My Next Books

Gisele Bündchen pose en
couverture du numéro de
juin/juillet 2012 de
Vogue Paris




Every odd N > 1 is the sum
of at most five primes
Terence Tao
arXiv:1201.6656v3

2012 May 16

Eurogrexit
The Times

Greece has been served notice that the euro can survive without it. Eurozone leaders are preparing for Greece to return to the drachma if voters return a left-wing government bent on ripping up the terms of the international bailout.

IMF head Christine Lagarde says the eurozone must be "technically prepared for anything" and warns a Greek exit could be "quite messy".

Dutch Minister for Europe Ben Knapen says there is no scope to water down Greek austerity plans.

AR The Grexit is a trial run for a hypothetical Europocalypse.

Merkollande
Financial Times

François Hollande flew to Berlin for talks with Angela Merkel within hours of being installed as French president. Both say Greece should remain a full member of the Eurozone and promise to consider new measures to revive economic growth.

AR The Gerfraxis is the neural tube of an embryonic Europaradise.

Death
Shelly Kagan

Death deprives me of the good things in life. But if that's true, there must be a time when it's true. So when is death bad for me? Not now, because I'm not dead. And not when I'm dead, because I won't exist. If nonexistence can be bad for somebody who doesn't exist, then it's bad for somebody who never exists. But there are zillions of possible people and we don't care about them.

Perhaps to say why death is bad we need to assume that something can be bad for you only if you exist at some time or another. Suppose that somebody has a nice long life. Now imagine halving his lifetime. That's worse for him. Now imagine halving it again and again. It gets worse and worse. But according to the assumption, when I cut off his last moment of existence that's fine.

If nonexistence is bad, then I should be upset by the eternity of nonexistence before I was born. But nobody is upset about that. So it makes no sense to be upset about nonexistence after you die. Before my birth I haven't lost anything. What's bad about death is the loss. Let's call the state before birth "schmoss" of life. Why do we care more about loss of life than schmoss of life?

2012 May 15

Grexit
CNN Money

Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts: "The threat from Greece remains real, and Greece exiting the euro area would likely have contagion effects that cannot easily be addressed in the current setup."

Hollande Strategy
Philippe Aghion

François Hollande has a strategy with three main ideas:

1 France must deliver growth, social inclusiveness, and budgetary discipline; all three at once.

2 France must improve education and innovation. Studies show a positive correlation between educational performance and growth.

3 The European Union must pursue both budgetary discipline and a complementary growth package. It should finance reforms in labor and product markets and higher education, and must do more on industrial policy. The eurozone needs unified banking supervision and deposit insurance.

Hollande wants inflation rates to rise in the northern eurozone.

The Meaning of The
Slate

John Edwards' lawyers intend to argue that Edwards did not violate campaign finance laws by using donations to hide his affair with Rielle Hunter. The law proscribes "any gift, subscription, loan, advance, or deposit of money ... for the purpose of influencing any election for federal office." Edwards' lawyers argue that the word the implies the sole purpose. Prosecutors argue that it indicates one among several purposes.

AR The defense may cite Bertrand Russell, who said
"The x such that f(x) is such that A(x)"
should be analyzed as
"There is an x such that f(x), and for all y such that f(y), y = x and A(y)"
and hence imply uniqueness.
Ref: Russell 1905

Au Revoir, France
The Telegraph

The new French president François Hollande plans to impose a 75% tax rate on earnings over €1 million, plus a 45% rate for income above €150,000, plus higher wealth taxes. Meanwhile in the UK, David Cameron is cutting tax rates for the wealthy.

Finance firms and banks in Paris have begun relocating their top executives in London. London already has a French population in the hundreds of thousands. Chelsea and Kensington are full of French banker families.




Marriage Sacraments
Garry Wills

Before the eleventh century there was no such thing as a Christian wedding ceremony in the Latin church. Only in the thirteenth century was marriage added to the sacraments. The sanctity of marriage is a medieval fiction.

St Thomas Aquinas argued that spousal consent is the efficient cause of marriage and the seal of intercourse the final cause. The myth of the sacrament should not deprive gays of a right to marry.

Busted Buddhas
The Times

Afghan government:
"The Bamiyan Buddhas are part of the culture of the human
race. Whatever the world's archaeologists agree on, the ministry will agree with that."

The Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Calls to restore them raise fears of a backlash from Islamists against shrines for infidels.

World Heritage status forbids a rebuild using modern materials. German art historian Bert Praxenthaler envisions restoring the small Buddha "with lots of holes and gaps" to retain its authenticity.

AR Siddharta Gautama
would say forget them.

Asian Sex Gang
The Telegraph

British historian David Starkey
on Asian child rapists: "Those men were acting within their own cultural norms. Nobody ever explained to them that the history of women in Britain was once rather similar to that in Pakistan and it had changed."

AR Off with his head.

Navy Jets U-Turn
The Times

The Royal Navy should have fast jets at sea by 2018 following a British government U-turn. The Ministry of Defence will revert to purchasing the jump-jet F-35B variant of the Lockheed Martin fighter after finding that continuing with the F-35C cats and traps option would cost too much and take too long.













ITV
Emer O'Toole, 28, went on national TV to show off her unshaven armpits.

AR Looks like a harmless
eccentricity to me.

 Greek Tragedy
Financial Times

Greece is heading for a fall. Radical leftist Syriza party leader Alexis Tsipras, 38, wants to rip up the "barbarous" austerity program and repeal measures forced by the international bailout to slash the Greek budget deficit. ECB executive board member Jörg Asmussen moots a Greek exit from the euro.










U Lodz Press
Our new book
due out soon

2012 May 14

Euro Alarm
The Times

UK Business Secretary Vince Cable says a "massive" economic impact awaits Britain if the eurozone fails to contain the turmoil on the continent. He said that there was little Britain could do apart from hope that eurozone firewalls were strong enough to hold back a blaze in Greece.

Greece
Financial Times

The Greeks have rejected austerity. Greece is sailing between the Scylla of depression imposed by creditors and the Charybdis of unilateral debt repudiation and chaotic exit from the euro. Last week more than two-thirds of voters backed parties opposed to the spending cuts, tax increases, and structural reforms imposed by the EU and IMF as the price of a second bailout. Yet the same proportion of these voters also say that they want to keep the euro. This contradiction is not sustainable.

2012 May 13

IAF 2030
Amir Mizroch

Israel Air Force officers have been brainstorming about the next steps for their role in Israeli strategic power. Major Nimrod Segev divided his officers into teams focused on advanced information technology, vast data, space, cyber, environment, intelligence, human factor, organizational behavior, and a red team to challenge the rest.

Ideas included nano drones an infantryman can keep in his pocket, helicopters piloted by robots for medevac, micro satellites on demand, large spy balloons in the upper stratosphere, virtual training with a helmet from your office, algorithms that resolve ethical dilemmas, and farming out code to a network of high school kids.

Segev says aerial combat is still a staple of IAF pilot training: "These days the air-to-air missile is the dogfight. The missile can be launched from a vast distance at an enemy plane. The point is to see the enemy way before he sees you, and for that you need datafighters, not dogfighters."
 
 

Vanity Fair

"There's something special about the way jockey Chantal Sutherland rides a thoroughbred racehorse. You notice it right away: you can always pick her out of a tightly packed field of 15 riders and horses." Bo Derek AR I see what you mean, Bo.

Males As Second Sex
Elizabeth Day

Men are being oppressed. In many walks of life, they are routinely discriminated against in ways women are not. More boys drop out of school, fewer men earn degrees, more men are jailed or die younger.

Psychologist Susan Pinker says most children with developmental and learning problems are male. She adds that male risk-taking and stress-related disease kill many more men than women in their prime.

Feminist Julie Bindel: "Masculinity is just learned behavior in the same way that femininity is. Ultimately, if we dismantle the patriarchy, that would end up being better for men, too."

Perhaps if we measured success differently, taking into account wellbeing from family relationships and a flexible work-life balance, men would be losing out.

2012 May 12

War Horse
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Blu-ray, USA, 2012

AR His best for many years: the horse reframed the horrors of World War I.

What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
By Michael J. Sandel
Reviewed by A.C. Grayling

Sandel says market economies have become market societies where bottom-line thinking prevails.
He raises two objections:

1 Fairness: Money can buy you more than your fair share of anything you want.
2 Corruption: Selling things of human value can degrade both things and seller.

Different people have different resources. What about the greater talent or harder work that helps a person accumulate more resources than a less capable or lazier person can?

Money is dangerous: consider buying a bride, bribing people to sell a body organ, paying people to do bad things, and letting people who pay do bad things.

We need to draw a line between the things that have a price and those that are priceless. We should do so before shooters can buy licenses to hunt down criminals in our woods and fields.

2012 May 11

Euroshift To Growth
Spiegel Online

After two years of austerity, growth is back in fashion in Europe, thanks to the incoming French president François Hollande. But the planned EU growth pact may be too small to help the crisis-hit countries of southern Europe.

Grexit Not Fatal
Spiegel Online

Greek radical leftist Alexis Tsipras declares previous euro bailout agreements to be "null and void".

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble says Athens can't be forced to retain the euro: "Greece must decide for itself if it wants to remain in the euro zone or not." If Greece wants to remain a member, then it "must form a stable government and it must adhere to its obligations." He says most Greeks want the euro at any cost "because they are conscious of all the advantages of the common currency despite all the burdens."

Asian Sex Gang
The Independent

Imam Alyas Karmani says over curry in Bradford that many British Pakistani men live in two worlds:

1 "A socially conservative culture where there is no toleration of sex outside of marriage, and little emphasis on sexual gratification." Many preserve family honor by marrying a cousin from their village in Kashmir. The new wives bring "an unhealthy attitude towards sex and sexuality".

2 "The over-sexualized, material and lust-driven English lifestyle, where women are scantily clad, binge-drinking is a mainstream form of entertainment and porn is a massive factor." Some Asians learn to like gangsta music and films glorifying sexual violence and gang lifestyle.

AR Blame the women, blame porn. Anything but bad men.

Permanent War
Peter Maass

A new kind of wartime emerged on September 11, 2001. The country had been attacked. But Americans who were not in the military were asked to live as though we were at peace. While Americans killed and got killed in Iraq, Americans back home shopped at Walmart and watched reality television.

In the post-9/11 era, the Obama administration has extended the Bush-era challenge to constitutional principles. John Horgan says war could end tomorrow if a few global leaders agree to end it. His proposals: cut the bloated U.S. military, end international arms sales, and scrap the nuclear arsenal. This is not an exit strategy.

2012 May 10

Total War On Islam
Danger Room

The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a total war against the world's 1.4 billion Muslims was needed to protect America from Islamic terrorists. The course at the Joint Forces Staff College has since been canceled. But the officer who delivered the lectures is still there.

From the course materials: "There is no such thing as moderate Islam. It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction."

A war plan to transform Islam by force included reducing Islam to cult status and starving Saudi Arabia. The officer dismissed laws protecting civilians and considered applying the Hiroshima precedent to bomb Mecca and Medina. His views are not the official policy of the U.S. government.

Obama Backs Gays
Charles Kaiser

President Barack Obama's blockbuster announcement that he is in favor of full marriage equality is the most courageous thing he has done since he entered the White House three and a half years ago.

AR So now lovers can get married independently of the shape of their genitalia. That's progress.

Romney Gay No
ABC News

Mitt Romney: "I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name."

AR Wise people of gender do not favor Mitt on this.

Women Haters
Will Self

Christian fundamentalists see abortion as genocide. Increasing numbers of U.S. states are demanding that women seeking abortions be subjected to the transvaginal probe, a long, dildo-shaped instrument used to detect fetal heartbeats.

The general idea of humiliating women by forcing things up their vaginas or subjecting their genitals to abusive examination in the cause of hygiene or to prove your virginity is a key weapon in the armory of patriarchal repression of women.

Christian tolerance of systematic misogyny continues unabated, as conservatives debate the outrage of single mothers claiming welfare benefits or as liberals allow web voyeurs to enjoy the degradation of young women in pornography.

Gang Rapes
David Aaronovitch

British Muslims gang-raped underaged white girls on a bare mattress above a kebab shop.

Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Ramadhan Foundation, said that of 68 recent convictions involving street grooming, 59 were of British Pakistani men and concluded that the community had a problem.

Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor for northwest England, said the men think women are lesser beings: "The availability of vulnerable young white girls is what has drawn the men to them."

Criminologists said of the Pakistani offenders: "The defendants in question are at most nominally Muslim. Practicing Muslims certainly aren't supposed to have sex with children."

It is not a tenet of Islam that girls should be seduced. But Islam teaches that a modest woman keeps her eyes downcast, covers her hair or her face, keeps her voice quiet, and does not speak to unmarried men. A woman whose eyes go where they will, whose hair is free, and who speaks freely is immodest.

Only an inferior culture treats women and girls as possessions to gratify men. Only a weak one fails to care for and protect its children.

2012 May 9

Ending Austerity
Martin Wolf

Austerity fatigue has set in. Many countries have no plausible exit from depression, deflation, and despair. The last chance of reform rests with François Hollande.

According to the IMF, the ratio of gross public debt to GDP will rise, not fall, in every year from 2008 to 2013 in Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Over a half of young people between the ages of 15 and 25 in Greece and Spain do not have a job, over a third in Portugal and Italy, and one in five in France. The IMF says the real economy will shrink this year in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. This is perilous.

Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann says monetary policy has reached its limits. Many Germans believe that their success is due to earlier socialist reforms, but this is nonsense. Germany has export-led growth and a superb industrial base. Weidmann: "Monetary policy in the eurozone is geared towards monetary union as a whole; a very expansionary stance for Germany therefore has to be dealt with by other, national instruments." This is not a monetary union. It is an empire.

Hollande must engage with Germans on how to end the eurozone crisis. The only sensible way out is to make symmetrical adjustments of trade imbalances and start reforming weaker countries.

Humor and Religion
Mark Oppenheimer

Jon Stewart, the comedian host of The Daily Show, seems to enjoy interviewing religious figures. He and his writers cover Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and a whole spectrum of smaller faiths, including atheism. And they pay attention to the finer points of belief, mining them for humor but at the same time informing us.

Stewart comes at religion with buckets of derision, but he and his writers have realized that good theology makes for good humor. All religions have beliefs that seem bizarre to outsiders. The Daily Show approaches American religion in the spirit of tolerance. Religions are strange: our job is to take an honest look, then tolerate them anyway.

Stewart has said very little about his own Judaism. But if he is indifferent to religion, he is clearly not bitter about it. He and his writers have the scrupulosity of objective journalists. Religious claims are frequently too bizarre for any sane person to believe. Humor is a great way to get over them.

Analytics and Religion
Alexandra Sifferlin

When people are primed to think analytically, it weakens the strength of their religious belief. In one experiment, researchers asked participants to look at images of sculpture: either Rodin’s The Thinker or another artwork of a discus thrower that had similar color and posture. Those who viewed The Thinker were significantly less likely than the control group to say they believed in God. Across the board, participants who were primed for rational thought were less likely to express religious belief.

The friction between intuitive and analytical thinking may help explain the origins of religious belief and disbelief. In human psychology there are two systems of thinking. System one is intuitive, rapid, and effortless. System two is analytical, reasoned, and thoughtful. Analytic thinking can push people away from intuitive thinking.

Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief
DOI: 10.1126/science.1215647

Narcissism and Religion
Alexandra Sifferlin

Narcissism may have the strongest effect on the religiously devout.

Students answered questions about how religious they were and about how acceptable they found certain ethically dubious behaviors. The Christians were more likely to show better ethical judgment than skeptics. But when data on their narcissistic tendencies was factored in, the more devout participants tended to make the worst ethical judgments. The ethical judgment of both nominals and devouts were clouded by narcissistic tendencies. For both groups, as narcissism increased so did the tendency to worse ethical judgment, but the effect of narcissism was stronger among those identifying themselves as religious. Skeptics showed more similar ethical judgment however narcissistic they were.

Narcissists tend to ignore the rules that govern the behavior of others, to attain personal goals at the expense of others, and be insensitive to what society expects of them in terms of conformity to its norms. So a person might be seduced by narcissism into engaging in unethical acts.

Does Narcissism Impair Ethical Judgment Even for the Highly Religious?
DOI: 10.1007/s10551-012-1239-0

Did Dinosaurs Fart To Death?
Fox News

Dinosaurs may have gassed themselves to extinction with their own flatulence. A new study shows that during the Mesozoic era millions of herbivorous sauropods farted a calculated 500 Tg (megatons) of methane a year, enough to warm the planet and hasten their own demise.

Could methane produced by sauropod dinosaurs have helped drive Mesozoic climate warmth?
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.042

The Observer
"It's up to you to have
an amazing life"
Olivia Newton-John, 63

AR I loved her in Grease

Denise Johnson
Perigee Moon
2012-05-05


Ignorance
The Independent

Michèle Roberts says of her novel Ignorance: "I was just impelled to write it." Born in 1949, she wanted to explore "how family stories veil, or put differently, what might have happened". Roberts went to a Catholic convent school and read English at Oxford. She says St Teresa of Avila is her muse. Her 2007 memoir Paper Houses describes her life in London, her discovery of socialist feminism, and her struggles with sexual guilt and terror.

AR I recall talking about revolution with Michèle
at Oxford 42 years ago.

Tom Jones, 71


Tom Jones earlier

Tom Jones
Caitlin Moran

Tom Jones appeared at the back of the stage, and gave out a primal bellow. It was a noise that appeared to have started before the beginning of time and would go on to outlive everything there is to come. For when Jones sings, it is not, technically, singing at all, but a primal energy ray from deep within his gonads, expressing his wish to have sex with every woman on the Earth. It is a sound meant to make all other men on this planet hide in fear, while their womenfolk take off their clothes and run towards Jones shouting, "I'm ready!" As a consequence of this unstoppable, unending testicularity, the Jones reaction shots are as unvaried as they are powerful. His reaction on sighting a young lady is always a hungry grin that says, "I'd like to fuck her."

AR Put your knickers back on,
Ms Moran!

The Scream
Edvard Munch's painting
sells for $120 million.



Get Over The War
The Telegraph

British Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said German reluctance to launch military action outside its own borders is limiting its international importance. German voters and politicians should accept that the war was "quite a long while ago" and play a more active role in global security operations.




under.me
Bar Rafaeli
promoting underwear

AR Why pay to cover up
that body?

2012 May 8

Greece And France
Gideon Rachman

A Franco-German split on growth versus austerity would open up a seismic fault in the foundations of the European Union and endanger the euro.

Most analysts assume Hollande will settle for a face-saving deal with Merkel to move the EU debate in favor of growth. A Hollande-Merkel deal would put a vaguely worded new growth pact alongside the fiscal pact. It would reject Eurobonds but might accept EU infrastructure project bonds. A typical Franco-German fudge would allow all parties to retreat with honor.

The new eruption of the Greek political volcano complicates things. The Greek problem cannot be fudged with a few words. Greece will either press ahead with big budget cuts soon, as demanded by its most recent bailout deal, or it will refuse, and the IMF will refuse more aid for Greece. The Greek government will then run out of money and Greece will exit the eurozone.

Faced with a choice between supporting Greece and supporting Germany, the French are almost certain to go with the Germans. The rhetoric is irrelevant.

How To Survive A Euro Collapse
Simon Wolfson

If the new President of France tries to stimulate growth through further borrowing, then the death of the euro may be close. Issuing government debt to stimulate growth is a dangerous game. The markets may lose faith and demand a risk premium.

I set up an economics prize to discover how to unwind the euro. If a Eurozone state exits the euro and devalues its new local currency, it will re-denominate contracts in the new local currency, leaving a legal and financial mess for overseas investors.

How to protect yourself from a euro collapse:
1 Transfer euro deposits from banks in a potential exit state to northern European banks.
2 Write new contracts in euros with legal provision for the possibility for a euro collapse.
3 Fund bank loans made in a potential exit state by deposits subject to local state law.

2012 May 7

Vorname Carmen
Regie: Jean-Luc Godard, Frankreich 1983
Analysiert von Prof. Dr. Gerhard Poppenberg
Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut Heidelberg

Hollande Wins
Financial Times

François Hollande, 57, is the next French president. Speaking at his rural base before flying back to the Bastille, the Socialist leader said his election signals hope that Europe can avoid austerity. He wants to give Europe a dimension of growth and prosperity and vows not to ratify the EU fiscal discipline treaty without new measures to promote growth.

AR Had to happen: Austerity sucks.

Global Machine Breakdown
Cullen Roche

The global economic machine is stalling. Modern monetary theory offers suggestions to improve it:

1 The debt crisis is a currency issue. Eurozone countries cannot borrow from the treasury or devalue their currencies. Bond investors trust nations with high sovereign debt only if they can still print money.

2 The money multiplier does not work as expected. Quantitative easing was expected to produce hyperinflation. Giving the banks more reserves should let them create money freely. But bank lending has continued to decline. So banks are not reserve constrained.

3 Government budget deficits are not always the enemy. As banks and households have both reduced their debt level, continued government spending is essential. Austerity has failed in Europe.

AR The money multiplier did not work "as expected" because the banks had to reduce their leveraging. Their previous multiplier was based on a faulty risk model. Banks are constrained by risk, not reserves.

2012 May 6

Apocalypse
Pascal Bruckner

Many people in Europe and America have convinced themselves that the end is nigh.

James Lovelock regards Earth as a living organism and human beings as an infection in it. Martin Rees gives humanity a 50-50 chance of surviving beyond this century. Al Gore proposes to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by using low-energy lightbulbs, driving less, checking your tire pressure, recycling, rejecting unnecessary packaging, adjusting your thermostat, planting a tree, and turning off electrical appliances. Others say we must change our diets, cut back on air travel, consume fewer material goods, and stop driving gas guzzlers.

A secular prophet has no function other than indignation. So he becomes intoxicated with his own words and claims a legitimacy with no basis. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds whose preaching brings only despair.

The Christian apocalypse saw hope of the coming of the Lord. Today we only hope to escape the chaos.

Recovery
Paul Krugman

Recovery would be easy to achieve: all we need is to reverse recent austerity policies and temporarily boost spending. The boom, not the slump, is the time for austerity. Now is the time for the government to spend more until the private sector revives.

We have both the knowledge and the tools to get out of this depression. We could be back to high employment very fast, probably in less than two years. All it takes is intellectual clarity and political will.

We need more government spending. High tax shares correlate with low unemployment. Austerity policies are followed by economic contraction and higher unemployment. Reducing the budget deficit lowers growth but fiscal stimulus makes jobs.

Adultery
Alain de Botton

Adultery is tempting and exhilarating. The real fault might be the lack of any wish to stray. This might be considered wrong, against nature. Refusal to entertain adultery would seem to represent a colossal failure of the imagination.

Seeing marriage as the perfect answer to all our hopes for love and sex is naive and misguided. What is wrong with the idea of adultery is its idealism. Adultery suggests that we might rescue our marriage through an adventure on the side.

There is no answer to the tensions of marriage. To feel only intermittent affection for a spouse, to have mediocre sex six times a year, to keep a marriage going for the sake of the children — such compromises are pitiful.

In a marriage, it is the ability to stay that is worthy of honor. A loyal marriage ought to recognize the immense forbearance and generosity of the two parties. If one partner should slip, the other might pause to admire the previous fidelity.

AR Must try this line on a sexy wife some time (just kidding — no prophet needs an adulteress).

My Amazon review of Sam Harris on morality and religion
Scott Atran on Sam Harris on morality and religion

2012 May 5

The German Model
Spiegel Online

Countries around the world envy German economic success. But a closer look reveals a much bleaker picture. Only a few workers are benefiting from the boom, while stagnant wages and precarious jobs are making it hard for the rest. Managers, specialists, and members of the core workforce are still in demand. But the people used for contract or part-time or temporary work are out in the cold.

Germany is increasingly moving in the direction of a three-class society. The first class contains executives and the like who are paid millions. The second contains the educated and reasonably paid legions of white-collar and skilled workers. Bringing up the rear are people like shop assistants, cooks, waiters, and teachers, who often earn less now than they did a decade ago.

Earlier reforms encouraging temporary work were intended to free up the labor market, but they largely failed to move more people from the third class into good jobs. To narrow the gap between rich and poor, we need more spending on education and changes to the tax and transfer systems. The reforms led by Chancellor Schröder as Agenda 2010 reorganized the welfare state. Now we need an Agenda 2020.

On Certainty
Ben Mason

The right and left hemispheres of the brain differ on certainty. The left brain rejects information that conflicts with its accepted theory, is an expert at denial, and has a penchant for delusional optimism. The right brain holds ambiguous possibilities in suspension and is good at contextualizing, empathizing, and intuiting.

The left brain not only shows exaggerated optimism about outcomes but also about its own ability. Children with right-brain deficit disorder ignore task obstacles, accept impossible challenges, make grossly inadequate efforts, and are stunned by the poor outcomes. Patients with right-brain injuries will make up convincing answers to questions rather than admit they don't know. They have an unbridled willingness to accept absurd ideas.

But nuanced understanding and a circumspect position are not signs of weakness. The right brain has an affinity for ambiguity and grasps implicit meaning, metaphor, humor, and irony. It sees everything in context. A wiser understanding of complex issues disavows claims of complete certainty as bogus. No right-minded person would be taken in by them.

On Art
Charles Murray

Belief that life has a purpose comes from belief in a personal God who wants you to be all you can be.
The rejection of traditional religion is conspicuous among intellectual and artistic elites.

The Europe Syndrome starts with a conception of humanity that is devoid of the divine. Humans are bags of chemicals that come and go. The purpose of life is to have fun. But European welfare states have plunging birth rates and fewer people find satisfaction in their work. Without family or faith, Europeans no longer celebrate greatness.

Religiosity is indispensable to great art. The falling away from religiosity must end. The West has been wandering in the wilderness. Humans are drawn to the big questions.

AR This (originally very long) jeremiad betrays deep ignorance of Art, of Europe, and of God.

The Meaning of Disgust
Nina Strohminger

Colin McGinn's new book is bullshit. Disgust is an emotion whose principal function is to help us avoid contaminants and disease. But McGinn says: "Disgust occurs in that ambiguous territory between life and death, when both conditions are present in some form."

He says disgust reflects our existential terror and ambivalence about being souls tied to mortal bodies. He argues that humans need the emotion to rein them in. Apparently, the desires of our caveman ancestors became so rapacious that "early humans started desiring sex with dead bodies and wanting to eat feces". Rather than seeing necrophilia and coprophagia as dysfunctional because they expose the sybarite to pathogens, McGinn says they are not "conducive to psychological wellbeing."

His prose is wild. On male genitalia: "Life and death coexist in complex and subtle ways in the penis and testicles, telling a story of triumph and tragedy." On feces: "I have no wish to romanticize the turd." Pubic hair is "nature's furry bounty". Semen is a "pointless sticky daub once it is spilled on the ground". The brain "resembles nothing so much as a mound of dung". The grave is "a rectum, with corpses featuring as large turds". On penis-vagina sex: "a tumor and a wound are violently combined in a vital act to produce a fresh life, itself redolent of death." On farting: "Who can deny the mood-destroying effect of an errant flatus just at the moment of erotic fervor?"

AR Oh, Colin.

2012 May 4

The Top One Percent
Joseph E. Stiglitz

In the United States, 1% of the population controls some 40% of the wealth and garner for themselves some 20% of all the income.

The TOP may believe that they earned what they received through hard work. But no one succeeds on his own. The poor often work far harder than the richest. After the crisis, the bankers walked off with outsized bonuses while those who suffered from the crisis went without a job. The government bailed out the banks but not the people.

In the United States, the political system is more akin to "one dollar one vote" than to "one person one vote." The system amplifies the voice of the wealthy. It fails to protect the ordinary citizens against the wealthy and enriches the wealthy at the expense of the rest.

The Occupy protesters say we need a democracy where people, not dollars, matter. We need a democracy that reflects the general interests, not the special interests. The best government that money can buy isn't good enough.

Of the 1%, for the 1%, and by the 1%

2012 May 3

Sarkozy Slams Hollande
The Times

Nicolas Sarkozy lost his temper last night in a TV debate with François Hollande. When Hollande accused Sarkozy of appointing cronies to high places, the president erupted and called him a "little slanderer".

Again and again Sarkozy accused his socialist contender of lying. "Monsieur Hollande, when you lie so shamelessly, do I have to accept it?"

In reply Hollande said he didn't have to listen to lectures from a failed president. "Monsieur Sarkozy, you would have a hard time passing for a victim. It’s never your fault. You always have a scapegoat."

There was no outright winner in the clash. But the incumbent failed to deliver a knockout blow against the challenger. Both sides claimed victory.

Toward the United States of Europe
Niall Ferguson and Pierpaolo Barbieri

Tom Sargent recently argued in his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture that Europe is now where the United States was under the 1781 Articles of Confederation. The next step is fiscal federalism, corresponding to adoption of the 1787 constitution.

Angela Merkel is no Alexander Hamilton. But she is the only Eurozone leader who has been boosted by her crisis management. At her last CDU Party Congress she called Europe a "community of destiny".

Germans are invested in the European ideal. It has helped them achieve prosperity, political respectability, successful reunification, and a dominant economic position. Today the biggest threat to Europe is the political fallout from austerity. The way forward is fiscal union.

Britzerland
Walter Ellis

Some say Britain should exit the European Union and become an offshore Switzerland. Within its island fortress, Britzerland would prosper on financial services and tourism.

But Switzerland is not what it once was. Now foreigners make up one in five of a population of almost eight million, and the percentage is growing. Over a fifth of the foreigners are Muslims. Switzerland still has high employment and expects modest growth this year, but there is strong global pressure to open up the banking system. So in future foreign clients will be taxed at foreign levels, hedge fund rules will follow EU best practice, and the tax regime will be aligned with Brussels. Switzerland is now bound more tightly than Britain to the free movement of people across its borders. Since 2002, the Swiss confederation has signed 210 bilateral treaties imposing European law.

In the old days, Bern eschewed membership of both the European Union and the United Nations. Then Switzerland joined the UN in 2002. Do Brits want all this?

The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt

Moral behavior emerges from natural competition among human groups. Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and support cooperative societies.

The ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally.

Digital Immortality
Stephen Cave

Digital immortality is about there being a silicon you for when the physical you dies. Your brain is scanned and your essence uploaded as data. This whole brain emulation is saved and brought back to life as an avatar in a virtual world or in the body of a robot.

We need to:
1 Read all the data that makes up who you are,
2 Store that vast amount of data,
3 Reanimate the data.

Theoretically the problem seems solvable, but whether the solutions are practical is another story.

Stuart Armstrong, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford: "Technology is now advancing faster and faster and we understand it a lot better because we built it ourselves. So the problems that digital immortality is facing are merely engineering problems."

AR GLOBORG

2012 May 2

China and Europe
Li Keqiang

China firmly supports the integration of Europe and regards the European Union as a strategic partner. With its solid economic foundation and scientific and technological strength, Europe can beat the crisis and turn it into an opportunity for greater progress.

China firmly supports Europe both in words and in deeds in its efforts to overcome the current crisis. In the past two years, China's imports from EU countries have grown at an annual rate of more than 25%. Last year, China almost doubled its direct investment in Europe.

When "designed in Europe" is combined with "made in China" and when European technologies are applied to the Chinese market, there will be amazing results. We are ready to work with Europe. China and Europe can progress and develop together.

Brits Flock To Islam
Abdal Hakim Murad

Many British Muslims do not publicly announce their faith. These are the submarines. There have been, it seems, a hundred thousand British conversions to Islam in the past decade.

Women account for three quarters of new Muslims in the UK. Often the spiritual wanderer finds his way to Islam having rejected Christianity because of the complexity of its belief system. Ultimate truth should be ultimately simple.

Mayday, from a hilltop in Pfalz

2012 May 1

London: Go For Typhoon
The Times

The British government is facing calls to choose Eurofighter Typhoons for its new aircraft carriers. Industry sources say adapting the Typhoon to fly off a carrier would be cheaper than either variant of the American F-35. It would also create British jobs at BAE Systems. The government had dismissed the Eurofighter option for fear of upsetting Americans, and BAE Systems has invested heavily in the F-35 program with Lockheed Martin.

Berlin: Go For Austerity
Financial Times

The Eurozone must stick to its austerity-led recovery plan, German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble said Monday: "The first precondition in order to have sustainable growth everywhere in Europe is fiscal consolidation."

Willy Words
Will Self

I used to remonstrate with readers who complained about my sesquipedalianism. I'd point out that my texts were as full of resolutely Anglo-Saxon slang as they were of the flowery and the Latinate. But I've stopped bothering.

Now I point out ruefully that although the subject matter of my writings — which includes sexual deviance, drug addiction, and mental illness — has become quite unexceptionable, the supposedly difficult language they are couched in seems to have become offensive.

Extraterrestrial Life
The Telegraph

Astronomers have discovered a planet capable of supporting life just 22 light years away. Planet Gliese 667Cc is rocky, with a mass of 25-30 zettatons (Earth mass is 6 zettatons), and orbits a red dwarf star in the habitable zone, where it gets enough solar energy to allow liquid water and mild surface temperatures.

Currently, planet hunters use the High Accuracy Radial Planetary Searcher (HARPS) telescope to measure the radial velocity of a star and analyze wobbles in its motion caused by a planet. They can detect planets of 3-5 times Earth mass. In future, they hope to detect planets as small as 10 zettatons.

CERN Finds New Particle
Spiegel Online

LHC physicists have discovered a new particle. It is a neutral baryon called "Xi_b ^ * 0" and made of three quarks: an up, a strange, and a bottom. Its mass-energy is between 6 and 7 GeV. The CMS detector recorded 21 decays, enough for a discovery.

AR I say call it a chibon.








Martin Amis revitalized English prose with the freewheeling energies of its American cousin.
His 13th novel is Lionel Asbo:
The State of England.

AFP
Ukrainian former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko is on a hunger strike in prison.

AR Set her free.




Macie
Polish artist Maciej Mielecki and colleagues plan to re-enact the 1945 Battle of Berlin next Sunday afternoon in the Spreepark, Berlin.

Posh Boys
Financial Times

David Cameron and George Osborne are called "posh boys" by one of their own MPs. The notion of position through privilege and connections conveys an image of being out of touch with ordinary people and is a toxic charge against a British leader. They are pretty posh too: children of millionaires, educated at top private schools, and members of elite Oxford drinking societies.




Too Old To Work,
Too Young To Die
Theodore Dalrymple

No one can fire older people just because of their age, and they must work longer to top up their pensions. But now it seems that younger people need their jobs. People have to work so long partly because for years the state has been running an unfunded pyramid pension scheme. Are older people selfish for working on or for retiring too soon?

How to meditate

2012 April 30

Growth Not Austerity
Larry Summers

European policy makers assume that countries are too deep in in debt and so face a high cost of borrowing, which inhibits growth. So they provide financing but insist on austerity.

Eurozone countries are in trouble because the financial crisis led to a collapse in growth. High deficits are a symptom. The right focus for Europe is on growth. Austerity is a step in the wrong direction.

Austerity at the national level is likely to reduce creditworthiness. Fiscal contraction reduces incomes, limiting the capacity to repay debts. It achieves only limited reductions in deficits, given reduced tax revenues and increased benefit payments. And it blights future growth by reducing capital investment and raising unemployment.

The Eurozone periphery cannot succeed unless Germany allows its trade surplus to contract. A country that drives down its economy in pursuit of austerity does its creditors no favor. Success requires growth.

Eurozone Split
The Times

François Hollande vowed to end the remorseless austerity programs advocated by Germany: "The citizens of France are going to address a message of change to Europe, and that message is one of reorientation towards growth. Our challenge is to refuse the austerity that cannot be our horizon."

AR Larry and François seem to agree.

2012 April 29

The Brain
David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis

DE Our lives depend on our brains. But the large majority of the brain's activity takes place under the hood of conscious awareness. So people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory.

RT Everything about us requires a brain in working order. It does not follow that our brains are pretty well the whole story of us. We are part of community of minds, a human world.

DE Brains and culture operate in a feedback loop. A brain reflects its culture. An understanding of the limitations of consciousness gives a richer understanding of the wellspring of our ideas.

RT Studies show choices are shaped by an implicit egoism built into the brain. But the public space of culture is at least as important. To say the brain is in charge is to personify it.

DE Illusions reveal that perceptions generated by the brain do not necessarily correlate with reality. We don't have a strong grasp of what reality out there even is, because we detect such a small slice of it. That small slice is called the umwelt. Our sensorium is enough to get by in our ecosystem, but no better.

RT We could not recognize illusions and so on for what they are unless most of our experiences were veridical. If we were confined to an umwelt, how would we know it? Knowledge transcends immediate experience and corrects our intuitions.

DE We are sealed off from most of reality but we can discover more of it by a process of careful experimentation. That is the endeavor of science.

AR We emerge like a spike from a stack that goes down through the brain and the umwelt to the world of physics and the universe. We're all spikes on the same stack.

2012 April 28

Attacking Iran
Danger Room

The U.S. Air Force is quietly preparing to assert air dominance in the Mideast again. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, F-15C Eagles flew air patrols from Saudi Arabia. But they met no resistance, and since then the Air Force has deployed only ground-attack planes to the Mideast. The F-15Cs stayed home in the U.S. and Japan. Now stealthy F-22 Raptors are ready for combat.

The Air Force is preparing to fight Iran. In March the Air Force deployed standard F-15Cs to the theater, probably either in the United Arab Emirates or in Qatar. Upgraded F-15Cs from Japan joined them, with the latest phased-array radars that track more targets, faster, than old mechanical radars. Now Raptors have deployed to Al Dhafra in the UAE. If they're from Alaska, they're the Increment 3.1 model with boosted bombing capabilities. The Mideast mission is the first F-22 deployment on the front line.

The Air Force needs to mix F-15s and F-22s. It has so few Raptors that it keeps 250 F-15Cs in service. Pilots have developed team tactics for the two types. Large numbers of F-15s cover for small numbers of Raptors that use stealth to penetrate enemy defenses. Look out for a Mideast deployment of Air Force bizjets and Global Hawk drones fitted with Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (Bacon). The F-22 and F-15 data links need a Bacon plane nearby to work together.

AR Good hunting, chaps!

The Jet That Ate the Pentagon
Winslow Wheeler

The United States is making a gigantic investment in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Claimed to be near invisible to radar and able to dominate any future battlefield, the F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies, and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years. But the program is a calamity.

1 Cost: This year, the acquisition price has increased to about $400 billion. This does not include the operating cost. The current appraisal for operations and support is $1.1 trillion, for a total of $1.5 trillion. The total program unit cost for each individual F-35 is now $161 million. But the estimate assumes the F-35 will only be 42% more expensive to operate than an F-16. Expect at least 100% more.

2 Schedule: The design was born some 25 years ago as a supersonic STOVL aircraft. Then it was decided to make it both an air-to-air fighter and a bomber. Next came stealth, imposing a new shape, new skin coatings, and new internal weapons bays. There would be three versions, for the three services. Hundreds of planes are being built before the test results are in. The test program is only 20% complete. The target date for combat readiness is 2019.

3 Performance: The F-35 lacks the F-16's agility in the air-to-air mode and the F-15E's range and payload in the bombing mode, and it can't match the A-10 at low-altitude close air support. Its availability will be lower because its complexity prolongs maintenance. The aircraft most like the F-35, the F-22, flew on average for only 15 hours per month in 2010. The F-35 is not even very stealthy.

Bottom line: Thumbs down.

2012 April 27

Money Corrupts
New Scientist

University of California researchers Dacher Keltner and Michael Kraus tested how people from different social backgrounds interact. The poorer subjects were more likely to use warmer and more expressive body language and gestures that signal engagement, while the richer participants were more aloof.

Asked to rate the emotions expressed in photographs of human faces, subjects with better jobs were consistently worse at the task. When pairs of students were asked to act out mock interviews, the students from poorer backgrounds were better at guessing their partner's feelings than those from wealthier backgrounds. But the wealthier students suddenly improved at reading emotions when they imagined talking with someone more prestigious.

In a test of altruism, people from poorer backgrounds tended to give more than wealthier people. Experiments show that wealthier people are more likely to behave unethically than poorer people. The results suggest that tax cuts for the wealthy will not cause benefits to trickle down to poorer people.

Keltner: "Our results say you cannot rely on the wealthy to give back, to fix all the problems in society. It is improbable, psychologically."

AR I cannot be corrupted. You are welcome to try by offering me a large sum of money.

The Roman Empire
Adrian Goldsworthy

The Romans dominated the Mediterranean in the second century BCE and in the following centuries ruled an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, from Britain to the Sahara. The last emperor to rule from Rome was deposed in 476 CE. The last to rule from Constantinople lost to the Turks in 1453.

The empire was based on military force. Julius Caesar said his campaigns in Gaul, Germany, and Britain were for the good of the republic. According to Virgil, Jupiter said it was the Roman destiny to "spare the conquered and overcome the proud in war" (parker subiectis et debellare supremos). The Romans expected victory or death. From graffiti on a cave wall in Jordan: "The Romans always win."

In 212 CE, Emperor Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to almost every free person in the empire. Many of the barbarian warlords who carved up the western provinces had served in the Roman army, including Alaric, the Goth who sacked Rome in 410. In the aftermath of the sacking Saint Augustine wrote his City of God. Christianity is the most profound legacy of the Roman era.

AR Roman military organization and weaponry beat all their opponents. The political organization was a legacy of Greek philosophy. I'm told the barbarians won by mounting stirrups on their warhorses, to allow standing in the saddle, a Mongol innovation.

The United States is the new Rome, and U.S. military organization and weaponry beat all opponents. What will be the new stirrup?

2012 April 26

Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?
Lawrence Krauss

Why is there something rather than nothing? The question has been asked since people have been around. Now we can plausibly argue that a universe full of stuff came from nothing. We know you can create space from where there was no space. There were no particles in space, but also there was no space. The laws of physics could be an environmental accident. On that theory, the laws of physics come into being when the universe comes into being.

Space didn't exist but the laws of quantum mechanics existed. Most of the laws of nature didn't exist before the universe was created. They were created along with the universe, at least in the multiverse picture. In a different universe, different forces and different particles might exist. We don't yet have the mathematics to describe a multiverse. I don't know what laws are fixed and I don't have a quantum theory of gravity, so I can't tell you for certain how space comes into existence.

You can keep asking "why" forever, but the "how" questions are the ones that matter. If the multiverse really exists, then it could be an infinite object. That may beg the question of where the multiverse came from. You might not be able to answer that final question.

"The ... standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories ... have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed."
David Albert,
from his critical review of the book
A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss
(video intro, 65 min)

Is Susy Dead?
Scientific American

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has yet to see any new phenomena that would support supersymmetry (Susy). Theorists introduced Susy fifty years ago to connect fermions and bosons. It would give every known boson a heavy fermion superpartner and every known fermion a heavy boson superpartner.

The LHC is smashing protons with an energy of 4 TeV apiece, generating new particles with mass up to about 1 TeV. For Susy to work as intended, at least a few of the Sparticles should have a fraction of that mass. The Higgs boson provides another reason for light sparticles. Without them, Standard Model calculations imply an infinite Higgs mass. A Higgs mass of around 0.125 TeV, as the LHC seemed to suggest in 2011, would be right where Susy predicts if sparticles have a fairly low mass. As the LHC collects data but no sparticles, Susy's fans may lose heart.

AR Frank Wilczek likes Susy (blog, 2001-11-27).

All in the brain: A trick that seems to defy gravity
Neural Correlate Society "Best Illusion of the Year" 2011
By Kokichi Sugihara (video, 50 sec, after ads)

2012 April 25

Robert B. Laughlin
Nobel Prize for Physics 1998
Der Letzte macht das Licht aus: Die Zukunft der Energie
Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut Heidelberg

AR An informal talk promoting his new book Powering the Future but fun anyway

Content Curators Are The New Superheroes Of The Web
Steven Rosenbaum

Curation is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information. Curators provide a consistent update regarding what's interesting, happening, and cool in their focus. Curators tend to have a unique and consistent point of view.

Superheroes are extraordinary humans who dedicate themselves to protecting the public. Anyone who steps up and volunteers to curate in their area of knowledge and passion is taking on a Herculean task. They're going to stand between the web and their readers, using all of the tools at their disposal to "listen" to the web, and then pull out of the data stream nuggets of wisdom, breaking news, important new voices, and other salient details. It's real work, and requires a tireless commitment. While there may be an economic benefit for being a "thought leader" and "trusted curator," it's not going to happen overnight. Being a superhero is often a thankless job.

AR So now I'm a web superhero — Spiderman! All I need is a way to make it pay.

2012 April 24

France and Europe
Gideon Rachman

The battle for France has a couple of weeks to run. After that, the battle for Europe will begin.

Both Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande promise to save the "French exception" by changing the European Union.

Sarkozy promises to protect the French way of life: to tighten border controls, limit immigration, and promote a "buy Europe" policy.

Hollande promises to lead the fight against austerity and to reorient the EU toward growth. He may want to change the ECB statutes and promised to reduce France's deficit yet promote European spending on infrastructure. Germany would pay, so expect a no from Berlin.

Anger, Not Racism
Agnès Poirier

In France on Sunday, over 6 million voters voted for Marine Le Pen. These are not 6 million French fascists hoping she will bring back black shirts and far-right politics. But many voters are worried about radical imams brainwashing young Muslims. The Toulouse killings reminded them of her rhetoric about the "enemy within". Policies like the burka ban fueled their anger.

Le Pen has managed to make the Front National more respectable. An FN vote is often a "no" or "fed up" vote rather than a racist one. From a British perspective, much of her program does not look right-wing. It may be better to look at the way politics has been waged for decades than to condemn FN voters. But it would be foolish to be too blasé.

AR Wisdom of the crowds: Oppose militant Islam.

Sarkozy Versus Hollande
France 24

Incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist candidate François Hollande square off in the second round of France's presidential election on May 6.

Sunday's Top 3
Hollande 28.6%
Sarkozy 27.1%
Le Pen 18.1%



Rex Features
Anti-immigration National Front party leader Marine Le Pen:
"The battle for France has only just begun."

My short cut of
The Unknown Life of JC
by Nicolas Notovitch

W-Film
Tomer (center) and Andreas





Hitch

Mitt channels Nietzsche
Hitch on that quote

Photo: Ray Tang / Rex Features
Damien Hirst
began his career in 1991, when, in a humid room in Soho, he hung large white canvasses on which were glued butterfly pupae, ready to hatch. Emerging butterflies flew around the room, feeding on sugar water, rotting fruit, and flowers before mating, laying eggs, and dying. Now the Tate Modern has recreated it. In a stark, white, windowless room, hundreds of tropical butterflies pull themselves from their pupae and flit around the room until they fall and die on the floor, where the staff sweep them up.

Stop The Bill
The Guardian

Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns the UK government that a planned extension of the state's spy powers would be a "destruction of human rights". He says: "The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing."

The UK government has run into a storm of criticism over its plan to allow GCHQ to monitor all internet communication in Britain. Berners-Lee: "The most important thing to do is to stop the bill as it is at the moment."


Q Where does spacetime
come from, O guru?
A Spin symmetry breaking
in the primordial blob

Marilyn By Magnum
Marilyn Monroe in 1952




Titanic!
The Guardian

Titanic 3D has broken box office records in China to become the biggest opening ever in the country. The movie has already taken more money in China than it did in 1998 on its original release.

Resurrecting Spits
The Telegraph

David Cundall, 62, is on a quest to recover a cache of buried Spitfires from Burma. He found them sealed and buried in crates and hopes to restore them.

In August 1945 the new Spitfire Mark XIV fighters were crated and shipped to Burma. But by then they were not needed and 12 were buried; 8 more may have been buried in December 1945.

2012 April 23

The Crisis of Big Science
Steven Weinberg

The Standard Model is our working theory of elementary particles. Quarks make up the protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei, and leptons include the electron. Force carriers include photons for electromagnetic forces, W and Z bosons for weak nuclear forces, and gluons for quarks. But the model does not explain the masses of quarks and leptons and does not include gravitation.

The theory of the weak and electromagnetic forces is based on an exact symmetry between them. The W and Z particles and the photons all appear as massless particles. But the electroweak symmetry is broken. The symmetry breaking involves a field with a particle we call the Higgs boson. We are looking for the Higgs. But finding it will not give us a deep new theory.

Without more funding, I do not think we can make much more progress in the search for the laws of nature. Fundamental physics may grind to a halt. But funding is a problem for all fields of science. Cosmology has been revolutionized by satellite observatories working in tandem with ground-based observatories. Without new space platforms, it may get stuck too.

AR The story of physics in the last hundred years has been thrilling beyond compare. It has changed everything for us Earthlings. But the civilization that sustained it needs a basic makeover. Too much of its foundation of ideas is a mess. Too many people are singing the wrong words. We need a new basic myth that can grip us all for a thousand years. Physics must wait.

Das Selbst
Thomas Metzinger

Sie haben das Gefühl eines Selbst. Das ist das Grundgefühl, das uns das Gehirn manchmal vermittelt: jemand zu sein. Aber das gehört nur zu einem vom Gehirn erzeugten Modell. Es ist eine Art vorübergehende Simulation.

Das Selbstmodell ist ein faszinierendes und hochkomplexes Gebilde. Es macht so etwas wie Ich-Gefühl, subjektives Erleben und kritische Rationalität überhaupt erst möglich. Das Selbst existiert nicht als Ding. Es ist nur der Inhalt eines Vorgangs, der sich im Laufe von Jahrmillionen der Evolution ständig weiterentwickelt hat.

In Zukunft wird deutlicher werden, wo und wie im Gehirn welche Komponenten des Selbstmodells dargestellt werden. Schichten des menschlichen Selbstmodells werden von außen erst erzeugt, von der Kultur etwa. Unsere Ich-Erfahrung wird auch beeinflusst von der Gesellschaft, in der wir leben, wir nehmen etwa Einflüsse von außen in unsere Persönlichkeit auf.

Es gibt Roboter mit Kameraaugen, die sich drahtlos mit dem Gehirn steuern lassen. Der Forscher steuert also direkt mit dem Selbstmodell in seinem Gehirn einen Roboter, ein Computer übersetzt. Mit einer Brille kann man dabei auch durch die Kameraaugen des Roboters sehen. Da fragt man sich schon mal: Wo ist es denn nun, das Selbstmodell?

Der Ego-Tunnel von Thomas Metzinger

2012 April 22

Jesus Lived in India
By Holger Kersten

Believers in the death and resurrection of Christ will have a hard time with this book. They will pick and poke at details just as some do over Darwin's theory of evolution or the new sciences of the universe and the brain. But Kersten's destruction of the orthodox position of traditional faith is clear and convincing, for me at least. His own research and his summary of the research of a vast number of other careful scholars has shown with some clarity that:

1 Jesus was a teacher in the tradition of Buddhism and Hinduism who quite possibly learned his trade in advanced and extended Indian or Buddhist training,

2 Jesus survived the crucifixion, as he would have hoped, using Yogic skills developed during his training plus the cooperation of friends who may have seen his suffering Roman cruelty as a Jewish victory, and

3 Jesus probably headed back east after his recovery and became a wandering teacher called Yuz Asaf who finally settled in Kashmir and is buried in Srinagar.

Any attempt to reconstruct the events of so long ago with any clarity is doomed to be debatable, and any attempt to do so for a historic figure like no other in (Western) history is going to raise organized resistance from vested interests, but Kersten has given us a platform for doing so that is really good, in my humble opinion. I have read several books on this and related themes, and this is the best, for me. The balance of fine detail and judicious overview, the insistence on hard facts and the sober appraisal of probabilities, the sympathy extended to people of faith, whether Indian or Mediterranean, and the overall scholarly tone of the enterprise together make this for me the fiducial source on this topic. I have no hesitation in recommending it to seekers after truth.

AR My Amazon review: five stars

Celebrating Hitch
Daily Beast

Martin Amis, Hitchens' friend since their Oxford days, recalled that his pal was a "self-mythologizer" who
often referred to himself in the third person. Whenever an injustice occurred, Hitchens would declare,
"The pen of the Hitch will flash from its scabbard."

2012 April 21

Israelis Loving Germans
Juliane von Mittelstaedt

On his first night in Germany, Tomer Heymann, an Israeli, slept with a German. He met Andreas Josef Merk, blond and Catholic, at a Berlin club. Heymann is a gay Jewish film director. Merk traveled to Tel Aviv on a one-way ticket and the two men celebrated Passover and Christmas together. Together they made a one-hour movie: I Shot My Love. Six years on, Tomer and Andreas are still together.

In a recent survey, 98% of Jewish Israelis say remembering the Holocaust is the guiding principle of their lives. But more Israelis are traveling to Germany, meeting Germans, and falling in love. Many Israelis are learning German, and Hebrew courses in Tel Aviv include many Germans. This century, there has been a rapid increase in the number of Israelis holding a German passport. For some, it's an insurance policy, for others a convenience. Some see it as a belated victory.

Who's Gay?
Matthew Parris

Men are not two tribes, homosexuals and heterosexuals. Imagine that most men are more straight than gay and some are more gay than straight. Imagine a scatter graph, with some close to one end, some to the other, and plenty in between. Social pressure to be straight would polarize the scatter to a straight majority and a minority who can only be gay.

A war between the world of macho heteros and that of gay pride puts a no man's land between them. Both straights and gays have reason to deny they had a choice: the straights because gay inclinations were disapproved of; the gays because their best hope for tolerance is to wimp out and say they can't help it. We all win when a man can say he chose.

Christopher Hitchens †
The Guardian

For an hour and a half, the Great Hall of the Cooper Union in Manhattan was filled with the wit and the coruscating erudition of the man universally referred to as "Hitch". Martin Amis delivered the eulogy. He said Hitch had been so widely loved partly because of his "full and friendly" good looks, partly because of his "perfect voice without any mannerisms or poncey intonations like mine", and partly because "he was an auto-contrarian" who loved nothing so much as to argue with himself.

The memorial marked the final gathering of the Hitchens gang — Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, James Fenton — with Hitchens' place marked by a photo of him (left). Stephen Fry recalled that there were few pleasures in life as great as having a disagreement with Hitch. But the aspect that boomed loudest was his relentless secular humanism in the face of ignorant religion.

† god is not great

2012 April 20

Germany Arms Greece
The Guardian

Germany fed a Greek appetite for arms that triggered the debt crisis. Just under 15% of German weapons exports and some 10% of French arms sales go to Greece. Speculation is rife that EU aid was conditional on Greece honoring its agreements to buy arms from Germany and France.

As a proportion of GDP, Greece spends twice as much as any other EU member on defense. Since the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Greece has perceived a security risk from Turkey and spent an estimated €216 billion on arms. Both Turkey and Greece are in NATO.

Romney Needs Mate
Anne Applebaum

Mitt Romney lacks charisma. He also needs someone to help win back women voters. What he needs is a glamorous female running mate. Sarah Palin, step right up.

AR Can someone find Mitt a Hillary in the GOP, please, before Sarah reads this?

Electron Quasiparticles
Nature

According to quantum theory, electrons in a chain of atoms can be split into three quasiparticles: a holon carrying the electron charge, a spinon carrying its spin, and an orbiton carrying its orbital location. Electrons confined in an atom behave like waves, and when excited the wave splits into multiple waves.

In 1996, physicists split an electron into a holon and spinon. Now, Jeroen van den Brink and colleagues have split one into an orbiton and a spinon. The team created the quasiparticles by scattering X-ray photons off a single electron in a 1D sample of strontium cuprate and measuring photon energy loss. When a photon lost between 1.5 and 3.5 eV, it excited the electron to a higher orbital and created an orbiton and a spinon moving in opposite directions through the sample.

Orbitons may help to explain how some materials are superconductors at high temperatures. They could also be useful a quantum computer, where fragile states decay quickly, since orbital transitions occur in femtoseconds.

2012 April 19

IMF Warning
Financial Times

The International Monetary Fund warned that European banks looked set to shrink their balance sheets by €2 trillion over the next 18 months. Unless officials improved their policy response, the IMF said, European banks would dump almost 7% of their assets by the end of 2013.

Eurozone Low
Financial Times

The eurozone is looking Japanese. Short-term German interest rates have fallen below their Japanese equivalents for the first time in more than two decades. Benchmark 10-year Bund yields on Wednesday fell to 1.63%, an all-time low. Japan shows that yields can go a lot lower. The outlook for equities in a Japan scenario is gloomy.

Indian Missile Test
The New York Times

India says it has successfully launched a missile with nuclear capability and a 5000 km range, giving it the ability to strike Beijing and Shanghai. With the Agni 5 missile, India is the sixth country with long-range nuclear missile capability. Defense analyst Poornima Subramaniam: "Agni 5 will give India complete coverage of targets in China."

AR Time for India and China to talk about their border in Assam.

Islamist Human Rights
The Times

Britain's relationship with the European Court of Human Rights was tense yesterday after the court halted deportation proceedings against the radical Islamist cleric Abu Qatada. David Cameron vowed to force him out of the country "no matter how difficult" after AQ's lawyers challenged the removal process.

AR Memo to DC: Kick the bum out even if the ECHR dithers. Let the lawyers fight it out after the fact. Don't let the taxpayer foot the bill for AQ to stay anywhere but in a morgue.

Podiumsdiskussion im DAI Heidelberg
Moralmaschine Religion!? Konstruktion und Anspruch ethischer Wirklichkeiten?
Das Böckenförde-Diktum auf dem Prüfstand

Es diskutieren:
Eberhard Schockenhoff, stellvertretender Vorsitzender des Deutschen Ethikrates,
  Professor für Moraltheologie an der Katholisch-Theologischen Fakultät der Universität Freiburg
Gregor Ahn, Professor für Religionswissenschaft
  an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Heidelberg
Joachim Kahl, Doktor der Theologie und Philosophie, freiberuflicher Philosoph
  mit Arbeitsschwerpunkten Religionskritik, Ethik, Ästhetik

Moderation:
Brigitta-Sophie von Wolff-Metternich, Akademische Oberrätin am Philosophischen Seminar,
  Universität Heidelberg

AR Prof. Schockenhoff hat die Diskussion mit seiner Katholischen Parole dominiert.

2012 April 18

Eurozone Misery
Martin Wolf

The eurozone is a monetary union, without fiscal backups. The pressure of adjustment falls on labor markets. Fear of inflation depresses nominal wages, leading to soaring unemployment, collapsing economies, and debt deflation. The eurozone is an aircraft being redesigned as it crashes.

Centrifugal forces
1 Solidarity remains largely national: The ECB is the principal international financier.
2 Power rests in member states: The eurozone is an international arrangement.
3 States disagree on what went wrong: Germans say fiscal indiscipline; others say excessive lending, divergent competitiveness, and external imbalances.

Centripetal forces
1 Fear of a break-up: Some say the single currency provides useful pressure for reform.
2 The ideal of an integrated Europe: The eurozone integrates states that used to go to war.
3 A secure place in Europe and the world: Europeans still believe in the postwar agenda.

The most likely outcome is a miserable but enduring union.

AR The union needs a shot of Teutonic dynamism.

The IQ Gene
New Scientist

A huge international brain study has found a gene that has a measurable effect on intelligence. Gene HMGA2 can vary at a single DNA site from C (cytosine) to T (thymine). With letter C, IQ rises by 1.29 and brain volume increases by 0.58%, adding around 9 ml of brain tissue, about 2 teaspoons. When people inherit C from both parents they get an IQ rise of about 2.6. The study involved 21,151 adults.

Nature Genetics, DOI: 10.1038/ng.2250

2012 April 17

Islam in Egypt
Amr Darrag

Egyptians are intent on creating a prosperous and democratic society. But the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, believes that the goals of the revolution are under threat.

We in the FJP believe that Islam brings about social harmony, justice, and prosperity. Our principles:
1 Individuals must be free to choose their faith and their way of life
2 Everyone is equal before the law
3 The people are the sole holders of power

Our economic platform is based on a free economy and social justice. A strong private sector is the main driving force behind a thriving economy, while the state provides the legal and political framework.

Robots in China
Klaus Zimmermann

Apple and Foxconn plan to improve pay and conditions for over a million workers in China. Foxconn will deploy a million industrial robots in its factories over the next three years.

Chinese economic planners know the number of annual entrants to its labor market is set to peak soon. The leaders know that the population may get old before it gets rich. The government wants to see wages go up, both to strengthen domestic consumption and because it helps Chinese companies produce more advanced goods for the world market. China needs well trained and well motivated workers. Using more robots fits that strategy.

The west has not begun to appreciate the consequences of this rapid embrace of automation. Europe must attract skilled immigrants and revitalize its universities.

World Military Spending
SIPRI

World military expenditure in 2011 totaled $1.74 trillion, almost unchanged since 2010 in real terms, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The 2011 figures were down for Brazil, Britain, France, Germany, India, and the United States. U.S. spending fell by 1.2% in real terms. Spending rose 6.7% for China and 9.3% for Russia.

SIPRI Yearbook 2011

2012 April 16

The F-35 Saga Continues
The Times

David Cameron may have to make a U-turn. British forces chiefs apparently want to abandon plans to buy the navalized F-35C fighter jet for the new carriers and revert to the F-35B jump-jet version.

The reassessment reveals:
— The Royal Navy will have two carriers with F-35B but only one with F-35C.
— Installing cats and traps would cause extra spending of up to £1.8 billion.
— Britain would pioneer the U.S. electromagnetic catapult, with all the risks.
— The F-35C is too heavy to land on the French Charles de Gaulle carrier.
— The carrier with the F-35C is unlikely to enter service until 2025.

Against the decision: the F-35B has lower performance and payload.

AR Cannot the government find a couple of billion more for the navy?

In memoriam

We may see gravity waves
by around 2015

Has Earth Seeded Space?
New Scientist

A team at Kyoto Sangyo University say Earth could have seeded other moons and planets with life. The asteroid that hit 65 million years ago may have not only killed off the dinosaurs but also kicked up well over a trillion tons of rocks into space. The team calculated that hundreds of millions of Earth rocks could have been thrown to Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa. Even more could have ended up on the Moon and Mars. Hundreds of rocks could even have made it to planets around other stars, such as Gliese 581.

arXiv:1204.1719v1




Günter Grass
Jeffrey Goldberg

German historian Ernst Nolte argued in a 2004 speech that the only difference between Israel and the Third Reich is Auschwitz. The late Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago once compared the Palestinian West Bank city of Ramallah to Auschwitz and accused Jews of worshipping
a spiteful god.

Günter Grass, in his writing, shows himself to be a man tired of hearing about the Holocaust, tired of thinking about the Holocaust, tired of carrying around the moral burden of the Holocaust. This is under-standable. But being a former member of the Waffen-SS
means having to say you're
sorry.

AR Maybe now GG,
after a lifetime of writing,
has a right to sigh and say
SS-hit happens.

2012 April 15

The Human Brain Project
Jonathan Leake

The Human Brain Project, funded by the European Union, will offer new insights into the human brain.
EPF professor Henry Markram: "The complexity of the brain, with its billions of interconnected neurons, makes it hard for neuroscientists to truly understand how it works. Simulating it will make it much easier, allowing them to measure and manipulate any aspect of the brain."

The virtual brain will be housed in a giant new supercomputer at Jülich, near Düsseldorf, Germany. The machine will generate 3D moving images of the brain on large screens around a cockpit. Scientists will sit in the cockpit and fly through the brain, zooming in or out to explore its workings.

For 15 years Markram and his team have dissected and studied the mammalian brain's basic information processing units, the cortical column. These units are less than half a cubic mm in size but contain tens of thousands of neurons with many millions of interconnections. The team used their data to simulate a cortical column in a supercomputer. By 2014 they hope to model an entire mouse brain.

Markram: "The human brain is far larger with around a million cortical columns. A computer capable of simulating it would have to carry out a billion billion calculations a second."

AR A fine challenge for an exaflops machine.

2012 April 14

The Hajj show is a hit

2012 April 13

Top Ten Philosophers' Novels
Seán McGrady

1 Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Reading Zarathustra for the first time, despite its literary form, its poetic vision, I treated it as pure philosophy. But nothing will quite prepare you for the deceptions of Nietzsche's language.

2 The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel by George Santayana
Santayana was attached to William James' idea that the emotions are the perception of bodily processes. Santayana develops this idea of the observing self philosophically.

3 Intimacy by Jean-Paul Sartre
The idea of intimacy denies everything of the transcendental ego and affirms intentionality, which a detached ego violates. Intimacy necessitates the connection to others.

4 Candide by Voltaire
Candide is perversion. Voltaire proceeds with caricature. The line of common sense philosophy leads straight from Voltaire to the modern preachers and prophets of this perversion.

5 A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
Murdoch denied that her novels were works of philosophical fiction. Existentialism, for her, defined the whole genre of the philosophical novel: philosophy clarifies, literature mystifies.

6 Thomas the Obscure by Maurice Blanchot
Blanchot wrote fiction that it was in part philosophical investigation. He described the fiction as ontological, where the language of ontology resides outside the subject and object divide.

7 Thérèse Philosophe by Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens
Dostoyevsky called it as a trashy little book. It is a tale involving a sexual romp with Catholic clergy confusing sexual with spiritual ecstasy that should never have seen the light of day.

8 The Stranger by Albert Camus
The stranger is conditioned in every respect. He could not be his own self in his actions. Rather than act, he is acted upon, and his world too is empty and meaningless, as there is no self.

9 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Eco's novel expresses the finite and infinite in themes and meanings, pinned down by a detective story. Beyond that simple form, there are unlimited mysteries to solve and connections to make.

10 Essays in Love by Alain de Botton
Many readers felt frustration that de Botton tells us nothing of what love is. The work failed as a novel because de Botton had not matured as a storyteller, but the real weaknesses are philosophical.

11 The Backslider by Seán McGrady

AR More shameless self-promotion there. I agree with his #1 anyway.

The Samaritan Temple
Matthias Schulz

The Old Testament says 10 of the 12 tribes in Samaria founded the state of Israel in the year 926 BCE. The two other clans lived in Judah with its capital Jerusalem. The Samaritans were in the majority. They were the guardians of the Ark of the Covenant and the keepers of the Mosaic tradition.

There's one big difference between the Samaritan Torah with the Jewish Torah. For Jews, the center of the world is Jerusalem, whereas for Samaritans it's Mount Gerizim. Shortly before his death, Moses told the Israelites to travel to Mount Gerizim and build a shrine there, or at least that's what the oldest Bible texts say. But then the Assyrians subjugated Israel and killed or enslaved its inhabitants. Many Israelites fled to Judah and Jerusalem.

The Jews wove an entire biblical tale around Judah. King David ruled from Jerusalem and his son Solomon allegedly built a glorious temple there. No remains have ever been found of his temple. But a temple stood for many years on Mount Gerizim, which in 180 BCE covered about 4 hectares and attracted huge crowds of worshipers. Then in 128 BCE a Jewish army burned it to the ground. The Samaritans never rebuilt it. The victors rewrote the Bible.

AR So forget about the Dome on the Rock. It's just another mosque.

eLife
Richard Lambert

Publishing academic research is an expensive business. Prestigious publications have high rejection rates, require peer reviews and cataloguing, and get the best papers. But academic researchers dislike making profits for publishers.

Wellcome Trust has agreed with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the United States and the Max Planck Society in Germany to underwrite a new web-based and open-access journal, eLife, run by scientists, for scientists.

INS Chakra
The Indian Navy has commissioned the Akula II class K‑152 Nerpa nuclear-powered attack submarine INS Chakra. The sub displaces 8140 tons, has a maximum speed of 30 knots, can operate at a maximum depth of 600 m, and has a strike range of 3000 km. It has four 533 mm and four 650 mm torpedo tubes and can fire Indian Club nuclear-capable missiles. INS Chakra was built in Russia and will serve until the Indian-built nuclear submarine INS Arihant is commissioned later this year. India is the sixth country to operate nuclear subs.

Rabindranath Tagore
Aditya Chakrabortty

Tagore Festival, Dartington Hall, Devon, England, April 6-9, 2012

Rabindranath Tagore, born in 1861, wrote on women's rights, the environment, Indian independence, and educational reform. In 1913 he won the Nobel prize for literature.

Authors today go straight from creative writing courses to careers in self-promotion. They have no time for politics.

Christianity
Andrew Sullivan

Christianity is in crisis. The Catholic Church hierarchy has covered up a conspiracy to abuse and rape countless youths and children. Protestant churches have declined and evangelical Protestantism has grown. Many evangelicals embrace a gospel of prosperity. Others defend a rigid biblical literalism. Something is wrong. Great injustices require mobilization and public witness. But Christianity will rise again.

AR Will it?


Respect
Theodore Dalrymple

George Galloway of the Respect party flirts with Islamism and has been married four times, thrice to Muslims. Bradford is the second seat with a large Muslim electorate that he has won. When the results were announced, he exclaimed, "All praise to Allah!" and his supporters responded, "Allah! Allah!" He got an even bigger cheer when he shouted: "Long live Palestine!"

AR GG, U twat!

Oxford Literary Festival 2012
The Sunday Times

The festival started in the Sheldonian Theatre and moved on to tents in Christ Church meadows.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said British Muslim women can "help assert them-selves" by wearing a veil.

Biologist Steve Jones: "I prefer not to argue with creationists. It's like getting into a boxing ring with a blancmange: it will quiver but it will always come back at you."

Children's novelist Katherine Rundell said she ties herself to her chair with shoelaces to force herself to write, and makes herself meet deadlines by writing £1,000 cheques to the BNP and handing them to a friend: "If I haven't written my book by a certain date, mail it."






Photo: Harry Borden
Baroness Warsi
The Guardian

My upbringing was strict, with a sense of purpose. At 41, I feel a real sense of confidence and stability. My first political memory is seeing Margaret Thatcher wave outside No 10.

AR Warsi will neuter
Gorgeous George.

2012 April 12

Muslims Can Reject Extremists
The Guardian

David Cameron says the Muslim world can reject a dead-end choice between extremism and dictatorship. Extremists are a dangerous foe on a par with supporters of slavery, but Indonesia has taken an extraordinary journey along the inspirational path to democracy.

Cameron cites four enemies of democracy:

1 Authoritarian leaders: "The Arab spring has shown that denying people their rights in the name of stability and security actually makes countries less stable in the end."

2 Corrupt elites: "Corruption denies the people their economic and political stake – the citizenship, the job and the voice that they want. Worse still, it breeds a cynicism and a sense of rage."

3 Extremists: Islam is "observed peacefully and devoutly by over a billion people" but "there is a problem across the globe with Islamist extremism, which is a political ideology supported by a minority" who reject debate and consensus.

4 Tribalists: Northern Ireland is a recent example.

AR The global community needs a clean separation between religion and politics.

The National Security Agency is building a big spy center in Utah

2012 April 11

MIT nuclear scientist Dennis Whyte: "We are basically making a star on the planet."
>> ITER

A British Museum exhibition on the pilgrimage to Mecca:
The Hajj

Ten Facts About Turkey
Foreign Policy

  1 Turkey is now 70% urban (France is 77% urban)
  2 Turkey's governing party (the AKP) has a reformist agenda
  3 Turkey's GDP grew at 8.5% in 2011 (almost as fast as China)
  4 Turkish women were given the vote in 1930 (but gender equality is very low)
  5 Turkey is slightly larger than Texas (but has much more biodiversity)
  6 Kurds are a big minority and Istanbul is the world's largest Kurdish city
  7 The Turkish press is vibrant but restricted (100 journalists are now in prison)
  8 The Turkish armed forces last staged a coup in 1997
  9 Turkey has compulsory religious education (in Sunni Islam)
10 Turkey's international trade is regulated in Brussels

What Grandpa Did
David Crossland

German historian Moritz Pfeiffer asked his grandfather what he did in World War II. His new book My Grandfather in the War 1939-1945 (in German) is based on his interviews with Hans Hermann.

Hans Hermann was born in 1921 in Wuppertal to an arch-conservative, nationalist family with a military tradition. His father served as a lieutenant in World War I. Young Hans was a member of the Jungvolk.

In 1941, Hans took part as an infantryman in Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. He said he knew nothing about such orders as the one to kill any Soviet commissars they captured.

Pfeiffer said it was "hardly believable" that his grandfather didn't know anything about mass killings. He says his grandparents suffered the same "moral insanity" that afflicted many Germans back then.

2012 April 10

Israelis Condemn Grass
Tobias Buck

In the six days since Günter Grass published his latest poem, the Nobel laureate and Waffen-SS veteran has drawn condemnation from the prime minister of Israel, the foreign ministers of Germany and Israel, and a host of pundits in both countries.

German commitment to Israel remains firm. Yet criticism of Israeli policies is no longer taboo. Lurking behind the Israeli fury is concern that broader German backing for Israel is on the wane. A rift is opening between Israel and western intellectuals and artists.

AR Muslims condemn a cartoon, Israelis a poem. Art works.

E-Book Hustle
Wired

Book publishers know they must evolve. A fifth of all Americans have read an e-book, and 114 million e‑books were sold in 2010. Some 48 million iPads, Android tablets, and e-readers were sold to U.S. consumers in 2011, twice as many as in 2010. Demand for e-books is growing fast.

The book revolution is far more complicated than that faced by the music and movie industries, which essentially needed to digitize their current products. Bookmakers must become multimedia companies. They face a dizzying array of decisions as they get their products to run on new devices and platforms.

The world of young-adult fiction provides great opportunities for multimedia storytelling. Books by television and film writers can be released as episodic apps and e-books. An episodic approach is natural for teenagers who spend tons of time reading text messages, Facebook updates, and blogs.

Future e-books could be more social experiences, with voting for characters or plots or optional extra content. For titles that become television shows or movies, publishers and studios could work together on combined print and screen versions. It will take a few years for the air to clear.

AR Maybe I should refactor my books and blog as an app.

Conservatives are neat freaks, liberals are slobs

2012 April 9

Jesus Was A Buddhist Monk
BBC 4 video, 49:12

This documentary examines a range of views on the life and death of Jesus. It seems the three wise men were Buddhist monks who found Jesus and came back for him around puberty. After being trained in a Buddhist monastery, he returned to preach Buddhist ideas to Jews, survived the crucifixion, and escaped to Afghan Kashmir, where he died as a well remembered teacher, aged 80.

AR This has the ring of truth for me. I vote for this story.

Saudi Princess Speaks Out
BBC

Princess Basma Bint Saud Bin Abdulaziz, 47, is the daughter of King Saud, a mother, a businesswoman, and a working journalist. These are the changes she would like to see in Saudi Arabia:

1 Rewrite the constitution
I would like to see a proper constitution that treats all men and women on an equal footing before the law. Our constitution should be inspired by the philosophy of the Koran.

2 Change the divorce laws
The current divorce laws are abusive. A woman can ask for a divorce only if she either pays a big sum of money or gets someone to witness why she is filing for a divorce. This contradicts the Koran.

3 Overhaul the education system
The focus in most of our educational system is on religious subjects. We need to encourage our youth to think freely, innovate, and use their initiative for the betterment of our society.

4 Reform social services
The ministry of social affairs is tolerating cruelty toward women rather than protecting them. The ministry is also one of the reasons poverty is rife in the kingdom.

5 Repeal the chaperone law
Women in Saudi cannot get around or travel without a male chaperone. The law curtails women's freedom and infantilizes women.

BBC podcast (28 min)

Deutsche Fassung im Spiegel

AR I taught physics to a teenage Saudi princess in London in 1981. Was it her?

John Derbyshire has shot himself in the foot

2012 April 8, Easter Sunday

Allaluyah, the concept for my next book on Globorg is risen!

Mitt and Bibi
The New York Times

Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu met in 1976 in the offices of the Boston Consulting Group, where both had been recruited as corporate advisers. That shared experience led to a warm friendship.

The men reconnected shortly after 2003 when Romney became the governor of Massachusetts. Netanyahu paid him a visit and told him how he had challenged unionized workers, reduced taxes, and privatized formerly government-run industries. He encouraged Romney to look for ways to do the same.

A few years later, Romney dined with Netanyahu in Jerusalem. When Netanyahu informed him of a campaign to persuade pension funds to divest from businesses tied to Iran, Romney offered his help.

Why is there something rather than nothing?
Lawrence M. Krauss

As a cosmologist, I am aware of the human need to assume that the existence of life, the universe, and everything reflect something profound. But science has taught us to think the unthinkable.

Most of the energy in the observable universe can be found outside galaxies in otherwise empty space. But the energy of empty space pushes distant galaxies away from us at an ever-faster rate. Eventually they will recede faster than light and will be unobservable.

The Large Hadron Collider has given tantalizing hints that the origin of mass is a kind of cosmic accident. Experiments suggest the existence of a universal field that gives the masses to all elementary particles that we observe today.

Combining the ideas of general relativity and quantum mechanics, perhaps the entire universe and even space itself could arise spontaneously out of nothing. The uncertainty principle expands what can possibly occur undetected in otherwise empty space. With gravity too, new universes can spontaneously appear and disappear.

Physics revolutionizes not only the concepts of "something" (elementary particles and the forces that bind them) and "nothing" (the dynamics of empty space or even the absence of space) but also the answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing.

A universe like ours could have come from nothing. This does not prove that it did, but we can imagine it did. Perhaps, alone and together, we make the meaning in our lives.

AR This was the drift of my 2004 essay Purpose in Life and Science.

Philosophical Novels
Jennie Erdal

My novel The Missing Shade of Blue (2012) flirts with big ideas: the illusory nature of happiness, the dangers of too much thinking, the illusion of free will.

Iris Murdoch is the author most people associate with the philosophical novel. The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) is concerned with good and evil, though the pupil of the title is said to be beyond both and close to "awful aspects of the world". Some of Murdoch's metaphysics seems to get lost in melodrama.

Milan Kundera is wary of the novelistic illustration of ideas. With philosophy and the novel, it seems difficult to get the balance right. His solution in The Art of the Novel (1988) is "not to transform the novel into philosophy" but rather to bring to the novel "a sovereign and radiant intelligence".

Julian Barnes ranges over a variety of philosophical concepts in his novel The Sense of an Ending (2011). It is a psychological mystery tale and a meditation on the passage of time and memory. It is laden with ideas: the subjectivity of memory, the illusory nature of truth, the philosophical rationale for suicide.

The novel and philosophy have a great deal to give one another. But the novel is something felt and lived, not something theoretical.

AR Endearingly shameless promotion of her own novel.

NASA/GSFC

NASA/GSFC

In northern Saudi Arabia, near the border with Jordan, engineers have pumped up water from deep underground
to create huge agricultural settlements, as these Landsat images show.

Imagine
Jonah Lehrer

Twenty years ago, Mark Beeman was studying patients who had suffered damage to the right hemisphere of the brain. Many of them had serious cognitive problems even though the left hemisphere had been spared. Beeman wanted to compare right and left brain activity for a standardized task. He came up with a set of word puzzles that subjects solved equally often by insight or by conscious analysis.

Beeman found that the brain quickly gets tired as the left hemisphere searches for logical answers. That triggers a switch of brain activity to the right hemisphere. A burst of gamma-wave brain activity appears 30 ms before an insight. Gamma rhythm correlates with the binding of neurons. In the seconds leading up to it, there is intense activity in the anterior superior temporal gyrus, located on the surface of the right hemisphere just above the ear. This is the neural correlate of insight.

AR Above the right ear,
good to know.

The People's Republic of China may become the world's largest military spender in just 20 years. It is investing in ballistic and cruise missiles, modern jets, submarines, radars and spy satellites, and cyber and space weapons. China aims to threaten American bases in the western Pacific and to push U.S. carrier groups beyond the first island chain. But China devotes just over 2% of GDP to defense; America spends 4.7%.

Chinese Military Power

Google
Project Glass
The New York Times

Google showed off a pair of glasses with a clear display that can stream information to the wearer and send and receive messages through voice commands. It even has a camera to record video and snapshots.

The augmented-reality display sits over the eye and runs on the Android mobile platform. Google has lots of other shapes and variations of the glasses in the works. Wearers say the glasses don't interfere with daily life. They actually free people up from technology.

One Day
YouTube, 2:30

AR GIG 0001

Daily Mail
George Galloway's third wife, Rima Husseini gave birth to their second son four months ago: "We are still married under Islamic law."

AR GG, U dog!

BBC
Divine Women
Anita Singh

Historian Bettany Hughes says Christianity was originally a faith where women held sway. In the first 200 years of Christianity, over half of all churches in Rome were built by women. "Our own monotheistic institutions might do well to take a leaf out of the book of human experience." Hughes will present the BBC 2 series Divine Women.










Daily Mail
After his Bradford West victory, George Galloway flew to Amsterdam and married his fourth wife, Putri Gayatri Pertiwi.

AR Good 4U George!

Sadie Jones
Elizabeth Day

Success came as a shock to Jones, who had spent 15 years as a screenwriter failing to get her work produced. "Life is not a meritocracy," she says now. When The Outcast was published, she says the reception was ridiculous: "Like being bombarded with sweeties."

Respect
Salma Yaqoob

Respect supporters predicted a shock. People are disillusioned with austerity and war and with being taken for granted. Bradford is mired in unemployment and stagnation. Respect argued that we need investment in order to re-energize our economy and create the growth to deliver jobs. When the voters of Bradford West heard that argument put confidently and coherently, with an eloquence that only George Galloway can summon, they responded warmly.

2012 April 7

Mideast Nuclear Proliferation
Foreign Policy

Multiple nuclear powers on a hair trigger in the Mideast is a nightmare scenario for security planners. But dire warnings about uncontrolled proliferation are far from reality.

Pakistan embarked on a nuclear program in 1972 to match India's nuclear development program. Pakistan's perception of the threat posed by India is far more acute than how either Egypt or Turkey perceive the Iranian challenge. And the security situation in the Persian Gulf is not as severe as the one along the Indo-Pakistani border.

Turkey is already under a NATO nuclear umbrella. Ankara safeguards roughly 90 American B61 nuclear bombs at Incirlik airbase. But Turkey cannot even deliver its allotted B61 bombs. Turkey has no fissile material, cannot mine or enrich uranium, and has no way to reprocess spent fuel. The Turkish government has plans for civilian nuclear power to provide a quarter of Turkey's electricity needs by 2040, but this is optimistic.

Egypt is way ahead of the Turks in developing nuclear infrastructure. The Egyptian Atomic Energy Commission was established in 1955 to develop peaceful atomic energy. The Soviet Union gave Egypt a 2 MW light water reactor. Yet Egypt has made no effort to develop nuclear weapons technology. Pundits who warn of an Egyptian bomb should visit Egypt. They would see its ramshackle infrastructure and the dire state of its economy and relax.

Saudi Arabia has the cash to buy a nuclear program. But they do not have the capacity to manage one. They would have to import Pakistanis to do the work or buy nuclear devices directly from Islamabad, both risky options. The Saudi kingdom says it would be forced to act if both Iran and Israel possessed a nuclear arsenal. Said an unnamed Saudi official in June 2011: "We cannot live in a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and we don't. It's as simple as that."

AR Saudi Arabia can easily do a deal with Pakistan. The Saudis allegedly financed the development of Pakinukes — "the Islam Bomb" — and now Pakistan needs more money.

The Villa In The Jungle
Spiegel Online

Israel sees itself as a "villa in the jungle," a vulnerable island of civilization surrounded by Islamists. Israelis call the Arab Spring the "Islamic Winter."

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said last November that the Arab rebellion is developing into an "Islamic, anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave," and the Arab world is "moving not forward, but backward."

Former Mossad head Efraim Halevi: "Obviously Israel is in the eye of the storm, but it behaves as if it were not involved in the events."

2012 April 6, Good Friday

Israel, Iran, Grass
Spiegel Online

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: "Günter Grass' shameful moral equivalence between Israel and Iran, a regime that denies the Holocaust and threatens to annihilate Israel, says little about Israel and much about Mr. Grass. For six decades, Mr. Grass hid the fact that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS. So for him to cast the one and only Jewish state as the greatest threat to world peace and to oppose giving Israel the means to defend itself is perhaps not surprising."

Iranian state broadcaster Press TV: "Never in the history of postwar Germany has a prominent intellectual attacked Israel in such a brave way as Günter Grass with his controversial new poem. Metaphorically, the Nobelist has delivered a lethally lyrical strike against Israel."

AR Grass is politically naive but hardly dangerous. The poem is an artless expression of an incorrect but superficially reasonable set of ideas for peace.

Egyptian Brotherhood
The Times

The Muslim Brotherhood has sent a delegation to Washington. The delegates from the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) want to secure funding and investment for Egypt.

FJP delegate Sondos Asem: "We acknowledge the very important role of the United States in the world and we would like our relations with the United States to be better than before."

A recent poll showed that 54% of Egyptians rated job creation and economic development as their top priority. Less than 1% wanted Islamic law.

AR We must give them the benefit of the doubt. Democracy may tame them.

2012 April 5

French Hard Line
Financial Times

France will take a harder line within the European Union on immigration and trade if President Nicolas Sarkozy wins re-election. French foreign minister Alain Juppé:

1 "There is an intellectual revolution to make ... which is this idea of a Europe which protects ... a Europe with borders ... We want the external borders of Schengen to be controlled which is not the case at the moment. The Greek-Turkish frontier is a sieve."

2 "We have a divergence with our British friends who see Europe as a big free trade area. That is not our vision. We must introduce into free trade the notion of reciprocity."

3 A "Europe which protects" involves building an autonomous EU defense capability.

Grass Versus Israel
Spiegel Online

Nobel laureate Günter Grass has outraged Germans with a poem, Was gesagt werden muss, criticizing Israel for its policy on Iran.

The Israeli Embassy in Berlin issued a statement: "What must be said is that it is a European tradition to accuse the Jews before the Passover festival of ritual murder ... Israel is the only state in the world whose right to exist is openly doubted. That was true on the day of its founding and it remains true today. We want to live in peace with our neighbors in the region."

German Jewish writer Henryk Broder: "Grass has always had a tendency toward megalomania, but this time he is completely nuts."

Grass revealed in 2006 that he served in the Waffen-SS in World War 2.

My translation: What must be said

No Consciousness In V1
Christof Koch

A new experiment shows that attention and consciousness are different. Scientists projected a low-contrast grating that was drifting horizontally into one eye. It was surrounded by a scintillating ring in the same or in the opposite eye. In the latter case, the central stimulus became perceptually invisible. The scientists manipulated the visibility of the moving grating (2 conditions) and whether or not subjects attended to the grating (2 conditions) by asking them either to monitor a series of single letters that appeared on the ring or to ignore the letters. At issue was whether the subjects consciously saw the grating and whether or not they attended to it (4 cases).

The scientists measured the subjects' functional MRI response in the primary visual cortex, V1, which receives visual input from the eye. Paying attention to the target consistently and strongly increased the fMRI activity, regardless of whether the subject saw the target or not. Many previous studies had shown that attending to a signal reinforces its representation in the cortex. Whether or not the stimulus was consciously perceived made no difference. Attention is not consciousness.

AR No surprise there. Consciousness is a much harder problem than attention.

2012 April 4

Obama Versus Social Darwinism
Financial Times

President Barack Obama aims to portray Republicans as good for millionaires but heartless toward ordinary Americans, whereas Democrats look out for the middle class.

He calls the budget proposal put forward by Republicans in the House of Representatives a Trojan horse: "Disguised as a deficit-reduction plan, it's really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It's nothing but thinly veiled social Darwinism." By "gutting" education and research and development, Republicans are proposing a "prescription for decline."

Obama: "In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few. It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class."

Romney Hat Trick
The Times

Mitt Romney: "Out-of-touch liberals like Barack Obama say they want a strong economy, but they really don't like businesses very much. The economy is simply the product of all the nation's businesses added together. So it's like saying you love omelettes but don't like eggs."

Ethics Made Easy
George Walden

Neuroscientists aim to explain every aspect of creation and perception by activity in different areas of the brain. Neuroscience reveals the raw facts about humanity and its works. In literary criticism, forget the jargon of semiotics and discover how axons and neurons help in the reading of a text. Mirror neurons are currently fashionable. Because mirror neurons are activated by seeing someone doing something and doing it ourselves, human empathy is built into the brain. It is ethics made easy.

2012 April 3

Rich Recovery
Robert Reich

The U.S. economy grew at an 3% annual rate in Q1. Americans raked in over $13 trillion. Yet all the gains went to the top 10% and the lion's share to the top 1%. More than a third of the gains went to 15,600 super-rich households (going by previous trends).

In 2010, the last year for which we have final figures, most of the bottom 90% lost ground. Their average adjusted gross income was below $30,000. That’s down about 16% from 2000 (all adjusted for inflation). The share of people with health insurance from their employers dropped from almost 60% in 2007 to 55% in 2010. And the share of private-sector workers with retirement plans dropped from 42% in 2007 to below 40% in 2010.

Meanwhile, the "talent" in executive suites is getting gold-plated healthcare coverage for themselves and their families, along with deferred compensation and fat pensions subject to few, if any, taxes. The stock market has shown nice gains over the past two years. The value of financial assets held by American households increased by $1.46 trillion in Q4, 2011. The richest 10% became $1.3 trillion richer and the top 1% gained over $550 billion.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke says the U.S. economy needs to grow faster to produce enough jobs to bring down unemployment. But we can't grow faster if the vast majority of Americans don't have the money to buy things. There's no way the richest 10% can do it.

AR The United States needs more socialism.

Bankers Decide Who Pays
Aditya Chakrabortty

My conspiracy theory involves powerful people meeting in private offices, hundreds of billions of euros, and clandestine deals ruining entire countries.

Last year, when the future of Greece was being decided, you probably didn't catch many references to Charles Dallara and Josef Ackermann. They're two of the most senior bankers in the world, among the top 1% of the 1%. In the euro negotiations they represented the International Institute for Finance. The IIF is a lobby group for 450 of the biggest banks in the world. After a deal was struck last July, the IIF put out a note bragging about its "catalytic" role. The agreement was terrible for the Greeks and brilliant for the bankers.

The tale of the IIF is a chapter in a bigger story of how governments across the western world got swallowed up by their finance industries.

AR The democratic deficit in Europe is unacceptable.

2012 April 2

Revelation
Elaine Pagels

1 Revelation is about how the world of the Revelator ended. He was a devout Jew who wrote his book as war propaganda after the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem.

2 The numerals 666 denote the Roman emperor Nero, who was despised by early followers of Jesus. The Revelator used the Jewish numerology system to spell out Nero's imperial name.

3 The Revelator was crusading for traditional values. He saw Jesus as the messiah but he didn't like what the apostle Paul was preaching. He was not a Christian in the modern sense.

4 There is more than one Book of Revelation. Plenty of books of revelation didn't make the final cut for the Bible. Early church leaders suppressed them all.

A Tale of Three Cities
David Goodhart

Muslim Asian youths rioted in Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford in 2001. Since then, segregation in housing and schools has got worse. There is gloom among ordinary people, white and Asian.

Together, the three towns house about 600,000 people, with a rising proportion of south Asian Muslims. In Bradford a third of the citizens are ethnic Asians, mainly Pakistanis, and in Oldham almost a quarter. Burnley is smaller.

The 1948 British Nationality Act allowed in all citizens of the Empire and Commonwealth. In the 1950s and 1960s, south Asian immigrants, mainly Pakistanis, came to work night shifts in textile factories. By the 1980s the textile industry had gone and multiculturalism encouraged segregation.

All three towns are studded with the relics of past glories.Today's inhabitants are like people camping in the ruins of a once-great civilization. A confrontation in Bradford in 1988 led to the burning of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. Now Naveeda Ikram is the first female Muslim Lord Mayor of Bradford. But the white schools in Bradford have some of the worst results in the country.

Arranged marriages with a partner from Pakistan are still common. Many young Pakistanis juggle three languages and study the Koran for hours every day after school. This has created some confused and delinquent young men.

The three towns have failed to reinvent themselves. Comparing what happened in Germany's Ruhr industrial region in the 1980s with the story in the northern mill towns, Britain looks negligent.

2012 April Fool's Day

Gorgeous Pink Islamo-Stalinist
Ron Liddle

You can imagine my delight when the news came in from Karachi West that "gorgeous" George Galloway had been elected with a thumping majority. Sir, I thought, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.

We need more Islamo-Stalinist self-publicists in the House of Commons. The weekly spectacle would be improved by a backbencher on his hands and knees in a pink leotard, lapping milk from a bowl held by a female member [as GG did on TV in Celebrity Big Brother — AR].

Galloway insisted to his electorate that he was teetotal, and always had been, condemned all western intervention in Muslim lands, and claimed his victory was down to "the grace of God". His supporters took every opportunity to bandy about the word "Zionist", a word that fundamentalist Muslims use interchangeably with the word "Jew".

I don't know what Allah thinks about men wearing pink leotards and miaowing like a pussycat on chav TV. But it was enough that Galloway's simplistic opposition to everything that constitutes western society struck a chord with the Muslim voters.

This is the bloke who, on the Iranian-owned Press TV, told Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Islamo-Stalinist president of Iran, that he supported his campaign for re-election.

BOSS Verdict
New Scientist

A trillion seconds after the big bang, matter collapsed around dense seeds of dark matter and rebounded to leave ripples that distributed the galaxies.

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) team studied 265,000 galaxies between 4.5 billion and 6.3 billion light years from Earth and found an excess of galaxy pairs separated by 500 million light years. This is the expected result for our models of dark energy.

Einstein Rules OK
The Telegraph

Beth Reid, NASA:
"We already knew that the predictions of general relativity are extremely accurate for distances within the solar system, and now we can say that they are accurate for distances of 100 million light-years."

The Independent
George Galloway, 57, won the Bradford West by-election for his Respect party, beating the Labour candidate by over 10,000 votes in a swing from Labour of over 36%.

Foto: Der Spiegel
SAP Turns 40
Hasso Plattner

In the software industry, you have to grow very rapidly and very strongly, or you don't stand a chance. Anyone who follows all the daily debates in Germany that are critical of capitalism and growth could come to the conclusion that we Germans don't want to be successful anymore. There are a lot of good things about Germany. We're the land of engineers. But we're also a nation of grumblers.

Today's computers basically still do the same things that they did before. Our job is to continuously adapt them to people's needs. If you're talking with someone who speaks haltingly, slowly and never looks you in the eye, you don't feel at ease. But if you're dealing with somebody who smiles at you, nods and can even complete your half sentences, you feel understood. That's how the computer of the future will be.

Our latest development is an innovative high-performance database for companies, the High-Performance Analytic Appliance, or HANA. We have to be fast enough to be able to deliver in a flash any content, at any time, in any place. That's what HANA and the cloud are all about. It's going to become another world.

AR My team developed HANA.
I wrote the first book about it.

2012 March 31

Afpak Analysis
CNN

General John Allen, Commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, described the quality of the Afghan military and police leadership as "mixed." A spike in attacks on NATO forces this year by their supposed allies in Afghan uniforms has led the U.S. military to reinforce protection measures such as a "guardian angel" program where sleeping ISAF soldiers are guarded by fellow soldiers.

CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen: "NATO's withdrawal strategy requires a high degree of trust between small numbers of military advisors embedded with much larger units of Afghan troops in order to succeed. This trust has now been eroded to a dangerous degree."

The Taliban engage ISAF forces less frequently and increasingly rely on roadside bombs and suicide attacks. According to ISAF figures, in the last year, insurgent attacks overall have decreased some 22%, but civilian casualties rose to their highest since 2001. There are still vast tracts of the country where neither government forces nor ISAF hold sway.

A forbidding collection of mountainous provinces along the Pakistani border represents a formidable challenge. The Haqqani network is Afghanistan's most capable and potent insurgent group, and they continue to maintain close operational and strategic ties with al-Qaida and their affiliates. Senior U.S. officials accuse elements in Pakistan's military intelligence service of aiding the Haqqanis as a way of ensuring Pakistani influence in Afghanistan.

The strategic dialogue between the U.S. and Pakistan, developed in 2009, is in tatters. Senior Pakistani officers are unyielding in their resentment of American unilateralism and the violations of Pakistani sovereignty and dignity that drone strikes represent. Pakistan continues to provide sanctuary to the Taliban's senior leadership. The Taliban says the atmosphere for negotiations had been soured by the burning of Qurans, the killings in Kandahar, and video of U.S. Marines urinating on Afghan corpses.

There is growing hostility toward the war back home. Support for the war in Afghanistan has fallen to an all-time low in the United States. The Western presence in Afghanistan may be a brief interlude before the remorseless logic of ethnicity and tribe, and the competing interests of neighboring states, reassert themselves. So it was with the British and Soviet occupations in centuries past. Lofty ambitions of reconstruction and democracy have faded.

Bradford Spring
David Aaronovitch

George Galloway has declared the "Bradford Spring" — an "uprising" of the ordinary people against the political establishment.

Bradford West has a Muslim community of about 38%. Galloway's appeal to the Bradford voters in a leaflet began like this: "God KNOWS who is a Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not. Instinctively, so do you. Let me point out to all the Muslim brothers and sisters what I stand for."

His first tweet after the election read: "Long live Iraq. Long live Palestine, free, Arab, dignified." George Galloway may be the first Arab Nationalist to be elected to the British Parliament.

George Galloway
The Independent

"Gorgeous George" says he was "born in an attic in a slum tenement in the Irish quarter of Dundee". He joined the Young Socialists at 13 and at 20 he was a member of the Scottish Labour Executive. By 30 he was general secretary of War on Want. In 1994, he visited Baghdad and was filmed telling Saddam Hussein: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability."

Christopher Hitchens said of Galloway: "He looks so much like what he is: a thug and a demagogue, the type of working-class-wideboy-and-proud-of-it who is too used to the expenses account, the cars and the hotels — all cigars and back-slapping. He is a very cheap character and a short-arse."

2012 March 30

Japan Versus North Korea
CNN

Japan will shoot down any part of the long-range rocket North Korea plans to launch next month that enters its territory, says Japanese defense minister Naoki Tanaka. Japan will deploy Patriot AC-3 interceptors in Tokyo and on various islands plus three destroyers carrying Aegis SM-3 interceptors in the seas around Japan.
 

In the United States, the share of state residents who say religion is very important to their daily lives correlates positively with the poverty rate (0.60), negatively with state income levels (-0.56), negatively with the share of state residents that are college grads (-0.55), positively with the share of working class jobs (0.61), and negatively with the share of knowledge workers and professionals (-0.38).

Going Solo
Eric Klinenberg

More people then ever before are living alone. In the UK and the United States, roughly 1 in every 7 adults lives in a solo household. In America, some 18 million women and 14 million men live alone, with over 16 million middle-aged adults between the ages of 35 and 64 and about 11 million older. Young adults between 18 and 34 add more than 5 million, a tenfold increase since 1950. Sweden and Norway lead the world ranking with 47% and 40% of single households. Germany ranks above the UK.

The rise of living alone shapes the growth of cities and economies. Modern welfare states make it possible. More people can afford to live alone and use social media to keep in touch. Young solitaires see living alone as a mark of distinction and success. They invest in personal and professional growth by undertaking solitary projects and working to build networks of friends and contacts. Living alone need not be lonely. Sometimes solos feel lonely and unhappy, but so does everyone else.

2012 March 29

Oil Prices: The Saudi View
Ali Naimi

High international oil prices are bad news. Saudi Arabia is keen to help address the problem. European economic growth is in our national interest.

Saudi Arabia would like to see a lower price. It would like to see a fair and reasonable price that will not hurt the global economic recovery, that will generate a good return for producing nations, and that will attract greater investment in the oil industry.

There is no lack of supply. Saudi Arabia's current capacity is 12.5 million barrels per day, way beyond current demand. We have proved to be a reliable supplier many times in the past. Our inventories in Saudi Arabia and around the world are full.

Oil has powered economic and social progress in Europe and the wider world. It will power the global economy for decades to come, but only if prices are reasonable.

German leaders think that one day renewable energy will be cheaper than fossil fuels

Raptor Ready
Wired

The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor stealth fighter entered service with the U.S. Air Force in 2005. This month, the first squadron of Raptors is at last fully combat-ready with ground-mapping radars and a flexible bomb payload. The F-22 Increment 3.1 adds a mapping function to the radar plus more accurate targeting and the ability to carry eight satellite-guided bombs. A four-ship of Increment 3.1 aircraft can successfully find, fix, track, target, and engage targets in the most challenging of anti-access environments. The total cost per Raptor is almost $400 million.

When God Talks Back
Joan Acocella

Tanya M. Luhrmann is an anthropologist specializing in esoteric faiths. She spent two years at an evangelical church in Chicago and another two years in a congregation in Palo Alto. Both churches were part of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship. She says they take three steps to find God:

1 Train yourself to recognize the evidence of his operation in your life. If a new or strange thought pops into your head, that may be God speaking.

2 Learn to treat God like an intimate. Some Vineyard women had a regular "date night" with Jesus.

3 Develop your heart. Cultivate the emotions appropriate to receiving God's unconditional love.

The Vineyarders seem to have no theology. Luhrmann compares their beliefs to children's thought processes. For some evangelicals, she says, God is not unlike a stuffed Snoopy.

Luhrmann: "The playfulness and paradox of this new religiosity does for Christians what postmodernism, with its doubt-filled, self-aware, playful intellectual style, did for intellectuals. It allows them to waver between the metaphorical and the literal."

When God Talks Back by T. M. Luhrmann

Brains
Henry Marsh

It is difficult for brain surgeons not to be materialists. The identity of mind and matter is most apparent for neurosurgeons when we see patients who have suffered damage to the frontal lobes of their brain. If the lives of head-injured patients with frontal brain damage have been saved by emergency brain surgery, we see this as a triumph. But all too often it becomes apparent as time passes that their social and moral nature has been irreversibly damaged.

My work as a neurosurgeon means that I have little choice but to accept that thought is a physical phenomenon, that mind is matter. Certain conclusions follow. Animals are conscious and can suffer as much as we do. There is no human soul and an afterlife is most unlikely. Most religions fail when faced by this central tenet of neuroscience. The inner sense of being and consciousness within us is a great and wonderful mystery.

Brains: The Mind as Matter
Wellcome Collection
2012-03-29 — 2012-06-17

Photo: Joanne Davidson
James Cameron and Kate Winslet at the world premiere of
Titanic 3D
Royal Albert Hall, London

CNN
Titanic and Avatar director James Cameron resurfaced after plunging to the deepest known point in the world's oceans in his one-man sub Deepsea Challenger. He reached Challenger Deep, almost 11 km below the sea surface in the Mariana Trench.

RAF
Vulcan 607
By Rowland White

AR Thrilling novel about the
1982 Falklands bombing raid



Ian McEwan on
Darwin and Einstein

Age of Ignorance
Charles Simic

The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the present United States of America, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit. An educated, well-informed population could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. The pernicious ignorance we confront today is the product of a deliberate effort to manufacture it. People who know nothing and talk nonsense are courted and flattered by politicians and ideologues. The hucksters know that to the ignorant and the bigoted, lies always sound better than truth.

2012 March 28

Oil Shocks
Martin Wolf

Barack Obama: "We are drilling more. We are producing more. But the fact is, producing more oil at home isn't enough to bring gas prices down overnight." That last word should read "period".

Within and across countries, a rise of $10 in the price of oil shifts $320 billion a year from consumers to producers. The 15% rise since December 2011 will shift close to $500 billion.

In the United States, Goldman Sachs notes that the rise will reduce GDP by 0.3% over the first year and lower U.S. household incomes by about 0.5%. For the European Union, IEA chief economist Fatih Birol notes that oil imports will cost 2.8% of GDP at present prices, against an average of 1.7% between 2000 and 2010.

The world remains vulnerable to oil shocks. The best response would be to reduce oil use. Higher prices would help. Why not tax oil imports?

AR This is dire. The oil producers must invest massively in Europe and America to prevent a catastrophe. Can we encourage Gulf Arabs to do that?

Particle-Wave Duality
Ars Technica

Researchers have performed a quantum interference experiment with much larger and more massive molecules than ever before. Thomas Juffmann et al. fired molecules of phthalocyanine and its derivatives at a grating to build up an interference pattern. The researchers reduced the momentum of the molecules to increase their quantum wavelengths by using laser ablation to free the molecules from a thin film in a vacuum chamber.

The molecules were passed through a collimator and then a grating with parallel slits. To reduce interactions between the molecules and the edges of the slits, the grating was coated with silicon nitride. Fluorescence microscopy was used to measure the final positions of the molecules to within 10 nm as they lodged in the fluorescent screen. Over time, the spots accumulated to form the pattern predicted by quantum interference.

AR No surprise here: quantum duality is well confirmed anyway.

2012 March 27

Afpak Nightmare
Gideon Rachman

The western intervention in Afghanistan has failed. Al Qaeda led NATO into Afghanistan, and the killing of Osama bin Laden has given America the closure it needs to withdraw. NATO is now focused entirely on training and equipping the Afghan security forces. Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt: "We will have given 100,000 people training and a gun, and then made them unemployed."

Neighboring Pakistan is in the grip of hysterical anti-Americanism. The regime is cranking up the production of nuclear weapons and distributing them all over the country. The drone strikes on jihadists in the tribal areas of Pakistan have bred a new generation of terrorists.

Science
Freeman Dyson

Science is only a small part of human capability. We gain knowledge of our place in the universe not only from science but also from history, art, and literature. Science is a creative interaction of observation with imagination. The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove. The fringe is the unexplored territory where truth and fantasy are not yet disentangled.  >> more

Last Rights
Melanie Reid

Because of a religious minority, a few antediluvian pressure groups and the might of modern medicine, we are condemning growing numbers of elderly, terminally ill or disabled people to a terrible lingering twilight rather than a good death in the circumstances of their choosing.

2012 March 26

U.S. Economic Outlook
Larry Summers

Employment has been growing well for some time now. The stock market level is higher, consumers are spending, the housing market is stabilizing, and innovation is driving investment. High oil prices, problems in Europe, and the deficit situation are alarming, but good news in any of these areas could improve forecasts.

The most serious risk to recovery is that policy will shift too quickly from maintaining demand toward fiscal and monetary prudence. Employment remains five million jobs short and GDP close to $1 trillion below potential.

British Competitiveness
Michael Heseltine

Governments encourage enterprise, stimulate investment, and reward success. All governments influence national industrial performance and intervene to help their companies to win.

In the British government in the 1990s, I was told that 40% of our companies were world class; the German equivalent was 60%. When the Chinese Prime Minister left the UK a few months ago he placed orders for £1 billion. A few days later he placed orders for £14 billion in Germany.

We in the UK need to improve our infrastructure, invest in R&D, and think long term. We must be very frank with ourselves about our status in an ever more competitive world.

Abolishing War
Eric Cohen

Stanley Hauerwas says being a Christian means never killing others in war. He thinks American patriotism is a false form of Christian piety in which killing for the nation is killing for God:

"We are fated to kill and be killed because we know no other way to live, but through the forgiveness made possible by the cross of Jesus we are no longer condemned to kill. A people have been created who refuse to resort to the sword, that they and those they love might survive. They seek not to survive, but to live in the light of Christ's resurrection. The sacrifices of war are no longer necessary. We can now live free of the necessity of violence and killing. War and the sacrifices of war have come to an end. War has been abolished."

Hauerwas never tries to imagine what life would be like if we adopted his ethic. If his is the true political theology of Christianity, then Christianity is a form of madness.

AR One fights a war to maintain good order and make a just peace, not to perform a blood sacrifice.

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Shunryu Suzuki

After some years we will die. If we just think that it is the end of our life, this will be the wrong understanding. But, on the other hand, if we think that we do not die, this is also wrong. We die, and we do not die. This is the right understanding. Some people may say that our mind or soul exists forever, and it is only our physical body which dies. But this is not exactly right, because both mind and body have their end. But at the same time it is also true that they exist eternally. And even though we say mind and body, they are actually two sides of one coin. This is the right understanding.

AR Zen is good.

2012 March 25

Stay With C, Do Not Go Back To B
The Sunday Times

The Royal Navy expects to get two expensive new aircraft carriers. UK Defence Secretary Philip Hammond says installing catapult and arrestor gear (cats and traps) for F-35C jets will cost nearly £2 billion. He wants to switch back to F-35B jump jets, which cost more but need no cats and traps.

The two carriers were ordered in 2007 and designed to fly jump jets. In 2010, the new Conservative government switched to the simpler, cheaper, and more powerful F-35C. Defence Secretary Liam Fox said the C was a "first-division aircraft" like those flown by the American and French navies.

Britain last had a carrier equipped with steam catapults in 1978. New U.S. EMALS (electromagnetic aircraft launch system) "cats and traps" for the British carriers will require expensive crew and pilot training. The first new carrier should sail in 2016 but will fly only helicopters. The second, with cats and traps, should enter service in 2020. Then the first will be mothballed or sold.

The Americans and French agreed with fanfare to set up joint carrier operations with the Royal Navy if it used catapults. The U.S. Navy wants Britain to have a carrier from which it can fly its own jets.

AR I hereby perform a flip-flop. I wanted to see the RN carriers fly jump jets but now I opt for cats and traps. Interoperability with the Americans and the French is paramount. Let any remaining Harrier know-how flow into a new project with fewer distractions than the F-35 saga.

In the Shadow of the Sword
Tom Holland

During the tumultuous early centuries of Islam when the Arabs conquered with an utterly consuming sense of religious certitude whole swathes of the tottering Persian and Roman empires, they composed not a single record of their victories that has survived into the present day. For the first century or more, our only original source is a shred of papyrus from about 740 CE.

The Prophet Muhammad led an army to victory at the battle of Badr in 624 CE and died in Medina in 632 CE. Much of what we think we know about him can be traced back only to a biography written by Ibn Hisham around 800 CE, who discounted many stories then circulating about the Prophet as bogus, irrelevant, or sacrilegious.

Islam was not originally a separate religion from Christianity or Judaism at all. The first Muslims called themselves believers, worshipped the Judeo-Christian God, regarded Moses and Jesus as prophets, and so on. Today's version of the Koran was established in 1924. Before that, there were seven equally valid readings. Much of the Koran derives from the Bible and has been repeatedly revised.

Forty years ago, a cache of ancient Koranic texts was discovered in Yemen. They showed that the Koran had changed markedly over the centuries, and was really, as a German scholar put it, "a cocktail of texts". The Yemeni authorities soon sent the scholars packing and hid away the crumbling manuscripts. Such prickly facts are blasphemously incompatible with devout notions of the Koran.

AR All the more reason to forget the Koran and fold Islam into a unified Goof cult.

2012 March 24

Scientism
Philip Kitcher

Alex Rosenberg's evangelical scientism rests on three principal ideas:
1 Physics is the whole truth about reality.
2 Darwinian natural selection explains humans.
3 Neuroscience shows us as we really are.

AR Rosenberg has revisited my 2008 Godblogs trinity:
1 Boss (physics)
2 Goof (biology)
3 Susie (neuroscience)

2012 March 23

Lenhardt
Simply Baroque!
Mozartsaal, Schloss Schwetzingen
La Folia Barockorchester + Maurice Steger auf Blockflöte
Mr. Corelli in London

A Trilllion And Counting
Wired

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter could need more years of work and billions of dollars in unplanned fixes. The trillion-dollar F-35 program was already the most expensive arms program ever. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps want to buy 2,500 F-35s and a list of other countries is waiting too.

The JSF software is complicated. The new jet needs nearly 10 million lines of on-board code, compared to 5 million for the F-22 and just 1.5 million for the F/A-18 Super Hornet. The software is taking longer to complete than expected.

So far the Pentagon has always opted to increase the program's budget rather than cut production numbers. That's no longer possible. Air Combat Command: "We cannot simply buy our way out of our problems or shortfalls as we have been able to do in the past."

Australia, Canada, and Japan are already backing off as the price rises. Alternatives include the Super Hornet, an upgraded F-15, the new F-16V, and the European Typhoon, Rafale, and Gripen fighters. Air Combat Command: "We will remain committed to the long-term success of the F-35 program."

AR What's the hurry if the F-15, F-16V, F/A-18, and so on can take up the slack? Take time to get it right, keeping out the Chinese hackers all the while, and maybe it will be worth a trillion dollars.

French Jews
Spiegel Online

More and more French Jews are buying homes in Israel amid fears of rising anti-Semitism in France. Many complain of being harrassed in public and feel the country is no longer a safe place to raise their children. In the wake of the Toulouse attacks, the wave of emigration is only likely to increase.

AR Blame the the Islamists for this. We hate them and they hate Jews.

Memorial and Museum
Auschwitz-Birkenau

The grounds and most of the buildings at the Auschwitz and Birkenau sites are open to visitors.
From the spring of 1942 Auschwitz became the largest site for the murder of Jews brought in by train under the Nazi plan for their extermination. More than 1,100,000 men, women, and children lost their lives here.

Photo: Ben Gurr
Diamond Jubilee Window
North Door, Westminster Hall
London, UK



Certificate of Existence

Barrel Of Oil: $125
Financial Times

Monday: Saudi Arabia is taking steps to cool the overheating global energy market. The Saudi cabinet said the kingdom would work individually and with others to "return oil prices to fair levels" of around $100.




F-35 Lightning 2 B or not 2 B?
The Times

UK defense secretary Philip Hammond and armed forces chiefs are urging PM David Cameron to reverse the 2010 decision to buy the navalized F‑35C version of the Lockheed Martin Lightning 2 fighter for the new British aircraft carriers. The C version would require "cats and traps" (catapults and arrestor systems) on the carriers and push the cost up £2 billion. The chiefs prefer the original plan to buy the F‑35B jump-jet version of the fighter. In 2010, Cameron claimed the F‑35B was a "more expensive and less capable version" of the plane.

International
Arms Trade
2007-2011
SIPRI

Top 5 Exporters:
USA 30%
Russia 24%
Germany 9%
France 8%
UK 4%

Top 5 Importers:
India 10%
S. Korea 6%
Pakistan 5%
China 5%
Singapore 4%

Global arms trade
2010 total:
US$ 411 billion

AR Buy.

Dodgy Rockers

Rock stars including Sir Mick Jagger and Bob Geldof are among the wealthy who have put almost 100,000 properties worth an estimated £200 billion into offshore companies. The practice is denying Britain more than £1 billion a year in lost tax.

AR Clobber 'em!

2012 March 22

Words Struggle To Survive
guardian.co.uk

Words are competing daily in a Darwinian struggle for survival. An analysis of Google data for over 10 million words used in English, Spanish, and Hebrew over the last two centuries shows that words are competing actors in a system of finite resources. Most recent changes to the vocabulary are due to the extinction of misspelled words and nonsensical print errors, and to the decreased birth rate of new misspelled variations and genuinely new words. Many words with low relative use are dying. Sometimes words are driven to extinction by aggressive competitors. In many cases words died in a competition for a monopoly as a standard name. The marketplace for words waxes and wanes with a global pulse as historical events unfold. Standardization technologies such as dictionaries and spellcheckers shape word evolution.

AR All this is no surprise to believers in the memetic doctrine of Dawkins and Dennett.

Imagine
MM

Jonah Lehrer aims to explain how creativity works and how you, too, can unlock your own creativity. To explain why letting go is a source of creativity, he says the self-control center of the brain shuts down to clear the path for unfettered self-expression. But this reasoning fails because there is no measurable one-to-one mapping between any brain region and any particular cognitive process. Neuroscience is still far from providing all the answers.

AR The weakness of the brain story is no surprise to the author of Mindworlds.

2012 March 21

China Transition
Martin Wolf

Outgoing Chinese premier Wen Jiabao: "The reform in China has come to a critical stage. Without the success of political structural reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic structural reform. The gains we have made in reform and development may be lost, new problems that have cropped up in China's society cannot be fundamentally resolved and such historical tragedy as the Cultural Revolution may happen again."

China is coming to the end of growth driven by rising inputs of labour and capital. It must now move to growth driven by improving skills and technology. China's working age population will peak at one billion in 2015. Cai Fang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences says that in 2011, "manufacturing enterprises came across unprecedented and universal difficulties in recruiting labour".

China is now a middle-income country and is determined to become a high-income country by 2030. That will take deep reforms. Reducing the investment rate of 50% of GDP to 35% without a deep recession requires an offsetting surge in consumption. China may manage the transition to a different kind of economic growth. The country still has vast potential.

Religion
New Scientist

Atheists often see gods and religion as being imposed from above, a bit like a totalitarian regime. But religious belief is more subtle and interesting than that. Religious belief is ingrained into human nature. Without it, we would still be living in the stone age. In the battle between science and religion, religion is much more likely to persist than science. But the truth or otherwise of religion can be treated as a scientific hypothesis. Society is gradually learning to live without religion by finding new ways of binding people together. Only by understanding what religion is and is not can we ever hope to move on.

2012 March 20

China
Gideon Rachman

China has some difficult political and economic transitions ahead. But there are good precedents. South Korea and Taiwan have both become functioning democracies and consumer societies.

Even a civil war need not prevent China from becoming a superpower. The United States fought a civil war but was the world's largest economy two decades later. Germany and Japan were both defeated and devastated in war but soon regained their prosperity. Those three countries had discovered the formula for a successful industrial economy. China has too.

China is not like the Soviet Union. Soviet inefficiency was disguised because it never competed on world markets, but China does. Nothing can stop a democratic China becoming a superpower.

Gaming Gulf War III
The New York Times

A classified war game of an Israeli attack on Iran forecasts a regional war. General James N. Mattis, whose Central Command covers the Mideast region from North Africa to India, said an Israeli first strike would likely have dire consequences across the region and for U.S. forces there.

The war game, Internal Look, found that the United States was pulled into the conflict after Iranian missiles struck a Navy warship in the Gulf. The United States then retaliated against Iranian nuclear facilities. The gamers judged that the initial Israeli attack set back the Iranian nuclear program by a year but American B-2 bombers and precision missiles would do far more damage. They confirmed that a conflict would be unpredictable and uncontrollable.

Internal Look has long been a major Central Command planning exercise. In the cold war they used it to game a move by the Soviet Union to seize Iranian oil fields. The American plan was to march six Army divisions north through Iran to meet a Soviet attack.

Falklands Update
Andy Beckett

Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, where the sea mists are thick and the winds icy, was established by British settlers in the 1840s on a sunny-side slope down to a deepwater inlet. All around is the bleached or rusting junk of centuries: skeletons of old ships, remains of Victorian farm equipment, the blackened wrecks of Argentinian helicopters.

The Falklands lost its strategic importance in 1914 when the opening of the Panama canal reduced the need for ships to take the Cape Horn route. The island economy reverted to sheep farming and the population of the islands dwindled to barely 1,800. In 1980, Whitehall officials proposed handing the Falklands archipelago to Argentina and then leasing back the islands for a number of years. Margaret Thatcher tried to sell the deal to the islanders but they stalled until 1982, when Argentina finally lost patience.

In the 1982 war, 255 British servicemen were killed, and a greater number of Falklands veterans have since taken their own lives, for a total of almost one for every three islanders. Now, at the Mount Pleasant airbase, the garrison has four Typhoon fighters, an infantry company, and an offshore frigate or destroyer. A Ministry of Defence spokesman: "It's the minimum credible deterrence posture we have down there. Defending the airhead is what it's all about."

2012 March 19

American Capitalism In Crisis
Financial Times

1 The crisis is punishment for Washington's gluttony. Stop taxing and over-regulating the wealth creators and free their animal spirits. Most elected Republican have pledged never to raise taxes.

2 Rekindle demand by fiscal and monetary means until the economy recovers. The Obama administration and mainstream economists fear fiscal austerity might cause another depression.

3 American capitalism was already failing before the 2008 crisis and needs a new foundation. The top one percent of Americans captured 93% of the growth in 2010, up from 65% in 2001. Real incomes stayed flat for the remaining 99%.

Silenced
Paul Berman

Radical Islamists aim to narrow the limits of what everybody else is allowed to think. They deem apostasy and blasphemy to be capital offenses punishable by death. They want the rest of the world to acknowledge that apostasy and sacrilege against Islam are abominations. Their success is owed in large part to systematic intimidation.

Modern Islamism started with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The notion of expanding the caliphate to the entire world emerged in the wake of the Rushdie affair. In 1990, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation proposed the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam — everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Sharia — and campaigned to persuade the UN to make it international law.

The UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance felt that people in the Western countries who expressed anxieties about Islamic extremism were guilty of Islamophobia. The OIC proposed that the UN condemn Islamophobia. Western reactions led to a condemnation of defamation of religions in general.

In 2008, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the State Department instructed their employees to avoid the words "salafi," "wahhabist," "caliphate," and "jihadist" as offensive to Muslims when used by non-Muslims. On the advice of unidentified Muslim consultants, the word "liberty" was also dropped in favor of "progress." That year, the UK Home Secretary also dropped the term "Islamic terrorism" and instead instituted "anti-Islamic activity." In 2009, the U.S. Homeland Security secretary dropped "Islamic terrorism" in favor of "man-made disasters."

Ref: Silenced

2012 March 18

How Creativity Works
Jonah Lehrer

Neuroscientists say the left side of the brain is the logical side. It solves problems in a straightforward, rational way. The right side, usually dormant, flashes into life only if you are stumped. It can pull up old memories and new feelings and give you a sense of divine inspiration. Right-brain thinking seems to dominate creative thought.

Brain waves are given off by electrical currents between the brain's nerve cells. Alpha waves are produced when the brain is relaxed but awake. In a process that has yet to be fully understood, these flood the right brain about eight seconds before an idea pops into the mind. A burst of alpha waves rearranges how the brain views a problem.

Ways to spark your inner muse:
1 Take a walk or a break or lie down
2 Get frustrated
3 Smoke some dope
4 See the color blue
5 Talk to people who know nothing about your work
6 Change jobs or emigrate
7 Feel sad

St. Patrick's Day

Art: Rob Mulholland
Mirrored sculptures near Aberfoyle in the Trossachs near Loch Lomond, Scotland

Sipa Press/Rex Features
Asma and Bashar Assad

Assad Emails
The Guardian

Earlier this year, Mayassa al Thani, the daughter of the emir of Qatar, advised Asma Assad that the family should leave Syria and suggested Doha might offer them exile: "I honestly think that this is a good opportunity to leave and re-start a normal life — it can't be easy on the children, it can't be easy on you!"



How to hide a Syrian tank
(video, 4:06)

Tyrannen-Gattin im
Shoppingwahn

2012 March 16

China No Model
Lifen Zhang

The China model has gained credibility in the west recently. But China became an economic powerhouse by embracing free markets and globalization.

Western leaders view the China model as a formidable rival just as they once admired Joseph Stalin's transformation of the Soviet economy, but their Chinese counterparts know its difficulties. The China model is good at creating national champions, building infrastructure, and responding fast to disasters and downturns. But it fails in accountability, transparency, democratic representation, and the rule of law. China now confronts rampant corruption, rent-seeking, cronyism, nepotism, injustice, inequalities, and social instability.

I once asked a senior advisor to China's leaders if there was nothing Beijing could learn from western-style democracy. His reply: "Voting."

2012 March 15

Nuclear War In Mideast
Ron Rosenbaum

The Israelis do not accept the inevitability of nuclear weapons in the hands of an apocalyptically minded group of theocrats which has repeatedly threatened to annihilate them. Even an incomplete attack that drastically slowed Iranian progress might be preferable to doing nothing.

Some of the mullahs running the Islamic Republic of Iran are reportedly adherents of the apocalyptic strain of Shiite theology that believes a world conflagration is a precondition for the return of the Hidden Imam and the salvific End of Days. Ayatollah Rafsanjani suggested that in a nuclear conflict "the application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world."

A nuclear cruise missile could turn the mountain now sheltering Iranian nuclear facilities into dust. Israeli military ethicist Moshe Halbetal says the emotional memory of the Holocaust would be a factor in deciding whether to go nuclear first in the face of an existential threat. Go nuclear if the aim was to target weapons and military installations. Israel has at least three subs capable of launching nuclear cruise missiles.

The U.S. intelligence community continues to underestimate Iranian intentions and capabilities. The world lost five years before the International Atomic Energy Agency accused Iran of continuing an enrichment pace that could only have military goals. The Iranians don't need a missile with a warhead for a bomb delivered by truck or ship. All they need for destruction is bomb-grade nuclear fuel.

AR Military logic says use a nuke to counter nukes.

"How can you compare the dishonoring of the Holy Koran with the martyrdom of innocent civilians?
The whole goal of our life is religion."
Mullah Khaliq Dad, Afghanistan

Greg Smith leaves Goldman Sachs and explains how low the vampire squid has sunk

Getty

Qatar
Spiegel Online

The Gulf state of Qatar is roughly the shape of Denmark but a quarter the size and mostly sand. In 1949, its population was about 16,000.
Today Qatar has an annual per-capita income of $98,000. As host of the 2022 World Cup, it will spend at least $150 billion on stadiums, expressways, and a subway system. In the city of Doha, Qatari ruler Emir Hamad Al Thani hosts Hamas and Taliban leaders, U.S. generals, and Muslim Brotherhood theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who preaches via the Qatari TV network Al-Jazeera, the Arabic answer to CNN. The Qatar Investment Authority owns 17% of Volkswagen and 10% of Porsche, and wants to buy a stake in the European aerospace corporation EADS.
But Qatar has less wealth than the United Arab Emirates, which in turn has less than Saudi Arabia. Qatar is a world power in miniature.

AR Car drivers rejoice: we pay for all this.

Top Gear
The Nissan DeltaWing is set to compete at Le Mans in June. Powered by a 300 bhp 1.6 liter turbo engine, the car has half the power of a full-fat Le Mans racer but also half the weight, drag, fuel burn, and tire wear.

Cameron, Obama







AP
U.S. Army Stryker
on patrol in Afghanistan

A new poll shows that 60%
of Americans think the war in Afghanistan has not been worth the cost. Rick Santorum says U.S. forces may need "to get out sooner" following the weekend shooting spree.

AFP
Iron Dome
CNN

Israel's portable anti-rocket system Iron Dome can take down mid-range rockets targeted at Israeli cities. First deployed in April 2011 and with a success rate of over 90%, the system counters a serious threat. The Israel Defense Forces say Iron Dome has intercepted 37 rockets fired out of Gaza since Friday.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu: "The Iron Dome system has proven itself very well and we will, of course, see to its expansion in the months and years ahead."

dapd
Ex-Bundespräsident
Christian Wulff soll sich
zur Erholung in ein Kloster zurückgezogen haben.








Great British Rot
Theodore Dalrymple

London 2011: 12,699 knife attacks known to the police
(up 13.6% from 2010); 58,160 burglaries (up 8.8%); and
68,754 muggings (up 13%).
Great Britain 2009: about 800,000 domestic burglaries;
of which the police detected
some 67,000 and for which
6,136 people went to prison (average sentence 17 months).

AR Zero tolerance:
Shoot to kill.

Teetotal On Acid
New Scientist

Taking an acid trip can help cure alcoholics. Researchers at the Norway looked at studies on the use of LSD for treating alcoholism from 1966 to 1970. The trials included 536 alcoholic participants, some 325 of whom were given a single dose of LSD. Almost 60% of the people treated with LSD had improved before their first follow-up session, compared with 38% of the controls. They were still doing better six months later.

J. Psychopharmacology
DOI: 10.1177/0269881112439253

2012 March 14

The British Prime Minister
Niall Ferguson

David Cameron is a scion of the British privileged classes. As a Conservative, he identifies strongly with Churchill: "It does still thrill me when I walk in and see the Cabinet Room and think of the days in 1940 when Britain stood alone against Hitler."

Like Churchill, Cameron favors military intervention at times. He pressed for military intervention in Libya last year. He is "immensely frustrated that we can't do more in Syria." On Iran, he is less hawkish: "I count myself a good friend of Israel, but good friends should be candid."

If Cameron is eager to deepen Britain's "special relationship" with the United States, his approach to the European Union is cooler. He sees a “remorseless logic” to the Eurozone predicament: having created a monetary union, they now need a federal fiscal system. But he wants no part of it.

The British economy is in trouble. Tax revenues are down and spending on welfare is up. Cameron's government has raised taxes and is poised to make drastic reductions in public spending. Given Britain's parlous fiscal position, fiscal stimulus was not an option. Cameron wants to boost growth through tax reform.

Cameron is not in Washington to lecture Obama on the costs and benefits of fiscal austerity. The main purpose of this trip is to ensure that they are singing from the same hymn sheet on the Mideast. Churchill would surely have approved.

2012 March 13

An Anglo-American Alliance
Barack Obama and David Cameron

Seven decades ago, as our forces began to turn the tide of World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill traveled to Washington to coordinate our joint efforts. The alliance between the United States and Great Britain is a partnership of the heart.

As leading world economies, we are coordinating closely with our G-8 and G-20 partners to put people back to work, sustain the global recovery, stand with our European friends, and curb reckless financial practices.

As the two largest contributors to the international mission in Afghanistan, we're proud of the progress our troops have made.

As members of the international community, we have been united in imposing tough sanctions on the Iranian regime for failing to meet its international obligations.

As two nations that support the human rights and dignity of all people, we stand with citizens across the Middle East and North Africa who are demanding their universal rights.

As two of the world's wealthiest nations, we still believe that there is hardly anything we cannot do.

AR Boilerplate for Barack, dreamworld for David.

Talk To The Taliban
David Miliband

In Afghanistan we are paying the price for the dominance of military tactics over political strategy. Without a change of course, things will get worse. The Afghan government is corrupt and Pakistan is unstable. Now come promises of revenge for the slaughter in Kandahar.

A recent NATO report based on the interrogations of 3,000 Taliban prisoners painted a picture of an insurgency bruised, not vanquished. Many think they are winning. Afghanistan has never been ruled by a strong central government. NATO needs an exit strategy framed around a political settlement.

AR Talking to the Taliban is a waste of time.

Ray Kurzweil Talks To Lev Grossman
Katherine Goldstein

At SXSW, Austin, Texas, Singularity prophet Ray Kurzweil presented a keynote conversation with Time magazine columnist Lev Grossman to discuss the future:

1 Ray says we will begin to think of improving our health and longevity along the same lines as writing computer programs. Genes are essentially software, so we’ll tweak them rather like we update a phone's operating system.

2 Ray says computers will become smarter than us. They have total recall and their understanding of nuance is getting better. We will begin to regard them as sentient beings. But he foresees no showdown. Humans will just team up with computers.

3 Ray says smartphones and computers and so on are getting cheaper and more ubiquitous. That trend will accelerate.

AR GLOBORG

2012 March 12

A Crucifix Is No Burka
Boris Johnson

British Airways worker Nadia Eweida was suspended in 2006 for wearing a tiny little cross round her neck for work. Everyone took her side. BA has a livery based on the Union flag, and it seemed the height of hypocrisy to paint a socking great cross on the tailfin of every plane yet forbid a teensy little crucifix around the neck of an employee.

After about a year of dither, BA caved in and allowed members of staff to wear a discreet religious symbol. But the case is not over. The good lady is neither a religious nutter nor driven by vindictiveness. She just wants the airline to accept that it was wrong, and has taken her case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

The British government is now apparently backing BA's original decision. Another female employee might argue that her deep personal convictions drive her to wear a burka. How could BA forbid a burka but not a cross? It is time for some common sense: there is a world of difference.

The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Rée

Jonathan Haidt is a world leader in the new discipline of cultural psychology, which combines understanding of what goes on inside our heads with an interest in the social meanings that surround us. He says the the mind is not a peaceful realm where reason and consciousness reign but a battlefield of conflicting impulses largely beyond our knowledge and control. It is like a mighty elephant crashing through the forest with a rational rider perched precariously on its back.

Haidt applies his elephant simile to morality and politics: most of our interactions with each other are processed by the elephant rather than the rider, and the elephant is a product of evolution. He develops a theory of moral motivation based on the elephant's taste for care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Their various permutations give rise to our innumerable forms of moral impulse. But he ignores the most basic facts of moral philosophy: that we can be tempted to do something we know to be wrong, or that we can yield to temptation and regret it bitterly.

Shaking Hands
The Guardian

If you think shaking hands is a friendly gesture, think again. It is an infection hazard. The World Health Organization says washing hands would probably cut deaths from diarrhea by half. People don't wash their hands properly after going to the toilet, taking the bin out, preparing food, sneezing, using public transport and other mucky activities. The bugs can stay on them for hours and be transferred to surfaces and handles for other people to share.

2012 March 11

China
Niall Ferguson

The People's Republic of China is poised to become the largest economy in the world. Chinese exports are in every country. Chinese firms are investing all over the world. Chinese students outperform their western contemporaries at the world's best universities. By 2020, China will account for 22% of total global consumption. Should we worry?

In the space of a generation, China has gone from communist equality to American levels of inequality. Hundreds of millions of rural poor are at the mercy of corrupt officials and rapacious land speculators. A few Chinese have become billionaires, but most have to live on miserable wages earned in wretched conditions. More than one in ten of Chinese citizens live on less than $1.50 a day.

China faces severe demographic and environmental problems. As a result of the one-child policy introduced in 1980, there are about 123 male children for every 100 females up to the age of four. Between now and 2050 the number of seniors over 60 will rise to nearly a third of the population. Breakneck industrialization has also brought air laden with lethal particles, lakes and rivers poisoned, drought and soil erosion, and urban sprawl.

Chinese industry craves raw materials. By 2035, China will be using a fifth of all global energy. It accounted for nearly half of global coal consumption in 2009 and consumes large shares of aluminum, copper, nickel, and zinc production. But it faces chronic water shortages. Overseas expansion may be the only way to secure the resources needed to keep the Chinese economic miracle going.

To get a glimpse of what Chinese expansion is like, look at Zambia. The Chinese state owns the main copper mine in Luanshya. China gets the copper, the Zambians get Chinese investment. As the Chinese come to dominate the global economy, they will expect everyone to work as hard as they do, and accept their pay and conditions. Get ready to work as hard as the Chinese, for as little.

AR A horribly plausible prognosis.

Chinks in Western Defenses
The Sunday Times

Chinese spies hacked into computers belonging to BAE Systems to steal vast amounts of data on the F-35 fighter. Officials say the jet's radar capabilities may have been compromised. A BAE executive said that Chinese cyber attacks against BAE had continued for 18 months and had managed to access F‑35 plans. Aviation experts speculate that delays and spiraling costs in the F‑35 program may be due to the cyber theft of technology that has left the jet open to detection and electronic attack.

AR That explains the delay and the costs.

The Joy Of Jihad
Michael J. Totten

Hezbollah is the most formidable non-state army in the world. And it's sworn to Israel's destruction. After Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah transformed itself into a new kind of army. During the 2006 war, Hezbollah forced Israeli ground troops to retreat.

The Party of God's most potent innovation at first was the suicide bomber. Hezbollah now has an enormous rocket arsenal with the power not only to kill civilians in Israel but also to sink Israeli ships and to blow up Merkava tanks. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah: "The elimination of Israel from existence is inevitable because this is a historical and divine law from which there is no escape."

Hezbollah's cult of death is stronger than ever. The eliminationist rhetoric and dreams of total destruction are taken to heart by those willing to die to kill Jews. Said one fighter: "You cannot understand the joy of jihad unless you are in Hezbollah."

AR Zero tolerance: Kill the PoGs.

2012 March 10

The Art Of Conversation
The Economist

In 44 BCE, the Roman orator Cicero wrote down some rules of conversation:
  1 Speak clearly
  2 Speak easily but not too much
  3 Give others their turn
  4 Do not interrupt
  5 Be courteous
  6 Deal seriously with serious matters, gracefully with lighter ones
  7 Never criticize people behind their backs
  8 Stick to subjects of general interest
  9 Do not talk about yourself
10 Never lose your temper

AR Excellent advice.

Meet SAFFiR
Wired

The Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot has been developed by the Naval Research Laboratory to help extinguish fires onboard ships and subs.

Scheduled for field tests in 2013, SAFFiR shows off the latest DARPA robotics technology:
+
Designed to use its robot
limbs like a human
+
Hands that can tote fire hoses
and throw gas grenades
+
Understand and respond to
human gestures
+
Track a person's line of sight
+
Batteries that last
30 minutes.

Matt
'It's much cheaper if you
travel at a different time —
the 1950s for example'

RCA Victor
Ziggy Stardust

A plaque marking the spot where David Bowie was photographed for the cover of his 1972 album
The Rise and Fall of
Ziggy Stardust and the
Spiders from Mars
will be unveiled in Heddon Street, off Regent Street, London.

AR Great album,
meant a lot to me.

The Pain of Exclusion
Kipling D. Williams

Our fundamental psychological needs are to belong to one or more groups, to maintain self-esteem, to have a sense of control over our lives, and to believe that our existence has a meaning.

Ostracism threatens all these needs. The brain registers it as physical pain, as a flurry of activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Ostracism usually engenders a concerted effort to be included again, though not necessarily by the group that shunned us. We do this by agreeing with, mimicking, obeying, or cooperating with others. We want to fit in, even against our better judgment.

2012 March 9

Watson The Billionaire
Sebastian Mallaby

Citigroup just hired a brilliant consultant called Watson to build out its digital banking. Watson also advises healthcare companies and took top prize last year on the TV show Jeopardy. Watson will soon earn more than $1 billion a year. Not bad for an IBM supercomputer.

Watson is only the start. The era of Big Data is at hand. Human judgment is making way for machine-driven analysis in executive offices. Innovators and programmers are earning more than ever as they leverage the new technologies to create global brands. The big machines will not raise unemployment in the long run. But in the short run displaced workers may be in trouble.

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Revisited
The Physics arXiv Blog

Einstein had a problem with "spooky action at a distance" in quantum mechanics. He debated it with Niels Bohr using the EPR paradox of 1935. Imagine a pair of entangled particles described by the same wavefunction. The particles can become widely separated in space, but still a measurement on one immediately applies to the other. Einstein said special relativity made this impossible, so something was wrong in quantum mechanics.

The EPR paradox hung on until 1964, when John Bell described entanglement as a "nonlocal" phenomenon. Entanglement allows a nonlocal influence between particles that does not force classical information to travel faster than light. This resolved the paradox with special relativity.

Hrvoje Nikoli in Croatia now reveals that Einstein first found the paradox in 1930. Einstein challenged the Heisenberg uncertainty relation between energy and time by imagining a box that can be opened and closed quickly and which contains an ensemble of photons. When open, the box emits a single photon at a precise time. This limits the resolution of a measurement of the photon's energy. But the energy can be measured with arbitrary precision by measuring the change of energy of the box when the photon is emitted, which must be equal to the energy of the photon. Einstein inferred that quantum mechanics is inconsistent.

Bohr said that since the measurement of time takes place in a gravitational field, the lapse in time during which the box is open must also depend on the box's position. This is not a good answer, since it presupposes a logical link between quantum mechanics and general relativity that we still lack.

Nikoli says the total energy of the system is constant and governed by a single mathematical entity, even after the photon is emitted. So the box and the photon must be entangled. A measurement on the box immediately influences the photon and vice versa. This is already the EPR paradox.

arXiv:1203.1139v1

2012 March 8

Bombs for Israel
The Times

President Obama reportedly offered Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu a deal: he will supply Israel with advanced bunker-busting bombs and long-range tanker planes if it agrees not to attack Iran in 2012.

The Military Balance 2012
International Institute for Strategic Studies

Asian defense spending is likely to exceed that of Europe in 2012. Between 2008 and 2010, defense spending has been reduced in 16 European NATO member states.

The United States, too, has begun to reduce defense spending. A reassessment of policy and strategy indicates a rebalancing towards the Asia-Pacific region. But the USA will remain by far the world's major military power and the only NATO member capable of sustaining large air-sea operations or of projecting substantial ground forces on a global scale for a sustained period.

In 2011, Asian defense spending increased by over 3% in real terms. China's share of regional expenditure is now more than 30%.

AR Russian spending is increasing too. We still need NATO.

Nick Bostrom is pretty sure we're living in a computer simulation and could be deleted

2012 March 7

Global warming on trial: William D. Nordhaus reports

2012 March 6

Lecture on Mideast policy and politics by former U.S. General John P. Abizaid
Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut, Heidelberg

White House, Monday

President Obama: We do not want to see a nuclear arms race in one of the most volatile regions in the world. We do not want the possibility of a nuclear weapon falling into the hands of terrorists. And we do not want a regime that has been a state sponsor of terrorism being able to feel that it can act even more aggressively or with impunity as a consequence of its nuclear power.

Prime Minister Netanyahu: Israel must have the ability always to defend itself by itself against any threat ... When it comes to Israel's security, Israel has the sovereign right to make its own decisions.

The God Wars
Bryan Appleyard

Neo-atheism is a tripartite belief system:
Atheism — there is no God and religions are deluded
Secularism — exclude religion from the public sphere
Darwinism — science tells the whole truth about us

In the early 1990s, I was engaged in a debate with Dawkins at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He said, to much applause, that the existence of God was a scientific issue.

Alain de Botton on Richard Dawkins: "He stands at the head of what can really be called a cult ... It smacks of a sort of psychological collapse in him, a collapse in those resources of maturity that would keep someone on an even keel. There is what psychoanalysts would call a deep rigidity in him."

After 9/11, Neo-atheism became a full-blooded ideology, informed by four books:
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
The End of Faith by Sam Harris
Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett
God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens
These authors became known as the Four Horsemen.

Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness, and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery that absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated.

AR I must write a manifesto on all this.

The book ends

Disney
Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins
in John Carter

John Carter
The Guardian

Andrew Stanton, 46, has earned Pixar more than $1.3 billion. The lead writer on the Toy Story trilogy and writer and director of Finding Nemo and Wall-E is in London to wrap his new movie
John Carter, an adaptation of
the 1912 science fantasy novel
A Princess of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The movie has cost Disney $250 million.

Philip K. Dick

Airbus Cracks Are British
The Times

Wing cracks that have grounded the Airbus 380 are the fault of design engineers at Filton near Bristol. The entire fleet is to be called in for overhaul after cracks of up to 2 mm were found in all 69 aircraft in service. The issue could cost Airbus €100 million in compensation.

The cracks were found as a result of fleet-wide checks after the blowout of a Rolls-Royce engine on a Qantas A380 flight last November. Investigations uncovered serious cracking in brackets in the interior of the wings. The problem is a design and process engineering failure.





British Carrier Confusion
The Guardian

British defense plans are in turmoil again. Last year the government decided to buy the navalized F-35C version of the Lockheed Martin F-35 for its new aircraft carriers. This version is not only cheaper but also has a longer range and greater payload than the vertical-lift F-35B version they originally chose. The change would let French planes land on British carriers, and vice versa, for joint missions. But now the ministry says redesigning the carriers for the F-35C will be too expensive.

The first new carrier will be launched in 2016 and mothballed immediately. The second will first sail in 2020. The pair will cost between £6 billion and £12 billion. The UK will have just six operational F-35s by 2020.

Anothermag.com
Kate Moss
La Moss, 38, is modeling
a chiffon outfit designed
by Sarah Burton

2012 March 5

Obama Versus Netanyahu
Financial Times

Barack Obama meets Benjamin Netanyahu during the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Israel and America are at odds on Iran and the Palestinian issue. On Iran, Netanyahu wants the United States to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities, but Obama doubts that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an existential threat to Israel. On Palestinian statehood, Netanyahu is bound to reject it, but demographic trends will force Greater Israel to limit democracy and hence its own legitimacy.

Can Obama disagree openly with Netanyahu when AIPAC and other groups in the formidable Israel lobby have so much influence?

Philosophy
Colin McGinn

Let us drop the name "philosophy" for the academic discipline. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, from the Greek. We philosophers value knowledge, but do we love it? And is it wisdom we value? Wisdom means practical wisdom, not scientific understanding. But academic philosophy is a science. The dictionary defines a science as "a systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject". Academic philosophy shares most of the marks of science as commonly understood.

I propose the name "ontics". It emphasizes that our primary concern is the general nature of being. The dictionary defines philosophy as "the study of the fundamental nature of reality, knowledge, and existence". All three cited areas are types of being. We might also say we do ontical science. We can leave the word "philosophy" to those practical sages who tell people how best to live. I hereby launch the Campaign for Renaming Academic Philosophy (CRAP).

Emotions
Jonah Lehrer

The emotional system may be better suited for difficult cognitive tasks than the conscious brain. The unconscious brain can process vast amounts of information in parallel to analyze large data sets without getting overwhelmed. Every feeling is like a summary of data, a quick encapsulation of all the information processing that we don't have access to. When it comes to making predictions about complex events, this extra information makes the difference between an informed guess and random chance. But subjects only benefit from the effect when they have some knowledge of the subject.

We Are in a Book!
Slate

We Are in a Book! is a kid's tale about Gerald the Elephant and Piggie the Pig. Gerald and Piggie are best friends. Gerald is anxious and Piggie is carefree.

Gerald and Piggie are hanging out doing nothing, when Piggie notices that someone is watching them. That someone, Piggie realizes, is you, "a reader!" They couldn't be happier. "We are in a book!" They explode into spasms of joy. Then Piggie asks Gerald if he would like to say a word "before the book ends." "ENDS!?!" Gerald cries. "The book ends?!" Piggie replies that all books end. Gerald is stricken by panic, then existential dread.

We Are in a Book! is freaky in its simple, direct depiction of death. It smacks kids right in the face with that nothingness. It shows how the void awaits us all.

2012 March 4

Samadhi

2012 March 3

Iran, Bombs, Oil
Gal Luft

When U.S. President Barack Obama meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week, gasoline prices will be on his mind. The tension with Iran has pushed crude prices to their highest level since the onset of the Arab Spring. The GOP smells blood.

Obama faces the risk of an Israeli military strike on Iran prior to the November elections. Should such an attack take place, the short-term implications for the global economy could be dire. A war in the Middle East means an oil shock and oil shocks bring recessions.

Obama wants a second term. He may decide to reinvent himself as a war president in the hope that American motorists will view their pain at the pump forgivingly as part of their patriotic duty. Such an option would also defuse Republican criticism that Obama is weak on Iran.

AR Oil spikes — bang goes Europe — I go down (hope not).

Engines Hard Astern!
Wolfgang Kaden

The euro has brought discord and disharmony to Europe. Debts accrued by individual states are being communized, which angers citizens in donor countries. The debtor countries must endure stringent austerity measures and massive cuts in social services and wages, angering their citizens.

Government leaders and central bankers have violated the EU treaties. They have exceeded the limit on annual government deficits and ignored Article 125 of the Lisbon Treaty prohibiting a member state from being liable for the debts of another member state.

The European Central Bank has been buying up sovereign bonds to finance debtor states. In the last three months, the ECB has lent a trillion euros to banks at low interest so that they could purchase sovereign debt. This easy money lets the debtors take on even more debt.

Going back now would mean honoring strict deficit rules and penalizing those who break them, ending the ECB practice of debt financing, and returning responsibility for budget and trade deficits to national governments. It would mean giving in to market forces.

AR Europe doesn't have a reverse gear. No going back. Brace for the iceberg.

Koran Burning
The New York Times

American and Afghan officials investigating the Koran-burning episode that has brought relations between the countries to a new low say that the destruction could have been headed off at several points along a chain of mishaps, poor judgments, and ignored procedures.

American officials insist that no deliberate insult was intended and that military justice and apologies should suffice, while Afghan religious leaders demand public identification and punishment of the offenders as the only way to soothe Afghan outrage over what is seen as unforgivable desecration.

AR Public punishment of Afghan religious leaders who support such a preposterous reaction to the destruction of a few useless books would be more appropriate. How about we each of us burn a Koran to show our contempt for this absurd hoohah?

Killing Babies
The Telegraph

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are "morally irrelevant" and ending their lives is no different to abortion, say researchers linked to Oxford University.

Dr. Trevor Stammers, director of medical ethics at St. Mary's University College, criticized the term "after-birth abortion" used in the Journal of Medical Ethics article: "This is just verbal manipulation that is not philosophy. I might refer to abortion henceforth as antenatal infanticide."

AR Whatever they call it, it won't go down well in the Bible Belt.

The Exegesis
Los Angeles Review of Books

In the years before his death in 1982, Philip K. Dick produced an 8,000-page opus of theological speculation known as the Exegesis, which editors Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem have culled to less than 1,000 pages.

In the Exegesis, Dick struggled to decipher a series of hallucinatory revelations that commenced in early 1974. Dick had endured a decade of counterculture paranoia spawned by a hermetic hippie lifestyle and punctuated by occasional flirtations with antiwar protest, and became convinced that he was the focus of a conspiracy linking the IRS, the FBI, Soviet agents, left wing American academics, and the hated Nixon administration.

Recovering from oral surgery in February 1974, pumped full of Darvon, lithium, and massive quantities of megavitamins, he began experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations that took the form of a pink laser shooting highly coded information into his opened mind during a series of hypnogogic visitations. He underwent a powerful anamnesis, stimulated by mystical contact with VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System, sometimes also called Zebra or God) that unshackled his genetic memory, permitting him to see through the Black Iron Prison of our world into the macrometasomacosmos, the morphological realm of the Platonic Eidos, in the process revealing himself to be a homoplasmate, an incarnation of the Gnostic Logos subsisting in orthogonal time.

AR What fun! One could go crazy too reading such stuff.

2012 March 2

The Anglosphere
Joel Kotkin and Shashi Parulekar

The Anglosphere — the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand — no longer enjoys the overwhelming global dominance that it once had. Commentators describe it as decadent compared with China. Like Germany in the 1930s or Japan in the 1970s, China has found that centrally directed economic systems can achieve rapid economic growth. But the Anglosphere is still far and away the world's largest economic bloc. It accounts for more than a quarter of global GDP.

Anglosphere countries possess overwhelming military superiority to protect their economic interests. Their economic and military leadership reflects their technological leadership. Almost all the world's leading software, biotechnology, and aerospace firms are concentrated in English-speaking countries. English is the primary global language of business and science and the prevailing tongue in a host of key developing countries. When European businesspeople venture overseas, they speak English.

Revelations
Adam Gopnik

The Book of Revelation has drama, but Elaine Pagels shows it's actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time it was written. It's a polemic written by an expatriate follower of Jesus who wanted the movement to remain Jewish. John of Patmos hated the pagan world. Yet this worst of all nightmares ends not in terror but in a glorious new world. It's a Hollywood ending.

USAF Can Help Israel Strike Iran
The Times

President Obama has a Pentagon list of military options for a strike against Iran's nuclear sites to discuss with Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu in Washington next week.

U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz mentioned plans for a joint air offensive against Iran. These include American refueling of Israeli jets in midair and American strikes against pillars of the Islamic Republic, including military bases, the Revolutionary Guard, and Ministry of Intelligence and Security installations. General Schwartz said the latest version of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb was now operational.

Washington says it takes the Iranian threat to build a nuclear bomb seriously. General Schwarz did not say whether air power alone could halt Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Muslims in Germany
Spiegel Online

About 20% of Muslims living in Germany are skeptical about integration, shows a German Interior Ministry study. There are an estimated 4 million Muslims in Germany, roughly half of whom have German citizenship. The study is based on telephone interviews with 700 Muslims.

Among Muslims aged 14 to 32, the report says "there exists a subgroup that could be described as strictly religious with strong antipathy to the West, a tendency to accept violence, and no willingness to integrate." German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich: "Those who reject freedom and democracy have no future here."

Positive spin: The study found that almost 4 in 5 Muslims with German citizenship and over half those without German citizenship have a positive attitude to integration.

Consciousness
Anil Seth

Neuroscientists are unraveling the neural mechanisms of human consciousness. Questions:

1 What are the critical brain regions for consciousness?
The brain contains billions neurons and trillions of connections between them. We think that consciousness depends on a specific network of regions in the cortex and the thalamus.

2 What are the mechanisms of general anesthesia?
General anesthesia causes total loss of consciousness. There is evidence that this involves a disintegration of how different parts of the brain work together.

3 What is the self?
Selfhood is a complex phenomenon. Its different features depend on different brain mechanisms and can be manipulated experimentally.

4 What determines experiences of volition?
The experience of intending and causing our actions is common. A growing consensus sees volition as involving a particular brain network mediating complex decisions between different actions.

5 What is the function of consciousness?
Many cognitive functions can take place in the absence of consciousness. Perhaps consciousness integrates information. Experiences rule out alternatives and thus generate information.

6 How rich is consciousness?
Most evidence about consciousness depends on subjective reports. Other evidence may let us distinguish the brain mechanisms of consciousness from those involved in cognition.

7 Are other animals conscious?
Mammals share much of the neural machinery important for human consciousness. But animal consciousness is unlikely to involve conscious selfhood in the same sense that humans enjoy.

8 Are vegetative patients conscious?
In a "vegetative state", patients' behavior suggests that they are awake but not aware. Brain imaging has revealed that at least some of these patients are conscious.

Anil Seth is co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, and chair of ASSC 16, Brighton, July 2-6.

AR This is how to make scientific progress. Colin (Feb 25) take note.

2012 March 1

Eurozone Solution
Guy Verhofstadt

Efforts to overcome the eurozone's sovereign debt crisis add up to more than €1 trillion, yet we are no nearer to a solution than in 2009. If Greece should remain part of the eurozone, then heads of government in the eurozone must accept a common economic policy, a single system of governance, and a common bond market.

A system of eurobonds for the eurozone could be based on an insurance model with a no-claims bonus for states performing well, whereby they would pay lower rates than poorly performing ones, so addressing the problem of moral hazard.

If such a system is only possible once all the elements of a common fiscal policy are in place, then an interim solution is required. A new European Collective Redemption Fund could make €2.3 trillion available to mutualize debt above 60% for countries not in a bailout program. It would be a temporary facility that married discipline with solidarity.

AR Sounds sensible to me.

Brain Drain
Andrew Hamilton

Oxford has just received the most generous gift to humanities students in its 900-year history. The £26 million gift will fund the Mica and Ahmet Ertegun graduate scholarship program for students from all over the world to study at Oxford.

The biggest financial challenge now facing higher education in the UK is how to fund postgraduate study. The United States offers graduate students a government loan scheme to cover their fees and living costs. The UK has no such scheme. A brain drain of excellent students to places where they can get funding is not in the national interest.

AR Andrew is interested in the themes of my book G.O.D. Is Great. I sent him a copy and talked with him about it but he hadn't read it and has still not offered his opinion. I find it hard to recommend that anyone do graduate work at Oxford.

Bloodless Religion
Caspar Melville

Alain de Botton wants to strip the assets of religion and build an atheist temple in the City of London. He sets himself the task of trying to make us all better, happier people and the world a nicer place. His books have sold briskly and he has launched two initiatives: the School of Life, which offers lectures and courses to the well-heeled in search of meaning; and Living Architecture, which offers posh holiday rentals in fine buildings.

De Botton calls his proposals reappropriation, reminding us how many of the apparent innovations of religion were taken over from previous cultures by the rampant colonizers of the monotheistic religions. Hence the atheist temple, art with a moral message, education with a purpose, communal meals, and regular rituals, including the odd orgy. He even wants to steal back the notions of the soul and original sin. "Soul has good common currency and is not strictly associated with the supernatural. ... What original sin is saying is: we are all nuts, we're all flawed, we're all crazy. It's got nothing to do with religion; it's just a useful metaphysical starting point."

This attempt to squat in religion's house without taking on the mortgage will outrage believers, who would deny absolutely that religion makes any sense without God. Despite the attention-grabbing tower and orgy proposals, there is nothing very new here. Trying to remake religion with the bad bits taken out is like joining the Church of England. No mention at all of Islam.

AR Impudent nonsense, doomed to triviality.

The Writer
Tim Parks

In recent decades, people started studying literature and large numbers of them began to write. But ever fewer authors sold ever more books while ever more writers sold ever fewer books. The new task of the writer was not just to deliver a book but to promote himself.

Creative writing courses don't teach students how to write. Such learning may or may not occur. The student is there to show himself to teachers who can help him get published. Most courses now offer classes on approaching agents and publishers and promoting one's work.

The perceived need for an expensive creative writing course to learn to be a writer affords paid employment to those older writers who have trouble making ends meet. Any idea that the publishing culture we have today might produce a credible canon is nonsense.

AR Money may measure value but it cannot define it.

Antarctica reflects the mood of my February

Bloch sphere representation
of a qubit

Reuters
Angelina Jolie
at the 2012 Ocars

Brits Are Broke
The Telegraph

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne: "The British government has run out of money because all the money was spent in the good years. The money and the investment and the jobs need to come from the private sector."


Brits Out
The Times

Britain's contingent of 20,000 troops and their families from Germany is scheduled to be withdrawn by 2020. The Ministry of Defence says the relocation will save £250 million a year.

A small contribution to
cognitive science

Hisaji Hara
A Study of Katia Reading
(2009, detail)

Japanese photographer Hisaji Hara has painstakingly restaged the haunting paintings of adolescent girls by Polish-French artist Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (Balthus)

Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
2012-02-24 — 2012-03-31

"I, Putin"
Spiegel Online

Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin isn't speaking to Hubert Seipel. The interview stalls and the conversation grinds to a halt. It is a scene for Seipel's film Ich, Putin, airing Monday on German television.

Seipel is an experienced political filmmaker and has made dozens of documentaries. Putin, 59, tries to portray himself as fit, vigorous and manly. But Seipel shows a man stubbornly fending off physical decline.



The Big Fight
The Guardian

Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford
Atheist Professor Richard Dawkins versus Christian Archbishop Rowan Williams

Dawkins: The laws of physics have conspired to make the collisions of atoms produce plants, kangaroos, insects, and us. Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing.

Williams: A soul is something that does not cease with death. What it is, I have no idea. A number of images, but no idea.

2012 February 29

Apple Worth $500 Billion
Financial Times

Apple is now the world's most valuable company, valued at $504 billion, or about $90 billion more than ExxonMobil. Apple CEO Tim Cook said the board was "thinking very deeply" about what to do with its cash reserves of some $100 billion.

The last three technology companies that came near $500 billion market capitalization were Microsoft (now worth $266 billion), Intel ($136 billion), and Cisco ($109 billion). Microsoft even surpassed $600 billion in 2000. ExxonMobil and General Electric are the only other companies to pass $500 billion.

Qubits
Wired

IBM physicists at Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, are advancing the art of computing with squid qubits. An IBM team is researching superconducting loops where current flows in both directions at once, one way for 1 and the other for 0. They implement a qubit on a silicon substrate as an aluminum oxide Josephson junction between two superconducting niobium electrodes. They have kept the system from decohering for as long as 10 to 100 microseconds. They have also built a controlled NOT gate that flips the state of one qubit depending on the state of the other and works with 95% reliability. They are now ready to build multi-qubit systems.

Emotional Style
Newsweek

A new theory traces emotional style to patterns of activity throughout the brain. The prefrontal cortex is the seat of judgment, planning, and other executive functions. Bundles of neurons run between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in negative emotion and distress. The left prefrontal sends inhibitory signals to the amygdala, allowing the brain to bounce back from an upsetting experience.

Mindfulness meditation is an effective tool for changing emotional style. It cultivates greater resilience and faster recovery from setbacks by weakening the chain of associations that keep us obsessing about a setback. It strengthens connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. As your thoughts begin to leap from one catastrophe to the next, you can pause, reflect, and step back from the abyss.

What Are Universities For?
Chris Patten

Britain has somehow managed to hang on to its reputation for having the second-best higher education system in the world. This may be partly because of language and because much of the rest of Europe has also underfunded its universities. Germany provided a higher education model for the United States in the 19th century but today there is no German university in the top 50.

The United States spends more than twice as large a proportion of its GDP on higher education as Europe and the UK. Higher education in California is socially inclusive but intellectually hierarchical. With its separation of elite research institutions, undergraduate state universities, and vocational community colleges, it would have provided a good model for Britain.

The German Genius
Andy Ross

Peter Watson has written the best biographical introduction to the glories of post-Enlightenment German history that I have found or can imagine. This is a thick book and dense with facts, but the narrative drive is relentless and the overall conclusion is convincing. Germany has done more than any other nation to shape the modern world we live in, the world in which the United States of America has taken up the flag and continued the long march into a brighter future. If the USA is the modern Rome, Germany is its Greece, its Athens and Sparta rolled into one.

Watson rolls out a pantheon of great Germans for our edification, and an impressive roll call it is. From the early days of Kant and the idealists and Goethe and the romantics, through the middle years of Nietzsche and Wagner, science and industrialization, military prowess and colonial adventures, to the glory days of Einstein and the quantum theorists, Freud and scientific medicine, Heidegger and the existentialists, to the apocalyptic horror of Hitler and the Nazis, and onward through the economic miracle to reunification and a respected place at the heart of the European Union, Germany has been there, done that, and seen it all.

This entire astonishing story is tirelessly chronicled in Watson's magnum opus. He offers potted biographies and assessments of the hundred or more prominent Germans that all educated people should be acquainted with, and sets the tales in a master narrative that takes the reader through a story like no other in the entire history of civilization. The new relevance of the story is that Germany is a lot more than the blighted source of two world wars and a holocaust. Germany was the engine of a hundred years of progress that changed the world and gave America the tools and the opening for its own world hegemony. Now, in a Europe that otherwise looks desolate, Germany is the best hope for renewal.

AR Peter Watson's book

2012 February 28

Turkey Versus Iran
The Atlantic

Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Istanbul's Kadir Has University, says Turkey and Iran will continue the elaborate diplomatic games they have played for centuries: "It's all smiles between Turkey and Iran, but that's very typical of the relationship between these two countries, which is competition and cooperation wrapped up in a total lack of trust."

The Human Brain Project The project will integrate everything we know about the brain into computer models and use them to simulate the working of the brain. Ultimately, it will attempt to simulate the complete human brain. The project presents a huge challenge for computing. Simulating just one neuron requires the full power of a laptop computer and the human brain has billions. As researchers come closer to simulating the complete human brain they will need ever more powerful computing resources.

2012 February 27

Friedrich to Greece: Jump!
Spiegel Online

German Interior Minister and CSU member Hans-Peter Friedrich says Greece should be encouraged to abandon the euro: "Greece's chances to regenerate itself and become competitive are surely greater outside the monetary union than if it remains in the euro area." The Social Democrats issued a statement saying: "The CSU is completely out of control." Green Party leader Jürgen Trittin said the comments were "absurd" and called on Merkel to restore order in her ranks.

AR Such fun when they have these fights up in Berlin.

Beyond Blue Brain
Nature

Henry Markram's proposed Human Brain Project (HBP) is an effort to build a supercomputer simulation that integrates everything known about the human brain, from the structures of ion channels in neural cell membranes up to mechanisms behind consciousness. The HBP is a finalist to win €1 billion as a European Union Flagship initiative.

The computer power required to run such a grand unified theory of the brain would be roughly an exaflop. Given Moore's law, exascale computers could be available by the 2020s. Markram says neuroscientists should get ready for them.

The Blue Brain Project was a prototype for the HBP. The effort has proved that unifying models can serve as repositories for data on cortical structure and function. The team has created the huge ecosystem of infrastructure and software required to make Blue Brain useful to every neuroscientist, says Markram.

Nature 482, 456–458
doi:10.1038/482456a

Future Mobiles
CNN

Mobile phones will dominate our lives and invade our privacy. Futurologist Ray Hammond sees new form factors, with fashion spectacles for the visual display, earring studs the audio, and a third device for touch input. Later they will migrate under our skin as Borg implants.

Future devices will protect us from information overload. Mobile voice-based assistants will become our data guardians and learn our personal preferences to tailor and streamline the flow of data we swim in. Users will trade privacy for an enhanced online experience.

Expertmaker CEO Lars Hard: "When we have a large screen, we can browse through large amounts of text, but that's not possible on a mobile device. So we need to bring more brains onto the device, so we can provide more relevant information when needed. ... Today the young generation are almost forced to be glued to a screen to catch up with everything on Facebook because all their friends are putting this pressure on them. But by having more personalization and personal agents that act as proxies for you, you can reduce the time you need to spend on the machine."

Fiksu CEO Micah Adler forecasts that annual app downloads in excess of 100 billion by 2015 will drive a market dominated by Apple and Android. He says the apps will evolve to enhance our existence. Cloud storage and processing will let mobile hardware last longer.

AR All this I said in my 2010 book G.O.D. Is Great.

Turing's Cathedral
The Observer

Alan Turing, 1950: "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."

George Dyson, 2005: "I visited Google's headquarters, and was utterly floored by what I saw. 'We're not scanning all those books to be read by people. We're scanning them to be read by an AI,' an engineer whispered to me. And at that moment, I started thinking, this isn't Turing's mansion, this is Turing's cathedral!"

AR At least the Googlebrain will read my unsold books.

Die Kunst des negativen Denkens
Dr. Klaus-Jürgen Grün
YouTube, 57:53

2012 February 26

Aspies
Spiegel Online

Thorkil Sonne was the technical director of the Danish communications company TDC. Then a psychologist said his young son had Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism. People with Asperger's usually have no problems concentrating and have very good memories, but their inability to relate to others makes them outsiders.

In 2004, Sonne established a company in Copenhagen called Specialisterne. The company hires autistic people and places them in projects, primarily with IT companies, where they analyze software, manage data, and write programs. Sonne ensures that his employees are paid standard industry wages. His long-term goal is to create a million jobs worldwide for "aspies" with autistic spectrum disorders.

Sonne: "I wanted to take advantage of the characteristics that autistic people have, not just for their sake, but also to benefit the economy." He says people with Asperger's can concentrate better and are more precise. They just need a little help with other things.

2012 February 25

Syria
Matthew Parris

Arab Spring was always a vainglorious metaphor, encouraging false hopes. There never was an Arab Spring. There's a region of the world whose peoples, since the fall of Byzantium, have twisted and tangled themselves into the most appalling, grisly and intractable mess, periodically exacerbated by intervention from the outside. We in the West may be able to help at the margins. And we will need patience as we watch thousands being slaughtered. But ever since the Crusades our intervention has usually made things worse.

AR Islam is the problem. It glorifies war and encourages brutality.

Iran
The Guardian

The Islamic Republic of Iran has accelerated its production of enriched uranium in recent months and stonewalled on evidence of work toward a bomb. Iran has now produced over five tons of low enriched uranium and over 100 kg of uranium enriched to 20%. Enriched further, the stockpile is enough for at least four nuclear warheads.

AR Islam again. Time either to fix it or to consign it to history.

Consciousness
Colin McGinn

Try to imagine a world with no consciousness in it. Now add consciousness. I predict it will seem to you that you have performed a miracle. We can distinguish five positions on consciousness:

1 Eliminativist: The impression that we are conscious is an illusion. Those who maintain that consciousness reduces to brain states eliminate it too. They are sentient beings who claim to be mindless zombies.

2 Dualist: The physical brain and the conscious mind remain distinct entities. But this makes the mind too separate. It precludes intelligible interaction and dependence.

3 Idealist: There is nothing but mind. We merely hallucinate brains. The universe is one vast consciousness. The Big Bang was just the cosmic spirit sneezing. But where did the spirit come from?

4 Panpsychist: Mind is all around us. Even the lowliest of things has a streak of sentience running through it. But there is no evidence of such distribution of consciousness in the material world.

5 Mysterian: I acknowledge that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical, and expendable feature of life on Earth. My philosophy has more ignorance in it than knowledge.

AR Amusing but defeatist, as I argued in Mindworlds. Colin is a nice chap but he's no scientist.

2012 February 24

Being Strong
Vladimir Putin

We in Russia will under no circumstances surrender our strategic deterrent capability. We see new wars breaking out and we see international law degraded and eroded. We cannot rely on diplomatic and economic methods alone to resolve conflicts.

We are developing our armed forces and modernizing Russia's defense industry. We will allocate around 23 trillion rubles for defense over the next decade. Russia's military and technical response to the U.S. global missile defense system and its European section will be effective and asymmetrical.

Some people argue that rebuilding our military-industrial complex will saddle the economy with the same burden that bankrupted the Soviet Union. I disagree. The USSR collapsed after it suppressed natural market forces in the economy and disregarded the interests of the people.

The huge resources invested in modernizing our military-industrial complex and re-equipping the army must fuel the engines of modernization in our economy. The objective is to secure Russia's sovereignty, the respect of our partners, and lasting peace.

Gulf War III
Eugene Robinson

The Iranian government wants Iran to dominate the region and seeks to perpetuate its own hold on power. Achieving nuclear capability would serve both these goals. A world with a nuclear-capable Iran would be a more dangerous place, for Israel, for the United States, for Saudi Arabia, and for many other nations. But an Israeli air attack would only delay the nuclear program by a few years. The United States could do a more definitive job, but it would take a massive, sustained bombing campaign of the kind that preceded the Iraq invasion. Are you ready for Gulf War III?

Santorum and Romney
George F. Will

Rick Santorum disdains Barack Obama's environmentalism as phony theology, calls involvement of government in public education anachronistic, says abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest, and declares that the purpose of sex is procreation. But in doing so Santorum has made his Catholicism more central and problematic in this nomination contest than Mitt Romney's Mormonism has been.

The phenomena that trouble Santorum are serious. The use of prenatal testing for search-and-destroy missions against handicapped babies is barbaric. Obama's pursuit of a national curriculum for kindergarten through 12th grade is ill-advised. And no domestic problem is more urgent and intractable than that of family disintegration. More than half of all babies born to women under age 30 are born to unmarried mothers. The resulting social pathologies, related to a constantly renewed cohort of adolescent males without fathers at home, include disorderly neighborhoods, schools that cannot teach, mass incarceration, and the intergenerational transmission of poverty. We do not know how to address this with government policies.

The Republican contest has become a choice between two miscast candidates. Romney cannot convince voters that he understands the difference between business and politics. Santorum is repelling people who want their politics without theology.

AR Politics is about more than business but less than God.

me@andyross.net  ●  16596 visits and 26264 page hits from 2012-04-18 to 2012-05-15  ●  2012-05-16