled by faulty intuitions about randomness.

Neuropolitics

Jonas T. Kaplan, Sarah I. Gimbel, Sam Harris

We used neuroimaging to investigate the neural systems involved in maintaining belief in the face of counterevidence. We presented 40 liberals with arguments that contradicted their strongly held political and non-political views. Our results highlight the role of emotion in belief-change resistance and offer insight into the neural systems involved in belief maintenance, motivated reasoning, and related phenomena.

Participants were especially resistant to arguments against their political beliefs. Given the personal importance of political beliefs for the subjects enrolled in this study, we expected our stimuli to evoke cognition related to social identity. We found that individual differences in resistance to belief change correlated with activity in brain regions important for the generation of emotions, feelings, and social judgments.

All of our participants were strong liberals. It is not clear how well these results would generalize to conservatives. Several studies have found structural or functional differences between the brains of conservatives and liberals.

AR Sample size 40.
 

2016 December 27

Passengers Arrival

AR

First contact with advanced alien visitors was the theme of Arrival. Huge ellipsoidal spacecraft came to hover silently over various spots of Earth and human experts sought to communicate with them. Amy Adams played the language expert who made first meaningful contact with the squid-like inhabitants of one of the ellipsoids. Their messages looked like splashed rings from wet coffee cups and she had a hard time making any sense of them. After humans worldwide struggled to guess a few words that seemed to form a vague message and military authorities began to get edgy, the spacecraft silently headed off, leaving a host of unanswered questions.

Communication is a deep philosophical enigma, and Arrival dramatized the issue superbly. The movie also forced us to confront our immaturity as a species by spacefaring standards. Civilized squids exploring the galaxy in giant ellipsoids would naturally find it hard to strike up a conversation with us, not only on the technical level but also in terms of what there was to say. The Adams character was moved in ways she found unable to express, and that seemed a bigger payoff than any new equation to warp spacetime or whatever. This was a movie for philosophers.

By contrast, Passengers could almost have been written to a formula. Avalon, a giant space cruiser bearing five thousand aspiring colonists in hibernation to a remote Earth-like planet, hits a cloud of space rubble and suffers damage. The story is set in a far enough future that the ship is on a fairly routine voyage using proven technology and the the passengers are as safe as on an ocean-going cruise liner on Earth today. But they are on a one-way voyage to a planet many light-years away. For a technophile, the visualization of this great vessel is surely the main treat in this movie.

The plot of Passengers relies in part on surprise, so it may be unwise to say too much, but the main plot line is the developing relationship between two passengers, Jim and Aurora (played by Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence), after first Jim and then Aurora wake up from hibernation following malfunctions caused by the rubble collision, some ninety years before arrival at the destination planet. As their lonely wakefulness in the huge public spaces of the ship works on them and as the ship suffers escalating malfunctions, the movie artfully evokes moods from such earlier classics as The Shining, set in an empty hotel, and Titanic, set on a sinking ship. Jim gradually masters his initial despair and seeks to repair the ship, while Aurora goes through a gamut of heartfelt emotions that Lawrence plays impressively well.

Arrival and Passengers are two very different movies, but they complement each other in ways that reward comparative reflection. Arrival shows how little one can say about the problems of saying anything at all. A single note of mystic bafflement is allowed to ring out loud and clear, with no more or less to convey than a Zen gong in a religious retreat. Passengers shows how even a formulaic plot can be redeemed by loving attention to the technically plausible visualization of the interior and exterior details of an interstellar passenger cruiser.

For me, this makes Passengers the more interesting movie despite my wholehearted admiration for the evocation of the mystic side of communication in Arrival. Scientists may do genuine homage to deep philosophy, but in the end they spend most of their time and effort on the technology, and hence get most of their kicks from it. And few scientists will fail to enjoy seeing J-Law in action.
 

2016 December 26

World War 3

Eric Schlosser

The United States and Russia are drifting toward a new cold war. Many of the nuclear weapon systems on both sides are aging and obsolete. The USAF Global Strike Command has 440 Minuteman III ICBMs, relics of the Cold War, sitting in underground silos, ready to take off within 2 minutes, to deter a surprise attack.

The US nuclear war plan is the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). It depended on getting Minuteman missiles off the ground immediately. The plan called for the destruction of 12,000 targets within the Soviet Union, with 400 nuclear weapons targeted on Moscow alone.

Missiles launched from Russia would give POTUS about 20 minutes to respond. Missiles launched from Russian submarines in the western Atlantic would give him only 5 minutes. A decision to launch Minuteman missiles on warning would kill millions of people.

The United States has taken precautions to thwart a cyberattack on its nuclear command and control system. If landline communications between Minuteman control centers and their missiles are interrupted, the missiles can still be launched by UHF radio signals from Air Force One. The radio link creates an entry point for a possible cyberattack.

Hundreds of missiles based on US Navy submarines also deter a Russian attack. But they too may be compromised by malware. The Royal Navy saves money by using Windows for Submarines, a version of Windows XP, on its ballistic missile subs. Microsoft support for Windows XP ended in 2014.

Russia is modernizing its nuclear arsenal. The Russian leadership is terrified of a decapitation strike. A first strike is probably the only imaginable route to decisive victory in nuclear war. Vladimir Putin: "When a fight is inevitable, you have to hit first."

POTUS has sole power to order the use of US nuclear weapons, with no legal obligation to consult anyone else.

AR Schlosser is an expert on all this. His 2013 book Command and Control is terrifying.
 

2016 Christmas Day

Sovereignty

AR

If I am a sovereign being, my free will is hard to find, and must defy the findings of neuroscience. If a public polity is to be sovereign, it must set its face against a well developed international order, with global rules on peace and war, trade and markets, and human rights and duties. If freedom is power, it must escape the chains of rules that bind our choices.

In personal or political life, the scientific constraints on free will fall behind in the admission that no well founded prediction can be derived in time to make effective decisions. If I wait for the scientific story to unfold, the moment has passed and my act is choked. Life as we know it involves acting fast, in real time, and the power to do so is our freedom.

Politicians are paid to make choices on behalf of those who put them in power. Voters may be pushed by powers beyond their control to vote as they do, but the laws of large numbers average out the wilder impulses and the rulers who emerge can count on a steady base. Still, the focused power that remains is hostage to a cloud of neural and social fortune.

In both personal and political life, seeking to escape the wheel of fortune is a fatal error. The road to absolute sovereignty is a hard one, and going with the flow is usually the better way. If I choose autonomy, to be my own boss and do my own thing, I must defy the gods, but if I work with others in similar predicaments I can make peace with my fate.

Neuroscience tells me that my brain has evolved to maintain the illusion of control, to steer me away from entanglements and toward a felt sense of freedom. But history shows that people must moderate their natural impulses if they want to live together in harmony. Politicians naturally want sovereignty, but they should beware of what they wish for.
 

2016 December 24

Now

Andy Ross

I started this book with high hopes and found the first half really interesting, then it went downhill fast. Muller is obviously an excellent experimental physicist and has understood Einstein's theories of relativity, at least, really well. He also gives workmanlike accounts of large parts of particle physics and the basics of quantum theory ...

That said, the denouement in Part V is an utter disappointment.
 

2016 December 23

Trump Tweet Translated

Max Fisher

PEOTUS Trump appears to have declared US nuclear weapons policy in a tweet:
"The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes."

Nuclear policy has a meticulous language all its own, but his words fall outside that language:

The word "strengthen" is not in its lexicon but may mean
— Modernize existing nuclear forces by upgrading President Obama's plan
— Expand qualitative nuclear capability by developing improved delivery systems
— Deploy existing weapons systems closer to adversaries

The word "expand" may mean
— Move some warheads from reserve stockpiles to active deployment
— Build and deploy new warheads
— Build new warheads and stockpile them

Strengthening and expansion may mean increasing
— The number and yield of nuclear warheads
— The speed, stealth, range, or other attributes of weapons that deliver them
— Both

"until such time"
— As I want
— As is necessary to maintain the status quo
— As certain foreign states fulfill certain conditions

"the world"
— All nuclear weapons states
— Russia and China
— Russia

The aim may be to
— Avoid any escalation that might disturb the global status quo
— Continue until the world accepts American nuclear primacy
— Continue until we get global nuclear disarmament

Any increase in capability would force Russia and China to respond, increase the number of nuclear conflict scenarios, and reduce the response time in a crisis. The Obama plan to update the nuclear arsenal is already projected to cost $1 trillion.

The Fall of Language in the Age of English

Minae Mizumura

This book was written for those who, in moments of solitude, quietly worry about the future of Japanese literature and the Japanese language. It is for those who think that what is being written in Japanese today is ultimately of little relevance but who wish, with mingled despair and resignation, that at the very least more people would read Japanese literature written in those years when it was deserving of the name.

AR My stab at learning Japanese in Japan, plus my reading of classic Japanese novels in English translation, suggests this despairing reflection is right. There was a fragile delicacy in the culture that appears like a vanishing world through the prism of English global hegemony.
 

2016 December 22

David Bowie

Ian Penman

In 1975 David Bowie was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a movie. In an interview for Rolling Stone he talked about the drugs he preferred. Station to Station, which he released in January 1976, was about as far from Kiss and Led Zeppelin and the Eagles as you could possibly get.

A key to his success in the 1970s was that his rock superstar personae, including Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, were both up on a pedestal and down in the everyday dirt. As an artist, writer, actor, singer, Bowie was good, but could never join the ranks of the greats in any of those areas. The huge surge of affection when he died came about partly because people felt he remained a kid who never forgot where he was from.

Bowie met the Somalian supermodel Iman in 1990 and he sobered up. Watching Bowie selling himself to the world was a depressing sight. To fall to Earth, you have to have been way up in the stars.

AR I liked the late Bowie. Sobering up is a seal of quality.

The Soviet Union

Leon Aron

The Soviet Union in 1985 possessed much the same resources as it had a decade earlier. The standard of living was lower than in most of Eastern Europe, but the Soviet Union had known far greater calamities without losing its grip. No key parameter of economic performance prior to 1985 pointed to disaster.

The Soviet Union was at the height of its global power and influence, both in its own view and in the view of the rest of the world. The structural reasons for its collapse fail to explain how it happened. Between 1985 and 1989, the state and its economic system began to be seen as shameful, illegitimate, and intolerable.

A quest for self-respect and pride hollowed out the mighty Soviet state. Deprived of its legitimacy, the USSR turned into a shell that crumbled in August 1991. The tale of this intellectual and moral journey is a central story of the last century.

AR The present USUK order could end equally quickly.
 

2016 December 21

The Trump Fact

Martin Wolf

Democracy lets people with different views live together in harmony. An outburst of fear and anger is disturbing because such primal emotions are hard to contain. In the UK and the US in 2016, they came together in nationalism and xenophobia.

The more powerful the passions, the more likely the democratic system will collapse into despotism. Demagogues claim the tyranny of the majority as a mask on the tyranny of one. Trump in charge of the USA is a devastating fact.

The Brexit Game

Daniel Finkelstein

Thomas Schelling worked out how to prevent nuclear war. He helped American policymakers see that they had to make first use taboo and ensure they could always retaliate. With a telephone hotline between the Kremlin and Washington, they could then avoid nuclear war.

The ideas of Schelling and the game theorists relate to the problems Britain now faces when negotiating departure from the European Union. Brexit is a game involving many players and a reasonable outcome is not assured. It could end in conflict and failure.

Schelling rules:

1 We should know what an acceptable deal looks like.
2 We should flag any absolute commitments clearly.
3 We should go for a good outcome for both of us.

AR Rule 0 — rise above us versus them.
 

2016 December 20

Germany 2017

Josef Joffe

On Bastille Day in Nice, a man drove a truck into a crowd, killing 86. Last night in Berlin, a man drove a truck into a crowd, killing 12. Germany has foiled many more terror attacks.

The German cocoon has burst. Germans will soon accept intensified surveillance. The federal government has decided to beef up data gathering and cyber warfare capabilities.

Angela Merkel's open-door policy on refugees will change. Last year she flung open the doors on German borders. Some 800,000 people from the Mideast and Africa swarmed in.

For Merkel, the open door was a grand moral gesture and an act of historical atonement. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Controls are now back with a vengeance.

Alternative für Deutschland will campaign against Merkel in the 2017 general elections. She will want to pose as a protector of domestic security. Germany is a terror target too.

AR The terrorists have split up Europe already.

America 2017

Edward Luce

One of the reasons the US won the cold war was its skill at breaking China away from the Soviet Union. When Nixon went to China in 1972 he cemented the Sino-Soviet split and weakened Moscow. Nixon was a devout student of global affairs who grasped the geopolitical chessboard.

Trump wants to be known as the president who returns manufacturing jobs to the US. He is using the threat to the One China policy as leverage to wrest concessions from China. It will backfire.

AR If Trump ups arms to Taiwan, China will be angry.

UK 2017

Gideon Rachman

Brexit could be chaotic for trade and diplomatic relations. A smooth divorce may prove unattainable and instead become a train crash. The reasons are procedural and political.

Procedurally, the negotiations are complicated. Britain and the EU will try to unpick a 40-year relationship in 2 years. UK ambassador to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers says it could take 10 years.

Politically, there is simmering ill will on both sides. The negotiating process will reveal the immense gap between the assumptions of the two sides. Talks could break down irretrievably.

The EU estimate of British financial liabilities following Brexit is that the UK will be facing a bill of up to €60 billion. That figure will cause outrage in the UK. But the EU will be able to justify it.

Britain could simply walk out and let the case go to the International Court of Justice. Then it will be impossible to make any further progress on Brexit. Opinion will harden on both sides.

Brexit would happen after 2 years even with no deal. The consequences could be dire. A senior British civil servant: "It's going to be bloody, but we're just going to have to bash on through."

AR Expect a Trumped-up nuclear holocaust first.
 

2016 December 19

Unpresidented Trump

Global Times

Beijing and Washington understand that China will return the captured underwater drone to the United States. The two governments have shown responsibility in maintaining peace and stability.

Trump tweets
1 "China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters — rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented act."
2 "We should tell China that we don't want the drone they stole back — let them keep it!"

Trump has no sense of how to lead a superpower. Since he has not taken office, China has kept a calm attitude toward his provocative remarks. But if he treats China after assuming office in the same way as in his tweets, China will not exercise restraint.

Reform Central Banks

Wolfgang Münchau

World Bank chief economist Paul Romer calls modern macroeconomics a racket.

The US and German central banks were independent before 1990 but most other central banks were not. Most people would probably not agree that since army generals know best what is good for us, national armed forces must be independent.

Defenders of the liberal order should push to reclaim the central levers of economic policy. They should distinguish the interests of the financial sector from those of the economy. Failure to do so was one of the reasons for the Brexit vote.

The case for reform is overwhelming.

Against Dark Matter

Natalie Wolchover

Erik Verlinde says gravity emerges from qubit entanglement and dark matter reduces to dark energy. He sees spacetime and matter as a hologram arising from an underlying network of qubits and traces dark energy to a property of the qubits.

Years ago, modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) inventor Mordehai Milgrom conjectured that when the gravitational field strength drops below precisely 0.12 pN/g, gravity somehow switches from an inverse-square law to something close to an inverse-distance law.

Verlinde gives a back story for the MOND equations. He says spacetime is a geometric representation of data stored in qubits. To do the work of dark matter, he postulates a thermal energy associated with long-range entanglement between the qubits.

This entanglement is disrupted by matter, which interacts with dark energy to modify gravity. The interaction increasingly dominates in larger volumes of spacetime. Verlinde says it causes galaxy rotation curves to deviate from the inverse-square law exactly as in MOND.

Analysis of galaxies strengthens his case. Researchers looked at 153 galaxies and compared the rotation speed of visible matter at a given distance from each galactic center with the visible mass within that galactic radius. The two variables were linked as in MOND without dark matter.

Testing the new MOND on data from more than 30,000 galaxies shows that Verlinde correctly predicts the gravitational lensing of light from the galaxies — another claimed effect of dark matter.

The crowning achievement for Verlinde would be to account for the claimed imprints of dark matter in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Dark matter explains the observed CMB spectrum but the old MOND does not.
 

USAF
USAF B-52H leads a formation of aircraft including two Polish Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons, four USAF F-16s,
two Luftwaffe Eurofighter EF2000s and four Swedish Air Force Gripens over the Baltic Sea for exercise
BALTOPS, 2016-06-09

Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images
Donald and Ivanka

Rail Strike Chaos

RMT union boss Sean Hoyle:
"Replace the capitalist system
with a socialist order ...
if we all spit together
we can drown the
bastards."

AR Kill.

Jail Riot Chaos

No hot water for showers in
a UK jail is thought to have
set off the worst prison
riot for a generation.

AR Pussies.

DE
Panzerjäger Tiger (P)
(a.k.a. Sd.Kfz.184 Elefant)
at Southampton Docks on
its way to Bovington
Tank Museum

2016 December 18

The New Sheriff

The Sunday Times

Donald Trump will reverse American policy toward Russia and in the Mideast. He will ally with Vladimir Putin and repair US ties with autocratic Sunni Arab regimes. His team promises a "night and day" contrast with the outgoing administration.

Trump will usher in a "new era of American leadership" and launch a new offensive against Daesh to show them there is a "new sheriff in town" after eight years of weakness. Trump will order his generals to deliver a plan within a month of his inauguration.

Trump will woo Putin. He will ditch the nuclear deal with Iran and drive a wedge between Russia and Iran. He will use US special forces to the max. An officer: "All we need is the presidential authority and the GPS coordinates and we can kill anyone in the world within 72 hours."

Trump: "Military, cyber and financial warfare will all be essential in dismantling Islamic terrorism. But we must use ideological warfare as well. Just as we won the cold war, in part, by exposing the evils of communism and the virtues of free markets, so too must we take on the ideology of radical Islam."

AR It might work. Worth a try anyway. Worst that can happen is nuclear holocaust.

The New Britain

Tom Crewe

Britain is the most centralized country in the Western world. Its local councils account for about a quarter of government spending. Since 2010 their spending has been cut by over a third, and is scheduled to fall much further by 2020.

Soon after 2010, councils in England were encouraged to freeze council tax. The tax is calculated on the basis of property values set in 1993 and not updated since. Councils are prohibited from running a deficit and are obliged to balance the budget every year.

Councils have made big savings in roads and transport. Spending on parks and culture has also fallen. Leisure centres, swimming pools, playing grounds, public toilets, and libraries have been closed.

Since 2010, billions have been cut from social care budgets. The services that remain are overstretched, and councils must make more cuts this year, with yet more to come. By 2020, English councils will be spending most of their income on social care.

Austerity destroys local government and marketizes nearly every aspect of public policy. Local government will soon be forced to outsource most of its responsibilities to the private sector. A municipal nation has been destroyed.

AR Be Stoic: The rich will get richer, the jams (just about managing) will go into forced servitude, and the rest will face death with a smile.

The New Stoics

Philip Delves Broughton

Last week Donald Trump met the new titans in Trump Tower. Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, and Larry Page of Alphabet came along in suits and ties. They have embraced Stoicism — accepting what they cannot change and managing what they can.

Stoicism is the new Zen. Ryan Holiday has sold nearly a quarter of a million copies of his book The Obstacle Is the Way. Athletes, Hollywood celebrities, and the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley bought the recycled philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.

The Stoics were indifferent to pleasure and pain, wealth and poverty, fortified by their distance from the emotions that trouble ordinary minds. When they kissed their children goodnight, they imagined them dying, so that if the worst were to happen they would be ready.

Marcus Aurelius faced war and death on the fringes of the Roman Empire. He wrote that facing a fine meal, you should recall "this is the dead body of a fish and this is the dead body of a bird or a pig".

James Stockdale was a US navy pilot who spent years in North Vietnam as a prisoner of war. He had read Epictetus. He survived by confronting the brutal facts of his situation. The men who went under were the optimists: "They died of a broken heart."

Epictetus: "Men, the lecture room of the philosopher is a hospital; students ought not to walk out of it in pleasure, but in pain."

AR Cue for my next book.
 

2016 December 17

British Tax Haven Gambit

Der Spiegel

Despite Brexit, Brits want a say in deciding EU tax policy. They propose an HM Treasury candidate to chair the EU working group that oversees tax competition between member states. EU27 members resist his nomination because since the Brexit vote Britain has blocked moves to outlaw tax havens such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and the British Virgin Islands.

AR Perfidious Albion — don't let it drag EU down.

German Armed Forces Update

Ursula von der Leyen

Since the election of the new US president, it has become clear to Europeans that we have to take matters that affect us into our own hands.

There is no military solution in Syria, only a political one. If there were a way to stop Assad by force without risking wider war, we would do so. Assad is getting massive air and ground support from Russia and Iran. Syria could set the world ablaze.

We have cut spending on the German armed forces for too long and now we must modernize them. We are approaching the NATO 2% goal in reasonable steps, but modernization takes time. We shall include this goal in our election manifesto.

The EU and Germany must do more in Mali. By agreement with the UN, the German army will take over helicopter rescue duties in northern Mali from Holland in spring 2017. The Bundestag will vote in January on increasing our manpower there.

The military can only do so much. Civilian aid costs money, but it is better than hosting African migrants here or deporting them.

AR Brits who would cut aid should see this too.

Quantum Futures

Anthony Sudbery, ed. AR

Determinism is the idea that if you know the present you can predict the future. It worked for centuries. Then came quantum physics.

Quantum theory defines a state vector from which you can derive predictions. If you choose which physical quantities you want to measure, subject to complementarity, the state vector gives you probabilities for the possible answers.

Quantum mechanics gives us two answers about the future. In the view from nowhere, the universe is described by a universal state vector and its evolution is deterministic. In the view from here and now, we occupy a particular world and its evolution is probabilistic.

From here and now there are many worlds, but one of them is singled out as actual. In my future, no one world is singled out for me. I face a superposition of future worlds.

Predictions do not have to be either true or false. Let a true statement have truth value 1 and a false one have truth value 0. The truth value of a prediction X is a number between 0 and 1 giving the probability of X.

In the view from nowhere, there are many worlds with different probabilities. My actual world is one of them, and it has probability 1 for me. Possible worlds that are counterfactual relative to my world have probability 0 for me.

The whole universal state vector goes into the calculation of future probabilities. Counterfactual events can still affect the future until they fall away by decoherence. Even in a deterministic universe, our predictions are always uncertain.

AR This is just the Kripke semantics of an Everett multiverse with Bayesian probability.
 

Kremlin, Moscow, 2016-12-08 (Maxim Shipenkov/EPA)
FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr. are in agreement with a CIA assessment
that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win.

UK government officials say Moscow is undermining the UK through espionage, misinformation, cyberattacks,
and fake news.

Petras Malukas
Seen in Vilnius, Lithuania

Cambridge University Library
Principia Mathematica
by Isaac Newton: 1687 first
edition sold for $3.7 million

DPA
German defense minister
Ursula von der Leyen with Saudi
defense minister Mohammed
Bin Salman al-Saud, Riyad

2015 Defense Budgets

United States $597.5 billion
Saudi Arabia $87.2 billion
United Kingdom $56.2 billion
France $46.8 billion
Germany $36.7 billion

Asteroid Armageddon

NASA scientist Joseph Nuth
says big asteroids and comets
on collision course with Earth
are extremely rare but for us
any collision is an extinction
level event. NASA has a new
planetary defense office and
Nuth recommends building
an interceptor rocket
in readiness.

AR
Clint and Tom did good.

Czego szukasz w Święta?
English for beginners
(2:59)

In hindsight, do you think
Britain was right or wrong
to vote to leave the EU?

2016 December 16

Christmas Dinner

Poole Conservative Association
Royal Motor Yacht Club, Sandbanks

AR Robert Syms MP gave an interesting speech on the United States and the federal ideal in Europe, the British and German economies, and the opportunities and challenges of Brexit.

Team Trump

Slate

Some choice picks:

● Vice-President: Mike Pence, the Governor of Indiana, an evangelical Christian who opposes abortion and denies the theory of evolution.
● Department of State: Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, whose interests and wealth are tangled in a web of global relationships, including a close partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
● Treasury: Steven Mnuchin, an investment banker who made billions off of the housing crisis.
● Department of Labor: Andrew Puzder, a fast-food CEO who disdains the minimum wage and backs increased automation in low-wage fields.
● Department of Education: Betsy DeVos, a billionaire who evangelizes charter schools and private instruction.
● Department of Energy: Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who infamously wants to dismantle the agency, when he can remember its name.
● Health and Human Services: Tom Price, a Georgia representative who opposes the Affordable Care Act and wants deep cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
● Environmental Protection Agency: Scott Pruitt, who describes himself as a "leading advocate" against the agency.
● Department of Justice: Jeff Sessions, the Alabama senator who opposes the Voting Rights Act and supports a rollback of federal protection for LGBT victims of hate crimes.
● Homeland Security: John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who opposes closing the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.
● Department of Defense: James Mattis, another retired Marine Corps general, on record as saying: "If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all."

AR Amazing, Donald.
 

2016 December 15

Google Translate

Gideon Lewis-Kraus

In November 2016, at a Google office in London, London mayor Sadiq Khan introduced Google chief executive Sundar Pichai. The Google of the future, said Pichai, is in artificial intelligence.

Google Brain was founded in 2011 to give artificial neural networks something like human flexibility. This approach to AI can solve hard problems like speech recognition and image recognition.

When Pichai spoke, Translate had just been converted to an AI system. The new incarnation had been completed in only nine months, yet showed huge overnight improvements.

Networks of simple artificial neurons can learn the way we do. An artificial neural network can rewire itself to reflect patterns in the data it absorbs. This approach to AI is evolutionary rather than creationist.

Google Brain built an artificial neural network comparable in complexity to a mouse brain. They taught it to recognize cats. They showed it labeled pictures of cats as inputs and rated its outputs, and let it wire itself to map the inputs to the outputs.

The cat work made Brain famous. Lead author Quoc Le then saw that if a network could handle a photo it could also handle a sentence. His team developed an architecture to accommodate complex structures that unfolded over time, like language or music.

A new chip made the network faster. Tensor processing units are deliberately imprecise: rather than compute 12.24 x 54.39, they compute 12 x 54. A neural network is formally a structured series of matrix multiplications carried out in succession, and the process needs to be fast rather than exact.

In February 2016, Google convened its research leads at an offsite retreat. The Translate update rolled out in November.

Good machine translation is likely to prove transformational. It is a big step toward artificial general intelligence, AGI.

AR This reminds me so much of what we used to do on a smaller scale at SAP.
 

2016 December 14

UK Bargaining Chips

Financial Times

A Lords committee says:

● UK government ministers should provide an immediate unilateral undertaking to protect the citizenship rights of EU nationals living in the UK after Brexit.
● Failure to do so would have severe consequences for EU citizens in Britain, who would become subject to national immigration laws of Byzantine complexity.
● Giving Europeans a firm message on their future before the end of Brexit negotiations is the only morally right action.

AR I am appalled and ashamed that the government under which I live has not already and unconditionally done so.

German Defense

Foreign Policy

The Bundeswehr has 176,752 active military personnel and 200 Leopard 2 tanks. The Luftwaffe has 109 Eurofighter Typhoons and 89 Tornados. The German navy has just 10 frigates.

German defense minister Ursula von der Leyen will spend an extra $140 billion on equipment over the next 15 years. Germany spends 1.2% of GDP on defense, against a NATO target of 2%, and she is raising this to 1.22% in 2017.

Low German defense spending and limited capabilities are a hangover from WW2. Over the last 25 years, Germany has converged with France and the UK on the politics of using military force. But even the Ukraine crisis has not changed German hesitancy about the use of military force.

A half of Germans think the defense budget should be increased. But Germans do not want to arm against Russia, even if people in the Baltic states and Poland do. Fear of being overwhelmed by refugees rather than fear of Russia is prompting Germans to rethink their security policy.

AR Germany, France, and the UK need to coordinate their defense policies much more closely — and as a matter of the highest priority.
 

The Big Picture — my review of a book by Sean Carroll
 

2016 December 13

Trexxon

Financial Times

Donald Trump has named Rex Tillerson, chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil, as his secretary of state. Vladimir Putin awarded Tillerson the Order of Friendship in 2013. Tillerson will work with secretary of defense "Mad Dog" Mattis (blog December 3) and national security adviser Michael Flynn, former director of the DIA.

Russia expert and former secretary of defense Robert Gates: "I strongly endorse the president-elect's selection of Rex Tillerson to be the next secretary of state ... He is a person of great integrity whose only goal in office would be to protect and advance the interests of the United States."

Trump has tapped billionaire investor Wilbur Ross for his commerce secretary and top trade official, Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn to head the White House national economic council, and Goldman alumnus Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary.

AR Big Business takes over US governance. This tends to confirm the view of politics and business I aired in my book G.O.D. Is Great (2010). Global corporations will win against national polities. Trump knows this. Snobbish governing elites will fail against brash hard chargers from the corporate jungle, just as smug religious elites failed against scientists.

Transformers

The New York Times

A billion-dollar investment fund led by Bill Gates and other technology titans will invest in transformative energy R&D to reduce the emissions that cause climate change.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures will capitalize on government-backed research through partnerships with the University of California system and other institutions.

The fund has 20 investors and will last 15 to 20 years. It will cover investments in electricity generation and storage, transportation, agriculture, and energy system efficiency.

Tragödie

Der Spiegel

Aleppo steht kurz vor dem Fall, Bewohner in den Rebellengebieten sind in höchster Not. Laut Rotem Kreuz ist die humanitäre Situation katastrophal, die UNO ist alarmiert wegen Berichten über Gräueltaten gegen Zivilisten.

Thinking

Science Museum

The new Winton mathematics gallery at the Science Museum in London reveals the richness of mathematics.

Maths is popular with A-level students in British schools. As a STEM subject it provides a ticket into the world of science and jobs. But the maths they learn will not equip them with the right skills.

The machinery that powers mathematics is crucial. Before modern computers, we did calculations by hand, so we worked hard to avoid them at the expense of more upfront deliberation in defining and abstracting the question. It was a meticulous process.

The process of defining questions, translating them into math, computing the answers, and interpreting results, is computational thinking. Mathematics is all this, not just pure calculation.

We need to focus on computational thinking, the process that drives practical applications of mathematics.

AR Years ago I helped set up the Mathematisches Kabinett, Deutsches Museum, München.
 

2016 December 12

Trump v China

Global Times

US President-elect Donald Trump: "I fully understand the One China policy, but I don't know why we have to be bound by a One China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade."

People marveled at Trump's commercial thinking and naivety for diplomacy. The One China policy has become a fundamental principle of international order. Leaders all around the world, including US leaders, understand it.

If Trump gave up the One China policy, supported Taiwan independence, and sold weapons to Taiwan, China would have no grounds to partner with Washington on international affairs and contain forces hostile to the US.

Trump is no geopolitical maniac, but he is easily subject to the hawkish advisers around him. We will learn more about how he interprets the One China policy after he is sworn in. China needs to be fully armed and prepared.

Trump v Government

Gideon Rachman

Donald Trump has placed a climate change denier in charge of environmental protection, an opponent of the minimum wage as labor secretary, a conspiracy theorist in charge of the National Security Council, and a protectionist at the commerce department. Now he is considering a recipient of the Kremlin's Order of Friendship as secretary of state.

● Russia: Trump seems to want a rapprochement with Russia, which is suffering under economic sanctions imposed after its annexation of Crimea and intervened for him during the election, exciting speculation about his relationship with Russia.

● Europe: The French and German governments fear Trump may support Marine Le Pen or the Alternative for Germany in elections next year, but weakening NATO could undermine his presidency.

● Iran: He could easily rip up the nuclear deal, but this could put the US on the road to war.

● Mideast: He advocates a much more ferocious approach to the war on radical Islamic terrorism.

● China: He signals a sharp rise in tensions with Beijing.

PEOTUS endorses expansion in the US Navy. He could split the informal alliance between Russia and China and instead form a Washington-Moscow axis. But his moves smacks more of chaotic improvisation than strategic thinking.

Trump v World

Brendan Simms

PEOTUS Trump may damage EU chances of dealing with its many challenges. EZ and Schengen states are no longer sovereign in regard to currency or borders, and Germany lacks military capability, but the EU has only a shadow capability at supranational level.

The UK may have to hold the line in Europe for years. Rearmament must begin now in preparation for war against a major power in Europe. A grand bargain with the EU might preserve free trade, restrict immigration, and increase British commitment to European security through NATO.

London needs to read its neighbors the riot act on Russia. Europeans have seen they cannot have a common currency or a common travel area without a common state, and a European army without a European state can only end in more tears. They need full political union now.

PEOTUS must see that America has the biggest stake in the success of NATO.
 

2016 December 11

Time

Natalie Wolchover

In quantum mechanics, time is universal and absolute. But in general relativity, time is relative and dynamical. We need to reconcile their notions of time.

Many physicists now consider spacetime and gravity to be emergent phenomena. Spacetime and matter emerge in a hologram from a network of entangled qubits. Spacetime is a geometric representation of the entanglement structure of the underlying quantum systems.

The hologram arises in toy universes with anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. In their elliptical geometries, spacetime increments shrink to nothing at a boundary. The boundary provides a surface for the entangled qubits to project the hologram. The qubit states are like steps in timeless code, giving rise to relativistic time in the bulk of the AdS space.

In our universe, the fabric of spacetime has a hyperbolic de Sitter geometry. The fabric stretches out toward the end of time. At the end, in the heat death, everything becomes causally disconnected, time breaks down, and nothing more happens.

Researchers do not yet understand the emergence of time from the entangled qubits on the timeless boundary.
 

2016 December 10

Climate Science

Philip Ball

Science is under attack. Donald Trump claimed that climate change was a Chinese conspiracy to undermine US industrial competitiveness. Now he repeats an evasive little mantra about having an open mind.

But this is like saying you have an open mind about the shape of the Earth or about evolution. Anyone with an open mind will agree there is a huge body of evidence showing that human activities are affecting global climate. Yet Trump will stop funding for the NASA Earth Science division.

NASA climate research and monitoring is essential and respected worldwide. NASA GISS is one of the leading centers for studies of global climate change. An Atlantic Council report in March identified climate change as a threat to US national security.

The Trump plans for more astronaut space missions are not a shifting of NASA priorities but a concerted attack on science. There is no compelling scientific or economic argument to put all NASA resources into space missions. Space research is a luxury, Earth observations are essential.

Trump advisor Bob Walker says environmental monitoring is politically correct and climate science is heavily politicized. This is science denial. NASA should not accept such blatant political manipulation.
 

2016 December 9

EU Nuclear Defense

Der Spiegel

Donald Trump said NATO is obsolete. He mooted pulling back the US nuclear shield from Japan and South Korea and suggested they develop their own nuclear weapons. If Trump seriously questions US nuclear guarantees, Europe will be vulnerable to possible threats from Russia.

In that case, Berlin would consider establishing a European nuclear deterrent. NATO military officers and diplomats are addressing the issue of a French-British nuclear shield for Europe. Britain and France have only around 450 nuclear warheads, but their second-strike capability is strong enough to defend Europe.

Politically, the issue is trickier. France views its nuclear capability as a national asset and Britain is facing Brexit. Europeans would be forced to depend on Paris and London for their security. After Brexit, Germans might rather fund an EU nuclear arsenal under French leadership.

AR I discussed a Franco-British EU deterrent in G.O.D. Is Great (2010). National prejudices and technical interoperability are big obstacles. But I say do it.

Russia v NATO

Robert Cottrell

General Sir Richard Shirreff offers a scenario: 2017 begins with a new Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russian army sweeps westward into eastern Ukraine up to Crimea. This conquest of half of Ukraine takes Russia three days. NATO fails to respond.

With that done, Russia moves against the Baltic states. Russian special forces engineer chaos during a demonstration in the Latvian capital Riga, which creates a pretext for a Russian invasion that is over in hours. Similar moves take Estonia and Lithuania.

NATO ambassadors meeting in Belgium fail to agree on action. Russian planes sink two navy ships, one German and one British. A reluctant Germany accepts that Russia and NATO are at war. The Shirreff scenario is a wake-up call to NATO.

AR See blog October 22.

Dictatorship of the People

Martin Wolf

Brexiteers will implement the result of the EU referendum. But the view that the executive must do so is a form of authoritarianism. The government becomes a dictatorship that rules in the name of the people.

AR Wolf wäre Volksverräter!
 

2016 December 8

Brexit

Theresa May

Queen Elizabeth I stood up for Britain. She had a very clear vision about what she wanted to do.

I think everybody has their own style as to how they do business. I just get on and do the job. What was important in forming the team was unity.

I've got a team around me, some of them people I've worked with before, some of them I've not worked with before. I've reinstated cabinet subcommittees. There's a much more open and free discussion among cabinet colleagues on different policy issues.

I don't take all the decisions. Everybody thinks that suddenly everything is coming to me as prime minister. But there are some crucial decisions that obviously I take. It's not a question of whether people have earned trust, but of where it's appropriate for different decisions to be taken.

Whatever side anybody was on in the referendum vote, we've all now got to come together and deliver for the public. It's important that we don't leave it for too long, otherwise people will lose faith in their politicians. They'll think that we're trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

I want to see as smooth and orderly a process as possible. Of course, it's going to be complex because there's a lot to deal with. You're not a member of something for 40-odd years and then it's easy.

I think it's important for us to build up the relationship with the people we're negotiating with. There are 27 member states which will be negotiating. They don't want to see others looking to break away and to vote to leave in the way the UK has done.

Brexit Plan

David Davis

We are seeking a bespoke outcome on terms of trading with and operating within the European market. We are seeking tariff-free, barrier-free access. We have to judge what is best for Britain, in terms of its access ​both to the European market and to the rest of the world.

Our strategy is to bring back the control of migration to the UK government and parliament. That will be exercised in the national interest. We would expect to see pretty free movement of highly talented labour, and not to cause labour shortages.

AR Selfish UK Strategy (SUKS)
 

U.S. Pacific Command
Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76), right, with Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF)
ships JS Izumo (DDH 183), center, and JS Kurama (DDH 144), Philippine Sea, November 11, 2016

75 years ago today:
Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor

Merkels Atomausstieg

Das Verfassungsgericht
spricht Energiekonzernen
ein Recht auf Schadenersatz
wegen des überhasteten
Atomausstiegs zu.

Christoph Niemann
AR My writing career

I2 Am Globorg
AR

I1 think this slogan makes
my Globorg idea ring better.
I1 is human, I2 is planetary.
So read I1 as "I for one"
and I2 as "I too".

Too Dumb To Know It

The Dunning—Kruger effect
is a cognitive bias in which
low-ability individuals suffer
from illusory superiority,
mistakenly assessing their
ability as much higher than
it really is. Dunning: "If you're
incompetent, you can't know
you're incompetent ... the
skills you need to produce a
right answer are exactly the
skills you need to recognize
what a right answer is."

REX
Donald J. Trump announced
his selection of retired USMC
General James N. Mattis to be
next US secretary of defense:
"The closest thing we have to
General George Patton."

2016 December 7

Resurgent Japan

CNN

The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force is one of the top five navies in the world.

Japan Security Watch blog editor and US Naval Institute News contributor Kyle Mizokami: "The United States and Japan are the two closest military powers in the world today. They're even closer than the US and UK. They train together on a daily basis, and there are major military exercises in air, land, and sea on almost a weekly basis."

Nylon Rage

Roger Cohen

The United States and Britain are hubs of globalized turbo-capitalism and finance. For at least a decade, fears and resentments had been building over the elites and the downsides of modern life. So the British voted to quit the European Union and Americans voted for Donald Trump.

Western democracies are in the midst of an upheaval. Virtual direct democracy through social media has outflanked representative democracy. The major political parties in Britain and the United States will have to prove their relevance again.

Democracies have not been delivering. A way is needed to restore faith in our societies. Germany, with its balance of capitalism and solidarity, its respect for the labor force, and its commitment to education and training, offers a model.

AR I discussed virtual direct democracy in chapter 1111 of G.O.D. Is Great (2010).

Eurosceptic Union

Brendan O'Neill

The overthrow of Matteo Renzi is the latest revolt against the new managerial elites. The Italian people knew very well that Brussels was backing Renzi. And they know the Five Star Movement, which wants a referendum on the euro, is likely to be a beneficiary of the turmoil.

So the people of Italy join the people of Britain in rejecting the bureaucrats. Brexiteers were inspired by the early revolts of the Dutch and French and by the fighting Irish. In turn, we Brits, French, Dutch, Italian, and Irish have emboldened Eurosceptics elsewhere.

Some revolts will go in a good direction, others in a dodgy one. But what binds them together is hope that politics can be reclaimed from the committee rooms of the technocrats and brought crashing back down to the rowdy, wonderful court of public opinion.

AR Be careful what you wish for.
 

2016 December 6

Deutschland

Angela Merkel

Eine Situation wie die des Sommers 2015 kann, soll und darf sich nicht wiederholen. Das war und ist unser und mein erklärtes politisches Ziel. Nicht alle der 890.000 Menschen, die gekommen sind, können und werden bleiben.

Hier bei uns in Deutschland gelten die Gesetze unseres Landes. Und zwar für jeden und jede in gleicher Art und Weise. Unser Recht hat Vorrang vor Stammesregeln, vor Ehrenkodexe und der Scharia. Bei uns heißt es: Gesicht zeigen, deswegen ist die Vollverschleierung nicht angebracht, sie sollte verboten sein.

Deutschland geht es nur dann gut, wenn es auch Europa gut geht. Wir müssen in dieser Lage, in der die Welt aus den Fugen geraten ist, zunächst alles daran setzen, dass Europa nicht noch schwächer aus den Krisen hervorgeht, als es hineingegangen ist. Unsere Zukunft hängt einzig und allein von unserer Stärke ab und die haben wir selbst in der Hand.

AR Letzter Absatz gilt auch für VK.

UK Lost Decade

Mark Carney

It doesn't feel like the good old days in the UK. Anxiety about the future has increased, productivity hasn't recovered, and real wages are below where they were a decade ago. No one alive today has experienced this before.

Monetary policy has been highly effective. The data do not support the idea that the period of low rates has benefited the wealthiest at the expense of the least wealthy. All monetary policy has distributional effects, but it is rightly the role of elected governments to take measures to offset them if they so choose.

Politicians need to foster a globalization that works for all. Redistribution and fairness also means turning back the tide of stateless corporations. Companies must be rooted and pay tax somewhere.

AR Nation states like the UK must learn to live with their neighbors before they can hope to put up an effective common front against global corporations.

Breakthrough Science

The New York Times

The Breakthrough Foundation handed out more than $25 million in annual prizes.

A special $3 million prize went to the LIGO experiment that detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes. The money will be split among Ronald Drever, Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss, and the other 1,012 scientists on the team.

The regular Breakthrough physics prize went to string theorists Andrew Strominger, Cumrun Vafa, and Joseph Polchinski. Strominger and Vafa used string theory to compute the entropy of a black hole and Polchinski generalized string theory to brane theory.

The Breakthrough mathematics prize went to Jean Bourgain for work including a decoupling theorem generalizing the Pythagorean theorem to the superposition of waves.

Life science prizes went to:
● Stephen Elledge for exploring how cells sense and respond to damage in their DNA and for insights into the development and treatment of cancer;
● Harry Noller for helping to unravel the structure of ribosomes and the role of RNA for them;
● Roeland Nusse for work on a gene that plays a crucial role in the development of embryos, stem cells, bone growth, and the progression of cancer;
● Huda Zoghbi for work on the genes behind the neurodegenerative disorders Spinocerebellar ataxia and Rett syndrome;
● Yoshinori Ohsumi for work on how cells recycle themselves that could help us better understand the process of aging.

AR Glad the gravity wave work was rewarded.
 

2016 December 5

Guts and Democracy

The Times

In Italy, prime minister Matteo Renzi resigned after losing his referendum on constitutional reform. Opposition leader Beppe Grillo had urged Italians to vote with their guts, not their brains.

Analysts fear a run on Italian banks and a plunge in the euro. The stability of the European Union is endangered. Italy will probably join France, the Netherlands, and Germany in holding elections next year, with the populists on the march.

AR Populism is a force the EU must learn to live with. The public image of the EU in the UK is far below what it needs to be to gain any popular traction. No wonder so many Brits want to leave it.

Violence and Death

Martin Amis

Violence is always a failure of articulacy. When I create a monster character, the covers of the book are like the bars of a cage. You can look at this monster and admire its severity and horror, but it doesn't mean you secretly want violence.

History is accelerating and the novel has responded to that. The narrative has to be much stronger than it used to be. Novelists are modern people too, and they felt this acceleration of history. You write the novels you want to read, and as I get older I write about the past.

I'm writing an autobiographical novel about three other writers — a poet, a novelist and an essayist — Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Hitchens. Larkin died in 1985, Bellow died in 2005, and Hitch died in 2011, and that gives me a theme, death.

AR Words, words, words — they all died — the end.
 

2016 December 4

Planet Earth

Stephen Hawking

I warned before the Brexit vote that it would damage scientific research in Britain, that a vote to leave would be a step backward. What matters now is how the elites react. To reject the vote as an outpouring of crude populism would be a terrible mistake.

The concerns about globalization and technological change are understandable. The automation of factories and the rise of artificial intelligence will accelerate the widening economic inequality around the world. Many people are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.

With the global spread of the internet and social media, economic inequalities are far more apparent than in the past. The lives of the richest people in the world are visible to anyone, so the rural poor join the economic migrants in search of a better life. These migrants undermine tolerance and fuel political populism.

Now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental challenges. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it, so we need to work together to protect it.

We need to break down barriers within and between nations. Our leaders need to acknowledge that they have failed and are failing the many. With resources increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, we are going to have to learn to share far more than at present.

We must help people to retrain for a new world and support them financially while they do so. If communities cannot cope with current levels of migration, we must encourage global development. This will require the elites to learn humility.
 

2016 December 3

Ivanka Trump, Climate Czar?

Politico

Ivanka, 35, Trump's avatar among the moneyed left-wing elite, is poised to play a larger public role than the first lady. She is positioning herself as a bridge to moderates and liberals disgusted and depressed with the tone and tenor of the new leader of the free world.

The ambitious daughter who once plotted her career around international brand domination is apparently planning to make climate change one of her signature issues.

AR If so, good news.

Mad Dog Mattis

Mail Online

US Marine Corps General James N. Mattis commanded a division in the invasion of Iraq and fought in Afghanistan. Also known as the Warrior Monk, he took the book Meditations by Marcus Aurelius into battle. His philosophy of warfare:

● The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event.

● That said, there are some assholes in the world that just need to be shot.

● It's fun to shoot some people.

● There is nothing better than getting shot at and missed. It's really great.

● I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all.

● Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.

● The most important six inches on the battlefield is between your ears.

● Marines don't know how to spell the word defeat.

● Wherever the enemy wants to fight, we will follow him to the ends of the Earth.

AR Any friend of Marcus Aurelius is a friend of mine.
 

2016 December 2

Richmond Park Surprise

The Guardian

Liberal Democrat Sarah Olney won the by-election in Richmond Park. She gained a majority of 1,872, just under 50% of the vote, to unseat former Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith, who had won a 23,000 majority in 2015. The vote was a de facto plebiscite on Brexit — Lib Dems said the strongly pro-remain constituency should have an MP who opposed hard Brexit.

Olney: "Richmond Park was full of people like me, who felt the country was going wrong, that the politics of anger and division were on the rise, that the liberal, tolerant values we took for granted were under threat."

The Selfish Gene

Matt Ridley

Richard Dawkins published his bestseller The Selfish Gene in 1976.

The book explored a new way of looking at evolution. Bill Hamilton had argued that the reason people devote themselves to raising their children was because this furthered the survival of their genes. Dawkins saw that natural selection is not mainly choosing among species, or groups, or even individuals, all of which are transient aggregations, but among genes.

Dawkins: "Genes are in a sense immortal. They pass through the generations, reshuffling themselves each time they pass from parent to offspring ... Our basic expectation on the basis of the orthodox neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that genes will be 'selfish'."

Daniel Dennett: "Many laypeople and even some biologists may fail to appreciate how bountiful this shift of attention has been."

AR Good book. The idea played a central role in the argument of my book Coral.
 

2016 December 1

The German Challenge

Nina Schick

The European Union is teetering:

— Italy Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is likely to lose a referendum on constitutional reform.
— Austria Freedom Party (FPÖ) presidential candidate Norbert Höfer looks set to be elected.
— Holland Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders calls for a European patriotic spring.
— France Front National presidential candidate Marine Le Pen looks set to do well next spring.
— Germany Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is making waves ahead of elections next fall.

Germany may have to lead alone on Brexit, Russia, Turkey, migrants, the EZ crisis, and dealing with US president Trump.

UK Needs Written Constitution

Anthony Barnett

The sovereignty of parliament is key to UK political arrangements. By making the will of the people sovereign, the Brexit referendum is constitutional dynamite for those arrangements. A written constitution is now essential to:

1 Establish a separation of powers between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary
2 Define the political powers and rights of citizens
3 Express the aspirations of UK society

AR Hear hear

Alt-Right's Jewish Godfather

Jacob Siegel

The night America elected Donald Trump president, Richard Spencer crowed: "We're the establishment now." His former mentor Paul Gottfried is a retired Jewish academic who studied at Yale under Herbert Marcuse.

Gottfried is a Nietzschean American nationalist. In his view, there are inherent differences between races, genders, religions, and nations, so equality is unnatural and is imposed by a class of managers who enforce multiculturalism and political correctness. Gottfried distinguishes social Darwinism from the corrupted version exploited by the Nazis and says Hitler was not a fascist but a far-right counter-revolutionary response to Stalin.

Richard Spencer created the website Alternative Right in 2010. Spencer: "American society today is so — pardon my French — fucking middle class in its values. There is no value higher than having a pension and dying in bed. I find that profoundly pathetic. So, yeah, I think we might need a little more chaos in our politics, we might need a bit of that fascist spirit in our politics."

AR More chaos
 

Paramount
Allied (starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard) is a good WW2 romantic thriller about the ambiguities of national identity.
It features excellently reconstructed settings and scenes that really catch the feel of wartime London.
But the action scenes are formulaic and Brad seems rather wooden as a loving husband.
 

CUBA
Katie Hopkins

I love what they have built here.
I admire the invisible scaffolding
in their society that preserves
calm amid the chaos.

We may believe we live in a
sophisticated society enjoying
more freedom than at any
other time in history.

But I have come to understand
how Castro giving his people
freedom from all that might
be a greater legacy.

Pap snap of aide's scribbled
notes reveals Brexit plan:
"Have cake and eat it"
(and beware French)

"The tree which moves some
to tears of joy is in the eyes
of others only a green thing
which stands in the way."
William Blake

Reuters
French former prime minister
François Fillon, 62, Republican
presidential election candidate
for 2017

"The right can be reassured:
with Fillon they are certainly
getting clarity."
France 24

YNH

Reuters
Donald Trump built a wall on
the border of his golf course in
Scotland, blocking the sea view
of local residents who refused
to sell their homes, then he
sent them the bill.

And what rough beast,
its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem
to be born?
W. B. Yeats

NF

2016 November 30

The End of the AA Order

Ian Buruma

Donald Trump and Nigel Farage have more in common than distaste for international or supranational institutions. Farage fulminated against the banks, the liberal media, and the political establishment. Trump deliberately tapped into the same animus against those elitist traitors within America who supposedly coddle minorities and despise the real people.

In the war years, the Anglo-American allies were the last hope of freedom, democracy, and internationalism. NATO and the ideal of European unification were born from the ashes of 1945. Decades later, conservatives regarded the Reagan-Thatcher revolution as a triumph for freedom.

The notion that the United States is the greatest nation in the history of man and that Great Britain is superior to any European country soon faded. Not only have the fortunes of most people in Britain dwindled compared with those of the rich, but it gradually became clear that they were doing worse than the Germans and many other EU citizens. The blight of the old industrial cities and mining towns was not a result of EU policies.

The last hope of the West might be Germany. Angela Merkel told Trump she would welcome a close cooperation with the United States, but only on the basis of democracy, freedom, and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or political views. She spoke as the true heiress of the Atlantic Charter.

AR Downfall: first USSR, then USUK, perhaps?
 

2016 November 29

EU Defense

Financial Times

A planned European Defense Fund will offset US pressure for NATO allies to increase military spending. The plan would increase cross-border defense procurement and standardization of equipment, and add EU space programs for security and defense. At present about 80% of European defense procurement is run on a national basis.

The NATO target for defense expenditure is 2% of GDP. Of the 22 EU member states in NATO, only the UK, Estonia, Poland, and Greece meet the threshold. The new plan from the EU executive aims to increase European land, air, sea, and space capabilities, plus those in cyber security and intelligence gathering.

France and Germany have led the charge for deeper defense coordination, backed by Italy and Spain. The new plan aims to to deliver a better return from rising defense expenditures. Member states would still own all military assets and technology, but would pool national resources to raise the benefit and efficiency of strategic equipment.

EU member states have the second-largest military expenditure in the world — the US spends more than twice as much. But EU spending inefficiencies add costs of €25 billion to €100 billion per year. With a total annual spend of €100 billion, the EU defense industry could fall behind without sustained additional investment.

Trees

Thomas Pakenham

A great oak canopy provides a home for an astonishing number of small insects, birds, animals, lichens, ferns, and fungi. The tree is the head, heart, and habitat of an entire civilization. A great oak can survive for between six hundred and a thousand years.

Many of the common trees in Europe and North America are facing an apocalyptic threat from Asia. Fifty years ago we lost most of our elm trees to a fungus from China. Today these new enemies are decimating our parks and forests.

A fungus plague is leading to the death of leaves and branches in ash trees. A green Chinese beetle has devastated many ash forests in North America. Half of the horse chestnut trees in Europe are believed to be infected by bleeding canker, a bacterial infection that slowly kills the tree.

There is a way to recreate the lost trees. Make sure to choose a Chinese or Japanese or Indian species of the same genus. These Asian species evolved side by side with the Asian diseases and are immune to them.

A wood wide web lets trees communicate. In a forest, an underground network of fungi connects trees of different species by passing chemical and electrical signals among the roots. Tree leaves are solar panels that use photosynthesis to fix carbon, the food of trees, and trees can exchange carbon through their roots.

Trees can exchange food and vital information. In their own way, trees have feelings, they communicate with one another, and the strong can assist the weak. Trees live in harmony with their neighbors and with their ecosystems.

AR Recall the Pandora trees in Avatar.
 

2016 November 28

UK Incoherence

Lord Kerr

Hard Brexit would be a disaster, a bonanza time for lawyers and emergency sessions of parliament. A huge part of the British statute book would collapse, leaving massive uncertainty for economic operators.

It is difficult when the people have just spoken for us to say: "OK people you voted, you got it wrong, we are not going to pay any attention." It is impossible in the House of Lords.

How do we look from across the channel at moment? We look incoherent. They cannot believe there was not a plan and five months on there is still no plan. They note the xenophobia, the attacks on foreigners, the sense that the climate in Britain is changing.

Theresa May's absolute rejection of any role for the European Court of Justice in Britain was the most damaging step. Most people in Brussels think that rules out anything but a hard Brexit.

We are not top of the agenda for many people in Europe. We need to take account of things that concern them and not to advance our arguments in terms of British exceptionalism.

AR The British front in the European civil war is an utter shambles.

UK Leverage

Financial Times

Top Whitehall mandarin Sir Jeremy Heywood: "What is our leverage?"

1 London is facing an EU that is economically fragile, worried about security, under populist assault, and divided over a crisis of legitimacy.

2 Brussels sees the UK as smaller than the EU, with more to lose, negotiating against a deadline controlled by the EU-27.

3 Brexit blows a hole in the EU budget and will be costly for some members.

4 The EU is worried about Brexit leaving outstanding liabilities of some €50 billion.

5 Defence and security is a UK strong suit.

6 The UK confronts the EU with a choice — continue a zero-tariff preferential trade arrangement or accept WTO terms — confident in the EU trade surplus with the UK and the economic pain from unwinding deep cross-border supply chains in industry.

7 A UK unbound can threaten tax and regulatory dumping — European capitals can be undercut.

8 The City of London is the main EU financial hub — a hard exit raises costs for corporate Europe.

9 The rights of more than 2.5 million EU nationals in the UK are a priority for EU states — but they can threaten retribution on 1.2 million UK nationals resident in the EU.

10 The EU must speak as one on EU issues, but it can speak as 27 on areas of national competence, so crafty British diplomacy can chip away at EU unity.

AR Looks like hard Brexit or unconditional surrender.
 

2016 November 27

Fight Brexit or Face Ruin

Will Hutton

Brexit is pure poison, polluting everything it touches. The fundamental questions the country should be addressing — the crisis in productivity growth, the lack of affordable housing, the overwhelming strain on public services, our desperately weak export sector — are all sidelined. There is not the bandwith or capacity to address them against the gigantic question of how to weather the greatest shock to our economy and society since 1945.

AR The UK parliament is grossly overburdened — so abandon Brexit, keep on delegating the boring stuff to Brussels, and go back to business as usual. Purge the Brexiteers, muzzle the gutter press, and use force to put down riots. Rulers dare not appease the mob — that way lies mob rule.

Historic Change

Yuval Noah Harari

Humans have two kinds of abilities, physical and cognitive. What you saw over the last century or two is a migration of people from jobs that require mainly physical abilities, like agriculture and heavy industry, to jobs that require mainly cognitive abilities. Now we are seeing that the machines are starting to compete with us, and outperform us, in cognitive abilities.

One of my main fears is that Homo sapiens are simply not up to the task. Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you. It works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you are unable to focus.

I am very much aware that change becomes more and more scary. Previously everyone who knew who you were and what you did and what you thought were your intimate community. Today, Apple and Amazon and WikiLeaks are not your intimate community.

AR These are fragments of a conversation between Harari and former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.

My recent review of books by Harari
 

2016 November 26

American World Leadership

Hugh White

At the turn of the century it seemed America had achieved pole position in the global order. Americans appeared poised to exercise an unchallenged, benevolent global leadership. But in three key parts of the world America has faced serious regional challenges:

1 Mideast — Terrorists contest regional incorporation into a global order whose ideology and culture they reject. In Iraq and Afghanistan, American attempts to create new states that would bring their peoples to order have failed. The state system in parts of the region has collapsed.

2 Eastern Europe — Russian president Vladimir Putin seeks to reassert a Russian sphere of influence. His use of armed force and political subversion revives memories of the Cold War. America has no effective response when the clashes are not big enough for nuclear conflict.

3 Asia — China aims to create a new regional order. It has the strategic weight and national resolve to mount and sustain this challenge. As a nuclear power China can devastate American cities, which means it can deter America from using its nuclear forces in a Pacific war.

For some years now, America has failed to achieve most of its objectives in pursuit of its vision of global leadership. The foreign policy establishment has underestimated the strength and resolve of key regional rivals. It needs to rethink the vision.

Retain EU Citizenship

The Times

British citizens who want to live and work in Europe after Brexit could pay an annual fee for individual EU citizenship.

European Parliament lead Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt: "I like the idea that people who are European citizens and saying they want to keep it have the possibility of doing so."

Luxembourg MEP Charles Goerens proposed the idea: "Between 15 and 30 million British citizens deeply regret Brexit. My amendment was tabled in order to get European citizenship for those British citizens who want to keep their citizenship. If it is adopted, it must be a voluntary request made by each UK citizen. It was thought at the very beginning that they should have to pay a fee but that is a detail. Paying a fee or not is not the essence."

AR I like it — count me in.
 

2016 November 25

"The people have spoken"

Katie Hopkins

We are the 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit. In the United States, 60 million people voted for Trump. But as Americans will discover and Brits are already learning, the system is a lie.

Project Fear has returned via the back door. Philip Hammond is predicting Armageddon over Brexit. The Office of Budget Responsibility is as pessimistic as a cancer victim at a funeral. Tony Blair is saying: "If you offer the people soft Brexit, they may realise there is no point leaving at all."

We are all sick of not being heard. Something darker is now lurking in our hearts. This is a pressure cooker whose lid is being screwed tighter while the temperature rises. This is an angry animal, forced into a cage and tormented, determined to find itself free.

AR Not just hysterical garbage but the canary in the mine.
 

2016 November 24

Raa-Raa at the Ritz

The Guardian

Farage allies, including the Barclay brothers, who own the Ritz and the Telegraph newspaper, and Arron Banks, who spent £7.5 million on the Leave.EU campaign, threw a reception at the Ritz to celebrate UKIP interim leader Nigel Farage.

Over English sparkling wine supplied from Lord Ashcroft's Gusbourne winery in Kent and canapes of coronation chicken and roast beef, shambassador Farage was toasted by a crowd including pro-Brexit Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg.

UK Ambassador to US

When asked, Jacob Rees-Mogg said he was not sure that Nigel Farage should be Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United States (the title adopted since 1893): "Mr Farage is certainly extraordinary in his own way but I think that being plenipotentiary as well may be a bit too much."

US Ambassador to UK

The United States Government Ambassador, or Chief of Mission, is the highest ranking American official in the United Kingdom. The position's title is "Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary" — extraordinary in that the ambassador is the personal representative of the President of the United States to Her Majesty the Queen and plenipotentiary indicating full power to negotiate.

AR Either way, Ambassador Frump — no way!

Outlook Dreadful

BBC

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) says that the vote to leave the EU means the UK economy will grow less and the government will have to borrow more.

OBR forecasts are slightly less gloomy than those of the Bank of England, more optimistic than independent forecasters, and considerably less gloomy than those of the Treasury during the referendum campaign.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says workers will earn less in real wages in 2021 than they did in 2008.

A Grim Picture

Resolution Foundation

The rest of this parliament looks set to see the return of the income squeeze we thought we had left behind in the last parliament. Households look set to see income growth averaging less than half the already very weak increases recorded between 2010 and 2015. The biggest losers are lower income families, with the entire bottom third set to see incomes fall.

"Everybody, whatever their political persuasion or indeed view on Brexit, will agree that the return of an income squeeze on this scale is hugely unwelcome."
Torsten Bell

Brexit Can Be Stopped

Tony Blair

Brexit can be stopped if the British people decide against it:

— Either you get maximum access to the single market and accept the rules on immigration, on payment into the budget, on EU legal jurisdiction, and people ask why we are leaving.

— Or you are out of the single market and the economic pain may be very great because you have years of economic restructuring.

AR Start living within our means — abandon Brexit.
 

AP
The Don

PETA



The Prophet of
Posthumanism
My review of Sapiens
and Homo Deus by
Yuval Noah Harari
PDF (10 pages)
(typo corrected
today)

UK PM Theresa May will slash
corporation tax to win back
business vote

Royal Navy is too small,
say MPs

AR Run up debt,
spend on arms,
alarm neighbors:
Looks bad.

PA
Buckingham Palace is the
London residence of the Queen:
The UK government will pay for
 a refit with £369 million of
taxpayers' money.

AR Demolish it and build the
New Houses of Parliament
on the site. Let the Queen
live in Windsor Castle.

Grievance

Donald Trump put his fingers
on the grievance of our time,
the disintegration of the
middle class. This is the
real story of 2016.

Reuters
Japanese prime minister
Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump
at Trump Tower: Abe said
they had got off to an
"extremely good start"





AFP
The special relationship:
German chancellor Angela Merkel
and US president Barack Obama
dining at Hotel Adlon, Berlin

NASA
NASA GISS: October 2016 was
the 2nd warmest in 136 years,
0.18 K cooler than October
last year.







New Scientist
60 years old this week.

AR And I have read it
for 50 of them.

ByeGravity
FLIKE
The ultimate flying bike:
up to an hour at 30 m
high at 100 km/h
ca €100,000

AR Boy toy for
Gulf princes

2016 November 23

Brexit Black Hole

CNN Money

The UK will be forced to borrow an extra £58.7 billion over the next 5 years because of an economic slowdown triggered by its vote to leave the EU, according to the OBR. Growth will be 1.4% next year, down from 2.2% predicted in March, and the weakest growth since 2009.

UK treasury chief Philip Hammond said growth would suffer because of greater uncertainty and higher inflation resulting from the drop in the value of the pound. Investment and consumer demand are also expected to weaken. Potential growth over the next 5 years will be 2.4% lower than if voters had chosen to remain in the EU.

Brexit Budget

The Times

The UK is to borrow another £122 billion over the next 5 years. UK chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond admitted today as the Brexit bill fell due. About half the extra debt is needed to plug a hole blown in the public finances by the uncertainty caused by the vote to leave the EU.

AR With UK GDP at about £1.9 trillion, the lower growth represents a loss of some £45 billion. Factor in the inflation and loss of real income caused by the nominal drop of over £200 billion in the value of the pound, and Brexit is costing more like £100 billion. This is too high a price to pay for any of the stated benefits, independently of the manifest political and goodwill losses.

The UK prime minister can claw back this loss overnight with a single executive act.

UK Trump Card

Der Spiegel

The game of Brexit poker has become more complicated. Many in the EU are concerned that the UK could increasingly turn to the US instead of keeping their economy as open as possible. If Trump moves ahead with protectionism, German companies and others in the EU will have to worry about their exports to the US as well as to the UK.

The US election has further deepened the rift between the EU and the UK. Previous differences are becoming more distinct. The UK and the EU are heading toward a hard Brexit.

AR Brexit Britain might manage as a US colony under Farage and Trump — a Frump state!

My Views

Donald Trump

We have a great country and we're a great, great people. I want to move forward.

On climate change, I have a very open mind. And I'm going to look at it very carefully. Clean air is vitally important. Clean water, crystal clean water is vitally important. Safety is vitally important. It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it's going to cost our companies. We have to make ourselves competitive.

The wind is a very deceiving thing. We don't make the windmills in the United States. They're made in Germany and Japan. They're made out of massive amounts of steel, which goes into the atmosphere, whether it's in our country or not, it goes into the atmosphere. We're subsidizing wind mills all over this country. For the most part they don't work. But it's hard to explain.

I've known Steve Bannon a long time. If I thought he was a racist, or alt-right, I wouldn't even think about hiring him. Steve went to Harvard, he was a Naval officer, I think he was with Goldman Sachs. Breitbart is just a publication. If I thought that he was doing anything, I would ask him very politely to leave.

They call it the Rust Belt for a reason. To me more important is taking care of the people that really have proven to love Donald Trump, as opposed to the political people. These people are really angry. I call them the forgotten men and women.

Right now we don't make the robots. We don't make anything. But robotics is becoming very big and we're going to do that. We're going to have more factories. We're going to start making things.

We're going for a very large tax cut for corporations. We have to get rid of regulations, regulations are making it impossible. Taxes, regulations, health care — we're going to talk repeal and replace. Infrastructure is going to be a part of it — a very large-scale infrastructure bill.

I don't think we should be a nation builder. I think going into Iraq was one of the great mistakes in the history of our country. I have some very strong ideas on Syria. I spoke to Putin. I would love to be able to get along with Russia and I think they'd like to be able to get along with us.

Israeli businesspeople tell me it's impossible but, I think you can make peace. I think people are tired now of being shot, killed.

General Mattis is is being considered for secretary of defense. He said, "I've always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture."

I hope we can all get along.

AR So do we all.
 

2016 November 22

Baltic Defense

Financial Times

Swedish opposition Moderate party defence spokesman Hans Wallmark suggests Sweden should join NATO instead of depending on its defense agreement with the US: "Now we have to rely on a person that is very tricky to read. The arguments for Swedish membership are therefore even higher today. It's better that we seek the strength in cooperating with 28 countries rather just one nation."

Finnish former prime minister Alex Stubb says Donald Trump could do a deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin to stop NATO enlargement: "This would leave a security political vacuum in northern Europe, especially Finland and Sweden."

AR Sweden and Finland should join NATO ASAP.

French Right

The Times

French Republican front runner François Fillon thinks the West treats Russia badly. He wants to forge an alliance with Moscow to fight terrorism and create a new balance in Europe.

AR Fillon could trump Le Pen and rebalance EU-Russian relations.

Canadian Trade

Financial Times

Canadian finance minister Bill Morneau: "We're not talking as much about Brexit as you are in the UK ... From our perspective, clearly the NAFTA relationship is of huge importance. That's our biggest relationship by a very big margin, so that's important to us. And then the CETA relationship opens up a very significant market. Our opening of exploratory talks with China ... we do see as important and as the UK figures its next steps, that will be important too."

AR Bang goes Commonwealth resurrection, with its smell of imperial preference.

Mass Democracy Has Failed

Rowan Williams

The election of Donald Trump confirms that the politics of mass democracy has failed. Theatrical politics delivers people into the hands of populist adventurers. Instead of the chilling talk about the people and its supposed will, we need to ask how politics can be set free from the deadly polarity between empty theatrics and a corrupt plutocracy.

AR A correct sentiment, in my humble opinion.
 

2016 November 21

Denmark v UK

Financial Times

Anglophile former head of the Danish foreign service and PM office Ulrik Federspiel: "Britain is a country close to our hearts. There is still a lot of goodwill. But our main concern is that we should not give away advantages of competitiveness to Britain or British companies ... We cannot afford to give British companies the upper hand."

Danish foreign minister Kristian Jensen: "We decided what we must go for is not what is good and bad for UK, but what is best for Denmark ... It's not to our advantage to be helpful and friendly. We would lose out. The more you look at the issues the more it toughens your line."

The UK percentage of Danish exports have declined from more than half after the war to about 7% today. The Danish fishing industry is vulnerable, as almost a third of its catch comes from UK waters. But about half of Danish GDP is from exports, and two thirds of exports are to the single market and Germany.

AR Brexit is like defection in the prisoners dilemma in game theory. If all cooperate, all benefit. If one defects, it benefits and the others lose — unless they gang up to punish the defector. Nazi Germany defected from a fragile European peace in 1939 and the world ganged up against it. Brexit is defection from a fragile European order.
 

2016 November 20

Big Brains

Steven Mithen

The human brain contains 86 billion neurons. It burns 25% of the energy our entire body needs, compared with 10% for almost all other vertebrates. Ancestral humans learned to feed bigger brains some 1.5 million years ago by cooking their food.

When primates and nonprimates diverged around 65 million years ago, primates began to pack their brains with many more neurons for the same brain mass. This occurred for both the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex, with the former containing about 80% of the neurons for most mammals.

The average size of neurons increases exponentially as the number of neurons increases in nonprimates but not in primates. As the cortex of a nonprimate acquires 10 times more neurons, its neurons become on average 4 times larger and hence the cortex 40 times larger in mass. Among primates, the average size of neurons remains constant as the neurons increase in number.

The average human brain has 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex, 69 billion in the cerebellum, and fewer than 1 billion in the rest of the brain. This fits the neuronal scaling rules for primates: we have a normal primate brain, with the right number of neurons for the mass of our brain and body size. Other great apes have relatively far smaller brains for their body size.

Different scaling rules apply to the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum. For all primates, when additional neurons are added to the brain the cerebral cortex increases in mass at a much faster rate than does the cerebellum. The cortical neurons make connections over several cm, but neurons in the cerebellum span only a few mm.

The human frontal and prefrontal cortex have a standard mass and a standard number of neurons for a primate of our size. But we have a higher total number of neurons compared both to great apes of our size and to primates smaller than we are. Our prefrontal cortex contains 1.3 billion neurons — this is the human advantage.

AR The further civilizational advantage is the algorithmic coding in the connectome.

Math Phys

Kevin Hartnett

Physicists and mathematicians are exploring a surprising correspondence. The values calculated from Feynman diagrams seem to match some numbers in algebraic geometry called periods.

Mathematicians study periods as numbers generated by integrating polynomial functions. The class of periods contains many features that point to an underlying order. Cohomology theories cover the geometric objects defined by the solutions to classes of polynomial functions.

Feynman diagrams have lines representing particle paths. In quantum mechanics, the path a particle takes is computed by taking a Feynman path integral over the set of all paths.

Each Feynman diagram has an associated integral. To calculate the probability of an outcome from a set of starting conditions, consider all possible diagrams for that outcome, take each integral, and add the integrals together to give an amplitude. Square the amplitude to get the probability.

Feynman diagrams with loops represent situations in which particles emit and then reabsorb additional particles. The new particles are created and annihilated before they can be observed. By considering more loops, physicists increase the precision of their calculations.

The number of loops in a Feynman diagram may correspond to a weight for the dimension of the space of the integration. The classification of periods by weights carries over to Feynman diagrams. This is work in progress.

AR The intercourse between mathematics and physics has been fruitful for centuries.
 

2016 November 19

US and Germany

Barack Obama

America has been closely divided politically for some time. But in this age of social media, voters can swing back and forth. Some of this is less ideological and more just an impulse toward change.

Some of the same concerns about globalization, technology, and rapid social change that were reflected in Brexit exist in the United States as well. If we address the concerns of those who feel left behind by globalization, then many of these tensions will be reduced. But if inequality continues to grow, then we could see more of these divisions arise around the world.

When I came in we had had a crisis, but we were able to stabilize the financial system, stabilize the US economy and return to growth. When I turn over the keys to the president-elect, the country will be much stronger than it was when I came into office.

I was elected because I believed in politics from the bottom up. Even when the economy was bad or we had problems, people sensed that I listened to them and I was on their side. All politicians today have to be more attentive to people wanting to have more control over their lives.

Angela Merkel has been an extraordinary partner for me and for the United States throughout my presidency. One of her great qualities is that she is steady. Chancellor Merkel and Germany are a lynchpin in protecting the basic tenets of a liberal, market-based democratic order that has created unprecedented prosperity and security for Europe and the world.

The values that we share — freedom of speech, freedom of religious practice, freedom for civil society, free and fair elections, the innovation created through a market-based economy — those things are ultimately going to be the path for us to continue into a better future.

AR And freedom of movement — don't let the terrorists win!
 

2016 November 18

Humans On Earth

Stephen Hawking

Our best chance for survival as a species is to leave Earth and establish colonies on other planets. The chance of a disaster to planet Earth adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.

Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up.

Germans On Brexit

Wolfgang Schäuble

Until Brexit is complete, Britain will have to fulfil its commitments. There may be some commitments that last beyond the exit. Also we cannot grant any generous rebates.

The UK is still a member of the EU and it has always upheld valid regulations, laws, and treaties. Euro clearing must be done within the eurozone because the euro is the EU common currency.

The UK will not get special treatment on migration if it wants to remain in the single market. Freedom of movement is a core element of the internal market. There is no à la carte menu.

Without membership of the internal market, without acceptance of the four basic freedoms of the internal market, there can be no passporting, no free access for financial products or for financial actors.

AR Just as I expect: Germans will stick to their guns. Nein means no.

Lost Enlightenment

S. Frederick Starr

Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane

AR So far I have only read a third of this book but already it has revealed a view of Central Asia from about 700 CE to 1200 that shows it to have been about as special as Classical Greece or Enlightenment Europe. For example, the Persian mathematician Khwarazmi (latinised as Algoritmi, ca 780 — ca 850) wrote a book of algebraic algorithms called The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing that was in regular use for centuries, the physician Razi (865 — 925) wrote an eight-volume encyclopedia of medicine, and the philosopher Farabi (latinised as Alfarabius, ca 870 — ca 950) wrote a book On the Perfect State reconciling Plato's Republic with Islam by calling the philosopher-king an imam or Supreme Leader.
 

2016 November 17

Remake European Union

Nicolas Sarkozy

I believe the UK belongs in Europe. But I respect their choice. The question is whether the UK and its 27 partner nations will have enough time to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement.

Nobody can enjoy privileges without fulfilling responsibilities. This is simple logic. No European government could agree to grant the UK free access to the single market if Britain does not accept rules, duties and concessions, including the free movement of Europeans, in return.

British doubts about the European project cannot be explained away as insular or idiosyncratic. And yet the only way forward for Europeans in our globalized world is to stand together. Europe needs an overhaul as well as reforms.

The EZ and the EU-27 have different paths to follow. The EZ needs to deepen its integration, with more permanent leadership for EZ summits, a central secretariat to serve as EZ treasury, and an EZ monetary fund. The EU-27 should revert to ensuring the domestic market operates smoothly and focusing on strategic issues, and needs to review Commission prerogatives.

Europe needs a new immigration policy. It needs a new Schengen, shared immigration and asylum policies, and consistent employment laws regarding foreigners to end social dumping. We need to protect EU borders and prioritize cooperation aimed at stemming illegal immigration.

Europe must not reform because it hopes to bring the UK back to the fold. It must reform because its future and its survival depend on it. Reform is urgent and vital.

Brexit

Civil Service World

UK civil service chief executive John Manzoni says the government already had too many objectives before the UK voted to leave the EU: "When I look across from outside, I say we're doing 30% too much to do it all well — that is the nature of government."

Manzoni says the civil service is "still in thinking mode" about Brexit. There is "an enormous amount of work going on across the civil service redefining what the future of the various policies might be, or what we might like them to be ... we need to go back, we need to re-plan, we need to be realistic, we can't do it all — it won't all happen within the existing envelope."

AR The ramifications of Brexit and Trump suggest the AA ship is entering uncharted waters where the crew will be challenged to stay in control. The downside risk is not just anger and confusion but the sort of global disorder we last saw 70-80 years ago.
 

2016 November 16

Merkel: Free Movement

The Guardian

German chancellor Angela Merkel: "Were we to make an exception for the free movement of people with Britain, this would mean we would endanger principles of the whole internal market in the European Union, because everyone else will then want these exceptions ... I personally hold the view that we will have to discuss further with the European Commission when this freedom of movement applies ... Free movement applies in the sense that the employee himself earns the money he needs for himself and his family in the other member state."

Boris: "Stupid"

Hospodářské noviny

British foreign secretary Boris Johnson: "It is stupid to say that freedom of movement is a fundamental right. It has been acquired by a series of decisions by the courts. And everyone now has in his head that every human being has a fundamental, God-given right to go and move wherever he wants. But it is not. It was never a founding principle of the European Union."

AR Treaty Establishing the European Community, Rome, 25 March 1957: Part Three. Community Policies. Title III. Free Movement of Persons, Services and Capital. Chapter 1. Workers. Article 48. Freedom of movement for workers shall be secured within the Community by the end of the transitional period at the latest.

"I'm a rabbi, and I'm applying for a German passport"

Julia Neuberger

Most of my mother's family, from Heilbronn, perished. So why would I want a German passport?

1 My synagogue took a group of members to Berlin. The city marked where Jewish families had lived with Stolpersteine commemorative plaques. It recorded the history and celebrated the contribution Jews had made to German culture.

2 This year, Heilbronn published a biography of my mother, from 1933 to 1947. The city gave us a huge welcome to launch the book. I felt comfortable in Germany, and quite at home.

3 I have also felt enormous admiration for Chancellor Angela Merkel.

When Britain voted for Brexit, I decided to reclaim my German origins. I am a European as well as a proud Briton. I think it perfectly possible to be a Briton and to hold a German passport too.

Germany has a rapidly growing Jewish community.
 

America—Russia
A New Special
Relationship

President Putin spoke to
Donald Trump and hailed
the idea of a new relationship
with the United States based
on equality, mutual respect,
and non-interference in each
other's internal affairs. They
agreed to get the Russo-US
relationship back on track.

AR Sounds OK to me.

AR A pitch for Globorg!

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
died 300 years ago today.
He developed binary arithmetic
and worked on a machine to do
computations. His imagination
paved the way for the
information age.

Twitter

Das Zeitungslesen des Morgens
ist eine Art von realistischem
Morgensegen.
G.W.F. Hegel

AR Reading the morning
newspaper is the realist's
morning prayer — and
updating this blog is
my morning devotion.



There is a crack,
a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen

AFP/Getty
Russian Armata tank

"We have to hope the rhetoric
we heard during the campaign
is rapidly replaced by a very
sober and serious statement
that if there is any question of
a NATO member being attacked
then Trump will without any
hesitation or equivocation come
to the defense of the country.
Anything less would be really
bad news for NATO."
Former NATO Deputy SACEUR
General Sir Richard Shirreff

Getty
Trump in 1987

FB
Make America
great again!

AP
The Don

2016 November 15

Brexit Update

The Times

A leaked memo prepared for the Cabinet Office and circulated within Whitehall is critical of Brexit plans and suggests civil servants are struggling. Gist:

1 Politics: The prime minister aims to keep her party from splitting. A public debate would expose splits. If necessary, a short enabling bill will be submitted to parliament, permitting the government to invoke Article 50 in March. The debate in parliament will shift expectations.

2 Government: Departments have developed well over 500 projects to implement Brexit. These are beyond the capacity and capability of government to execute quickly. Departments are struggling and need increased headcount in the 10-30,000 range.

3 Industry: Government expects lobbying on company decisions, industry insights and issues, and overall business concerns. The government priority remains its political survival, not the economy. There will be no clear strategy soon.

AR I never expected otherwise. May is on a loser with this one.

Autocrats

Masha Gessen

Donald Trump is not a regular politician. He has won the presidency despite repeated media exposure as a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax avoider, and race baiter. He is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat — and won.

I have lived in autocracies and written about Vladimir Putin's Russia. My rules for surviving in an autocracy:

1 Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.
2 Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.
3 Institutions will not save you.
4 Be outraged. Trump has secured power.
5 Do not make compromises. They will be fruitless.
6 Remember the future.

AR Perhaps Trump will turn out to be a Teddy bear.

A New Dark Age?

Ross Andersen

Donald Trump and his advisers are said to be looking for a way to terminate the Paris climate agreement within his first 100 days in office. They will likely also gut the Clean Power Plan.

Adviser Myron Ebell may head up the Environmental Protection Agency. Ebell: "There has been a little bit of warming. But it's been very modest and well within the range for natural variability, and whether it's caused by human beings or not, it's nothing to worry about."

Trump promised to end US support for UN climate science. Two of his leading advisers on space policy argued that NASA should cut spending on "politically correct" environmental monitoring.

Scientists have a natural interest in the ebbs and flows of atmospheric chemistry, and the carbon cycle that determines Earth's climate on long time scales. The science of cloud formation, precipitation patterns, sea winds, and hurricanes is essential to a deep understanding of the physical world. We depend on the good health of the vegetation that greens our continents.

Scientists have made a long march from antiquity, when the Earth was proven round, to the Scientific Revolution, when it was found to be moving, to the Enlightenment, when geologists began to grasp its extreme age, on through to today. The close, patient study of this planet has nothing to do with the passing fashions of political speech in the here and now.

AR Absolutely.
 

2016 November 14

Nietzsche Was Right

Theo Hobson

Friedrich Nietzsche said liberal democracy cannot work. Belief in equality and social justice leads to fragmentation. Politics is dominated by noisy disadvantaged groups who treat any unifying ethos as the oppressive ideology of the ruling class.

He was right. Progressive politics is collapsing as its rhetoric is dominated by concern for various victim groups. In the UK and US, about half the electorate dislikes such rhetoric enough to overturn the ideals of the other half.

Liberals lack a big bold unifying vision. To renew the liberal vision, restate it in bigger bolder terms. Stop fetishizing a few victim groups.

Hau ab, Briten!

Tom Nuttall

The UK is an example of how not to handle populist outrage. European politicians will take a tough line on Brexit to defend the project they have spent years on. If that means politics must trump economics, so be it.

Britain may try to stall the efforts of the EU-27 to show life after Brexit. This plays to those in Europe who just want to say "Fuck it" to the Brits, says a senior German MEP. When Brexit talks sink into acrimony, expect those Europeans to say the EU is well shot of Brits.
 

2016 November 13

NATO

Jens Stoltenberg

This is no time to question the value of the partnership between Europe and the United States.

European leaders have always understood that when it comes to security, going it alone is not an option. American leaders have always recognised that they had profound strategic interest in a stable and secure Europe. And throughout the last 67 years America has had no more steadfast and reliable partner.

We seek to prevent a conflict. An attack against one will be met by a response from all.

Right On Trump

The New York Times

Dutch Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders: "Congratulations! A historic victory! A revolution! We will return our country to the Dutch. We are witnessing the same uprising on both sides of the Atlantic."

French Front National party leader Marine Le Pen: "It shows that when the people really want something, they can get it. When the people want to retake their destiny in hand, they can do it ... It's the emergence of a new world."

Italian Five Star Movement leader Beppe Grillo: "They called us sexists, homophobes, demagogues and populists. They don't realize that millions of people already no longer read their newspapers and no longer watch their television."

Austrian Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache: "The left and the corrupt establishment, which considers itself so superior, are being punished blow by blow by the voters and voted out of various positions of responsibility."

British former UKIP leader Nigel Farage tweeted: "It was a great honour to spend time with Donald Trump. He was relaxed and full of good ideas. I'm confident he will be a good President."

Mars

National Geographic

Filmed in 19 locations across the world and set both in the present and the year 2033, Mars depicts how we will colonize Mars.

The series features interviews with Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Martian author Andy Weir, NASA engineers, and former Apollo 13 astronaut James Lovell. A fictional narrative is set in 2033, when the first human mission lands on Mars.

Producer Justin Wilkes: "If the world can come together for something as significant as putting people on Mars, then what else are we capable of doing? I think we need that hope."
 

2016 November 12

The Last Trump

The Guardian

Trump calls global warming bullshit, a hoax. He plans to pull America out of the Paris climate agreement. He says he will axe clean energy funding, end aid to developing nations for climate change problems, and wave through contested fossil fuel projects.

US National Center for Atmospheric Research senior scientist Kevin Trenberth: "This is an unmitigated disaster for the planet."

The Trump presidency will likely see a resurgence in US greenhouse gas emissions. If China, India, and the European Union fail to make compensatory emissions cuts, the planet could spiral into runaway climate change.

NASA scientists are expecting cuts to climate research programs. But the physics is inexorable:
2016 will be the warmest year on record.

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) chief executive Rush Holt:

"During the campaign, Trump was all over the place ... AAAS, for more than half a century, has been outspoken to policymakers and the public about the risks of human-induced climate change and the need to take action to mitigate it ... I think we will be urging him to look at the evidence even before his first day because climate change is a major, historic, global problem."

AR I was an AAAS member from 1989 to 1991.

Democracy

Joshua Rothman

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, 85, understands human behavior in terms of the search for meaning. His words:

"Democracy is teleological. It's a collective effort with a noble goal: inclusion. In some ways, democracy is a fiction that we're trying to realize ... The belief that democracy is supposed to be a system in which non-élites have a say — that principle is built right into the nature of democracy. But there are constructive ways of asserting it and destructive ways."

On Islam: "As long as human beings aspire, they will be capable of corrupting the object of their aspiration. I'm a person of faith ... If I were Muslim, I would look at the present situation in Saudi Arabia and with the Islamic State and I would be appalled, as my Muslim friends are."

World War II was the defining fact of Taylor's childhood: "The climax — a day I'll never forget — was when France sued for the armistice. In my family, that was the end of civilization."

Taylor is in favor of localism and subsidiarity. A rooted, meaningful democracy might be centered on local schools, town governments, voluntary associations, and churches. Family members talk, over dinner, about politics, history, and faith — a pastoral vision.

AR Compare Heidegger and the Volksgemeinschaft. I admire Taylor's work — at Oxford I regularly attended his All Souls seminars on Hegel.
 

2016 November 11

Brexit Britain, Trumped America, and Militant Islam

AR

The House of War has become a house of division. Europe is teetering on the brink of disintegrating into quarrelsome nation states and America is sinking into riots and discord that could split the union. Militant Islamists are gleeful.

The psychic fog of old religious dogmas still hangs around our body politic. Christian values still constrain European and American attitudes to sex, birth, death, atheists, and animals. Harsher doctrines still shroud the faithful in the House of Islam.

Some recent immigrants into Europe are infected with an ideological plague. Muslims who regard it as their holy duty to wage jihad against the infidel will not rest easy in Western lands. Jihadists need to be liquidated before it is too late.

The Christian doctrine that we should love the sinner but hate the sin may guide us. Immigrants with a Muslim heritage can be fine people, but their hard religious views must be melted down. If the newcomers fight assimilation, we must fight back.

Our first duty is solidarity with each other as members of a strong and vibrant civilization. Europeans and Americans have a common cause here. Brexit or Trumpet diehards should turn their anger to revulsion for the plague within Islam.

Make no mistake, this will be hard. But it must be done. Any lesser response will leave our neighbors bowing to Mecca, cowed by evil men.
 

2016 November 10

Future Greenhouse Warming

Science Advances

Global mean surface temperatures are rising in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The magnitude of this warming at equilibrium for a given radiative forcing is uncertain, but we find that the range of estimates of future warming by 2100 CE overlaps with the upper range of climate simulations conducted in CMIP5. Within this century, global mean temperatures will very likely exceed maximum levels of the last 784 000 years.

AR Astronomers say Earth will warm up like Venus.

US Election: Analysis

CNN

Electoral College so far: Clinton 232, Trump 290 (1 state to call)
— Michigan so far: 47.3%, 47.6% (96% in at 3:53 pm ET)

National vote: Clinton 59,926,386 (47.7%), Trump 59,698,506 (47.5%)

Exit polls
Male voters: Clinton 41%, Trump 53%
Female voters: Clinton 54%, Trump 42%
Voters aged 18-44: Clinton 52%, Trump 40%
Voters aged 45+: Clinton 44%, Trump 53%

Senate: Dem 48, Rep 51 (1 to go)
House: Dem 193, Rep 238 (4 to go)

UK Comment

The Times

UK prime minister Theresa May policy board chairman George Freeman: "The roar of anger at globalization, machine politics, out-of-touch elites has now swept the UK and the USA. All in mainstream politics need to look harder, listen better, and think smarter about the underlying causes of popular anger and address them. We need new policies to respond to and address the grassroots failure of our political economy."

Election 2020

Peter Diamandis

Key trends by 2020:

1 Social media will have continued to explode
2 Machine learning and AI will move forward 10x
3 50 billion devices and 1 trillion sensors will come online
4 Digital avatars will become photorealistic and fully programmable
5 Micropayments, smart objects, and blockchain apps will go mainstream

Bottom line: The 2020 election will be very personal.
 

2016 November 9

UK date 9/11

TRUMP TRIUMPHS

The New York Times, 1009 ET

President: Clinton 218 Trump 279 (270 to win)
Congress: Dem 191 Rep 236
Senate: Dem 47 Rep 51

A New Anglo-American World

AR

President Trump in America and Brexit Britain in Europe — the transatlantic Nylon axis has taken a turn for better or worse, but certainly a turn. The currently liberal world order will become more illiberal. The borders of the AA nations will become less porous and self-interest will take the lead as tie breaker and deal breaker.

Globalization will continue but politicians will learn to champion it less naively than before. Big corporations will continue to go their own way, but they will more often have to fight for their transnational privileges. Markets will be sliced and diced with new political restrictions, and consumers will face more limited choices.

Geopolitically, expect harder regional profiles, with the European Union holding back from the new mood in the AA world and European nationalists confronting EU liberal pieties more aggressively. China will find America a more awkward bilateral trading partner and a more assertive regional military opponent. NATO will struggle to keep the attention of Americans focused on Europe, and Russia will be tempted to ramp up border tensions.

The wider lesson to draw here is that communities sharing a native language develop a deeper cohesion than communities based on the more superficial ties of shared interest or prudential calculation. Londoners feel closer to New York than to Brussels. Philosophers will see this as a confirmation of the felt importance of the folkish community as described by Martin Heidegger.

In the short term we can expect a bumpy ride. Americans will retreat faster from their Globocop role and Europeans will build up their union independently of the breakaway province across the Channel. We are witnessing the breakup of the world order established after World War II.

American Id

Diane Roberts

The United States has elected its own Silvio Berlusconi — or Benito Mussolini. Donald Trump is the narcissist who basks in the adulation of his mostly white male followers. Members of the elite did not reckon on their anger and fear.

Trump says out loud all those things white people have been thinking but were told by teachers and the media they should never express. A lot of them like his tantrums and vows of revenge. Trump is the American id, untroubled by reason or reality.

Congress will have to keep Trump from declaring war in a fit of pique or trying to dismantle parts of government. And staff around him will have to keep him from insulting foreign leaders or behaving like a toddler. His voters want someone who will come in and drain the swamp or burn the place down. They may get their wish.

Trump is currently involved in 75 legal cases. Some he instigated, some have been brought by former employees, some involve civil charges of fraud. A Trump presidency is terrible for America and terrible for the world, but it will be great for satire.

American Tyrant

Andrew Sullivan, May 1, 2016

Plato said the longer a democracy lasted, the more democratic it would become. Deference to authority would wither, tolerance of inequality would wane, and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would run riot. This freedom is unstable.

The rich come under attack, patriarchy is dismantled, and family hierarchies are inverted. Students mock their teachers, animals are regarded as equal to humans, and the foreigner is equal to the citizen. Then a future tyrant will seize his moment.

He makes his move by taking over a mob and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. Soon his enemies are forced either to appease him or to flee as he promises to cut through the paralysis and take them on. The people thrill to him.

Donald Trump fits the platonic template. He is the true messiah of conservative populism, but he is not just a wacky politician. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an Extinction Level Event.

AR Whoa — steady on, Sullivan!

German Reactions

Der Spiegel

"Democracy, freedom, respect for the law and for human dignity, regardless of ancestry, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political leanings. On the basis of these values, I offer the future president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, close cooperation."
German chancellor Angela Merkel

"Trump is a warning to us as well. He is the harbinger of a new authoritarian and chauvinistic international movement."
German vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel

"During his campaign, Trump was critical not just of Europe, but also of Germany. I believe we must prepare for American foreign policy becoming less predictable. We must prepare for a situation in which America will be tempted to make decisions on its own more often."
German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier

"Europe has to prepare for the fact that it must provide for itself."
German defense minister Ursula von der Leyen

Historic Day

27 years ago today: Berlin wall breached

78 years ago today: Reichskristallnacht
 

ARRIVAL
(2:25)

AR Promises to be
a major movie.

Sir Tim Is Back
University of Oxford

Sir Tim Berners-Lee joins
the University of Oxford
Department of Computer
Science. Department head
Professor Mike Wooldridge:
"Few living individuals have
changed our world as profoundly
as Tim did with his invention
of the World Wide Web.
We are delighted and
honoured to welcome
Tim back to
Oxford."

The Times
Bonfire of the Sanities

Edwin Landseer
The Monarch of the Glen
— yours for £10 million



TITANIC
At the Spectator's
Parliamentarian of the Year
awards, Boris Johnson promised
to make a "titanic success"
of Brexit.



BREXIT
Unwort des Jahres

Reality Is Not What It Seems

Carlo Rovelli is a true heir to the
legacy of the Renaissance man.
His exposition of loop quantum
gravity is authoritative and,
I am pleased to say,
intelligible, so far
as it goes.
>>>

Sandbanks
The property on this peninsula
(just minutes away from me)
is valued at about £1 billion

2016 November 8

The Closing of the Liberal Mind

John Gray

A liberal order that seemed dominant after the end of the cold war is fading. The folly of the masses has replaced the wisdom of crowds as the liberal obsession. Liberals see the task at hand as securing the survival of their way of life.

Liberal societies have a future only if the protective role of the state is firmly reasserted. Rolling back the state can have the effect of leaving people less free. Liberals still say globalization is producing a worldwide middle class that is demanding political freedom.

There is no detectable connection between advancing globalization and the spread of liberal values. Liberals resist this because their liberalism is a surrogate religion, providing the meaning of history. But human rights cannot serve as a template for world order.

Liberals talk about reason versus an emotional rejection of experts. Yet much of what has passed for expert knowledge consists of speculative or discredited theories. Voters are ignoring the intellectual detritus that has guided their leaders and are responding instead to facts and their own experiences.

A post-liberal society is one in which freedom and toleration are protected under the shelter of a strong state. In economic terms, this entails discarding the notion that the primary purpose of government is to advance globalization. In future, governments will succeed or fail by how well they can deliver prosperity while managing the social disruption that globalization produces.

Liberals find themselves powerless spectators of events. They still want more idealism and still want to renew the liberal projects of the past. All they have left is fear of the future.

AR A strong state must follow a guiding vision, or it falls into autocracy. The only vision that excites me is that of a future global polity. I revelate that the increasing role of technology — and the big corporations that drive it — will reconfigure history as the launch ramp for the emergence of a global organism embracing all life on Earth.

In this view, nation states are unstable dominoes in the way of big corporations. The only polities strong enough to prevail are federal superstates, a group of which can govern the planet. A sovereign parliament of gentleman amateurs in Westminster can only complicate the construction of a less liberal United States of Europe.

Robocars

Sue Halpern

A few decades from now, nearly all vehicles will be self-driving. Taxi bots owned by companies like Uber and Google will largely eliminate the need for private car ownership. This will result in fewer cars on the road, fewer traffic jams, and fewer accidents. Without armor, cars will be lighter and smaller.

Travelers will have to spend less. The built environment will improve as road signs are eliminated and parking spaces become green spaces. Switching to full vehicle autonomy could save the US economy $1.3 trillion a year.

A legal issue may slow widespread adoption. The driver of an autonomous car is its computer, so the insurance will be carried by the car manufacturer or by the software developer. Tort law is likely to be as challenged by the advent of robot cars as the car industry itself.

Autonomous vehicles are potentially killer robots. They will be programmed to execute a predetermined calculus that puts a value on the living creatures that come into their path. Someone will have to write the code to set these limits, and no one knows what they will write.

The winners in the decades ahead will be those who own the robots. Companies like Uber and Google are poised to control the national fleet of robocars. US lawmakers are using their plans to block investment in mass transit.

The software driving robocars will be ripe for hacking and sabotage. Autonomous vehicles, with their cameras and sensors, could become robotic spies. The FBI and IRS will gain.

AR Time to rethink cars and roads.
 

2016 November 7

Democracy

New Yorker

Democracy is other people. The ignorance of the many has long galled the intellectuals. But preselection of voters faces objections:

1 Voter screening might be biased in a way that is hard to identify or correct.
2 Universal suffrage is deeply established in our minds as a default.

Public welfare is more important than hurt feelings. It is right to limit the political power that the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. A proposal: extra votes for degree holders, a council of meritocrats with veto power, and a qualifying exam for voters.

AR Set a test for a license to vote. Give star performers bonus votes.
 

2016 November 6

The Ruling

A.C. Grayling

The ruling by the high court is a glimmer of hope. If there is a debate in parliament on it, if the vote is free, and if MPs vote according to their beliefs about what is best for the UK, the madness of Brexit can be stopped.

A referendum is not an election. Briefing paper 07212 sent to MPs on 3 June 2015 made it clear that the referendum was advisory and consultative only, that neither the government nor parliament was bound by it, and that in matters of major constitutional import a simple plurality of the vote is insufficient.

A majority of UK citizens (counting 16-17 year olds, expats, and Bregreters) now wishes to remain. MPs will have the country on their side in doing what most of them know is right.

AR Good old Grayling — refusing to drink the Kool-Aid.

Let Parliament Vote

Stephen Kinnock

Article 50 states that any member state may decide to withdraw from the EU in accordance with its own constitutional requirements. A member of the EU that has decided to leave must notify the European Council of this intention. Notification is secondary to a constitutionally sound decision to trigger Article 50.

Technically, the referendum was advisory. For it to have constitutional force, it will require a parliamentary vote. Failure to go through due process would leave the government exposed to the risk of a range of legal challenges.

The high court ruled that parliament is sovereign. This removes a potential obstacle to Brexit. A parliamentary vote is also constitutionally and legally necessary in order to enact it.

The referendum was about Brexit, not about bulldozing UK democracy. No one voted to neuter UK democracy. The prime minister should let parliament vote on the broad terms of Brexit.

Germans in Britain

Anna Lehmann

About 300,000 Germans are among the migrants in the UK. For many who settled in Britain long before the campaign to leave the EU gathered steam, the result of the vote feels like a personal slight against Europeans.

Renate Dietrich-Karger: "Jewish relatives of mine fled to the UK to escape the Nazis. I came to the UK for the first time in 1965 and at that time it was to me the land of hope and glory. But a lot has changed since then."

Gisela Stuart MP was a leading campaigner for Brexit. Her own status as a European immigrant has since made her a target. She says she has been called a traitor by EU supporters: "I never received abuse in the United Kingdom for being German, but I now receive it from Germany."

Many Germans who have come to Britain in the last 20 years are highly skilled. More than 5,000 teach and research at British universities, and another 3,000 work as doctors and medical staff in the NHS.

Michaela Frye is a senior researcher at the department of genetics at the University of Cambridge. She has lived in the UK for 15 years and her son attends an independent British school. Neighbours are asking when they will leave. She says: "I feel European. That's what all my work is about. And now what? Get lost?"

Will 300,000 Germans remain in the UK in 2019?

AR Will I?
 

2016 November 5 — Bonfire Night

Scorched Earth

The Guardian

IIED director Andrew Norton: "The voices of the people who will be hit hardest by the devastating impacts of climate change need to be heard."

FOTE campaigner Asad Rehman: "The Paris agreement is a major step in the right direction, but it falls a long way short of the giant leap needed to tackle climate change."

AR Time to crack down on emission offenders.

Anarchy in the UK

Janice Turner

The Daily Mail front page of three High Court judges pictured above the headline ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE looked like a wanted poster.

Here was a major British newspaper — echoed by The Daily Telegraph and Daily Express — suggesting an independent judiciary, indeed the rule of law itself, are tiresome impediments. There was no explanation that a legal ruling saying parliament must vote on Article 50 was unlikely to halt Brexit. Or that scrutiny of EU departure terms might be wise.

A Mail columnist warned of huge public anger and predicted riots in the street. Think Erdogan, Putin, Trump — the birth of a dictator.

AR Time for a military coup to crack down on the press? If the High Court judges object, we can call them enemies of the people.
 

2016 November 4

Brexiteers Dinner

Guest speaker: Rt Hon Sir Desmond Swayne TD MP
Lodge of Amity, Poole

AR Sir Desmond gave the ruling a good thrashing.

The High Court Ruling

Jolyon Maugham

The UK government intends to appeal. But it can have little confidence about the outcome and will be drafting a Bill in readiness. That Bill would have to pass both the Commons and the Lords.

The Commons is unlikely to reject the Bill but it may impose conditions on triggering Article 50. Procedural conditions may require government to present its negotiating strategy to parliament in advance, regularly report to parliament on the progress of negotiations, and give parliament the final say over the outcome. Substantive conditions may include setting negotiating priorities.

If the House of Commons does not impose conditions, the House of Lords probably will. But all this will take time. Theresa May is unlikely to trigger Article 50 in 2017 Q1.

AR May had hoped to by-pass the parliamentary combustion chamber.

EU Referendum Voting Intention

BMG Research

October poll: "How would you vote if ..."
Remain 45%, Leave 43%, Don't know/Prefer not to say 12%
Excluding DKPNTS: Remain 51%, Leave 49%

AR Within the margin of error for a small poll
 

2016 November 3

Brexit Court Defeat for UK Government

BBC, 1300 GMT

Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the EU, the High Court has ruled. So the government cannot trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on its own.

AR To my great relief — may sanity prevail.

Immigration

"The insistence of the EU that free movement must mean common entitlement to benefits is barking mad."
Daniel Finkelstein

AR 1 This is a splendid usage of the phrase "barking mad" so common among parliamentarians, but not a benign one. Surely the principle that all men are equal under the law applies here. We need not go as far as John Rawls in making a virtue of blindness in our formulation of the social contract to insist that differences of nationality within a club of civilised nations should not be accepted as a marker of discrimination between people.

As a British citizen in Germany I both expected and received substantially the same treatment from national and local officials as if I were a native German, on the principle that national borders within a civilised polity are artificial hindrances to the free traffic of free citizens going about their lawful business. If British officials now seek to behave otherwise, it will be a shameful regression to the sort of police state mentality that we rightly condemn in other parts of the world.

Nuanced treatment of migrants is entirely possible within a legal framework that treats all men and women equally in principle. If migrants must have paid into the system for some years before being entitled to benefits, then we can demand the same of native Britons. If we seek to privilege native youngsters in the higher education market then we can factor in the parentage of students, and so on. All this is not beyond the wit of lawyers.

Postwar Germans have a saying: "Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger" — free travel for free citizens. In a country whose citizens include numerous former refugees and whose history records too many outrages against foreigners, an excess of concern for freedom may be excused. But let us not make Britain the butt of invidious comparisons for philosophers and historians into the far future. In seeking to privilege holders of British nationality over citizens of similar nations, we insult our neighbours and demean ourselves.

AR 2 About half of net immigration into the UK is from outside the EU. Since we face no legal barrier to throttling that half of the flow yet have failed for many years to do so, what assurance do we have that removing the legal barrier to throttling the EU half of the flow will in fact succeed in doing so? Are we not rather in the position of the proverbial drunk who looks for his lost house keys under the street lamp on the principle that only there is he in a position to see them?

We appear to be intent on making a theatrical show of throttling EU migration in an attempt to persuade the electorate that we are doing something, however futile and self-defeating, to reduce numbers that seem too big, without anyone having any real clue as to how many people the UK can reasonably absorb and whether the newcomers will bring us a net benefit or not, despite our fears for the carrying capacity of these islands.

I would suggest that we do better to appoint a parliamentary committee to look more carefully into these questions and to ask whether the obvious damage Brexit will do to civil relations with our closest neighbours can be outweighed by the apparent easing on our social services, housing stock, and sense of national identity consequent upon any feasible diminution in net immigration.

Quantum Brain

Jennifer Ouellette

Matthew Fisher proposes that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could carry qubits in the brain.

Fisher discovered an experiment from 1986 comparing the effects of lithium 6 and lithium 7 in rat brains. One group of pregnant rats was given Li 7, one group was given Li 6, and a third was the control group. The mother rats on lithium-6 showed much stronger maternal behavior toward their pups than the others.

Fisher suspected nuclear spin. The lower the spin, the less the nucleus interacts with EM fields, and the less quickly it decoheres. The lithium isotopes have different spins: Li 7 decoheres too quickly for cognitive processing, while Li 6 can remain entangled longer. This was a hint that quantum processes play a functional role in the brain.

Phosphorus atoms have a spin of 1/2, low enough for long coherence times. The time can be extended further if they are bound in clusters of 9 calcium atoms and 6 phosphorous atoms as Posner molecules. Fisher thinks these could carry qubits in the brain.

Pyrophosphate is made of two phosphates bonded together. The spin interaction between the spins of the phosphates entangles them. They can pair up in four ways, one of which has a 0 spin state.

In a living cell, enzymes break apart the entangled phosphates into two free phosphate ions, which remain entangled as they move apart, more quickly with the 0 state. These ions can then combine in turn with other ions and atoms to form Posner molecules. The clusters protect the entangled pairs so that they can maintain coherence for long periods of time.

Fisher has applied for funding to investigate further.

AR Hmm — looks better than tubulin dimers in microtubules.
 

2016 November 2

Theresa May

Christoph Scheuermann

British prime minister Theresa May wants the EU to have no say over British immigration policies. She thinks British voters have decided to turn their backs on Europe.

A pall of xenophobia has settled over the UK. May: "If you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere."

Moderate Conservatives feel excluded by this kind of rhetoric. Parliamentarians who were in favor of remaining in the EU feel silenced in the pro-Brexit party.

May knows how vulnerable she is among the hardliners. She dare not seem to be trying to thwart the will of the British people.

Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke: "Theresa May is in the biggest political shambles the Conservative Party has found itself in for years."

AR Citizens of the world unite!
 

2016 November 1

Cars

Wired

One person, one car — the vision that made the Ford Motor Company one of the most successful enterprises in modern history. Ford CEO Bill Ford: "Unless we figure out a very different urban transportation model, it's not gonna work. If you think we're gonna shove two cars in every garage in Mumbai, you're crazy."

FoMoCo is experimenting with remote-controlled cars that use 4G networks, tech to help you find open parking spots, and a system to let you control your Nest thermostat from your dashboard. Ford: "By definition, most of them won't work. But the bigger risk is doing nothing."

Ford wants his company to be about moving people. He imagines you'll tell your phone where you want to go, and whether you're looking to move quickly or cheaply. It generates a single ticket that will take you through every step of the appropriate route, a combination of car, taxi, subway, bus, bicycle, whatever.

Although he worries about seeing the FoMoCo reduced to the role of hardware subcontractor for more innovative companies, "I am very confident that we can compete and morph into something quite different."

AR Cars will evolve into robopackaging for people.
 

AR These results show the strength of the popular mandate for the UK government to pursue its present Brexit policy.
I see no strength at all. If the government commits Brexit anyway, it will be a free and sovereign act of the executive,
for which it will bear the full and sole responsibility — for better or worse — who can tell?
 

WWF
World's largest marine park
created in Ross Sea
Antarctica

The Prophet of
Posthumanism
My review of Sapiens
and Homo Deus by
Yuval Noah Harari
PDF (10 pages)
(typo corrected
today)

VKW
Professor Emerita Dr. V.
Krawczyk-Wasilewska

RIA

2016 October 31

American Anger

Simon Schama

A Clinton victory is very unlikely to include Democratic control of the House of Representatives. The next president will take office commanding a minimal majority in the Senate and with the House still controlled by the Republican party.

The root cause of Trumpian rage is not economic. Exit polls of nearly 100,000 Trump voters in the primaries produced a median household income of $72,000, about $20,000 higher than the national median. Under pressure from undersupply of skilled labor, real wages are going up, not down.

The Obama presidency reversed what to alienated whites was the natural order of things. When Birther Trump came along, giving disgraceful credence to racist fantasy, conspiracy mutterings went mainstream. What Trump supporters celebrate as the repudiation of political correctness is really the permission their leader has given them to vocalize the happy rush of hatred.

The cult of the pure national tribe is back with a vengeance. America was built on the honor of immigration, but the cultural civil war will not go away with a Clinton presidency.
 

2016 October 30

Red White Blues

Nathaniel Rich

Across the United States, red states are poorer and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states. The more conservative you are, the worse off you are likely to be and the sooner you are likely to die.

This stratum of white Americans has consistently voted against its own interests. They find themselves reviled for their Christian morality and traditional values. Economic despair is the central motivation behind their rage.

Donald Trump has emphasized the core elements of this deep story. Their suffering is not merely a personal or demographic crisis but a national tragedy. It threatens to capsize the entire republic.
 

2016 October 29

Macht endlich Schluss mit der Zeitumstellung!

Stern

Die ständige Verdreherei der Zeiger ist ein Produkt längst vergangener Zeiten. Es bringt nichts.
Schluss mit der Umstellerei!
 

2016 October 28

SMASH Physics

New Scientist

Guillermo Ballesteros and colleagues claim to sort dark matter, neutrino oscillations, baryogenesis, inflation, and the strong CP problem — all at once.

SMASH builds on the neutrino minimal standard model (nuMSM), an extension of the standard model adding 3 right-handed neutrinos, introduced by Takehiko Asaka and Mikhail Shaposhnikov in 2005. SMASH adds a new field to include the axion (for dark matter) and the inflaton (for inflation).

As a final flourish, SMASH solves the strong CP problem, to say why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.

Reference

Søren Kierkegaard

Peter E. Gordon

Kierkegaard is widely considered the most important religious thinker of the modern age. He thought a reconciliation between religion and secular reason is impossible. Faith alone distinguishes the authentic individual, and faith is a leap into paradox.

Kierkegaard was a moralizing Lutheran. He argued that when faith and humanity conflict, faith supervenes. For him, there is a chasm between God and humanity, between the individual and the collective.

He despised Hegel, whose dialectic traced the emergence of constitutional government and the perfection of a society in which no individual remains unfree. For Hegel, in a modern society rationality is something shared by all individuals. In a rational world the individual no longer feels any contradiction between subjective interest and the public good.

Many students of theology looked to Hegel as a guide for understanding the social and historical character of religion. Some of them concluded that religion was a human creation. Kierkegaard regarded the sociality of reason as a kind of totalitarianism.

AR My verdict: win for Hegel — the totalitarianism of reason dissolves in science, and the paradox of faith is analogous to the paradoxes of set theory (see my book Mindworlds).
 

2016 October 27

Totalitarian Extremism

Tony Blair

A dangerous strain of totalitarian thinking rejects and subordinates all universal norms and values to a single violent dogma. The transnational ideology gives its followers certainty and justifies violence. Their war is for hearts and minds in a sustained battle of ideas.

This is not a war with Islam. But if people are brought up to dislike Jews or consider millions of Muslims to be apostates, that prejudice allows extremism to grow. Unless we counter religious prejudice within Muslim communities, extremists will use this bias to gain a foothold.

Most people in Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, and India believe that politics, government, and religion should all be separate. Two thirds of people across the globe agree with them. Prejudice against Jews, minorities, women, and any who disagree with radicals is a problem.

Muslim voices are the most effective at dismantling and countering extremism. Their efforts must be supported by all of us. This is a fight against a perversion of Islam.

The Terminator Conundrum

The New York Times

The Pentagon has put artificial intelligence at the center of its strategy to maintain the US position as the world's dominant military power. It is spending billions of dollars to develop autonomous and semiautonomous weapons and to build an arsenal stocked with such weaponry.

Defense officials say the weapons are needed for the United States to maintain its military edge. At the core of the strategy is centaur warfighting — emphasizing human control and autonomous weapons as ways to augment and magnify the efforts of soldiers, pilots and sailors, not replace them.

American officials are only just beginning to contend with the implications of weapons that could someday operate independently, beyond the control of their developers. Inside the Pentagon, the quandary is known as the Terminator conundrum.
 

2016 October 26

Folklore in the Digital Age

Violetta Krawczyk-Wasilewska

From the Foreword by Andy Ross:

Folkloristics is the study of folklore using approaches and insights from science and the humanities. Folklore expresses a people's culture and heritage, and so helps to define our ethnic and cultural identities.

Professor Violetta Krawczyk-Wasilewska, the author of the essays in this book, has enjoyed a long and successful career as a folklorist. She has worked with various folklore resources, most of them narrative genres, transmitted orally and locally, but also in printed and pictorial form. More recently she has expanded her resource base to include online folklore.

Online and digital cultures are both driving and following a process of globalisation. Global multimedia culture not only endangers traditional folklore but also creates new folklore, often in surprising ways. The miscellany of themes that the author touches upon in this book amply illustrate the range of modern folklore studies. ...

Lodz University Press / Jagiellonian University Press 2016
150 pages

AR I also co-authored Chapter VII.

Global Tech

Jonathan Margolis

Europe has no big internet companies. Sweden has Spotify, the UK has Asos, and Germany Zalando and Rocket Internet, but none is a Google or an Amazon. The three top listed US internet companies are valued at $1.3 trillion, the top in Europe only $20 billion.

The internet giant technology creates unicorns and then the giants eat them. The lions at the top of the food chain are the likes of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Even the unicorns are mostly US: of 176 unicorns globally, 101 are in the US and 19 in Europe.

The internet is an almost wholly US environment, and most of its money flows back to the US. VC money and the size of the domestic market are factors. Europe is big but its laws, languages, even mains plugs are different. The US is global in one country.

AR Global corporations will divide and conquer national polities. Politics as we know it will become as irrelevant as the Vatican in the new world of big tech.
 

2016 October 24

UK Sovereignty

AR

One argument cited for Brexit is that the UK parliament will once again become absolutely sovereign. No longer will it be subject to laws dictated by unelected overseas officials. The argument is buttressed by the assurance that any bad laws imposed by a UK government can be rescinded following a general election that throws out the scoundrels responsible for those laws.

But there are at least five grounds for considering the cited argument to be either naive or disingenuous:

1 Absolute national sovereignty is an illusion in a networked and globalized world
2 The absolute sovereignty desired by many MPs need not be good for UK voters
3 The checks and balances on a sovereign UK parliament are inadequate
4 The electoral system in the UK is less democratic than it might seem
5 British people deserve something better than a sovereign polity

PDF, 2 pages
 

2016 October 22

Russian Aggression

General Sir Richard Shirreff

Since the formation of NATO in 1949, the defense of Europe and the free world has depended on the absolute certainty that the United States will come to the aid of a NATO member if attacked.

Russian president Vladimir Putin aims to re-establish Russia as one of the global great powers and to dominate the former republics of the Soviet Union. But if Russia puts one soldier across the borders of the Baltic states it means war with NATO.

Russia integrates nuclear weapons into every aspect of its military doctrine. Any form of nuclear release by the Russians would almost certainly precipitate nuclear retaliation by the United States, MAD, and the end of life as we know it.

Requirements for peace in Europe:
● Forward basing of a credible military capability in the Baltic states and eastern Poland
● Regenerating the military capabilities of Canada and European members of NATO

Vladimir Putin

Rod Liddle

Some British people admire Vladimir Putin for his decisiveness and social conservatism. While the West flounders, Putin acts. But I am not a member of his fan club. He strikes me as amoral and ruthless and belligerent. Yet we provoke and provoke, we distort the facts in order to suit our agenda, we vilify Putin and his country in a belligerent manner.

I hope that Putin's belligerence is just an act. But it may be a misplaced hope. You cannot divest a country of its empire, its political system, its industry, its money, and its prestige in a few years and not expect some sort of rebound. It was a missed opportunity twenty years ago not to have love-bombed Russia and invited it to join NATO.

Reality

Michael Brooks

General relativity and quantum mechanics could not be more different from each other. Physicists seek to unite them in a theory of quantum gravity that describes reality at the Planck scale. It is a daunting task that was the undoing of both Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger. The two men spent the last years of their working lives trying to solve this problem, but failed to make any headway. Carlo Rovelli likes loop quantum gravity. Most physicists prefer string theory.

AR I like loop quantum gravity too. I really like the theory of causal dynamical triangulation. String theory helps itself to too much metaphysics.
 

ESA

The Age of Em
Robin Hanson

AR An em is an AI emulation
made by scanning your brain.
It lives in a simulated reality.
Hanson imagines the rapture
for geeks. Not for me.

ESA/Christophe Carreau
Lightning on Venus
(artwork)

AR
FUK — EU
A rock in a hard place
Red: Fortress UK
Light blue: EEA
Royal blue: EU

AR I'm blue

2016 October 21

Decline of the West

Javier Solana, Strobe Talbott

The transatlantic community has set a global example for regional cooperation. That achievement is now in jeopardy as the European Union faces an existential crisis and the United States sours on trade agreements with Europe and Asia.

The EU has been at the vanguard of globalization. But the financial crisis exposed structural flaws. The EZ imposed a common monetary policy and a fixed exchange rate, but without fiscal integration, which hobbled its response to sovereign debt crises and caused unemployment.

The last year has seen one catastrophe after another. A rash of terrorist attacks has heightened security concerns, the UK decision to leave the EU has raised fears of contagion, and an influx of migrants and refugees from the Mideast and Africa has placed burdens on member states.

The US election campaign has revealed a similar malaise. Many Americans are pessimistic about the future and nostalgic for a seemingly better past. As in Europe, there is mistrust of elites and experts, and enthusiasm for populists.

This backlash brings threats of protectionism, isolationism, nativism, and xenophobia. NATO needs beefing up to help prevent the political disintegration of Europe. Western governments must work to cement a new public consensus for globalization.

May in Brussels

Financial Times

Theresa May made a short presentation on Brexit that ran for about five minutes.

Angela Merkel: "Basically it was a repetition of what we have heard so far. Nevertheless, it was important for us to have it repeated in that format. As far as the practical terms are concerned, it is going to be rough going. It will not be that easy."

François Hollande: "I say very firmly: if Mrs May wants a hard Brexit she will get a hard negotiation."

Donald Tusk: "We have to expect the dual reality from now on. It is a fact of life and we have to live with it. It is not our decision, it is not our choice. I would prefer 28 member states, not only for the next months but for the next decades."

AR Brexit is an act of national pride. But pride comes before a fall.
 

2016 October 20

Milkomeda

Stuart Clark

Some 4 Gy from now, the Milky Way will collide with Andromeda to form one big Milkomeda galaxy.

Alignments of satellite galaxies, globular clusters, and trailing streams of stars suggest that the Milky Way and Andromeda interacted in the past. Simulations suggest that galaxies are surrounded by a halo of dark matter. Parts of the halo fragment to form a population of dwarf galaxies scattered around the parent galaxy. The dwarf satellites and other halo objects around the Milky Way and Andromeda form polar disks that are aligned as if the two galaxies had interacted in the past.

Simulations of this process do not yet work as intended and theorists are struggling.

The ExoMars Mission

The Guardian

The joint European-Russian ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter is now in orbit around Mars. It will sniff the atmosphere in search of life and is the science package.

The Schiaparelli lander was a technology tester. In a planned 360 s descent from orbit, contact was lost in the last 50 s. The lander jettisoned its parachute about 30 s early and its retrorockets switched on for 3—4 seconds rather than a planned 30 s. Transmissions continued for a further 19 s.

AR Win one, lose one.
 

2016 October 19

Moon Shots

Barack Obama

In science fiction, what you hear about is generalized AI. Specialized AI is about using algorithms and computers to figure out increasingly complex tasks. If properly harnessed, specialized AI can generate enormous prosperity and opportunity.

The government should add a relatively light touch. But our general commitment as a society to basic research has diminished. The analogy that we still use when it comes to a great technology achievement, even 50 years later, is a moon shot.

I am still a big space guy — I was a sucker for Star Trek when I was a kid. It was really talking about a notion of a common humanity and a confidence in our ability to solve problems. That is what I love most about America.
 

2016 October 18

British Taboo

Joris Luyendijk

For Brexiteers, the UK is a great country and the EU is a disaster, and the UK needs the EU far less than vice versa so Europeans will give Britain a great deal. For Remainers, the threat in Brussels to back Brexit unless the UK got a better deal for Britain was not blackmail but a demand for concessions, as if UK membership is a favor granted by the UK to the EU.

Brits were unable to accept the most powerful argument for the European pooling of sovereignty: Today Europeans make up 8% of the world population but we will only represent 5% in 2050. By then no single EU country will be among the global top economies. The case for European integration rests on a recognition of diminishing global heft.

This insight remains a national taboo in Britain. Fortress UK isolation will not be splendid.

British Roads

Simon Wolfson

Potholes and daily gridlock — the state of UK roads is a national disgrace.

Nine out of ten journeys in Britain are made by road, but roads get less than half of government transport spending. Road traffic is rising but spending on road maintenance is falling. We all suffer.

Motorists are a cash cow for the Treasury. Receipts from fuel duty and vehicle excise duty brought in £33 billion in 2014, yet only about £9 billion of that went back to roads. This is highway robbery.

The future of roads is the topic for the 2017 Wolfson Economics Prize.

AR British roads — grrrr!
 

2016 October 17

Venus

Hannah Devlin

Venus has a surface hot enough to melt lead and skies darkened by toxic clouds of sulphuric acid. But conditions on the planet were not always so hellish.

A study to be presented at the AAS DPS 48 / EPSC 11 meeting in Pasadena this week suggests that starting about 3 billion years ago and persisting for over 2 billion years Venus may have had a balmy climate and oceans up to 2 km deep.

Venusian climate simulations suggest that 2.9 Gy ago Venus had an average surface temperature of 284 K (11°C) and still only 288 K (15°C) 2.2 Gy later as insolation increased.

NASA GISS team lead Michael Way: "At a low latitude and low elevation the surface temperatures would not have been that different from that of a place in the tropics on Earth [but] you would have mostly overcast skies during the day and precipitation."

JAXA Venus Climate Orbiter mission worker Professor Takehiko Satoh: "Probably Venus once had an ocean and probably the environment of Venus and the Earth might have been similar."

Venus now has a CO2 atmosphere at a pressure of 9 MPa and an average surface temperature of 735 K, thanks to a runaway greenhouse effect.

AR Earth could be next — time to go to Mars.

Hard Brexit

Henrik Müller

The UK government is looking at a hard Brexit. The EU will make it harder.

The EU will send a signal to other Europeans who may be tempted to leave the EU. Insisting on an Article 50 exit forces a decision — in or out. After that free decision, Britain must accept the consequences.

EU trading partners will suffer from decimated trade. But bowing to UK demands would be worse: If other member states could pick cherries too, the EU would fall apart.

Then the UK would get a very hard Brexit.

Costly Brexit

Financial Times

Britain could continue to pay billions to the EU after Brexit to maintain passporting rights for the City of London in Europe. Also, after Brexit, the UK will face a divorce bill from the EU for up to €20 billion. The ONS says the average annual net UK contribution to the EU from 2010 to 2014 was £7.1 billion.

Brexit has made a sterling crisis far more likely because it has triggered:

● An adverse supply side shock. The reduction in trade and openness caused by Brexit is likely to reduce UK productivity and output in the long term.

● An adverse demand side shock. Economic uncertainty and delayed corporate investment may reduce GDP in the near term.

● A rise in the risk premium required to hold sterling. The medium term equilibrium for the exchange rate is down, UK interest rates are down, and investors deem sterling more risky.

With sterling weak, easing fiscal and monetary policy may be a mistake.

Weak Brexports

Deutsche Bank

World trade no longer consists of finished goods bartered for raw materials. Global value chains have led to huge growth in the trade of intermediate and capital goods. Any manufacturing exports today contain a big chunk of value added abroad. Low domestic value added in UK manufacturing means sterling depreciation will hurt exporters as well as help them.

Services make up 45% of UK exports, but demand for services is less sensitive to price than goods, as service providers compete on quality, not price. So the UK will benefit less from devaluation than any other G7 economy and may struggle to offset a loss of Single Market access.

Irish Fear Hard Brexit

The Guardian

Irish leaders warn of economic disaster on both sides of the border without decisive action to confront the effects of Brexit. Incalculable consequences for the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland involve border questions and Irish beef exports to the UK. Some forecasters fear that Ireland could be harder hit than Britain by the tumult.

Scots Want Soft Brexit

The Times

SNP deputy leader Angus Robertson says a second independence referendum will be taken off the table if the UK government secures a soft Brexit.
 

2016 October 16

Britain After Brexit

Lionel Barber

The vote for Brexit was a popular revolt. We are sailing into uncharted territory.

Prime minister Theresa May wants to begin divorce proceedings in 2017 Q1, putting the UK on course to exit the EU in 2019. Her government is trying to figure out the parameters for a new deal with Europe. Three scenarios:

1 An amicable divorce: All parties make rational choices. The UK obtains some control over EU immigration and continues to access the single market as long as it complies with EU regulations.

2 A quickie divorce: Britain rejects post-exit deals with the EU. Tariffs are imposed on UK manufacturing exports and the UK economy specialises in services and lose manufacturing.

3 A hostile divorce: Negotiations between the UK and EU become acrimonious and the negotiations prove fiendishly complex. Financial markets are spooked and the UK slips into recession.

Brexit offers an opportunity to redefine our role in a new world.

UK Will Lose, EU Will Win

Jay Elwes

Theresa May is heading for a political fight she cannot win.

The EU will yield nothing. The pound has dropped by 14% against the dollar. Nothing has happened on British talks with the EU. No one will talk to us until the government triggers Article 50.

The "all over by Christmas" view of Brexit negotiations is fantasy. When talks begin, Britain will be negotiating with an economic giant. In 2015, UK GDP was $2.8 trillion and EU GDP $16.2 trillion. About 44% of UK exports go to the EU but 16% of EU exports to the UK.

Donald Tusk: "Our task will be to protect the interests of the EU as a whole, to stick unconditionally to the Treaty rules and fundamental values. By this I mean, inter alia, the conditions for access to the single market with all four freedoms. There will be no compromise in this regard."

Theresa May is heading for disaster.

UK Democracy

Stephen Kinnock

Leavers said "take back control" to return parliamentary sovereignty to Westminster. Now the UK executive aims to seize control by imposing hard Brexit upon the British people and parliament.

The prime minister says there will be no votes on the timing of the triggering of Article 50, on the terms for entering negotiations, or on the final terms of Brexit. The Great Repeal Bill will leave 40 years of legislation vulnerable to change by diktat.

There is a mandate for Brexit but not for the final settlement. The people voted to take back control, not to face decline and fall. Leadership is not about bulldozing UK parliamentary democracy.

AR We want a vote on the terms.
 

Cory Poole
Andromeda and part of the Milky Way, seen from California
(3:27)

Yuval Noah Harari
History began when humans
invented gods, and will end
when humans become gods

AR Response

The Prophet of
Posthumanism
My review of Sapiens
and Homo Deus by
Yuval Noah Harari
PDF (10 pages)

Pound hits $1.22
on Brexit worries

AR Emigrate?
Can't afford it.


Let Them In

Vote Leave campaign director
Dominic Cummings says
Theresa May must drop her
pledge to reduce net migration
to the tens of thousands and
give skilled workers the right
to come to Britain. He says
the public are only really
concerned by too many
unskilled immigrants.

AR Free movement
for EU workers!

MARS
Bas Lansdorp

Live on Mars in 2027:
The people we send there
are going for the rest
of their lives.

Mars One

"The words my husband
used are unacceptable
and offensive to me."
Melania Trump


"I'd like to punch
him in the face."
Robert De Niro

AR
Fortress UK

Johnny Foreigner
Need Not Apply
The Guardian

Leading foreign academics
acting as expert advisers to
the UK government have been
told they will not be asked to
contribute to any government
work and analysis on Brexit
because they are not
British nationals.

AR Seriously? Is it OK if
they wear yellow stars?

2016 October 15

Human History

John Gray

Yuval Noah Harari says a new religion is emerging to reflect the shift that is occurring in our sense of ourselves. Dataism combines the ­view that organisms are biochemical algorithms and the theory of artificial intelligence to produces a single overarching theory that unifies all the scientific disciplines. But it is hard to envision Dataism having an influence anywhere near comparable with that of traditional religions.

Whereas Dataists believe that humankind is obsolete, the techno-humanists think that technology can be used to fashion a superior human model. Techno-humanists have dif­ferent ideas about what constitutes a superior species, and there is nothing to suggest this process will end in a godlike being that is supreme over all the rest. Any realistically imaginable post-human future will be a continuation of human history by other means.

The chief legacy of monotheistic religion is the belief that humankind is some kind of universal subject, striving throughout history to realise common ends. No such conception can be found in polytheistic faiths, which see people as essentially disparate in their goals and values. The idea that the human species could act as a conscious agent is a relic of monotheism.

AR John and I studied together at Oxford, though we were not friends. Now I prefer my own review of Harari's claims.
 

2016 October 14

Hard Brexit Or No Brexit

The Guardian

European Council president Donald Tusk: "The only real alternative to a hard Brexit is no Brexit, even if today hardly anyone believes in such a possibility ... The brutal truth is that Brexit will be a loss for all of us. There will be no cakes on the table, for anyone. There will be only salt and vinegar."

He said the best deal for the UK would be to remain in the EU.

AR Too many Brits voted for Boaty McBoatface on June 23.

May Buries Thatcherism

Martin Wolf

Theresa May: "The central tenet of my belief is that there is more to life than individualism and self-interest. We form families, communities, towns, cities, counties, and nations. We have a responsibility to one another. And I firmly believe that government has a responsibility, too."

UK prosperity depends heavily on the skills and knowledge of foreigners, as both workers and investors. Given that the UK is far from the economic powerhouse some imagine, this dependence will continue. It is vital that the government does not curtail UK access to such global resources.

AR May — we need free movement.

Nobel Lyrics

CNN

Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mick Posey: "As a Pop Culture professor I have to do a fist pump and say YES! Dylan won a Nobel Prize in Lit!"

AR YES!
 

2016 October 13

Get Real, Brits

Joris Luyendijk

Why is the pound plunging against the euro and not the other way around? Why do we not hear of companies escaping from the EU to "free-trading Britain" while there is almost a traffic jam in the other direction? Why do EU leaders look rather relaxed when Brexit comes up?

Britain is losing itself in delusional grandstanding, talking about itself to itself. While 44% of British exports go to the EU single market, British politicians have gone out of their way to undermine, disparage and insult the parliaments and institutions that now hold so much power over them.

The EU will defend its national and continental interests with as much vigour as Britain will. And, since the EU is more than seven times bigger, it will impose its will. Brexit will mean what the EU decides it means.

Harte Linie gegenüber Briten

Der Spiegel

Die Präsidenten von zwei der größten deutschen Wirtschaftsverbände, des DIHK und des ZDH, befürworten eine harte Haltung der restlichen EU gegenüber Großbritannien. In den anstehenden Brexit-Verhandlungen sollten die anderen 27 EU-Staaten London keinesfalls gestatten, die Zuwanderung aus der EU zu begrenzen und trotzdem Zugang zum gemeinsamen Binnenmarkt zu erhalten.

AR Richtig so: zusammenhalten.
 

2016 October 12

Human Settlement of Space

NASA

Later this week, US innovators will meet at the White House Frontiers Conference to explore how US investments in science and technology will help us settle space, the final frontier.

NASA has worked over the past 6 years to help catalyze a vibrant new sector of the economy by enabling the commercial transportation of cargo and soon crew from US soil to the International Space Station. Americans are working at more than a thousand companies to support commercial space initiatives and a new commercial market in Low Earth Orbit.

Over the next decade, NASA will demonstrate and test technologies in cislunar space. The NASA Asteroid Redirect Mission will send a robotic spacecraft to a nearby asteroid to test out exploration technologies, conduct scientific and planetary defense experiments, and then return a boulder from the asteroid to an orbit around the Moon for astronauts to study.

NASA has asked the private sector how it might use an available docking port on the ISS. A potential use of such a port would be preparation for one or more future commercial stations in LEO, ready to take over from the ISS once its mission ends. NASA will provide companies with an opportunity to add their own modules and other capabilities to the ISS.

The Journey to Mars will be challenging — we are pushing the boundaries.
 

2016 October 11

To Mars

Barack Obama

The space race we won not only contributed immeasurably important technological and medical advances, but it also inspired a new generation of scientists and engineers with the right stuff to keep America on the cutting edge.

We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America's story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time.

Nobel Prize in Economics 2016

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences goes to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström for their contributions to contract theory.

Holmström demonstrated how a principal (e.g., a company's shareholders) should design an optimal contract for an agent (the company's CEO), whose action is partly unobserved by the principal. His informativeness principle stated precisely how this contract should link the agent's pay to performance-relevant information.

Hart made fundamental contributions to a theory that deals with incomplete contracts. Because it is impossible for a contract to specify every eventuality, this theory spells out optimal allocations of control rights. His findings on incomplete contracts have shed new light on the ownership and control of businesses.

CEO Pay

The Independent

There are social consequences to executive rewards as well as corporate and investment consequences. At a time of rising inequality and insecurity, the pay packages handed to company CEOs are contributing to the anger and unrest that played a role in both the disastrous Brexit vote and the rise of Donald Trump.

Where Are the Aliens?

Brian Cox

Enrico Fermi, 1950: "Where is everybody?"

One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that.

It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster. We could be approaching that position.

AR Chilling but logical
 

2016 October 10

Pulling the Plug

CNN 1704 GMT

House Speaker Paul Ryan told fellow Republicans Monday he will no longer defend Donald Trump and will instead use the next 29 days to focus on preserving the GOP hold on Congress.

Grudge Match

CNN

Donald Trump will live to fight another day. It took the nastiest, most bitterly personal presidential debate in recent memory for the Republican nominee to stanch the downward plunge.

Hillary Clinton spoke of her years fighting Republicans on policy but said she never questioned their fitness to serve as president until now: "Donald Trump is different."

American politics changed in the course of one nasty night. The once sacred tradition of a presidential debate exploded into something quite chilling.

No other presidential candidate in history has faced the personal buzzsaw that Trump represented on Sunday night.

Insult Bazaar

Edward Luce

Donald Trump stuck to his motto: "Never explain. Never apologize."

US presidential democracy has nosedived into an insult bazaar last seen in the 19th century. An acutely polarised electorate has only become more divided.

Media observers may see a shameless male bully trying to intimidate his female opponent. Trump fans see an outsider delivering home truths to the consummate insider which no one else dare say.

By the truth standard, Trump was the clear loser.
 

2016 October 9

The Great Repeal

Jolyon Maugham

The proposed Great Repeal Act says nothing about our future relationship with our EU neighbours. The European Communities Act 1972 would need to be repealed anyway. The Great Repeal Act does nothing until we leave the EU and merely places the repeal in the hands of the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister can trigger Article 50, which already amounts to repeal of the 1972 Act. Once Article 50 is triggered, negotiations ensue, we agree terms with our EU partners, our membership of the EU ceases, and MPs repeal the European Communities Act as a final formality. But an Article 50 challenge now in court argues that a Prime Minister cannot repeal an Act of Parliament.

To deliver her Great Repeal Act, Theresa May will have to persuade MPs to support it. The House of Lords cannot withhold consent to a measure promised in an election manifesto, but this Act was not promised, and Lords say it would not pass. An MP could then table a motion to take back control from an unelected Prime Minister and hold a referendum to choose between the relationship we have with the EU and the deal the Three Brexiteers end up proposing.

AR All sounds a bit dicy — the game is still undecided.

The Great Return

Niall Ferguson

Mother Theresa went to Oxford as the daughter of a provincial Anglo-Catholic clergyman. Yet she is more than a high church Christian Democrat. Her conference speech did three things:

1 Aimed for hard Brexit in a clear appeal to UKIP voters
2 Repudiated Thatcherism in a bid for Labour voters
3 Promised a new industrial strategy

She fired off a barrage against the "privileged few ... the rich, the successful and the powerful ... the powerful and the privileged ... the rich and the powerful".

I warned that a vote for Brexit risked returning the UK to the 1970s. I now fear this is what May has in mind — first the industrial strategy, then the sterling crisis.

AR Promised everything to everyone — something must fail.
 

2016 October 8

Earth 2, 3, ...

Sara Seager

Astronomers did well to discover a planet around the very nearest star to our sun. Proxima Centauri is 40 Pm away, still far out of reach for human space travel. But Proxima Centauri b orbits within the star's Goldilocks zone, where the planet's surface might be just right for life, if the planet has an atmosphere like ours.

Astrophysicists will now look for water vapor in the planet's atmosphere. We would like to find oxygen, which is a sign of life, and ozone, which creates a high atmospheric layer that protects the planet surface from UV radiation. We will aim to make an inventory of other gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, to help us understand the atmosphere.

Our descendants will wish to geoengineer their surroundings even on Earth. On other planets they may first need to terraform the atmosphere and surface. On a cold planet with a thin atmosphere, they could reuse ideas developed for Mars.

They could deploy a big mirror in orbit around the planet to beam starlight down to warm its surface, melting ice caps of frozen carbon dioxide and water. This would create a stable greenhouse atmosphere that builds up the pressure to let liquid water exist. To get oxygen, they could seed the planet with cyanobacteria.

I imagine a more fantastic future. Future generations will surely develop interstellar propulsion and terraforming technology. Our descendants may also do away with human space travel, instead sending raw materials and DNA to create humans on arrival, tailored to their planet.

Proxima b

The Independent

A team at LAM in Marseilles believes planet Proxima b, which was first spotted in August, could be an ocean planet. In Astrophysical Journal Letters they calculate its dimensions, discuss its surface, and say it may be covered by an ocean 200 km deep.

Team lead Bastien Brugger: "Among the thousands of exoplanets we have already discovered, Proxima b is one of the best candidates to sustain life [and] is the closest exoplanet to Earth. It is really exciting to have the possibility that there is life just at the gates of our solar system."

Erstes Hitler Buch

Marc von Lüpke

Thomas Weber behauptet, der spätere Diktator habe bereits 1923 ein Buch mit dem Titel "Adolf Hitler: Sein Leben und seine Reden" verfasst. Als Autor verzeichnet das Werk einen gewissen Baron Adolf-Viktor von Koerber. Weber fand in Koerbers Nachlass Aussagen des angeblichen Buchautors, die Hitler als Schreiber identifizieren.

Weber: "Bislang sahen wir Hitler in diesem Zeitraum eher als eine Art Trommler, eine Art Strohmann ... Dieses Buch beweist, dass Hitler schon sehr früh ein geschickter Manipulator und politischer Strippenzieher gewesen ist und nicht zunächst nur ein Propagandist, der von Hintermännern nach oben bugsiert wurde."

Adolf-Viktor von Koerber, geboren 1891, war ein Adliger und ehemaliger Kampfflieger. Zunächst zählte er zu den frühen Anhängern Hitlers, wandelte sich aber vor 1933 zu einem Gegner des zunehmend radikaleren NSDAP-Chefs und verbrachte das Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs im KZ.

Wie Adolf Hitler zum Nazi wurde
Thomas Weber

Hitlers Rolle im Ersten Weltkrieg sah ganz anders aus als von seinen Biographen geschildert. Er war am Kriegsende politisch absolut orientierungslos und kam in nur wenigen Jahren vom unpolitischen Nobody zum Führer einer Bewegung, die die Welt veränderte. Anhand neuer Quellenfunde beschreibe ich die Schritte, die Hitler zum fanatischen Nazi machten.

Dancing in Rumi's Footsteps

Andrew Harvey

Discover the wisdom of Sufism and liberate your soul.

Jalaluddin Rumi experienced the full flowering of divinity in human form. He showed us how to touch the tender heart of God. When we read his poems, our hearts thrill to his passionate outpourings of love and devotion.

Rumi shows us how to birth ourselves as divine.
 

Nasty Brits

"Arrogant. Nasty to Americans
when we were over there saving
them. Nasty when I visited them
a few years ago — wanted a
whole lot for nothing."
Chuck Yeager

Speech to Conservative
Party Conference 2016
Theresa May
(1:02:25)

Nobelpriset i fysik 2016
New Scientist
(0:53)

AR Oy, what about
gravity waves?





Stink

Comet 67P/Chu-Ger was
sniffed by ESA lander Philae.
Its coma blends H2S, NH3 and HCN, to recall the aroma of
rotten eggs, cat urine, and
bitter almonds.

Another Lost Decade?
Aditya Chakrabortty

Hammond has just admitted
that Britons will soon get much
poorer. He has binned plans for
cutting spending and reducing
debt and has no replacement.
The UK is jumping off a diving
board with no certainty
of water below.

AR The UK future:
Splash or splat!

Conservatives
A country that works
for everyone
(23.04)

New Scientist

2016 October 7

Climate Change

Paul Krugman

The two major US political parties are at odds on climate.

If Hillary Clinton wins, she will move forward with domestic clean energy policies and international negotiation — a one-two punch that offers some hope of reining in greenhouse gas emissions before climate change turns into climate catastrophe.

If Donald Trump wins, the paranoid style in climate politics — the belief that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a vast international conspiracy of scientists — will become official doctrine, and catastrophe will become all but inevitable.

There is no other issue this important.

Divisive Nationalism

The Times

German chancellor Angela Merkel won thunderous applause from hundreds of German business leaders yesterday as she warned that Britain could not retain full access to the EU single market unless it allowed free movement of people.

French housing minister Emmanuelle Cosse described as a catastrophe the British plan to force companies to publish the number of foreign workers they employ.

Italian deputy foreign minister Mario Giro warned that UK political leaders were taking the tone of nationalist parties in Hungary and Poland.

Doing a Brexit

François Hollande

The UK has decided to do a Brexit, I believe even a hard Brexit. Well, then we must go all the way through the UK's willingness to leave the EU. We have to have this firmness.

If not, we would jeopardise the fundamental principles of the EU. Other countries would want to leave the EU to get the supposed advantages without the obligations. There must be a threat, there must be a risk, there must be a price. Otherwise we will be in a negotiation that cannot end well.

Margaret Thatcher wanted to stay in Europe, but she wanted a cheque in return. Now, the UK wants to leave and pay nothing. It's not possible.

Taking a Pounding

Financial Times

The British pound fell more than 6% against the US dollar early on Friday before recovering most of its losses. Sterling was trading below $1.24 and €1.11 Friday afternoon. It has sunk 4.6% since the Sunday conference speech by UK prime minister Theresa May.
 

2016 October 6

Mother Theresa

Der Spiegel

Theresa May had posed as the hard Brexiteer. Now she speaks to ordinary working class people of fairness and equal opportunity.

May is appealing to the people — a smart but risky move among Conservatives. May sees her chance to emerge as the winner from the British political turmoil in recent months by championing the disadvantaged.

The economic future of the UK is uncertain. May opted for hard Brexit on Sunday and sterling plunged on Monday. Some experts warn of riots if the government does not change course.

May has long tried to give the Conservatives a more social image. Now she is dutifully enacting the popular will.

European Defense

Ursula von der Leyen

My plea to the British is not to block important European developments. It is not good to prevent Europe from organizing itself better. We Europeans want to expand our security and defense policy and work together better.

We need a strong European pillar in NATO. Two decades ago the Americans were not particularly interested in a cohesive Europe in NATO. Today they say Europe must be better organized. Germany has stepped up and done a lot more in NATO.

Germans accept the importance of security. The problems of the Mideast are suddenly in our towns and communities. Germany is still one of the safest countries in the world, but terror has crept into our daily life. And that causes a feeling of insecurity.

A nationalist and racist solution cannot be a solution for us. We would point out that every citizen benefits from a country open to the world. The commitment to NATO is important — that we stand by each other.
 

2016 October 5

A Fairer Britain

Theresa May

I want to set out my vision for Britain after Brexit. I want to lay out my approach, the things I believe. I want to explain what a country that works for everyone means.

I want to set our party and our country on the path towards the new centre ground of British politics, built on the values of fairness and opportunity, where everyone plays by the same rules and where every single person is given the chance to be all they want to be. A vision is nothing without the determination to see it through. And that's what Britain needs today.

The referendum was not just a vote to withdraw from the EU. It was about a sense many people have today that the world works well for a privileged few, but not for them. It was a call for a change in the way our country works forever. Our society should work for everyone, but if you can't afford to get onto the property ladder, or your child is stuck in a bad school, or your pay has stagnated for years, or if your complaints fall on deaf ears, it doesn't feel like it's working for you.

We see division and unfairness all around: between a more prosperous older generation and a struggling younger generation, between the wealth of London and the rest of the country, and between the rich and powerful and their fellow citizens. We applaud success. But we also value the spirit of citizenship that means you respect the bonds and obligations that make our society work, that means a commitment to the men and women around you, that means you train up local young people before you take on cheap labour from overseas, that means you pay your fair share of tax.

Today, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ or pass in the street. If you believe you're a citizen of the world, you don't understand what citizenship means.

My mission — and the mission of this party — is to build a country that truly works for everyone, not just the privileged few.

AR Excellent keynote speech — well worth watching.

Immigration

Amber Rudd

The British people sent a clear message in the referendum. Recent levels of immigration motivated a large part of the vote. The Conservative party was elected on a manifesto commitment to reduce net migration to sustainable levels.

Leaving the EU is just one part of the strategy. We have to look at all sources of immigration:
● Landlords who rent to people who have no right to be here will be committing a crime.
● Immigration checks will be mandatory for those wanting to get a licence to drive a taxi.
● Banks will have to do regular checks to ensure they are not serving to illegal migrants.

I want to reduce net migration while continuing to ensure we attract the brightest and the best:

● We will examine tightening the test companies have to take before recruiting from abroad.
● We will ensure people coming here are not taking jobs British people could do.
● We will look at tailoring our student immigration rules.

This Government will not waver in its commitment to put the interests of British people first:

● We will make it easier to deport criminals and those who abuse our laws.
● We will deport EU nationals that repeatedly commit so-called minor crimes in this country.
● We will set up a fund to ease the pressures on public services in areas of high migration.

My primary concern is protecting our way of life, and delivering the security measures we require to ensure this. We have a government committed to putting British interests first, delivering both the security of our borders and control of who comes in.

AR Not reassuring.

Devaluation

The Guardian

The pound was worth $1.55 last October. Now it is heading toward $1.27. A year ago the pound bought €1.34. Today a pound will buy less than €1.12.

AR No EZ life for Brits.
 

2016 October 4

A Greater Britain

Philip Hammond

We are leaving the European Union. We are ready to take whatever steps are necessary to protect the economy from turbulence. And when the process is over, we are ready to provide support to British businesses as they adjust to life outside the EU.

The decision to leave the EU has introduced new fiscal uncertainty. Last year, the government borrowed £1 in every £10 we spent. The British people elected us on a promise to restore fiscal discipline. But we will no longer target a surplus at the end of this Parliament.

The Conservative commitment is to build a country and an economy that works for everyone. We will do it by making the British economy the most outward-looking, most dynamic, most competitive, high wage, high skilled, low tax economy in the world.

But to deliver that strong, prosperous, economy requires long-term, sustainable growth. And long-term sustainable growth requires us to raise our national productivity. Our national productivity is lower than the US and Germany, lower than France and Italy. Millions of British workers are working longer hours for lower pay than their counterparts in Europe and the US.

The good news is that we do know how to do productivity. Parts of London have the highest productivity in Europe. The bad news is that the productivity gap between our capital and our other cities is greater than in any other major economy in the world. Closing that gap will be key.

The British people have made a bold decision. We will not let them down. Let us resolve to tackle the challenges we face at home with renewed vigour. A bigger, better, Greater Britain!
 

2016 October 3

Conference Quotes

Theresa May

The referendum result was clear. It was legitimate. It was the biggest vote for change this country has ever known.

There will be no unnecessary delays in invoking Article 50. We will invoke it when we are ready. And we will be ready soon. We will invoke Article 50 no later than the end of March next year.

It is not up to the House of Commons to invoke Article 50, and it is not up to the House of Lords. It is up to the government to trigger Article 50 and the government alone.

Because we voted in the referendum as one United Kingdom, we will negotiate as one United Kingdom, and we will leave the European Union as one United Kingdom.

Our laws will be made not in Brussels but in Westminster. The judges interpreting those laws will sit not in Luxembourg but in courts in this country. The authority of EU law in Britain will end.

We are going to be a fully independent, sovereign country — a country that is no longer part of a political union with supranational institutions that can override national parliaments and courts.

We will do what independent, sovereign countries do. We will decide for ourselves how we control immigration. And we will be free to pass our own laws.

We will seek the best deal possible as we negotiate a new agreement with the European Union.

Global Britain

Boris Johnson

Freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom to practice whatever religion you want and to live your life as you please — these freedoms are not inimical to prosperity — they are in fact essential to sustained growth.

Britain incarnates that symmetry. Britain is ranked among the top three most innovative societies on Earth. We should have absolutely no shame or embarrassment in championing our ideals around the world.

Never once have I felt that this country would be in any way disadvantaged by extricating ourselves from the EU treaties. We will remain committed to all kinds of European cooperation. But we will also be able to speak up more powerfully with our own distinctive voice.

Every day I go into an office so vast that you could comfortably fit two squash courts and so dripping with gilt bling that it looks like something from the Kardashians. This was once the nerve centre of an empire that was 7 times the size of the Roman empire at its greatest extent. This country, over the last 200 years, has directed the invasion or conquest of 178 countries.

It would be a fatal mistake now to underestimate what this country is doing or what it can do. When we give our armed services clear and achievable missions we can still be remarkably effective. We will be the leading military player in western Europe for the foreseeable future.

And our hard power is dwarfed by soft power — the vast and subtle and pervasive extension of British influence around the world that goes with having the language that was invented and perfected in this country, and now has more speakers than any other language on Earth.

Free markets and free societies go together. I urge you to look at the successes that these free institutions have helped to engender. Global Britain is a soft power superpower.

AR A glorious load of ripe B—s.
 

2016 October 2

Great Repeal Bill

The Sunday Times

UK PM Theresa May: "We will introduce, in the next Queen's speech, a Great Repeal Bill that will remove the European Communities Act from the statute book. That was the act that took us into the European Union. This marks the first stage in the UK becoming a sovereign and independent country once again. It will return power and authority to the elected institutions of our country. It means that the authority of EU law in Britain will end."

Mars Is Awfully Cold

Tony Allen-Mills

Elon Musk dreams of colonizing Mars. He plans to send thousands of colonists there to build a city. Musk: "I think probably we'll name the first ship ... Heart of Gold."

Fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams will recall that Heart of Gold is a shoe-shaped spaceship powered by an Infinite Improbability Drive.

Antarctica is a prototype for space environments and is about as like Mars as anywhere on Earth. Scott of the Antarctic: "Great God! This is an awful place."

Dark Galaxies

Joshua Sokol

Dragonfly 44 is a dim galaxy, but in size and mass it rivals the Milky Way. Such ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) have been discovered in several galaxy clusters. The motion of stars in UDGs can test theories of dark matter.

In models of galaxy formation, clumps of dark matter coalesce into haloes. Then gas and fragments of other galaxies, drawn by gravity, collect at the center. They spin out into a disk and collapse into luminous stars to form a galaxy we can see. The formation of UDGs is a mystery.

The Dragonfly 44 galaxy has a total mass of around a trillion suns but there is no evidence that it is spinning. In most galaxies, stars and gas can outweigh dark matter near the center by a ratio of 5 to 1, but at the center of Dragonfly 44, dark matter outweighs the rest by 50 to 1.
 

2016 October 1

Brexit

Philip Hammond

Theresa May and I share clear objectives. We should be looking for a good Brexit, not a hard Brexit or a soft Brexit. The British people will expect us to negotiate a solution that allows the UK economy to go on growing. Whatever control powers we have over immigration into the UK, we will use them in a way that supports the UK economy.

Green Britain

The Independent

Brexit could means a greener Britain. A radical reform of British farm subsidies could restore the countryside to something of its original health and charm. Rather than protecting agricultural incomes, rural policy could protect the environment and biodiversity.

Britain could buy more food on world markets. One way or another, the British agricultural sector would most likely be reduced in size as the economy adjusts. England will not return to being a gigantic forest, but there is an opportunity here.

Google Assistant

Farhad Manjoo

Google has pumped vast resources into data mining and artificial intelligence systems. Now the company is melding these advances into a new product, the Google Assistant. The ultimate aim is to build something like the talking computer on Star Trek.

Based on your interactions with it over the years, Google would know your habits, your preferences and your budget, plus your friends, family and your colleagues. With access to so much data, and with the computational power to interpret all of it, the Assistant most likely could handle the entire task. If not, it would simply ask you to fill in the gaps, the way a human assistant might.

Google could build a more capable digital assistant than others. Google is also a leader in machine learning. But it may not have the prowess to create the friendliest or most charming assistant.

AR I called such assistants avatars in my 2010 book G.O.D. Is Great.