2017 May 30

European Defense Strategy

Paul Mason

President Trump is ready to put American business interests before those of Planet Earth or of Europeans facing down Russia. If it comes to a fight, America will be last, not first.

The EU powers and the British government need a new strategy. Angela Merkel sees this. Her speech should lead Europe to consolidate around the EZ core and liberal values.

Britain, set on a catastrophic exit from the EU single market, must wake up. When the UK was the dominant world power, playing one European power against another may have been fun. After 1945, the urge to stand aloof from Europe and seek to divide it is fatal.

We need to defuse the Brexit bomb fast. The current UK government includes amateurs who dream of a new trading empire and nationalists who jeer at the idea of a European army.

Trump shows the current strategy of NATO is a dead letter. From 1939 to 1941, the UK had to fight as a European power to survive. Europe needs more security cooperation.

Brexit Bomb

Simon Tilford

Brextremists often say the EU economy is weak and the UK economy can boom by leaving it. In fact, Brexit threatens to make matters worse.

British economic growth between 2000 and 2015 lagged behind Spain and Germany. In 2015 Britain ranked only slightly ahead of France. UK wages have risen by much less than French and German wages over the last 15 years, and Brits have to work longer hours than the French or the Germans to earn as much. Since 2000, poorer regions of Britain have not been catching up with richer EU regions but falling further behind.

A successful labor market requires skilled workers, access to housing, and good quality infrastructure. A significantly higher proportion of young British adults suffer from weak literacy and numeracy than those in France, Germany, Italy, or Spain. The UK is building around half as many houses as it did 40 years ago, and has invested less in roads, railways, and air travel than other large EU economies over the last 20 years.

Outside the EU, Britain will trade less with member states. Brexit threatens to make a mediocre economic performance even worse.

Merkel in Munich

Gideon Rachman

Speaking at an election rally in Munich, Angela Merkel came close to announcing the death of the Western alliance. But her speech was a blunder for at least five reasons:

1 It is a mistake to allow the Trump presidency to throw into doubt an alliance that has kept the peace in Europe for 70 years. It is possible that Trump is an aberration and will soon be out of office.

2 Trump was right about the failure of most European countries to meet NATO targets on military expenditure. It is unsustainable for the US to account for most of NATO defense spending.

3 By implying that NATO is now coming apart, Merkel has compounded the error Trump made. Encouraging the Russian government in this way reduces European security.

4 Merkel was unwise and unfair to bracket Britain with America. The UK sided with the EU against the US on climate change. The UK government upholds the British commitment to NATO.

5 Pursuit of the Brexit negotiations in a similar spirit would risk creating lasting antagonism between Britain and the EU. A hard Brexit could weaken the British commitment to NATO.

Merkel chose a beer-tent in Bavaria to announce a separation from the UK and the US while bracketing those two countries with Russia.

AR She was electioneering.
 

2017 May 29

Every Word a Winner

Annett Meiritz, Anna Reimann, Severin Weiland

Angela Merkel in a Munich beer tent: "We must fight for our future, as Europeans, for our destiny."

Merkel is now regarded as a leader of the liberal world. Her beer tent speech breaks with her previous caution over the US president. Her hopes are fading for constructive cooperation with Trump.

Trump says "America First" and means Europe must do more in future. Merkel and her foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel agree on more defense spending — controversial in Germany.

Global and European politics will be important in the German election campaign. Merkel now poses as a champion for Europe against Trump.

Merkel is betting on France. She and President Emmanuel Macron will push for a roadmap of reforms. Gabriel has a plan to invest more in EZ defense and foreign policy.

AR EZ fusion can be the core of a historic union as strong and stable as China.

Merkel v Trump

The New York Times

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe's most influential leader, has apparently concluded that the United States of President Trump is no longer as reliable as it once was.

Merkel: "We Europeans must really take our fate into our own hands — of course in friendship with the United States of America, in friendship with Great Britain, and as good neighbors wherever possible also with other countries."

She said the G7 discussion about climate was very unsatisfactory — six against one. Trump refused to endorse the Paris climate accord, scolded Germany for its trade practices, and lectured NATO members for not spending enough on defense.

Trump tweet: "Just returned from Europe. Trip was a great success for America. Hard work but big results!"

Presidency in Peril

Elizabeth Drew

If Donald Trump leaves office before four years are up, this month might turn out to be the turning point. New revelations surround whether he colluded with Russia. His troubles will only grow.

Impeachable offenses are political questions. An impeachment of a president is grounded in the theory that the holder of that office has failed to fulfill his responsibility to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. This prevents a president from setting a tone that leads to acts by his aides that amount to a violation of constitutional government.

Trump has the most unhappy White House staff ever. He is a nearly impossible person to work for and screams at his staff when they tell him something he doesn't want to hear. People who have been to the Oval Office have come away stunned by his minimal attention span, his appalling lack of information, his tendency to say more than he knows.

The survival of Trump's presidency may depend on congressional Republicans. Their challenge is how to overcome the blights of Trump's chaotic governing and his lack of achievements on Capitol Hill. His sole substantive accomplishment thus far is House approval of a health care overhaul that will throw tens of millions of people off of health insurance.

Trump is in some ways a cannier politician than Nixon. He knows how to lie to his people to keep them behind him. But he cannot keep blaming his failures on others.
 

2017 May 28

Martin Luther

Ingrid D. Rowland

On Halloween 1517, Martin Luther, Augustinian friar and professor of theology, posted a broadsheet on the faculty bulletin board of Wittenberg University in Saxony. The poster proclaimed a series of propositions that questioned the basic beliefs of the Catholic Church.

His 95 theses set off the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation. Friar Martin focused his ire on the sale of indulgences. These papal dispensations grew out of a traditional medieval conviction that prayer, repentance, good works, and pilgrimage could atone in some measure for sin.

The sale of indulgences became an industry in Saxony. Pope Julius II and the Augsburg banker Jakob Fugger directed the revenue from German indulgences toward the rebuilding of Saint Peter's in Rome. Penitents put coins in indulgence chests, iron-bound coffers like giant armored piggy banks.

Friar Martin was driven by a spiritual insight. The Christian hope for eternal life, he believed, was a divine gift that no human being, no matter how virtuous, could ever deserve. Salvation was a gift from God, bestowed by divine grace.

Luther survived the firestorm his theses ignited not only because of his courage and eloquence but also because the local sovereign, Elector Frederick III of Saxony, sided with him. The archbishop of Mainz, Albert of Brandenburg, sided against and reported on the theses to Pope Leo X. The pope summoned Friar Martin to Rome but the friar demurred.

An interview was arranged in Augsburg in 1518. The inquisitor was a cardinal under instructions to make Luther recant or to arrest him and drag him back to Rome. But Luther stood his ground and the cardinal let him go.

In the following years, Luther proclaimed his views in torrents of prose and poetry in both Latin and German, and spread them as widely as the printing press could reach. He married the runaway nun Katharina von Bora, who bore him six children.

AR Halloween 2017 — mark your calendar!
 

2017 May 27

G7 Fiasco

Die Welt

Donald Trump wrecked the G7 summit: After endless wrangling, only a meager communiqué emerged.

Trump did not want to commit clearly to the Paris climate agreement. He portrayed the fight against terrorism as more important in a tweet: "Terrorism is at the top of the list." He blocked progress on free trade and criticized the Germans for running a trade surplus with the US.

AR Mr Nyet should take more care of his levers of global power.

G7 Summit

BBC

G7 leaders call on internet giants to crack down on extremist content. But they failed to agree on climate change — US president Donald Trump refused to endorse the 2015 Paris accord on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Trump and UK prime minister Theresa May talked trade.

G7: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and US.

German Cars Are Better

Financial Times

US president Donald Trump: "I don't have a problem with Germany, I have a problem with German trade. Look at the millions of cars they sell in the US. Terrible. We'll stop it."

German manufacturers exported 670,000 cars and light trucks to the US last year. BMW, Mercedes Benz, and Volkswagen produced 809,000 vehicles at their US plants. US auto imports from Germany, worth $22 billion, were 3.8% of all US auto imports in 2016.

EU president Donald Tusk: "This is going to be the most challenging G7 meeting in years. It is no secret that some leaders have different positions on climate, on trade .. Most importantly, we have to defend the rule-based international order."

Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn: "He wants to understand how we can bring back manufacturing, bring back jobs, but still be environmentally friendly, but not have a restriction enforced upon us that makes absolutely no sense."

AR Germans make the best cars, Americans make the best weapons. This illustrates the Ricardo theory of comparative advantage and shows why global free trade is best.
 

2017 May 26

NATO

Donald Trump

Members of the alliance must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations:
23 of the 28 member nations are still not paying what they should be paying and what they are supposed to be paying for their defense.

Two percent is the bare minimum for confronting today's very real and very vicious threats. If NATO countries made their full and complete contributions, then NATO would be even stronger than it is today, especially from the threat of terrorism.

The NATO of the future must include a great focus on terrorism and immigration. You have thousands and thousands of people pouring into our various countries. We must be tough. We must be strong. And we must be vigilant.

AR Trump is losing friends in NATO.

Quantum Dark Energy

Joshua Sokol

Dark energy was conjured up to explain what is pushing the universe apart ever faster. It seems to be spread evenly through space at a density of a few GeV/m^3.

Quantum mechanics (QM) says the vacuum is filled with jittering quantum fields. Calculations suggest a dark energy density way too high, so perhaps the fields tend to cancel out on big scales.

General relativity (GR) says energy is absorbed and released all the time by the flexing of spacetime. Overall balance is preserved, but the fine details remain mysterious.

GR and QM see the fundamental structure of the cosmos differently. GR sees 4D spacetime as smooth and continuous, but QM implies that on a small scale space is made up of discrete units. No unified theory of quantum gravity exists.

Perhaps particles feel the granularity of spacetime as friction and lose energy into space. If so, the matter in the universe has been losing energy steadily since a fraction of a second ABB. But the resulting estimate for dark energy strength is still way off.

Quantum cosmology lets the early universe be in a superposition of many sizes and states at once. The precision with which we can know the rate the universe is accelerating is uncertain, with consequences for all other variables that depend on that rate, such as the density of dark energy.

AR I vote for uncertain acceleration and dark energy as a rounding error.
 

2017 May 25

Hurricane Donald

Die Welt

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker: "I view President Trump with increasing sympathy. I think he is beginning to sense the wind of history."

NATO v Daesh

Financial Times

NATO leaders are expected to agree to join the US-led coalition against Daesh today as US president Donald Trump visits NATO headquarters in Brussels. NATO allies anticipate that he will publicly endorse NATO Article 5 mutual defence guarantee for the first time in Brussels.

Trump has pressed allies to intensify NATO counter-terror efforts, a demand backed by the UK. Germany and France had resisted joining the coalition against Daesh, but each of the 28 NATO members is already in the coalition. NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said allies were still discussing whether NATO should join.

UK prime minister Theresa May: "We must redouble our resolve to meet the threats to our shared security whether from terrorism or Russia .. unity in responding to common strengths is our most potent weapon."
 

2017 May 24

Terrorists Target Children

The New York Times

The suicide bombing in Manchester, England, on Monday night that killed young fans of the pop star Ariana Grande is wrenching.

Daesh claimed responsibility for the bombing. British police officials believe the suicide was Salman Abedi, 22, whose parents emigrated from Libya. This attack is an attempt to provoke a thirst for vengeance and a desire for safety that sweeps away the most cherished democratic and inclusive values. Daesh wants to watch Western democracies embrace its mad version of a holy war pitting Muslims against Christians.

AR NYT published leaked details that hinder ongoing British law enforcement operations. This will have implications for UK-US security cooperation going forward.

Service and Care

The Times

President Trump met with Pope Francis. Trump described the meeting as a great honor.

A Vatican statement confirmed their joint commitment in favor of life, and freedom of worship and conscience, and called for collaboration between the State and the Catholic Church in the United States in service to the people in the fields of healthcare, education and assistance to immigrants.

Francis gave Trump a copy of his encyclical on caring for the environment.

Global Government

The Independent

Nearly 7 out of 10 people in the UK support the creation of a form of world government to deal with major risks facing the world. Over 6 in 10 say they consider themselves global citizens.

A survey interviewed 8,100 people in Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, India, South Africa, the UK and US. The survey found nearly 9 in 10 supported taking action on global warming.

In the UK, over 8 in 10 agreed climate change could be a global catastrophe. A majority (54%) said they would be happy for the UK to give up some sovereignty to address such problems.

The Trump Budget

Financial Times

President Trump will call on Congress to push through $3.6 trillion of spending cuts in order to balance the federal budget in 10 years. He proposes a range of cuts in welfare outlays and healthcare support for poorer families, while sheltering the military, social security, and Medicare.

Comment
Larry Summers

The first Trump budget appears to contain a logical error of the kind that would justify failing a student in an introductory economics course.

Apparently, the budget forecasts that US growth will rise to 3% by 2021 thanks to proposed tax cuts and regulatory policies. Then the administration asserts that it will propose revenue-neutral tax cuts, with the revenue neutrality coming in part because the tax cuts stimulate growth.

This appears to be the most egregious accounting error in a presidential budget in the nearly 40 years I have been tracking them.

The president's economic team is failing. Claims about tax cuts not favoring the rich, claims made for the deal negotiated last week with China, the ridiculous estimate of the costs of Dodd-Frank, or the new budget — not one of them meets a minimal standard of competence and honesty.
 

2017 May 23

God of Israel

Jerusalem Post

"The ties of the Jewish people to this holy land are ancient and eternal .. Israel is testament to the unbreakable spirit of the Jewish people .. My administration will always stand with Israel."
Donald Trump, Jerusalem

God of Go

The New York Times

The world’s best player of Go has been defeated by an AI program. Chinese champion Ke Jie, 19, was defeated by AlphaGo, developed by Google division DeepMind. Ke: "Last year, it was still quite humanlike when it played, but this year, it became like a god of Go."

Time in Islam

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Islamic conception of time is that mere chronology is irrelevant in comparison with the theological sense of eternity. What matters is only the Hereafter, and thus heaven and hell. Mere terrestrial time is seen as limited and relatively insignificant, a stepping stone to the infinite. This is the core of Islam. So working hard and making money, or recreational things like going to the pub or watching soccer or going to the movies — all this is rejected as sinful or futile.

AR The Prophet contemplated eternity on clear nights on a mountaintop.

Time in Physics

Tim Maudlin

In special relativity, the time directions are structurally different from the space directions. In the timelike directions, you have a further distinction into the future and the past, whereas any spacelike direction can be continuously rotated into any other spacelike direction. The two classes of timelike directions cannot be continuously transformed into one another.

If time had no direction, that would make time into just another spatial dimension. I can imagine a 4D spatial object, but nothing happens in it. This is the way people often talk about the block universe. I believe that the past is as real as the present, which is as real as the future. Things that happened in the past were just as real. If that is all it means to believe in a block universe, fine.

The block universe is a rigid structure. The totality of concrete physical reality specifies that 4D structure and what happens everywhere in it. In Newtonian mechanics, this object is foliated by planes of absolute simultaneity. And in relativity you have a light cone structure instead. So it has a different geometrical character. But the idea that the block universe is static drives me crazy.

For time to pass means for events to be linearly ordered, by earlier and later. The causal structure of the world depends on its temporal structure. To understand the later states, you look at the earlier states and not the other way around. The direction of causation is also the direction of explanation. Time is a fundamental feature of the universe.

AR Time is basic in physics. Quantum mechanics points to a better understanding. The key is to get the math right — my work in progress on the foundations of quantum theory has a lot of math in it so I am writing it anew in TeX (MacTeX, via arXiv).
 

2017 May 22

Saudis v Iran

Richard Haass

Donald Trump in Riyadh on Iran: "It is a government that speaks openly of mass murder, vowing the destruction of Israel, death to America, and ruin for many leaders and nations in this room."

Saudi Arabia and Iran remain the most powerful countries in the Mideast. Saudi deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman rejects talks with Iran: "We will not wait until the battle is in Saudi Arabia but we will work so the battle is there in Iran."

Concerns about Iran help explain the warm welcome in Riyadh for Donald Trump. Saudi Arabia is buffeted by low oil prices, high unemployment, widespread corruption, and war in Yemen.

Iran will not soon reform. Moderate president Hassan Rouhani has been re-elected but an imperial foreign policy employs militant groups such as Hizbollah and Hamas to project armed force.

Saudi Arabia and its conservative Sunni allies will be hard pressed to match Iran even with their new US arms. Saudi-Iranian relations could all too easily take a turn for the worse.

Trump On Islam

Christoph Sydow

President Trump managed his speech on Islam in Saudi Arabia without mistakes. He quoted from the Koran, praised Islamic culture, and heralded a new beginning: "America and Islam are not mutually exclusive and are not in competition with each other."

Trump is right that the Mideast does not fufill its potential, but terrorism is only partly to blame. Corruption, cronyism, and discrimination hold back the Muslim world. The greatest fear for people in poorer Muslim countries is failing to find a job or to feed the family.

In Saudi Arabia bibles and crosses are forbidden and no other faith than Sunni Islam can be lived freely. For the Saudi rulers, a Muslim who publicly renounces Islam is a terrorist but a Muslim who blows up in a bus in Jerusalem is a martyr.
 

2017 May 21

Battle Between Good and Evil

Donald Trump

Our goal is a coalition of nations who share the aim of stamping out extremism and providing our children a hopeful future that does honor to God.

This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects, or different civilizations. This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life, and decent people of all religions who seek to protect it. This is a battle between good and evil.

There is still much work to be done. That means honestly confronting the crisis of Islamic extremism and the Islamists and Islamic terror of all kinds. We must stop what they are doing. Drive them out of your places of worship, drive them out of your holy land.

Every time a terrorist murders an innocent person, and falsely invokes the name of God, it should be an insult to every person of faith.

AR Trump went off script to cite Islamic extremism and Islamic terror.
 

2017 May 20

Euler's Formula

AR

Last night in my bed between slumbers,
My thoughts swirled around complex numbers.
They made an equation
With artful persuasion
And conjured up dreams full of wonders.

A limerick for math can be fun.
You just have to do a small sum.
I did one with phi
And imaginary i,
Thought Euler and just let it run.

There was an equation well wrought:
E power i phi as first thought,
Then minus cos phi,
Minus i by sin phi,
To find that it all comes to nought.
 

First Light

Ashley Yeager

Not long after the Big Bang, a hydrogen fog pervaded the early universe and snuffed out the light of the first stars and galaxies. For hundreds of millions of years, they were all but invisible. Eventually this fog burned off as UV light reionized the atoms.

In the first years ABB, free particles flew about scattering light. At about 380 ky ABB, they cooled enough to form H atoms, which clumped into stars. The first hot stars started the reionization, but they soon died, and later stars were dimmer and cooler.

Supermassive black holes power quasars. Because quasars emit way more hard radiation than stars do, they may have reionized the universe. Astronomers have found faint quasars at around 1 Gy ABB and evidence for quasars back to 600 My ABB.

AR The past was a violent place.

Hatred, Insanity, Absolute Rubbish

Nigel Farage

The British government will always hate me. They will never forgive me for being successful.

A wave of insanity overcame the political classes of Europe. Europe is not the EU. I am working for a real Europe, one that does not attempt to take away from individual member states their national identity.

We British are not allowed to have our own foreign policy. We are not allowed to have our own trade policy. We have to break this down. The EU is dying. The whole project is finished.

I met with the Russian Embassy's deputy chief-of-mission in London in 2013. I said I admire Vladimir Putin. As a political operator, he was the best in the world.

I never received a penny from Russia. My campaign was not about money but about messages. I appear on Russia Today twice a year, or three times last year.

I went to meet Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for journalistic reasons. I met with him very briefly. We talked about a lot of things.

I used to do politics 100 hours a week. But now I do politics for 40 hours a week, so I have got a lot of time to do other things. I am a Fox News contributor. I am an LBC presenter. I write.

The EU wants to expand to the east and threatens Russia. I want the EU to be destroyed. The EU is an anti-democratic, failing structure.

Brexit is the best thing. The idea that the EU is good for the economy is absolute rubbish.
 

2017 May 19

Forward Together

Theresa May

The next five years are the most challenging that Britain has faced in my lifetime.
Brexit will define us.

Now more than ever,
● Britain needs a strong and stable government
● Britain needs strong and stable leadership
● Britain needs a clear plan

I believe our United Kingdom can emerge from this period of great national change stronger and more prosperous than ever before. I believe we can be a country that stands tall in the world and provides leadership on some of the greatest challenges of our time.

I believe we can — and must — take this opportunity to build a Great Meritocracy here in Britain.

Five giant challenges:

1 A strong economy that works for everyone
We need to make the most of our existing strengths, invest in infrastructure and people, and ensure that the whole of our economy across the whole of our country can grow. Without a strong economy, we cannot guarantee our security, our personal prosperity, our public services, or contented and sustainable communities.

2 A strong and united nation in a changing world
We need to deliver a smooth and orderly departure from the EU and forge a deep and special partnership with our friends and allies across Europe. As there is increasingly little distinction between domestic and international affairs in matters of migration, national security and the economy, Britain must stay strong and united — and take a lead in the world to defend our interests.

3 The world's great meritocracy
For too many people, where you end up in life is still determined by where you were born and to whom. We need to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to make the most of their talents and hard work, whoever you are and wherever you are from.

4 A restored contract between the generations
We need to respond to the reality of an ageing society, giving people security in old age and caring for those with long-term health conditions, while making sure we are fair to younger generations.

5 Prosperity and security in a digital age
For the sake of our economy and our society, we need to harness the power of fast-changing technology, while ensuring that our security and personal privacy — and the welfare of children and younger people — are protected.

Splendid Isolation

Stefanie Bolzen

Theresa May nennt das Tory-Parteiprogramm ein Porträt Großbritanniens nach dem Brexit.

May hat die Einwanderung als ein Grundproblem definiert, das den sozialen Zusammenhalt unterminiert. Deshalb wird sie die Beschäftigungsbedingungen für ausländische Arbeitnehmer in Zukunft schwer machen.

Für den Moment betrifft diese Regelung nur Nicht-EU-Bürger. Aber die Uhr tickt. Am 30. März 2019 werden auch die EU-Ausländer voraussichtlich nur noch einfache Ausländer sein. Dann gehen britische Bürger endgültig vor.

May wird das Reich in eine neue Richtung führen, mit harter nationalistischer Rhetorik.

AR Ich will nicht in einem ausländerfeindlichen Königreich wohnen.

European Maritime Day 2017

Poole, UK, May 18-19, 2017

European Maritime Day is the annual meeting point for Europe's maritime community to network, discuss and forge joint action.

The Future of our Seas

Karmenu Vella

Welcome to European Maritime Day 2017. As it does every year, this conference brings together Europe's maritime community to exchange ideas and forge partnerships needed for the blue economy.
From maritime spatial planning to the fight against illegal fishing, ocean mapping to marine science, habitat conservation to regional strategies, our collective initiatives have transformed the way Europe goes about the maritime business.

This year's theme introduces corporate responsibility as one of the pivotal aspects of sustainability. It therefore strives to secure commitment not just from governments and NGOs but also from business leaders all over the world.

Welcome to Poole

Janet Walton

Poole is proud to be the host of the prestigious European Maritime Day conference this year. The program for the conference at Lighthouse Poole is extensive. In support of European Maritime Day, Poole has created an interesting and diverse business program to enable its local and regional businesses to be part of the event and maximize the opportunities for the region.

AR Janet is a Conservative councillor and Leader of the Council, Borough of Poole. I have worked in close coordination with her since 2014.
 

2017 May 18

Is Trump Toast?

David Remnick

Donald Trump came to the presidency skilled in the art of deceit. More than forty years ago, Roy Cohn, who lived for decades under various indictments for bribery, extortion, and other sins, and yet always managed to escape conviction, instructed the ambitious young man in the dark arts.

Trump the businessman was spurned by the New York business community less for his cartoonish flamboyance than for his dishonesty and meanness of character. He stiffed contractors and workers, screwed creditors, violated casino regulations, promoted scams, and bragged of charitable contributions he never made.

In the past two weeks, a presidency of ideological meanness and unsurpassing incompetence has moved on. The usual comparison is with the Nixon presidency in the Watergate era.

Nixon aide Roger Stone was a political mentor to Trump. Roy Cohn introduced Stone to Trump, and Stone helped Trump see the political advantage in many sleazy tactics and alliances. Since then, Trump has been the focus of investigations on housing discrimination, bribery, corruption, dealings with the mob, misleading earnings reports, fraud, and improper campaign contributions.

The Trump presidency may well end before 2021.

The 25th Amendment

Ross Douthat

The US presidency is not just another office. Donald Trump has charisma, cunning, an instinct for the jugular, a common touch, and a certain creativity. But they are not enough.

The presidency now has kinglike qualities, and we have a child upon the throne. It is a child who blurts out classified information in order to impress distinguished visitors or who asks the head of the FBI why the rules cannot be suspended for his friend and ally. A child also cannot really commit high crimes and misdemeanors.

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution allows for the removal of the president if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet informs the Congress that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office and (should the president contest his own removal) a two-thirds vote by Congress confirms the judgment.

I respectfully ask leading Republicans to reconsider their support for Trump.
 

2017 May 17

Republican Paralysis

Edward Luce

Most people know Donald Trump is unfit to be commander-in-chief. But no elected Republican has dared to act. Over a quarter of Americans are diehard Trump supporters.

Trump draws power from alternative narratives. Whenever the elites express outrage at his actions, his supporters take pleasure in their anguish. Trump is delivering on what he promised.

Republicans may bide their time until midterm elections. If polls were held today Republicans would lose control of the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate. Then they would act.

Republicans stand for national security and the moral fiber of American leadership. Trump is tearing up those principles before their eyes. They must hold him to account.

Blurt

Daniel W. Drezner

Donald Trump improvises, he thinks on his feet. It sounds like he blurted out national security secrets because he was bragging.

Trump got what he shared from an intelligence report. This is probably going to affect the way the US intelligence community does things like putting together briefing memos and so forth. You can see why they would be incentivized to say as little about sources and methods as possible.

If the Washington Post story is accurate, Trump gave information where it would be easy to divine where the source came from. So if you are an intelligence agency, and you want to provide information to the president, you have to be worried that if you got information from a sole source, he then might just blurt something out and burn that source.

Trump has committed a series of gaffes and own goals.

Trump: Let Flynn Go

The New York Times

President Trump asked FBI director James Comey to shut down the federal investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The request is documented in a memo Comey wrote shortly after an Oval Office meeting that took place the day after Flynn resigned in February. Such FBI memos are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations.

According to the memo, the president told Comey: "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go."

House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz demanded that the FBI turn over all "memoranda, notes, summaries and recordings" of discussions between Trump and Comey.

AR More blood — the hunt is on.

Bombshells

Daily Beast

Report: Israel Was Source of Secret Trump Intel
McMaster: Trump Didnt Even Know Where Info Came From
McCain: Trump Scandal Has Hit 'Watergate Size'
 

2017 May 16

White House Chaos

The Washington Post

This time it did not even take 24 hours for Donald Trump to throw his staffers under the bus and contradict their denials.

The president revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador during an Oval Office meeting last week, potentially endangering a coveted intelligence asset, compromising a crucial alliance, and undermining the war effort against Daesh.

After The Post broke the story, senior White House aides quickly denied it. Then, on Twitter this morning, Trump essentially acknowledged that our reporting is accurate.

AR The Post smells blood and strikes a pose.

Merkron Drive EZ Motor

The Times

French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel agree on a reconstruction of Europe. They say they are ready to change the EU treaties to strengthen the EZ.

Macron: "In the past the subject of treaty change was a French taboo. That will no longer be the case. What the eurozone needs is an investment policy. We have to introduce new, fresh money as a budget. That requires convergence rules, real structural reforms .. That is the goal of the joint road map we are working on."

Merkel: "We are at a moment where people are looking tentatively at the European Union and realising it does us a great deal of good, it is important .. we should use this moment to push forward the strengthening of Europe."

Macron: "The French agenda will be an agenda of reform in the coming months, in economic, social, and educational terms — not because Europe requests it, but because France needs it."

Germany On Brexit

Jeremy Cliffe

There are two Germanys. One is familiar to Britain: the efficient, sober place where they make the cars and the dishwashers. These Germans exhibit a pragmatism born of a seafaring past. For centuries the Hanseatic League had trading posts in London and in towns all along eastern England. This is the Germany with which Britain can do business.

There is another Germany. If the first is the Germany of seas, the second is the Germany of rivers. It is a romantic land of dense forests and dark past traumas. It is continental and bleeds into bordering countries. This is the Germany where many families have collective memories of oppression and flight. For this Germany, Europe is about more than trade.

The two Germanys are often in tension, and Angela Merkel bears traces of both sides. The chancellor has Hanseatic family roots. She thinks that national governments, not the European Commission, should call the shots in the EU. Yet she also embodies the Germany of rivers. Merkel grew up behind the Iron Curtain and bridles at fences and walls.

Brexit has aligned the two Germanys: The Germany of rivers wants a clean Brexit; the Germany of seas mourns the loss but essentially agrees. German interests once served by a closer relationship with London now depend on the cohesion of the single market. The British who lost their way must learn there is no deal better than membership.

EU Defense Fund

Financial Times

Brussels plans to spend EU funds for military purposes. A proposed European Defense Fund would finance the development of prototype military kit such as drones, robots, and cyber defence technology. The European Commission will ask member states and MEPs to back the plans.

France and Germany believe Brexit will let them deepen EU military activities. EU-27 members will be asked to pool military spending to reinforce anti-terror defenses and external borders. The new fund raises pressure on Brussels to make up an annual budget shortfall of €10 billion after Brexit.

Under EU law, the EU budget cannot be used to fund military operations. Brussels says it can legally set up a fund tapping the EU budget to develop high-tech military prototypes. The European Commission believes the fund could spend €500 million per year on research from 2020.

AR Good plan — pity UK out of it.
 

2017 May 15

Silk Road Spirit

Xi Jinping

More than 2,000 years ago, our ancestors, driven by a desire for friendship, opened the overland and maritime Silk Roads and thus started a great era of exchanges among civilizations.

Today, we gather here to renew the Silk Road spirit and discuss the Belt and Road development for international cooperation. This is both a continuation of our shared legacy and a right choice for the future.

We are at a fresh starting point, ready to embark on a new journey together. So long as we press ahead with a common vision without back-pedaling or standing still, we will achieve greater connectivity and benefit from each other's development.

Belt and Road initiative

Economic growth is not on solid ground. Economic globalization is encountering some headwinds. Development has become more uneven, not to mention the other challenges that overshadow the world economy, such as wars, conflicts, terrorism, and a massive flow of refugees and migrants.

Confronted by these challenges, many countries are pondering the way forward. In a world of growing interdependence and challenges, no country can tackle all the challenges or solve global problems on its own.

Swan geese can fly far and safely through winds and storms because they move in flocks and help each other as a team. The best way to meet challenges and achieve better development is through cooperation.

The Belt and Road initiative is the project of the century and will add splendor to human civilization.

Acceleration

Andy Beckett

Accelerationists say computer technology and global capitalism should be massively sped up and intensified. They favor robots and cyborgs. A central figure of accelerationism is British philosopher Nick Land.

Land has published prolifically on the internet about the obsolescence of western democracy. He has also written approvingly about human biodiversity, capitalistic human sorting, and the inevitable disintegration of the human species as AI improves. Accelerationism is not about restraint.

Land taught philosophy at the University of Warwick. He wrote in 1992 that capitalism had always been held back by politics and saw civilization accelerating toward an apocalypse. He said he worked in the field of The Collapse of Western Civilization Studies.

In 1995, Land and others founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). Initially based in the Warwick philosophy department, it later moved to a room above a shop in Leamington Spa. Its members remain attached to the idea that it became a kind of group mind. Even inside the Warwick philosophy department, its disdain for standard academic practice became an issue.

Early in the new millennium, after a breakdown, Land left Britain. He now lives in Shanghai. In a 2004 article, he described the modern Chinese fusion of Marxism and capitalism as the greatest political engine of social and economic development the world has ever known.

Mind and Body

Riccardo Manzotti

You are the subject.

You are not your body. The body is part of your experience, just as things in the world outside are part of your experience. Both are you.

At every moment, you are an experience identical with an object that is causally affecting your body. You are the thing that has your experience. You experience those objects.

A subject is a combination of objects relative to your body. To be a subject is to experience objects relative to your body. We each experience a world that differs from what others experience.

The self is the world.

AR This is the position I worked out in Mindworlds.
 

2017 May 14

Eurovision 2017

Euan Ferguson

Eurovision 2017 was won for Portugal by Salvador Sobral.
The song was immensely, stoppingly surprising, beautiful.
Hopes for the "epic sax guy" of Moldova were doomed.
Romania ran with a phenomenal mix of yodelling meets rap.
Hungary came on with a lovely mix of hip-hop and gypsy.
Azerbaijan had many high mad hopes for a dreadful mélange.
Lucie Jones sang well for the UK and garnered many votes.
Denmark went for an Aussie who is still learning the language.
Ukraine gyrated around a giant heavy metal head.
Germany went with a sweet but unmemorable piece.

Shot, Kicked, Suffering

Gina Miller

My father was a socialist. I see myself as a conscious capitalist. You have to respect what money and success gives you, then have the responsibility that goes with that. My strength of character is a privilege. I can do anything to survive.

I expected people to be nasty. I didn't expect people to say I wasn't even human, that I was a primate, and that I should be beheaded and shot. Other people took out Facebook campaigns to gang-rape me because that's what black bitches deserve. The one repeated over and over is that I should be the second Jo Cox. Now I have security all around my home.

People started sending me letters about what was happening. This young Polish woman who was standing at a bus stop up north was kicked to the ground. A grandmother said her grandson won't go to school because he's been told he's a monkey and he should get back home. I get these all the time now, and they are saying I need to be their voice.

A hard-right element in the Conservative party is gaining more and more power. Their agenda is quite simply low tax, low regulation, low social spending. They make lots of money for themselves and watch everybody else suffering.

Atonement

Ian McEwan

Angry old men are shaping the future of the country against the inclinations of its youth. By 2019 the country could be in a receptive mood: 2.5 million over-18-year-olds, freshly franchised and mostly remainers; 1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves.

Brexit has stirred something not heroic or celebratory or generous in the nation, but instead has coaxed into the light from some dark, damp places the lowest human impulses, from the small-minded to the mean-spirited to the murderous.

2017 May 13

Trappist Sounds

Joshua Sokol

The star TRAPPIST-1 is circled by seven planets about the size of Earth. The clockwork of the star system is the most complex case yet of a resonant chain, where the years of each orbiting body relate to one another as simple ratios. For every 8 times the innermost world races through its orbit, the next planet goes around roughly 5 times, the next one after that orbits 3 times, and the next one 2 times. And so on.

Matt Russo, Daniel Tamayo, and Andrew Santaguida have translated their intricate dance into a musical composition — Trappist Sounds (1:54).

The seventh planet, h, orbits about once every 3 weeks. Sped up some 200 million times and expressed in sound waves, that frequency is a C note. From there, the known ratios between planets determine every other signature note. Together the notes form a major ninth chord. The team added drumbeats for whenever an inner planet overtakes an outer neighbor, marking close gravitational interactions among the planets.

Quantum Vacuum

Frank Wilczek

Quantum particles are bubbles of froth kicked up by underlying fields. The fields fluctuate in intensity and direction. The average value of the electromagnetic field in a vacuum is zero, but the average value of its square is not, so the energy density in an EM field is infinite.

Quantum fluctuations are virtual particles or zero-point motion. They involve an infinite amount of energy. But only changes in energy are observable, and confirm predictions.

Gravity responds to all kinds of energy. So the infinite energy density associated with the activity of quantum fields is a problem. Experiments show the gravitational pull of the vacuum is quite small.

The measured density of the vacuum is dark energy. For fields associated with bosons the energy density is positive infinity, while for fields associated with fermions the energy density is negative infinity. The infinities can cancel in supersymmetric theories.

In addition to fluctuating fields, the vacuum contains condensates, such as the Higgs condensate, which should also weigh something. Perhaps the measured level of dark energy is an anthropic feature of our corner of the multiverse. I hope we find a better story.

AR I like loop quantum gravity — see Rovelli.
 

2017 May 12

Brexit Britain

William Davies

Theresa May and the Conservatives are on course for a landslide victory.

May speaks as if Britain is a nation united, aside from the divisive forces of party politics and liberal elites seeking to thwart the will of the people. She claims her opponents are merely playing political games and stresses the need for strong and stable leadership — a classic populist trope.

Her campaign message is simple and strong. A campaign video sees her speaking solemnly in front of a Union Jack in a dimly lit room as if announcing a new war, using the majestic plural variously to mean her party, her government, or all true Brits. The viewer is blinded by her majesty.

If Brexit goes bad, she and her party will be the rock in the storm.

AR FUK v EUSSR — Brexit is Battle of Britain 2.

Another Tweet Too Far

Jennifer Rubin

Trump tweet: "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"

The Republican dam must break. The party once united by political thought and respect for civic virtue has adopted an unscrupulous leader for the sake of holding power. Republicans defend ignorance, bigotry, dishonesty, and ineptitude for the sake of a top marginal tax rate of 28% — this seems shockingly tribalistic.

Trump says he fired James Comey because he decided Russian interference in the election was fake news. The entire intelligence community confirms the interference and members of both parties acknowledge it. Republicans are refusing to concede that bullying and firing the FBI director is impeachable conduct.

We are not surprised that the president thinks he can shut down an investigation if he dislikes the way it is going. We are surprised that so many conservatives are letting tribal loyalty trump the truth. We hope the dam breaks soon.

AR Terminate the Terminator — asap.

Frightful Five

Farhad Manjoo

A handful of American technology companies now dominates much of the global economy. The Frightful Five — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google — are among the most valuable companies on the planet, collectively worth trillions. Apple reached $800 billion in market cap this week, and the others may not be far behind.

A better way to appreciate the power of these five might be to examine the role each of them plays in your own life, and the grip each holds on your psyche. Last week I came up with a fun game: If an evil monarch forced you to abandon each of the Frightful Five, in which order would you do so, and how much would your life deteriorate as a result?

AR The real story of our time — Globorg (ppsx, 6.4 MB).
 

2017 May 11

Conspirators

The Washington Post

After the president fired James Comey, the cloud hanging over the White House got bigger and darker. Donald Trump looks like he does not want to get to the bottom of Russian interference in the US election and the potential wrongdoing of his own staffers.

POTUS 45 has surrounded himself with sycophants and amateurs. They were caught off guard by the blowback. Senate investigators have asked the Treasury Department criminal investigation division for any relevant financial information related to Trump and his team.

Terminating Comey will only lead to more questions about Russia. Hours later Trump met in the Oval Office with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and ambassador Sergey Kislyak, implicated by the FBI in the Michael Flynn investigation.

The FBI fears the Russia investigation might now be upended. Trump has hired a Washington law firm to deny that he has connections to Russia. This will give new momentum to Democratic calls for a special prosecutor.

Consumers

Deborah Cohen

Consumption is as much about state intervention as about individuals or markets. For a consumer society to flourish, goods have to be invited in. The drive for accumulation is made a virtue.

Marxists said commodity fetishism put a price on the products of labor and alienated things from their makers. In 1958, J.K. Galbraith said consumerism had sapped people of their commitment to the public good.

State spending is part of the story of consumption. Crucial to postwar affluence in Europe and the United States was sharply increasing public spending. Social democracy spurred on consumerism.

Consumption is a juggernaut. We can lament the volume of stuff we purchase, yet much of our waste is from habits that have little to do with individual motives or morality.

Consciousness

New Scientist

Researchers are exploring the tree of life to consider where, when, and why consciousness emerged.

Anil Seth says we can infer the evolutionary history of consciousness by comparing animals alive today and working back to their common ancestor. As we observe signs of consciousness in other animals, we can gradually refine our notion of what we are talking about.

Jesse Prinz says consciousness is largely about perception and emotion. These basic components of conscious experience could be widespread, even in animals that lack our mental sophistication and brainpower.

Bjørn Grinde finds that mammals, birds, and reptiles all show signs of emotional responses, while fish and amphibians do not. The brains of higher vertebrates show that the ability to assign value to an experience arose around 300 million years ago in their common ancestor. Consciousness is slow and energy intensive, and can only do one thing at a time, so perhaps it emerged just once.

Bruno van Swinderen looked at selective attention. He trained fruit flies to walk on a trackball in front of a virtual scene. By rotating the trackball, the flies could choose which of two objects to attend to. When a fly attended to an object, its brain generated specific frequencies recorded by probes. A dynamic window of attention that moved around and suppressed competing objects marked the dawn of consciousness. The animals that pay attention also need to sleep and include vertebrates, insects, crustaceans, and octopuses.

Michael Graziano says selective attention is about data handling. An animal needs a mental model of attention much as it needs a mental model of its body. This model is responsible for our conscious awareness of the world. Perhaps such sophistication is only found in vertebrates.

Eva Jablonka believes unlimited associative learning is a marker for the origin of consciousness. This requires selective attention, binding sensations into a perception, performing compound action patterns, and distinguishing between self and environment. Such learning is widespread in the animal kingdom and may have evolved about half a billion years ago.
 

2017 May 10

Brexit

Guy Verhofstadt

I believe that a Brexit deal remains more likely than unlikely. There is more that unites the two sides than separates them. A no-deal scenario would be a disaster for all.

An early challenge will be to agree on the rights of EU citizens in the UK and vice versa. The complexities at stake include residency, healthcare, social security, and non-discrimination. All of these rights will need a mutually agreed enforcement mechanism.

The debate about a financial settlement is likely to be complex and heated. The EU will not seek to punish the UK, but it is only fair that the UK agrees to pay its share of outstanding commitments and liabilities. It would be wrong for EU taxpayers to be asked to pay it.

The third priority is a solution to protect the Good Friday Agreement. This may ultimately require a special status for Northern Ireland. Many Irish citizens residing in Northern Ireland will continue to enjoy rights as EU passport holders.

The EU and the UK should aim for a future association agreement that goes beyond trade to include security and defence cooperation. Discussions about a future partnership can only start when there is clarity about how the existing relationship is dissolved.

I am confident the gulf between the EU and the UK government can be bridged. Achieving this will require cool heads. Failure would not be in the interests of either side.

AR Good start
 

2017 May 9

Airbus A400M

RAF Atlas Success

The UK Ministry of Defence says the key contractual milestone has been met following the handing over of its seventh Airbus A400M airlifter. The RAF has four A400M Atlas aircraft in service and three undergoing installation and testing of a defensive subsystem. The RAF A400M fleet is achieving excellent in-service results, with a mission success rate in excess of 90%.

Vernichtendes Zeugnis

Das Bundesverteidigungsministerium sieht die militärische Einsatzfähigkeit des Transportflugzeugs A400M wegen anhaltender technischer Probleme und der Vertragsquerelen mit dem Hersteller Airbus gefährdet. Airbus werde nicht die nötigen Investitionen tätigen, um erforderliche Nachbesserungen am A400M auf den Weg zu bringen, schreibt das Ministerium.

AR Kognitive Dissonanz

The Threat

Ross Anderson

We seem to have no privacy. The intelligence agencies can access just about everything. This is the threat.

The Internet of Things affects safety. In the old days, car safety was about hardware. Now you get software updates in one car after another. A threat to cause millions of cars in America to turn right and accelerate sharply into the nearest building, bringing traffic to a standstill in all American cities, is an interesting weapon.

The Internet brings three steps forward and one step back. The industry is rather bad at recognizing the backward steps. It tends to hope that other people will clean up its messes.

The UK government made a serious mistake when it let GCHQ break into Belgacom in order to wiretap the European Commission. That seriously annoyed the Eurocrats. There are hazards involved in lowering the threshold for conflict.

In elections we have seen the progressive adoption of social media techniques and messaging. In the Scottish referendum in 2014, nationalists hounded and abused people in favor of remaining in the UK. We saw the same thing in the Brexit referendum in the UK.

These are problems we shall be wrestling with for the next decade.

AR Cherries picked from an Edge conversation.
 

2017 May 8

EZ Choice

Wolfgang Münchau

The landslide victory of Emmanuel Macron gives Europe hope. France faced a clear choice between EZ reform or quitting. This election was about the future of France in Europe.

France and Germany have similar labor productivity and have had similar economic performance since 2000. But Macron will need to get French debt down from 100% of GDP to the EU target of 60%, as Germany will by 2020. Fortunately, the EZ economy is in a mild cyclical upswing.

AR EZ union will be a home run for Western ideals.

Ten Errors

Stephan-Götz Richter

Brextremists make ten strategic miscalculations:

1 The UK is not so united: The people of Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland can only dream of a similar level of cohesion on Brexit within the UK as in the EU-27.

2 Conservatives have always sought to divide and conquer Europe. But the frontal attack on Poles in the UK last summer offended Poland, a potential ally against the EU.

3 Brextremists take pride in misjudging EU realities from pure arrogance. Their misunderstanding and contempt for the EU met its nemesis in EU-27 unity on Brexit.

4 Their dream of a special deal between Theresa May and Angela Merkel was always a long shot. Merkel is far too cautious to let the UK start picking cherries.

5 They say the UK is in much better economic shape than the EZ. But the UK economic outlook is stormy, while the much maligned EZ economy is recovering.

6 Brextremists failed to see that Brexit would weld the EU together. Brexit is a gift from the gods to the EU, which lacked a deterrent against leaving until now.

7 The threat of a hard Brexit is a spectacular own goal. A Brexit with no agreement hurts first and foremost the UK.

8 Most EU members think the EU is stronger with the UK. They hope the UK will relent and see reason. Germans want allies and have no desire to appease Brextremists.

9 Theresa May says EU-27 unanimity on Brexit increases uncertainty and instability for the UK. She sounds like Marine Le Pen.

10 Brextremists are wrong to imagine that after the French and German elections resistance to UK demands will collapse and the UK will win.

AR A partisan perspective, but some hits.
 

2017 May 7

Emmanuel Macron président de la République

Paris Match

AR Big relief — French voters have seen reason.

The French Are Better

Theodore Dalrymple

France is the most visited country in the world. It is well administered, its roads are among the best in the world, its public transport systems are incomparable, and it is clean.

Every small town in France has at least one independent bookshop. One cannot attribute the high cultural level in France to bookshops alone, but at the least they help to maintain it. The attention to detail in shops is a sharp contrast with Britain. All this adds to the enjoyment of life.

France has its problems, too. Its immigrant banlieues are frightful battery farms of resentment, trafficking, and delinquency. Its educational system has deteriorated and its modern architecture is among the worst in the world. Its labour laws, social charges, regulations, and legal bias inhibit small businesses and seem to reward idleness.

The rigidity of the labour market leads to higher unemployment, but the difficulty of getting rid of an employee gives the employer an incentive to train him to be more efficient. And the French are efficient: far fewer of them working far fewer hours produce at least as much as the British.

The French, like us all, have their vices. They are the most abominable hypocrites about money. They talk equality and exude avarice and envy. Their snobbery is as bad as ours. But we should not exaggerate their woes, the better to avoid confronting our own.
 

2017 May 6

Quantum Thermodynamics

Natalie Wolchover

Quantum information theorists say information is physical. When energy spreads from hot objects to cold ones, particles become entangled and information spreads between them. Since information is conserved, if entropy reflects an information snapshot of a system, the universe can evolve yet always have a global entropy of zero.

Imagine a big bath of particles that possess energy and angular momentum. This bath is coupled to a weight, for energy, and a turntable, for angular momentum. Normally, to do work you need hot and cold reservoirs. But a reservoir containing multiple conserved quantities follows different rules.

In the big bath system, you can trade between conserved quantities like energy and angular momentum. The weight can rise as the turntable slows, or vice versa, using the qubits describing the energy and rotation states as a currency. Trading conserved quantities like this is a new idea.

AR Entropy is obviously relative to a snapshot — this is the good part of QBism.

Quantum Bayesianism

Christopher Fuchs

The wavefunction of a system encodes the probabilities for the outcomes of any measurements an observer might perform on it. The wavefunction probabilities are Bayesian and are updated as new data come to light. The wavefunction describes the observer's perspective.

Quantum Bayesianism solves many mysteries. Collapse of the wavefunction is simply the observer updating a data snapshot after making a measurement. Spooky action at a distance also reflects the update of a snapshot. QBism treats the wavefunction as a description of a snapshot.

AR This is my take on QBism — Fuchs' take is mostly nonsense, imho.
 

2017 May 5

European Crisis

Ross Douthat

In Europe, recent trends have elevated an educated upper class while separating it from a declining and fragmenting working class. A growing immigrant population serves this upper class while seeming to compete with downscale natives for jobs, housing, and social benefits.

Europe is stuck with a flawed experiment in political economy, a common currency without a common fiscal policy or a central political authority to claim legitimacy. The damage that this combination has done to the economies of Southern Europe is striking and severe.

Europe has sub-replacement fertility. A continent of historic states without a strong assimilative tradition is attempting to integrate an immigrant population that differs dramatically from its natives. Part of this immigrant population is tempted by jihadist ideologies.

European governance has a democratic deficit. The EU ruling class relies on illiberal methods to maintain the peace. Elite EU politics seems to believe that the important thing is to concentrate every effort on delegitimizing and defeating critics rather than solving problems.

Right-wing populists are not outliers in an otherwise harmonious and liberal Europe. It is not right-wing authoritarians but the great and good of Brussels and Berlin who have shown consistent contempt for the popular will. The European Union has problems its leadership cannot or will not solve.
 

2017 May 4

L'euro et la peur

Paris Match

Marine Le Pen: "L'euro, c'est la monnaie des banquiers, ce n'est pas la monnaie du peuple .. c'est la raison pour laquelle il faut que l'on arrive à s'arracher à cette monnaie .. les Français auront une monnaie dans leur portefeuille, une monnaie qui permettra de retrouver un niveau adapté de notre économie et de partir à la conquête du monde."

Emmanuel Macron: "Une grande entreprise ne pourra pas payer en euros d'un côté et payer ses salariés de l'autre en francs. Ca n'a jamais existé, madame Le Pen. C'est du grand n'importe quoi."

Le Pen: "L'économie britannique ne s'est jamais aussi bien portée que depuis que les Britanniques ont décidé de reprendre leur liberté."

Macron: "La grande peur, qui la manipule depuis le début? C'est vous. Qui joue sur les peurs? C'est vous. La grande prêtresse de la peur, elle est en face de moi."

Clean

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

In a busy life, our activity separates us from our deeper selves. With our smartphones and computer screens, we often remain caught on the surface of our lives, drowning in soulless materialism.

Over the years I have developed a number of simple practices that bring together action and a quality of mindfulness that can nourish our lives in hidden ways. Activities like mindful walking or cooking with love and attention can reconnect us with life in its beauty and wonder. One of these practices is cleaning.

The art of cleaning is a simple spiritual activity that is often overlooked. Cleaning a table, dusting a shelf, I give attention and love, because everything responds to love and care. When I clean I am also caring for what is around me, knowing that it, too, needs to be loved.

I love to clean. In cleaning my living space I am clearing up debris that clutters our life more than we realize. Just as ritual bathing prepares the worshipper, or just as we may take off our shoes at the entrance to a temple or mosque, cleaning is an important preparation for living with the sacred in our daily life.

We need to learn how to clear up after ourselves. To give space to the divine, to return to the sacred, we need to relearn how to live lightly, to leave as little debris behind us as we can.
 

2017 May 3

Brextortion

The Times

The EU will bar Theresa May from negotiating Brexit with other EU leaders. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker told her that under the EU mandate European Commission chief negotiator Michel Barnier would run the talks on behalf of the EU.

Some EU figures seem to think talking with UK Brexit minister David Davis is pointless. They could substitute EU deputy negotiator Sabine Weyand for Barnier to give May a graceful way out.

New bottom line: The EU is ready to up the UK Brexit bill to €100 billion.

AR Either the tone of the proceedings improves or the UK is doomed.

Bloody Difficult

The Guardian

Theresa May says Jean-Claude Juncker will be the next person to find she can be a "bloody difficult woman" as cabinet frustration over the Brexit negotiations mounts.

AR Either this is just posturing for voters or the UK is doomed.

Brextremists

New Statesman

Logic says those tasked with delivering Brexit should be those who supported the ludicrous idea in the first place. But almost everyone who understood international trade backed Remain. So the ministers now delivering Brexit are:

● Liam Fox — tours the world as trade secretary to advertise how many principles Britain will flog off in order to sign trade deals, and motivates British business by calling it fat and lazy.

● David Davis — has prior ministerial experience of the EU, but he has no time for doubts about a hard Brexit, and is relaxed about not assessing the effects of a Brexit with no deal.

● Boris Johnson — decided to back Leave after writing one column for Brexit and one for Brussels, and deciding which one he preferred, mistaking good rhetoric for good government.

AR Either May accepts harder logic or the UK is doomed.
 

2017 May 2

German Focus

Peter Müller

Theresa May enjoyed a "very constructive meeting" with Jean-Claude Juncker, said a UK government spokesman. But Juncker later told Angela Merkel that May lives in another galaxy. Merkel then said in the Bundestag that London was under illusions about Brexit negotiations.

The EU plans to present a Brexit bill of around €60 billion, but May said the UK does not have to pay a cent. She also demanded an immediate start to talks on a future trade deal. The EU first wants to sort out the bill and clarify the future rights of EU citizens living in the UK.

Last week the British cited the purdah rule to delay the EU budget. The rule says that during an election campaign a UK government cannot enter into any financial obligations that would bind its successors. Perhaps the EU should postpone all talks until after June 8.

British Fantasy

UK Prime Minister, 2019 (not)

Despite the unstinting efforts of my government, the UK and the EU have been unable to reach an agreement. I must warn you that difficult times lie ahead. There will be severe disruption to trade and travel for an extended period of time, and this could lead to a serious recession. Britain has made a democratic decision to leave the EU, but the EU has proved unwilling to accept that decision and negotiate a fair deal. Instead, it is determined to punish the UK.

Some European politicians seem to believe that they can humiliate Britain and bend the country to their will. Clearly, they have no knowledge of the history or nature of the British people. A country that has defeated Hitler, the Kaiser, Napoleon, and the Spanish Armada has no reason to fear the bureaucrats of Brussels, or the governments of Malta and Slovakia —

   This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
   This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
   This other Eden, demi-paradise,
   This fortress built by Nature for herself
   Against infection and the hand of war,
   This happy breed of men, this little world,
   This precious stone set in the silver sea,
   Which serves it in the office of a wall
   Or as a moat defensive to a house,
   Against the envy of less happier lands,—
   This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
   — William Shakespeare

(with thanks to Gideon Rachman)

French Philosophy

Die Zeit

French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron says France could exit from the EU if it does not reform. He said he has defended European ideas and policies, but he has to listen to people who are now extremely angry and impatient. He said he would seek to make fundamental reforms to the EU and the European project, and added that it would be fraud if he let the EU remain as is.

French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has backed off from her promised Frexit. She now says she would favor a soft exit — and only after several months of talks with European partners.

AR My favored scenario: EU heads off both Frexit and Brexit with commitment to deep reforms.
 

2017 May 1

Easternization

Jessica T. Mathews

Asia is home to 4.4 billion people. China became the world's largest economy (measured by PPP) in 2014. Its growth has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, financed the US deficit, and let China massively increase military spending.

President Xi Jinping has built public support for his view that China is claiming its rightful place as a world power after more than a century of foreign humiliation. Communist Party legitimacy no longer rests on ideology but on economic growth. Xi has launched a vigorous campaign against elite corruption, conveniently jailing many of his political opponents.

India is growing faster than China but is still far behind. Culturally and politically, India is facing west. Its relations with the US have been growing steadily closer since 2000. The success of Indian immigrants in the US is a powerful factor.

India, China, and Japan are three of the world’s four largest economies, by PPP. Though today the US and the EU together remain substantially larger, their ability to impose order on the world is not what it once was. But the dominance of the West is driven as much by values and ideas as by economic and military power.

President Trump took the US out of the TPP, which did not include China. A few weeks later, China sent officials to a meeting of the remaining TPP members to discuss a new trade regime around China, and not the US. Trump has made cuts to the State Department, to foreign aid, and to most international institutions and programs.

General James Mattis, 2013: "If you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately."

AR The Hegelian Weltgeist returns to China.
 

2017 April 30

Trump: First 100 Days

CNN

The election of Donald Trump has caused a severe case of global geostrategic whiplash. The number of campaign promises that have morphed into presidential U-turns is staggering:

China — Trump said he would name China a currency manipulator, threatened a trade war, questioned the One China policy, and accused China of being soft on North Korea. After talks with Chinese president Xi Jinping, Trump reaffirmed the One China policy, praised Beijing for taking positive steps on North Korea, and said China is not manipulating its currency.

Egypt — Trump hit it off with Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi when they met. Sisi visited the US to deepen military cooperation, fight terror, revive his economy, and gain legitimacy.

Germany — Trump had said Angela Merkel made a catastrophic mistake on migrants, was as bad as Vladimir Putin, and was trying to take US business. Now Trump says the EU is wonderful and he is totally in favor of it. He said NATO was obsolete. Now he says it is not obsolete.

Iran — Trump planned to take a hard line toward Tehran. When Iran tested missiles, the harsh US reaction warned Tehran about US strategy on Iran. The Rouhani administration moderated its behavior. Iranians view Trump as erratic and hostile toward their republic.

Iraq — The battle to liberate Mosul shows Trump how hard it is to defeat Daesh extremists. Heavier US and Iraqi firepower has come at a high cost in civilian casualties. Trump had toyed with taking Iraqi oil. His administration has decisively shot down that notion.

Israel — Trump pledged to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, dismantle the Iran deal, reduce funding to the UN, and cut aid to the Palestinians. Yet he wanted to close a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians. The Israeli right wing still expects Trump to be a friend.

Mexico — Trump still has yet to meet Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. Mexicans say they will not pay for the wall, but they fear Trump could impose taxes as payment. On NAFTA, if a good deal is not renegotiated, Mexico plans to walk away from the pact.

North Korea — The NK government says North Koreans are under imminent threat of US attack and uses this threat to justify its investment in weapons of mass destruction. A clash between Trump and Kim Jong Un is a recipe for disaster.

Russia — Trump wanted better US-Russian relations but Vladimir Putin says the level of trust on a working level has deteriorated. Congress is investigating allegations of Russian interference in the US presidential election.

Syria — Trump promised a plan to eliminate Daesh. He tried to ban Syrian refugees from entering the US. He was silent on the civil war, but after news of a chemical weapons attack in Idlib he suddenly fired dozens of Tomahawk missiles onto the Shayrat airbase.

Turkey — Trump has taken a softer tone on Turkey. Ankara responded positively to the Tomahawk strike. Trump congratulated president Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his referendum success.

UK — Trump held hands with Theresa May at the White House in January. May wants a close bond for the sake of the special relationship as Britain prepares for a future after Brexit.

EU Hard Line

Financial Times

European leaders say Brextremists have completely unreal expectations of a swift trade deal between the UK and the EU. Over lunch on Saturday, EU leaders took less than a minute to adopt tough negotiating guidelines. 

Jean-Claude Juncker and Michel Barnier report a lack of realism in terms of sequencing and timelines from their talks in London and say the two sides are far apart. Donald Tusk: "Before discussing the future we have to sort out our past."

Tusk invited Barnier to hear other EU leaders. Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte: "It is important that we get agreements as soon as possible on issues like the Irish border, the divorce bill, we are talking serious money. We have to talk about citizen's rights."

German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble: "There is no free lunch. Britons must know that. We don't want to weaken Britain. But we also don't want that the rest of Europe is weakened. Britain should not have advantages after the exit that other countries don't have."

Belgian premier Charles Michel: "A Brexit for free is not possible. Maybe the British government will do its utmost to split the 27 nations and it is trap we need to avoid .. If you are no longer part of a club, it has consequences."
 

2017 April 29

NK Missile Fail

CNN

North Korea on Saturday launched a ballistic missile that blew up over land, says US Pacific Command. The missile crashed within NK territory near Pukchang.

US President Donald Trump tweeted: "North Korea disrespected the wishes of China & its highly respected President when it launched, though unsuccessfully, a missile today. Bad!"

North Korea

Rex Tillerson

All options for responding to future provocations must remain on the table. Diplomatic and financial leverage or power will be backed up by willingness to counteract North Korean aggression with military action, if necessary.

The United States also would much prefer countries and people in question to own up to their lapses and correct their behavior themselves. But we will not hesitate to sanction third country entities and individuals supporting the DPRK's illegal activities.

For too long the international community has been reactive. The more we bide our time, the sooner we will run out of it. We must prefer a negotiated solution to this problem, but we are committed to defending ourselves and our allies against North Korean aggression.

My First 100 Days

Donald Trump

I loved my previous life. I had so many things going. Actually, this is more work than my previous life. I thought it would be easier. I do miss my old life. I like to work, but this is actually more work.
 

2017 April 28

A-Mind

Demis Hassabis

Intelligence can be viewed as a process that converts unstructured information into useful and actionable knowledge. The scientific promise of artificial intelligence (AI) is that we may be able to synthesize, automate, and optimize that process. 

At DeepMind, we developed the AlphaGo program that beat a top player at the game of Go. With
10^170 possible board configurations, Go is insoluble by brute-force methods. We used deep neural networks to build a learning system, and showed it thousands of strong amateur games. Then we had it play against different versions of itself thousands of times, learning from its mistakes and improving. More than 200 million people watched AlphaGo win its victory.

In the next few years, scientists and researchers using similar approaches will generate insights in a multitude of areas. AI is analogous to the Hubble telescope — a scientific tool that allows us to see farther and better understand the universe. AI can play a role in supporting experts by identifying patterns and sources that can escape human eyes alone. This collaboration between people and algorithms will propel scientific progress over the next few decades.

Physics and neuroscience are in some ways the most fundamental subjects. Between them they cover everything.

AR I agree — see my book Mindworlds.
 

2017 April 27

North Korea

CNN

US senators attended a meeting on North Korea at the White House. Members of both parties said they were reassured by the administration update.

Democrat Senator Chris Coons: "It was a sobering briefing, and an important opportunity for the entire Senate to hear the emerging plans of the Trump administration."

Republican Senator Bob Corker: "It was an OK briefing."

Korean War

Newsweek

The 1950-1953 Korean war killed some 2.7 million Koreans, 800,000 Chinese, and 33,000 Americans. Today President Trump says US patience with the NK nuclear and missile program has run out. Pyongyang responds with more bellicose rhetoric.

All Koreans know NK artillery batteries can hit Seoul if another war breaks out. The time from firing a shell to impact in the city is 45 seconds. Kim Jong Un has fired 66 missiles in tests, has gradually increased their range, and is working to miniaturize the NK nuclear arsenal to make warheads. An MRBM with a nuclear payload could hit South Korea or Japan.

The young man known in China as Fatty Kim the Third seems serious about being a nuclear power. In speeches, he mentions Korean reunification far more often than his father did. He could fire 600 chemically armed Scud missiles on all SK airports, train stations, and marine ports, and launch MRBMs with chemical warheads at Japan to hinder US reinforcements.

The US-SK 2015 war plan OPLAN 5015 includes attacks on NK nuclear and missile facilities and decapitation attacks against Kim Jong Un and the rest of the NK leadership. A pre-emptive strike against NK missiles or nuclear facilities would be unable to take out all the NK artillery front loaded near the border, but US-SK firepower would terminate the Kim dynasty.

Pentagon thinking is that it would be a 4-6 month conflict with high-intensity combat and many dead. In 1994, President Bill Clinton was advised that a war on the peninsula would likely result in 1 million dead, and nearly $1 trillion of economic damage.
 

2017 April 26

Robert Pirsig

The Times

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a tale of a father and son bonding, travelling on a motorcycle on a tour of western America. It discusses science and mysticism, mind and machine, and western enlightenment through reason versus eastern enlightenment through mysticism.

Pirsig was born in Minneapolis in 1928. His father was a law professor of German descent and his mother was Swedish. At age 9 Robert was assessed to have an IQ of 170 and at age 15 he entered university. He was expelled for failing grades: "Science could not teach me how to understand girls sitting in my class."

In 1946 he joined the army and served in Korea. Then he studied oriental philosophy in India. Back in Minnesota, he worked on a newspaper and met Nancy. They married in 1954 and had two sons. Pirsig wrote technical manuals, bought an old farm, and started teaching philosophy.

Pirsig went to study in Chicago, but it soured and he was given electroconvulsive shock treatment. Writing ZAMM was his salvation. After being turned down by 121 publishers, it was published in 1974. It sold 5 million copies. A sequel, Lila, appeared in 1991. Pirsig: "I felt that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the journey out, and Lila was this trip back."

AR I loved ZAMM — one of the few books I've read twice.
 

2017 April 25

Google Books

James Somers

Google had a vision: All the books ever written could be as instantly accessible as web pages.

The project began in 2002 when Larry Page offered the University of Michigan a deal: Let us borrow all your books and we'll scan them for you. In just over a decade, after making deals with numerous library systems, Google had scanned about 25 million books, at a cost of $400 million.

Authors and publishers complained. They filed a class action lawsuit against Google on behalf of everyone with a US copyright interest in a book. Only about half the books published between 1923 and 1963 are in the public domain, and no one knows which half.

The Authors Guild agreed on a collective licensing regime for out-of-print books. Authors and publishers could opt out their books at any time. For the rest, Google would display and sell their books, but 63% of the revenues would go into escrow with a Book Rights Registry.

The agreement set the terms for a public utility to be deployed on terminals to local libraries nationwide. But many feared what had happened to the academic journal market: The Google Books price would be fair at first, then once libraries and universities were hooked it would rise. The Department of Justice said the settlement would give Google a monopoly.

Now Google has a database of 25 million books that no one is allowed to read.

Quantum Computing

Tom Simonite

Google is working on building a quantum chip that performs a calculation beyond the reach of a conventional computer. The chip will race a supercomputer to prove it.

Quantum chips crunch not bits but qubits. Researchers have so far demonstrated quantum computing with only small groups of qubits. Google will need a grid of 49 qubits for its "quantum supremacy" experiment, but its latest chip has only 6 qubits. Quantum processors would need to crunch many more than 50 qubits to do useful work.

The experiment could become a benchmark for a working quantum computer. It has already helped managers at Google see that the technology is on its way.

Quantum Mechanics

University of Vienna

Quantum mechanical rules work extremely well. But there are still open questions regarding the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Some scientists aim to develop alternative versions of the mathematical rules to gain new insight into the underlying reality.

In standard quantum mechanics, the rules use complex numbers. An alternative theory uses hyper-complex numbers, which are a generalization of complex numbers. Hyper-complex rules can replicate most of the predictions of the standard rules, but some operations that commute in standard quantum mechanics do not commute in a hyper-complex world.

A team tested for deviations from standard quantum mechanics predicted by hyper-complex rules. An interferometer allowed a photon to travel both ways around a loop at the same time. Their loop included a normal optical material and a specially designed metamaterial. The normal optical material slowed down the photons, whereas the metamaterial sped them up.

The rules of standard quantum mechanics say light behaves the same whether it first passes through a normal material and then through a metamaterial or vice versa — the effects of the two materials commute. In a hyper-complex world, they might not. The team verified that hyper-complex rules are not needed in this case.

AR That's a relief — the complex rules are complicated enough.
 

2017 April 24

Emmanuel Macron v Marine Le Pen

Financial Times

Emmanuel Macron looks likely to beat Marine Le Pen in the second round of French elections on May 7. A centrist who supports open markets and France staying in the EU, he took 23.75% in the first-round vote, ahead of Ms Le Pen at 21.53% (definitive results as of 0702 ET).

The euro jumped 2 cents against the US dollar as the results were confirmed, pushing above $1.09 (with the pound at $1.27 / €1.17).

Un immense gâchis

Alexis Brézet

Ainsi donc, l'imperdable a été perdu. L'impensable s'est imposé. L'impossible est advenu. La droite, qui pendant cinq ans aura étrillé les socialistes dans tous les scrutins, la droite, dont les idées et les valeurs n'ont jamais été aussi majoritaires dans les profondeurs du pays, cette droite à qui la victoire ne pouvait pas échapper a été, hier, sèchement éliminée. Alors que le désir d'alternance, après un quinquennat unanimement jugé calamiteux, n'a jamais été aussi puissant, elle ne sera pas, pour la première fois de son histoire, représentée au second tour de l'élection présidentielle.
 

2017 St George's Day

En Marche! La France

Le Figaro

Estimations sofres à 20h00, 1er tour en % des suffrages exprimés:
23% Emmanuel Macron, 23% Marine Le Pen

Planet Over Presidency

Bill McKibben

We have only a short window to deal with the climate crisis or else we forever lose the chance to thwart catastrophic heating.

In Paris in 2015, leaders pledged to try to hold global warming to 1.5 K. But at current rates of burning coal, gas, and oil, we are on course to overheating.

The hope was that growth in renewable energy would begin to close the gap between what physics demands and what our political systems have so far delivered.

But President Trump will slow that momentum. The effects will be felt for many years. The effects of climate change policy are forever.
 

2017 Earth Day

Fast Radio Bursts

Katia Moskvitch

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) last just a few milliseconds, but they are the most luminous radio signals in the universe. When a repeating FRB was spotted, the extragalactic magnetar model became the most popular theory.

Astronomers spotted a flash that made eight reappearances, originating in a dwarf irregular galaxy about 1 Gpc away. The data seems consistent with the magnetar theory. Magnetars generally form from Type-I superluminous supernovas, which appear relatively often in dwarf irregular galaxies.

Each generation of stars since the Big Bang has increased the metallicity of the universe. But dwarf irregular galaxies formed from primordial hydrogen and helium. Their low metallicity lets them make more massive stars, which die to form highly magnetized neutron stars, or magnetars.

Brian Metzger guesses that the repeater is a young magnetar, a newborn neutron star, probably less than 3 Gs old, with a powerful and unstable magnetic field that pumps energy into the expanding cloud of supernova debris, which absorbs the energy and occasionally releases FRBs.

Another idea is that FRBs are emitted by active galactic nuclei (AGNs). AGNs are thought to be powered by supermassive black holes, and many of them have jets that could beam FRBs into space. But AGNs usually exist in bigger galaxies, not dwarfs.

We need more data.
 

2017 April 21

NK Nightmare

Nicholas Kristof

Leaning on China to pressure North Korea could fail. Then Donald Trump gets mad and destroys an NK test missile on its launchpad with a barrage of cruise missiles. Result: a new Korean war.

North Korea might respond by firing artillery at Seoul, a metropolitan area of 25 million people. The NK regime would be destroyed, but the country has a huge army and missiles that can reach Tokyo. A war could cause a million casualties and $1 trillion in damage.

US and South Korean policies toward North Korea have failed over the years. If Trump tries a pre-emptive military strike, heaven help us.

German-US Trade

David Böcking, Christian Reiermann

German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble has flown to Washington to report to Team Trump.

The German trade surplus is mainly the result of market decisions made by companies and consumers. The surplus was 8.6% of GDP in 2015 and 8.3% in 2016, and is estimated at 7.5% in 2017 and 7.0% in 2018. Around half of it is due to structural factors such as the global competitiveness of German vendors and the quality and complexity of German products.

German companies and private citizens invest abroad to earn profits that account for a quarter of the current account surplus. German investors hold a stake in more than 3,000 American companies employing around 672,000 people, accounting for a total turnover of €466 billion. In 2016 alone, $63 billion in German capital flowed into the US. This is due to US importance to the global economy and to the global role of the dollar.

Germany has taken steps to reduce the surplus. A minimum wage and €11 billion in tax cuts will increase domestic demand and public investment has increased by 45%. Germany has no influence on the exchange rate and applies no protectionist measures.

Whether all this will convince Team Trump is unclear.

German-UK Trade

Tony Barber

Germany exported goods and services worth about €100 billion to the UK in 2015, notching up a bilateral trade surplus of about €40 billion. Direct and indirect German investments in the UK amount to almost €110 billion. Fewer than 10% of German companies expect a negative impact from Brexit, mostly from lower British demand and a weaker pound.

For Germany the integrity and success of the EU are matters of existential importance. Sophia Besch and Christian Odendahl: "Berlin ... considers disintegration of the EU the biggest Brexit risk ... In Germany's view, Brexit is geopolitical vandalism."
 

2017 April 20

Dover and Out

Jonathan Freedland

Britain will leave the EU at the stroke of midnight on March 29, 2019. Theresa May: "This is an historic moment from which there can be no turning back."

May will take the UK out of both the single market and the customs union. Membership in the single market meant accepting the four freedoms: freedom of goods, capital, services, and people. Continuing to embrace that last freedom was a red line for May. She is equally determined to break free of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, which means leaving the customs union too.

Remainers see big holes in the government case. May and her ministers say they want frictionless free trade with Europe, on the best possible terms. They want continued close security cooperation. They want free trade in a world turning to protectionism. They want Britain to be a global magnet, attracting people of ambition. That was what the UK had, until they decided to throw it all away.
 

2017 April 19

Landslide

The Times

Theresa May is on course to win a majority of more than 100 in a June snap election, with Labour pro-Brexit voters deserting Jeremy Corbyn, according to polling data.

"Since when did prime ministers and party leaders deliver Easter messages? ... Mrs May's rather bland one ... did suggest a Christian duty to unite in support of Brexit."
Matthew Parris

$1 Trillion to Fix US Roads

Wired

President Donald Trump will soon reveal his $1 trillion plan to fix everything. But $1 trillion will barely cover what the Department of Transportation estimates is a $836 billion backlog in US highway investment needs.

The US road construction and repair funding system is broke. The Highway Trust Fund comes from gas and diesel pump taxes, but Congress has not raised the gas tax since 1993. Congress stabilized funding for a few years and kicked the can down the road. But in the long term, if vehicles continue to get more fuel efficient and electric cars catch on with the US public, the tax revenues will fall.

The 2015 transportation bill finally funded a study of a road usage tax, where people pay per mile they drive instead of per gallon they burn. This could raise as much as $246 billion by 2020. California has just wrapped up the largest ever US pilot study of a road usage charge. The great majority of participants thought it was fairer than a gas tax and liked road charging as a concept.

AR The pay per mile scheme gets my vote for funding UK roads too.
 

2017 April 18

Statement

Theresa May

I have just chaired a meeting of the Cabinet, where we agreed that the Government should call a general election, to be held on June 8.

Britain is leaving the European Union and there can be no turning back. We want a deep and special partnership between a strong and successful European Union and a United Kingdom that is free to chart its own way in the world.

We need a general election now, while the European Union agrees its negotiating position and before the detailed talks begin.

Transhumanism

Meghan O'Gieblyn

I first read Ray Kurzweil's book The Age of Spiritual Machines in 2006. A few years earlier, I had dropped out of Bible school and stopped believing in God. I was living alone in Chicago and working nights as a cocktail waitress.

Kurzweil divided all of evolution into successive epochs. We were living in the fifth epoch, when human intelligence begins to merge with technology. Soon we would reach the Singularity and be transformed into spiritual machines. We would resurrect our minds onto supercomputers and our bodies would become incorruptible.

Transhumanists say they are carrying on the legacy of the Enlightenment. Most are atheists. Some transhumanists say true resurrection can happen only if it is bodily resurrection. They tend to favor cryonics and bionics. The question of whether the resurrection would be corporeal or merely spiritual was debated by early Christians.

My doubts about God began after I read The Brothers Karamazov. I could not reconcile the idea that an omnipotent and benevolent God could allow so much suffering. Transhumanism offered redemption without the problems of divine justice.

Oxford philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom suggested that we live in a Matrix-like simulation and that the posthumans running it are like gods in relation to us. Simulation theologists say it is reasonable to assume that our creators are benevolent because the capacity to build sophisticated technologies requires rational purpose and social harmony.

Christian Transhumanism Association chairman Christopher Benek told me Jesus was both fully human and fully God. Science had verified the potential for matter to have two distinct natures. Superposition, a principle in quantum theory ...

AR Cut — Ed.
 

2017 April 17

Turkey

Maximilian Popp

Turks voted yes. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won a narrow majority for introducing a presidential system that puts all the power at the top. After a hundred years of parliamentary democracy, Turkey will be become a one-man state.

The referendum should never have taken place. Citizens were forced to decide on a constitutional change during a state of emergency. Erdogan mobilized the entire state for his campaign yet won by less than 2%. In the three biggest cities — Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir — he lost.

Erdogan can now dissolve parliament whenever he likes. He can side with one party and can pick new constitutional judges. He will abolish the post of prime minister and reintroduce the death penalty.

Europe and Turkey are partners in NATO and about 3 million Turks live in Germany. Turkey depends on EU trade, so the EU can exert leverage in negotiations on deepening the customs union. The EU should work with Turkish civil society and offer refuge to persecuted journalists and academics.

AR Trexit.

Brextinction

Financial Times

A year after the Treasury forecast that leaving the bloc would hit the UK economy hard, economists agree that the report mostly stands the test of time.

Consumer willingness to spend since the referendum suggests that they think the government assessment of a permanent long-term hit to incomes was wrong. Economists still think consumers are likely to be proved wrong.

The Treasury analysis predicted that Brexit would reduce trade and foreign investment in the UK, reducing the growth rate. The harder the Brexit, the worse the predicted effect. The ultimate impact of leaving the EU looks more negative than positive.

MIT economics professor John Van Reenan: "As we get closer to the end of Article 50 and a hard Brexit looks likely, I suspect this is when the proverbial will hit the fan."

EU Goes Pear-Shaped

Hans-Werner Sinn

Brexit is a problem for the EU. The British economy is as big as that of the 20 smallest member states combined. It is as if those 20 were leaving the EU at once.

Brexit destroys the European equilibrium. In the European Council, a blocking minority needs 35% of the EU population. The UK and the Deutschmark bloc (Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Finland) have a population of 35%. These countries favor free trade.

The Club Med bloc has a population share of 36%. After Brexit, the first block shrinks to a share of 25%. Club Med grows to 42%, and they favor protectionism.

AR Brexit wrecks the EU and the UK. Well done — NOT!

British Islands, Child Sex

The Sunday Times

British overseas territories are among the world's leading hosts of websites with images of child sexual abuse. UK Council for Child Internet Safety executive member John Carr urged ministers to intervene to place UK overseas territories under the same rules as the .uk domain.

AR All these little British overseas territories, these toxic remnants of empire, should be offered a choice between subjection to full and enforced domestic UK law and tax legislation or complete and unsupported independence. Their present status is disgraceful, an affront to all decent taxpayers in properly regulated states.
 

2017 Easter Sunday

Peace

No news is good news.
 

2017 April 15

Patriotism

Will Self

My father was British and my mother American, and Jewish. In my youth I railed against all states. I enjoyed the upside of living in a cosmopolitan city. When I was growing up in London, people always banged on about how polyglot it was.

Remainers failed to explain how the EU was going to prevent the 1% getting relentlessly richer. Windy talk of human rights is always an appeal to the world government, which would be the only institution capable of enforcing them.

Victory

Liel Leibovitz

For most of us, the Passover story is a tale of liberation, in which an oppressed minority rebels and resists the oppressive might of a wicked regime. But try to see things from the other side.

The Pharaoh proceeds cautiously at first, afflicting the Israelites with no more than hard labor. When that proves to be bad policy, he escalates. By the time Moses arrives, the remaining Israelites are so thoroughly persecuted they lose the spirit to rise up. Moses understands that nothing short of divine intervention can redeem them.

Israel is mired in a futile struggle against Palestinian terrorism, America is wasting time on Daesh, Europeans cannot stop Islamist fanatics. We think each oppressed people, whether afflicted by real burdens or by imagined slights, will raise itself up. The Egyptians failed to crush the Israelites — the oppressed will not be crushed.

Follow this argument to its logical end, and your best bet is to try and appease your enemy. But the Pharaoh story also shows you can wage a gradually escalating war against your foes and achieve a victory so crushing that they need divine intervention to survive.
 

2017 April 14

Germany and Europe

Der Spiegel

Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) faces a challenge from chancellor candidate Martin Schulz (SPD) and foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD). They want relaxation of the austerity demands on southern EU states and want to expand the EU mandate into a social dimension. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and many southern EU heads of government want the same.

Merkel is opposed to transferring more social competencies and money to Brussels. Her circle wants reforms and competitiveness, citing polls showing a clear majority of Germans opposed to more aid for Athens. Finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and his counterparts in other EU member states want further austerity in Athens.

Gabriel thinks it was a mistake to let Merkel set EU policy: "There is significant support for Europe on the center-left. I think it is possible to win an election on appeals for a more socially minded Europe ... We Social Democrats are in favor of an EU pursuing the harmonization of living conditions."

A Foreign Ministry paper on pillars of social rights advocates more money for education, mobility and research, and more EU money for the fight against youth unemployment to boost development in poorer regions. EPP parliamentarian Manfred Weber: "A campaign focused on Europe is fine with us. We have the support of many voters."

European Commission proposals for a European pillar of social rights include a comprehensive package of social rights to create equal opportunity on the job market along with minimum salaries, unemployment benefits, and health care.

Gabriel's campaign lets Merkel sit between the extremes as the voice of reason.

Britain and Europe

Chris Giles

Brexit is bad news. At best, the UK and the EU27 will reach an agreement they both believe serves their interests reasonably well. At worst, Britain risks a disorderly exit.

The UK seeks a deep and special partnership with the EU after Brexit. It hopes to protect the rights of EU citizens living in Britain and UK citizens living in EU member states. It wants a soft border in Northern Ireland, free trade in goods with minimal customs barriers, an ambitious services trade agreement, and security and policing cooperation.

The EU27 seeks guarantees for citizens and a good solution for Ireland, but otherwise starts out from the status quo. Since the EU is happy with Britain as a member state, it seeks compensation from the UK for damaging changes.

Britain starts from a fantasy in which the UK is already outside the EU and seeking a better relationship, while the EU 27 is grounded in reality. Britain will have to budge.

Brits must face the facts. May will do her best. The EU demand for a financial divorce settlement is reasonable. Gibraltar cannot get the same EU deal as the UK.
 

2017 April 13

Trump Flip-Flops

CNN

President Donald Trump on NATO: "I said it was obsolete; it's no longer obsolete."

In a WSJ interview, Trump praised Chinese president Xi Jinping, backed down a threat to brand China a currency manipulator, and eased off on his demands for China to reverse the trade imbalance with the United States.

Trump decried Syrian president Bashar al-Assad as a "butcher" and might now advocate regime change.

Trump: "Right now we are not getting along with Russia at all. We may be at an all-time low in terms of relationship with Russia."

He even publicly criticized his political guru Steve Bannon.

A wild first 100 days.

The Science of Consciousness

June 5-10, San Diego, California

The 2017 conference was scheduled in Shanghai, China, June 5-10, but due to unforeseen circumstances is moving to The Hyatt Regency La Jolla at Aventine, near the UCSD campus.

TSC is the world's largest and longest-running interdisciplinary conference on all aspects of the nature of conscious experience, awareness, feelings and existence. Questions include how the brain produces consciousness, whether consciousness is intrinsic to the universe, or an epiphenomenal illusion, how consciousness can causally affect brain processes, what are the best empirical theories, do we have free will, how did life and consciousness originate and evolve, what are the origins of moral and aesthetic values, how can we improve mental, physical and cognitive function, and can consciousness persist after bodily death. These are approached through science, philosophy, culture, and contemplative practices.

TSC began at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1994, and returns there in even-numbered years, alternating with TSC conferences around the globe.

AR I was at Tucson in 2000 and 2002, as well as at the TSC meetings in Denmark in 1997, Sweden in 2001, and the Czech Republic in 2003. I also liked the ASSC meetings in Bremen in 1998, Oxford in 2006, and Berlin in 2009.
 

2017 April 12

Ghost in the Shell

The Observer

The groundbreaking 1995 original Ghost in the Shell, based on a manga series by Masamune Shirow, was a masterpiece. The Hollywood remake has dialled down the introspection, beefed up the action, and tweaked the enigmatic plot.

The result is not so dumbed down that it loses the original chilly techno-dread. Scarlett Johansson dives deep into a tricky role, a character who is as much a sentient weapon as she is a human consciousness. The visual impact is breathtaking.

AR Despite the Hollywood action format, the philosophical issues about human or cyborg identity come over clearly. The future cityscape is richly imagined and chillingly plausible. And Johansson as Japanese is amusing.

London

The New York Times

Modern London is the metropolis that globalization created. London is banker to the planet. It is as much city-state as city, with a culture and economy that circulate the world.

Modern London thrives on the idea that one city can be a global melting pot, a global trading house, and a global media machine. The thought is that being connected to the rest of the world is something to celebrate.

What happens to London when that idea unexpectedly falls away? Brexit is probably the noisiest and most complicated divorce in modern European history. The certainties that sustained a great city are no longer certain.

Those who voted for Britain to leave the European Union say London is reclaimed. But banks, investment firms, and other companies are making plans to move elsewhere.

AR From potential capital of Europe to actual capital of a rocky outcrop.
 

2017 April 11

North Korea

CNN

Carrying more than 5,000 sailors and 60 aircraft, the Nimitz-class carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) is heading for North Korea. She is escorted by guided-missile destroyers USS Wayne E. Meyer and USS Michael Murphy and the guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Champlain. The three escort warships have more than 300 combined missile tubes and are outfitted with the Aegis ABM system.

Peter Layton, a visiting fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Brisbane, Australia:
"The Carl Vinson group is commanded from Hawaii, rather than the US military base in Japan, so it's a clear American initiative not a Japanese or South Korea one. That may defuse attempts to link Japan and South Korea and thus limit the possibility of any North Korean aggression against them."

Former CIA and NSA head retired General Michael Hayden:
"No matter what we do there is this move by North Korea to build missiles and put weapons on top of missiles. This is what they count on for regime survival. ... The best we can do is box it where it is right now. I don't think we can make them give up the program."
 

2017 April 10

Dreaming

Nicola Davis

Researchers have found that the dreaming brain and the waking brain often recruit the same areas for the same types of experience. Dreaming about faces is linked to increased high-frequency activity in the brain region for face recognition, and so on.

Francesca Siclari and colleagues made a series of EEG recordings of participants who were sleeping. The participants were awakened periodically and asked if they had been dreaming. If they had, they were asked how long they thought the dream had lasted and what they could remember of it.

The researchers linked dreaming to a drop in low-frequency activity in a cortical hot zone including visual areas and areas involved in sensory integration. This held regardless of whether the dream was remembered or not and whether it occurred during REM or non-REM sleep.

The researchers also linked dreaming to an increase in high-frequency activity in the hot zone during non-REM sleep and linked dream recall to an increase in high-frequency activity toward the forebrain. They saw similar activity in the hot zone and beyond for dreams during REM sleep.

The team learned to predict dreaming from the EEG trace with high confidence. The study could help clarify the nature of consciousness by revealing what happens in the brain during sleep when we switch from unconscious to conscious states.
 

2017 April 9

Globocop Redux

Niall Ferguson

President Donald Trump launched 59 Tomahawk missiles against a Syrian airfield in Homs. I think we can now discern the beginning of an improvement in US foreign policy.

The head of the Russian propaganda outlet RT observed darkly that the airstrikes had been ordered on the centenary of the US entry into WW1.

President Woodrow Wilson opted for intervention in Europe. He chose to tip the scales in favor of Britain and France. He had a strategy.

Trump has shown the world that a new sheriff is in town. He has shown Chinese President Xi Jinping that he will not shirk from using force against North Korea.

This does not amount to a coherent strategy to stabilize the Mideast.

AR The Wilson strategy led to WW2.

Gibraltar

Oliver Bullough

The Rock imported 117 million packs of cigarettes in 2013. This epic Russian smuggling operation may have cost EU countries €700 million in lost tax revenues.

Gibraltar used to be a naval garrison blockaded by Spain. When the money dried up with the end of the cold war, the Rock had to diversify. Like other British colonies, it did so by aggressively undercutting the rules and taxes of its neighbors.

There are more than 60,000 companies registered in Gibraltar. These undermine the UK as much as everyone else. A recent Gib growth industry has been online gambling.

Gibraltar is loyal, it guards the gates to the Med, it loves Britain and the Queen. This is like a kid who visits his gran every weekend, just so he can nick her pension.

AR Give it back to Spain.
 

2017 April 8

Quantum Weirdness

Anil Ananthaswamy

David Bohm developed a quantum theory in which a wave with properties identical to that of the standard wave function guides particles around. In his picture, if particles are entangled, a common pilot wave guides them, and any change in the position or momentum of one particle instantly changes the pilot wave, thus influencing all the other particles.

In a new double-slit experiment, researchers created pairs of photons with entangled polarizations, and sent one photon of each pair through a double slit that would let a vertically polarized photon through slit A and a horizontally polarized photon through slit B. Measuring the polarization of the second photon revealed the polarization of the photon passing through the slits.

The team determined the path of the traveling photon as it went through the apparatus and measured the polarization state of the associated probe photon. They did this with tens of thousands of photon pairs, and found that, on average, at the moment a photon passed through slit A, the probe photon would be vertically polarized, as expected. When a traveling photon was measured at a position on the screen corresponding to having passed through slit A, half the time the polarization of the probe photon was horizontal, suggesting that the traveling photon had passed through slit B.

The experiment shows that the moving photon is constantly changing the polarization of the probe photon. Look at the probe photon at the moment the moving photon goes through a slit, and there is no contradiction. But look at it the moment the moving photon hits the screen and, half of the time, its polarization state has changed. Bohmian theory accepts this nonlocality.

Bohmian mechanics is formulated to replicate the predictions of standard quantum mechanics for non-relativistic particles. By contrast, quantum field theory is Lorentz invariant. Attempts to marry Bohmian ideas with special relativity still fail.

AR Locality fails in Bohmian mechanics, so it offers no advantage over standard quantum theory, just a lot of traditional metaphysical baggage that physicists should learn to drop. My interpretation is closer to Copenhagen but better adapted to general relativity and information theory.
 

2017 April 7

Trump Raises the Stakes

Dennis B. Ross

President Trump's decision to launch 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against Al Shayrat air base in Syria was swift and purposeful. The United States has sent a powerful message that there is a price for using chemical weapons.

AR His baptism of fire.

Brextremism

David Aaronovitch

Die Welt gerät aus den Fugen. UK governments had stuck to their promises, delivered to their allies, and been diplomatically astute. But now the UK seems to have gone mad. The prime minister gave the job of foreign secretary to a man who campaigned for Brexit and who compared the EU to the Nazi occupation.

The European Research Group is the most powerful opposition force in British politics. The group wants a hard Brexit: little or no severance money to the EU, little or no jurisdiction from the European Court, a gung-ho up-yours stance on relationships with the single market, and impatience with those who dislike their vision.

Two weeks ago the Daily Telegraph published a letter from 70 MPs demanding that the BBC tell the good news about Brexit. In the last week MPs have played a kind of Monty Python sketch of competitive bragging, where one says we won't pay anything and another adds: "Never mind paying nothing, they should pay us!"

ERG people are busy talking with themselves about what a good position we are all in. One said the EU negotiators won't really insist on getting their money before talking about trade. In a normal parliament a strong opposition could act as a corrective to this sort of fantasy. How can our EU partners take it seriously?

AR If the UK sets itself against the EU, only one of the unions will survive. Place your bets: a little old union with toytown politics, medieval institutions, and a broken economy takes on a big new one with an unparalleled cultural heritage, modern political institutions, and one of the strongest economies in the world.

The Age of Genius

Steven Nadler

In 1633, René Descartes learned that Galileo had been convicted of heresy by the Catholic Church and punished with a life sentence of house arrest. Descartes was shaken enough to suppress a treatise he had written based on the heliocentric model of Copernicus. Something special happened in philosophy in the seventeenth century, and especially in natural philosophy, science.

The New Philosophy was characterized by a reliance on reason and evidence rather than devotion to religious or ancient authority. Truth was a matter of discovery, not decree. Philosophy pursued causal explanations of phenomena based on experiment and mathematics. Popular accounts of modern philosophy typically start with Descartes, who in 1637 said cogito ergo sum.
 

2017 April 6

My White House Role

Ivanka Trump

I think there are multiple ways to have your voice heard. Where I disagree with my father, he knows it. And I express myself with total candor. Where I agree, I fully lean in and support the agenda and make a positive impact. But I respect the fact that he always listens. It's how he was in business. It's how he is as president.

I am confident in my father to be able to execute on his promise to the people who elected him. I think the election highlighted for people just how divided this country was. We're in a unique time where noise equals, in a lot of people's perception, advocacy. And I fundamentally disagree with that. I do think there's a time for public denouncement. I also think there's a time for discussion.

I wasn't elected by the American people to be president. My father is gonna do a tremendous job. And I wanna help him do that. But I don't think that it will make me a more effective advocate to constantly articulate every issue publicly where I disagree. I think most of the impact I have, over time, most people will not actually know about.

If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then I'm complicit. I don't know that the critics who may say that of me, if they found themselves in this unique and unprecedented situation that I am now in, would do any differently than I'm doing. So I hope to make a positive impact. I hope time will prove that I have done a good job and, much more importantly, that my father's administration is the success that I know it will be.

AR Sounds good to me.
 

2017 April 5

German President Attacks Brextremism

The Guardian

German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier told MEPs in the European Parliament that the Brextremists would be unable to deliver on their promise to take back control.

He said he was convinced that in this world a single European country standing alone and without the EU cannot make its voice heard or assert its economic interests. Only as partners on the world stage can Europeans avoid becoming the playthings of other powers.

He said Brextremist promises would come to nothing, "Take back control" is a strong slogan but nationalists are unable to deliver it, and if it can be delivered then it is something we can only do together.

He described the UK vote to leave as "bitter" and said Germany fully supported the European project. He dismissed Donald Trump's claims the EU was a vehicle for German economic dominance.

In English, Steinmeier added: "In my country, yes, we want Europe. We want to build a better Europe and we want to be a European Germany."

European People's Party bloc leader Manfred Weber: "Some of the politicians in London have not understood what leaving the European Union means. It means being alone."

British leader of Conservative MEPs Ashley Fox: "The European Parliament claims to represent all the citizens of the EU, and until we leave that includes UK citizens. Therefore, Conservative MEPs intend to continue playing a full role in all debates, including discussions on Brexit. To suggest otherwise is both unconstitutional and undemocratic."

Exit vom Brexit

Markus Becker

Ein Widerruf der Austrittsmitteilung durch die Briten dürfte nur unter Bedingungen, die von allen Mitgliedstaaten der EU-27 festgelegt werden, möglich sein.

Rechtsdienst des Europaparlaments: "Es herrscht weitgehende Einigkeit, dass der Austrittsprozess gestoppt werden könnte, wenn alle anderen Mitgliedstaaten zustimmen."

Der Europäische Gerichtshof müsste entscheiden.

AR EuGH — von Brextremisten verflucht!
 

2017 April 4

European Security

Edward Lucas

Germans sometimes call Brits Inselaffen — island monkeys — unpredictable, backward, quarrelsome, and isolated. The term has boomed since Brexit.

At the annual Königswinter conference last weekend, British participants tried to outline a new post-Brexit Anglo-German relationship. The best line was that Brexit was a resolution, not a dissolution. Instead of moaning about EU integration, Britain would now engage on things like security.

Security problems abound:

● The Balkans are awash with Russian influence and jihadists.
● Europe has failed in Syria, in Libya, and in the Mideast.
● Turkey is descending headlong into autocracy.
● NATO deterrence in the Baltic states is still fragile.
● The war in Ukraine bubbles on.
● Democracy and the rule of law are under strain.

Serious shit, as one German said.

Germany and Britain complement each other. Germany is the economic giant, Britain is the leading military and intelligence power. German defense spending may not reach 2% of GDP, but it may hit 3% on defense and conflict prevention combined.

Britain objects to an ECJ ruling that would prohibit GCHQ from collecting and storing internet data. Brexit will solve that problem for the Inselaffen.

Gibraltar

CNN

EU draft negotiating document on Brexit: "After the United Kingdom leaves the Union, no agreement between the EU and the United Kingdom may apply to the territory of Gibraltar without the agreement between the Kingdom of Spain and the United Kingdom."

That prompted fury in Britain. Former Conservative party leader Lord Michael Howard: "I do think it is a remarkable coincidence that 35 years ago this week another woman prime minister sent a task force half way across the world to protect another small group of British people against another Spanish speaking country."

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson: "I think the position of the government is very, very clear, which is that the sovereignty of Gibraltar is unchanged, and it's not going to change and cannot conceivably change without the express support and consent of the people of Gibraltar and the United Kingdom, and that is not going to change."

Spain called for cool heads. Foreign Minister Alfonso Dastis: "Frankly, it seems to me that someone in the United Kingdom is losing their temper."

Gibraltar is classified as a British Overseas Territory. The UK has held sovereignty over Gibraltar for more than 300 years after it was captured from Spain in a war. In a 2002 referendum Gibraltar residents rejected a proposal to share the territory between the UK and Spain, but in the 2016 referendum 96% of them voted to stay in the European Union.

Between a Rock and a Hard Brexit
Sean O'Grady

Gibraltar is a remnant of the British Empire. Spain will not forget about the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht that assigned the Rock to the UK.

The Kingdom of Spain is soon to be the fourth largest EU economy and has the backing of the entire European Union. The Brexit choice may be between:
— A good deal for the UK and Gibraltar shared with Spain
— A hard and hostile Brexit plus a blockade of Gibraltar

The UK will also need to be mindful of its base on EU member Cyprus.

Großbritannien verliert die Contenance
Die Welt

Der Vorschlag, in den Krieg gegen Spanien zu ziehen, stammt aus Michael Howard. Der ehemalige Vorsitzende der Konservativen Partei, der sich seit sieben Jahren Baron Howard of Lympne nennen darf, brachte den Krieg von seinem Wohnzimmersofa aus ins Spiel.

Gibraltar ist nur halb so groß wie die Falklandinseln, besitzt aber etwa 30.000 Einwohnern. Vor etwa 300 Jahren fiel der Fels in britische Hand. Die spanische Bevölkerung wurde vertrieben. Der Landzipfel ist dem breiteren Publikum vor allem als notorische Steueroase ein Begriff.

Spanien hat den Schotten nun weiteren Auftrieb verschafft: Madrid hat seine bisherige Opposition zum EU-Beitritt eines unabhängigen Schottlands gerade aufgeben. Gibraltar hat mehrheitlich gegen den Brexit gestimmt: 96% der Bevölkerung waren gegen den Austritt.

Madrid hat sich zurückgehalten. Außenminister Alfonso Dantis: "Die spanische Regierung ist ein wenig überrascht über den Ton, den Großbritannien anschlägt. In diesem Fall mangelt es eindeutig an der traditionellen britischen Contenance."

AR Ein Hauch von deutscher Schadenfreude da!
 

2017 April 3

World Exclusive

Donald Trump

I have great respect for Xi Jinping. I have great respect for China. China has great influence over North Korea. And China will either decide to help us with North Korea, or they won't. If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.

Look where we are. We have an $800 billion trade deficit. The Mideast is a mess. This is a very, very serious problem that we have in the world today. The United States has talked long enough and you see where it gets us, it gets us nowhere. 

I think Brexit is very good for the UK. I would have thought when it happened that more would follow, but I really think the European Union is getting their act together. It could be a very good thing for both. There is a different spirit for holding together.

Bull's Eye!

Natalie Wolchover

In July 2014, German statistician Thomas Royen proved a famous conjecture at the intersection of geometry, probability theory, and statistics that had eluded experts for decades.

The Gaussian correlation inequality (GCI) was posed in an elegant form in 1972. Royen, 67, found it could be extended into a statement he was familiar with, and suddenly saw how to prove it.

His proof was short and simple. He typed it up and posted it to arxiv.org. False proofs of the GCI had been floated repeatedly over the decades, so at first his achievement went unrecognized.

In its 1972 form, the GCI puts a lower bound on the odds in a game of darts. Imagine two overlapping convex polygons A and B centered on a target point. Darts thrown at the target will land in a bell curve distribution of positions around the center point. The GCI says the probability that a dart will land inside both A and B is at least as high as the probability of landing in A times the probability of landing in B. The same inequality was thought to hold for any two convex symmetrical shapes with any number of dimensions centered on a point.

Royen found he could generalize the GCI to apply to statistical spreads related to the squares of Gaussian distributions, called gamma distributions. His familiarity with gamma distributions sparked his epiphany. He transformed his function into a simpler function and saw that the derivative of this transformed function was equivalent to the transform of the derivative of the original function. The latter derivative was always positive, proving the GCI. Experts say any graduate student in statistics could follow his proof.

Royen: "It is like a kind of grace. We can work for a long time on a problem and suddenly ... a good idea."
 

2017 April 2

Schism

Niall Ferguson

Brexit will be much more protracted and expensive than the worst imaginable divorce. Both sides: "Never again will those impossible people on the other side of the Channel be able to interfere in our affairs. Now we can take back control and sit back and watch their union fall apart."

Schisme est le mot juste — recall the great division between western and eastern Christianity in 1054. As Rome was to past schisms, so Brussels is to this one.

Britain was always a brake on European federalism. Now the EU27 can unite in giving the UK a hard time. Brextremists see an economic 1940, with a global Britain striking out anew.

AR May the force be with EU in year 77 of the fight for FUK.
 

2017 April 1

Quantum Questions

Robbert Dijkgraaf

Quantum theory and modern mathematics complement each other to reveal symmetries in reality.

Classical mechanics may compute how a particle travels from A to B along a geodesic. Quantum mechanics considers all possible paths from A to B. The Feynman sum over histories assigns to each path a weight that determines the probability that a particle will go that way. The classical solution is simply the most likely one.

Calabi-Yau spaces are compactified 6D solutions of the Einstein equations of gravity. One can count the number of curves on a Calabi-Yau space using an integer, the degree, that measures how often the curves wrap around. Finding the number of curves of a given degree is hard even for the simplest Calabi-Yau space, the quintic. The number of degree 1 curves is 2,875. The number of degree 2 curves is 609,250. The number of degree 3 curves is larger.

String theorists defined a single function with a physical interpretation as a probability amplitude for a string propagating in the Calabi-Yau space that probes all possible curves of every possible degree at once. An equivalent formulation of the physics uses a mirror Calabi-Yau space with a different topology but the same string propagation. The difficult computation on the original manifold translates into a single integral on the mirror manifold.

Mirror symmetry illustrates duality. Two classical models can be equivalent when considered as quantum systems. Dualities point to deep symmetries of the underlying quantum theory. Mirror symmetry can connect symplectic geometry, which underlies much of mechanics, with algebraic geometry, the world of complex numbers.

Mathematicians bring new rigor to quantum theory as they work on homological mirror symmetry.

AR Hard stuff. My work is prior to all that.