Tim Maudlin says
Stephen Hawking
doesn't know what
he's talking about


Shai Agassi rolls out
electric cars in Israel


Triumph Daytona 955i 2004
singing its heart out
(YouTube, 4:35)

2012 January 27

Religion for Atheists
The Guardian

Alain de Botton's father Gilbert was born in Egypt and became a multimillionaire banker: "My dad was a slightly stricter version of Richard Dawkins. The worldview was that there are idiots out there who believe in Santa Claus and fairies and magic and elves and we're not joining that nonsense."

After heading Rothschild Bank, Gilbert established Global Asset Management in 1983 with £1 million and sold it in 1999 for £420 million. Alain says he was an extreme atheist: "I think it was a generational thing." And yet Gilbert now lies beneath a Hebrew headstone in a Jewish cemetery in London.

In 2008, Alain established the School of Life in Bloomsbury with books on the ground floor and a salon where he teaches "ideas to live by". He says society can't get to where he wants it to go without plundering religion. Politicians haven't got the buttons, but religions have, and know how to use them.

Alain De Botton was born in Zurich and schooled in England. After a double first in history at Cambridge, he did a master's in philosophy at London and began a PhD but gave up: "I had a long night of the soul."

AR Alain, 42, has earned several million from his popular philosophy books.

USS Gerald R. Ford
Pentagon Cuts
Financial Times

The Pentagon will cut $485 billion from its planned spending over the next decade but will maintain all its 11 aircraft carriers and will
continue to invest in the F-35 program. JCS chairman General Martin Dempsey: "We are retaining our full spectrum capability."

Dassault Rafale
The Royal Navy may buy French fighter jets for its new aircraft carrier. The UK government is concerned about escalating costs and delays in the American JSF/
F-35 program and may invest in an interim capability such as the
F-18 Super Hornet or the French Dassault Rafale.








Harper's Bazaar
New Yorker Vera Wang, 62,
has a new home in Beverly Hills,
pictured in the U.S. edition of
Harper's Bazaar: "I am not the
sort of woman who would wear
high heels with a bathing suit.
Let's get that straight right now."

The Power of Introverts
Scientific American

Introverts prefer quiet environments, while extroverts need higher levels of stimulation to feel their best. Our schools and workplaces are designed for extroverts.

Research shows that brainstorming in groups is a terrible way to produce creative ideas. Solitude is a crucial ingredient for creativity.

Quiet by Susan Cain

The Third Jihad
The New York Times

Ominous music plays. Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets, and an Islamic flag flies over the White House. Narrator: "This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America ... This is the war you don't know about."

The Third Jihad: Radical
Islam's Vision for America

Iranium: The Movie

Both movies are financed by
The Clarion Fund

Chuck Norris











AFP
Laura Dekker, 16, returns from
a one-year solo voyage around
the world in her yacht Guppy

2012 January 26

Cameron @ Davos
Financial Times

British PM David Cameron called on Berlin to contribute significantly more resources and guarantees to help solve the eurozone crisis. He criticized eurozone leaders for being distracted by other issues, such as the introduction of a financial transaction tax, which he described as "quite simply madness".

British officials are frustrated with German leadership of the eurozone and criticize Germany for seeking to persuade other countries to "become more German" without accepting that Germany must "become less German" by importing more. Cameron called on Germany to allow its trade surplus to fall.

AR I pay transaction tax for my work deals and things I buy, so why shouldn't the financial predators? Cameron should stop preaching and start solving the problem.

Merkel @ Davos
Financial Times

German chancellor Angela Merkel said Europe can only recover the confidence of global markets if the weaker European economies boost their growth and competitiveness with structural reforms and ensure that their debts are sustainable. Responding to IMF calls for much bigger firewalls to protect European sovereign debt from speculative attacks, she questioned their credibility: "If Germany promises something that cannot be delivered if the markets attack it hard, then Europe would be left with a wide open flank." Merkel called for more European solidarity through closer integration. German businesses see beyond austerity and report growing confidence in their prospects.

Europe: The Rescue
Camilla Cavendish

Late last year, the yield on two-year Italian bonds hit 7% and it seemed that Spain might fail to refinance its debts. Then the ECB began offering banks unlimited three-year loans. Spain and Italy needed time to make structural reforms and the move has given them three years. Now Spain has raised a fifth of its needs for this year through bond auctions and the yield on Italian bonds stands at 3.5%. The ECB has allowed what is in effect quantitative easing. This week the ECB may join in a restructuring package for Greek debt. The technocrats may have rescued Europe.

World Economic Forum
Financial Times

Davos expert verdict:
1 Globorg is weakening and risks another crunch.
2 Globorg will grow only slightly with regional recessions.
3 Expect an economic crunch or another sub-par year.
4 Weak government responses will worsen any crisis.
5 Most big issues depend on solving the eurozone crisis.

Experts say the eurozone needs:
1 Austerity and structural reforms in peripheral countries
2 Fiscal integration with risk sharing, including eurobonds
3 Interim liquidity support for countries struggling to borrow
4 Deep restructuring of Greek sovereign debt
5 Eurozone-wide recapitalization of European banks

Fifth Generation Dominance
American Forces Press Service

Fifth-generation fighter aircraft are key to America maintaining domain dominance in the years ahead, say U.S. Air Force officials. The new defense strategy guidance unveiled by President Barack Obama affirms that the U.S. military must be able to defeat anti-access, area-denial threats. The strategy requires the ability to operate against adversaries across the spectrum of conflict. Fifth-generation aircraft are a key ability in in combating the growing anti-access, area-denial capabilities of other nations. The F-22 and F-35 fighters bring maneuverability, survivability, advanced avionics, and stealth technology to the fight. They are particularly relevant at the top of the spectrum and are key to the warfighting capability of the nation.

AR In other words, lawmakers, don't you dare cut the budget for these items!

2012 January 25

State of the Union
The Times

President Obama used his State of the Union address to:

1 Promise more equality: "We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules."

2 Outline a new Buffett rule ensuring that wealthy executives do not pay lower tax rates than their secretaries do. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett says he and his rich friends should be taxed more heavily. Like Mitt Romney, Warren Buffett pays about half the rate of regular income tax.

3 Lay out an economic blueprint highlighting corporate tax breaks to encourage insourcing and skills training. On energy, America should increase its independence by opening up more of its oil and gas reserves and by investing in clean energy.

4 Warn Iran: "America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. But a peaceful resolution of this issue is still possible, and far better, and if Iran changes course and meets its obligations, it can rejoin the community of nations."

AR All this sounds good: Romney the raider will have to fight to do better.

Watchdog for Investors
Financial Times

Martin Wheatley, new head of UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA): "You have to assume that you don't have rational consumers. Faced with complex decisions or too much information, they ... hide behind credit rating agencies or behind the promises that are given to them by the salesperson."

The FCA will police markets and protect investors in an effort to head off new financial scandals. Research in behavioral economics shows investors often make decisions contrary to their own interests because of their aversion to losses or unwillingness to ditch a losing strategy.

Wheatley sees risk in the combination of predatory selling and poor consumer choices: "Those two things don't meet in a happy place ... The profitability to the firm appears to be a bigger concern than the suitability to the customer."

AR Wheatley has obviously read Daniel Kahneman's new book (blog, Jan 5).

2012 January 24

Gulf Storm Warning
Financial Times

Tensions are mounting between Iran and the west over Tehran's nuclear program. The US and its allies are pressing ahead with sanctions and are ready for naval action if the Islamic Republic tries to throttle the world's oil supply.

European Union sanctions will ban imports of Iranian crude oil. Iran has tested cruise missiles that can hit ships in the Strait of Hormuz and threatens to shut the strait. It has warned its Gulf neighbors not to replace Iranian oil in world markets. The regime is pushing ahead with plans to enrich uranium in an underground bunker that conventional bombs cannot destroy.

Iran has an ill-trained military, an obsolete air force, and a navy of speedboats. But it can interrupt the oil traffic in the strait. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, says Iran has the ability to block the strait for a few weeks. Iran would likely start by using speedboats to force tankers to make evasive maneuvers or undergo inspections. If Iran were to mine even part of the strait, U.S. forces would need weeks to clear the danger. They would first have to locate and destroy any missile and other threats to their mine-clearing vessels and helicopters.

Few western military strategists believe Iran will block the strait, as that would also block its own oil exports. Washington is trying to cool tensions. A joint Israeli-U.S. military exercise planned for the spring was canceled last week. Any random incident or miscalculation could provoke a war.

2012 January 23

Capitalism
Martin Wolf

Crises are inherent in capitalism. Periods of stability and prosperity lead to the leveraging of returns. People in the financial system profit from such leverage and underestimate its perils. The financial system is abused and then collapses. We need to protect finance and the economy from each other.

The limited liability corporation is vulnerable to looting. Incentives for top employees encourage manipulation of corporate earnings. It is vital to encourage the independence of boards and ensure that pay packages are transparent. But except in banks, governments should not intervene directly.

Taxes play a decisive role in determining how the market economy operates. We need to remove the incentives for leverage embedded in taxation. We should shift the tax burden from incomes on to consumption and wealth. We must ensure richer people pay tax.

Plutocrats like closed political and economic systems. But they undermine the open access on which democratic politics and a competitive market economy depend. Protecting democracy from plutocracy is a challenge because capitalism today is global. The answer is more global governance.

2012 January 22

My Endorsement For President
Chuck Norris

We need to appoint a commander in chief who can clearly lead America to a more solvent and secure future. We are electing a president, not a pastor or pope. We need a veteran of political war who has already fought Goliath.

My questions to find our next president:
  1 Who is most committed to follow and lead by the U.S. Constitution?
  2 Who has the greatest leadership ability to rally, unify and mobilize citizens?
  3 Who has the best working comprehension of America?
  4 Who has the best ability to influence a volatile world away from its brink of destruction?
  5 Who has clear and present moral fortitude?
  6 Who can best beat President Barack Obama?
  7 Who has the best abilities to lead Washington politics and politicians?
  8 Who has the best plan and leadership ability to restore America's economy?
  9 Who is the most fiscally prudent?
10 Who has demonstrated the highest regard for human life?

My wife Gena and I believe former Speaker Newt Gingrich is the answer to most of those questions and deserves our endorsement.

AR Oh, well, if Chuck says so ...

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Ron Rosenbaum

A new edition of William L. Shirer's 1,250-page book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich marks the 50th anniversary of its winning the National Book Award. Many baby boomers read Shirer as their parents' Book of the Month Club selection and still recall the impact it had on them.

Shirer was 30 when he took up residence in Berlin in 1934. He witnessed the rise of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler and he covered the Blitzkriegs against Poland and France before he was forced to leave in December 1940. In 1941 he published Berlin Diary, recording his response to the rise of the Reich. By 1960, Shirer had 15 years to distance himself and then to return from that distance. Rereading his magnum opus, one sees how subtly Shirer shifts between telescope and microscope. He gives us Tolstoyan vistas of battle, and yet his close-ups of the key players lay bare their minds and hearts.

Shirer maintained that Hitler and his furious drive were a distillation of centuries of German culture and philosophy. The term "Third Reich" was concocted in a 1922 book by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who believed in the divine destiny of a German history with three momentous acts. Charlemagne's First Reich was followed by the Second Reich, resurrected by Bismarck with his Prussian "blood and iron" but betrayed in November 1918. Thereafter Germany was awaiting the savior who would lead the Third Reich to its destiny.

AR I recall reading the book as a teenager in the 1960s. It had a big impact on me too.

2012 January 21

Charity Needs Capitalism
Bill Clinton

We can and must rethink the relationship between economic and social challenges, so that benefits and opportunities are available to more people. People are demanding it. The current systems are not working. The financial crisis showed that the path we were on was unstable and unsustainable.

We see a new approach in big companies that have shifted their corporate culture to increasing shared value. When our bottom line is more about strengthening the future than maintaining the present, and when our financial interests are aligned with our social ones, we will be closer to the kind of world we want all our children to live in.

Members of the Clinton Global Initiative have made thousands of commitments that are improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the globe. These efforts benefit both the communities they target and the corporations and philanthropists involved. All this enhances profits, increases economic inclusion, and gives more people a stake in a shared future.

AR Good old Bill — I'd still vote for him to be president.

Hexplane
Wired

The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey takes off like a helicopter and flies like an airplane. The guys at Oliver VTOL have plans for Hexplane, which combines the fuselage of a Boeing 737 with three Osprey hover rigs. Company founder Richard Oliver says the redundancy of six independent engines and propellers provides more safety.

AR I like it. Reminds me of the Fairey Rotodyne.

PHILOSOPHER

Buy @ Amazon:

USA

UK

Ralph Fiennes
directs and stars in
Coriolanus

YouTube trailer
(2:15)

Derek Parfit has spent decades building an ethical theory that
is fundamentally misguided

2012 January 20

The Chinese View Of SOPA
The New Yorker

Opponents say SOPA and PIPA would impose a censorship regime like the Great Firewall of China. Rebecca MacKinnon says they would impose a "censorship mechanism that is almost identical, technically, to the mechanism the Chinese use to censor their Internet."

Chinese reaction to American protests ranges from sympathy to snickering. A joke on micro-blogging site Weibo: "The Great Firewall turns out to be a visionary product; the American government is trying to copy us." Another joke: "At last, the planet is becoming unified: We are ahead of the whole world, and the American imperialists are racing to catch up."

Weibo has a team of censors on staff to trim posts with sensitive political content. Opponents say American sites would also need censors to police content for copyright violations. Blogger Dr. Zhang: "I've come up with a perfect solution: You can come to China to download all your pirated media, and we'll go to America to discuss politically sensitive subjects."

2012 January 19

Diminishing Returns
Financial Times

The implosion of financial capitalism has become a crisis of political authority in the west. Behind this lies an unequal contest between a globalized economy and politicians with national electorates.

Capitalism no longer belongs to the west. The troubles faced by the advanced economies have crystalized a wrenching shift in the balance of global economic power. The financial crash inflicted huge losses on the innocent. But the Occupy movement falls short of a coherent prospectus. Globalized capitalism has outstripped the capacity of national governments to manage it.

The sense of collective interest visible at the post-crash meetings of the G20 has dissipated. What started out as a crisis of financial capitalism may give way to a backlash against globalization.

Online Piracy
Matthew Yglesias

Much of the debate about SOPA and PIPA centers on entertainment industry claims about the economic harm of copyright infringement. Large-scale, unimpeded, commercialized digital reproduction of other people's works could destroy America's creative industries. But the question to ask is whether there's a problem from the consumer side. If infringement got out of hand, we might face a bleak scenario in which bands stop recording albums and no new TV shows are released. But we're not living in that world.

2012 January 18

Civilization
Steven Pearlstein

Niall Ferguson claims that European world hegemony came not as the result of any natural advantages but because it was able to develop just the right mix of political, legal, and social institutions that made it resilient enough to prevail. Ferguson is an economic historian known for the breadth of his knowledge, the clarity and pithiness of his prose, and the originality of his analysis. But Civilization is a mishmash of disconnected and sometimes contradictory riffs held together by faulty logic, inept metaphors, and clever turns of phrase. Ferguson comes off as an intellectual showoff who couldn't be bothered to edit his own ideas. As he says, the real threat to our dominance in the world is from ourselves.

Augmented Reality
Amara D. Angelica

Imagine a future in which icons flash on your car windshield, hologram-style, as your car approaches restaurants, stores, historic landmarks, or the homes of friends. Point your hand at them, and the icons open to show online information. Wave your hand again, and you've made a restaurant reservation. Oh yeah, now there's the perfect combo: AR, booze, and driving. Here's an app I want: one that warns me when an AR car is approaching so I can swerve out of the way.

AR These are just updated HUDs from aircraft: see my 2010 book. But pilots have, like, common sense.

Cruise Ships
New Scientist

The design of giant cruise ships needs urgent rethinking after the rapid capsizing of Costa Concordia, says maritime trade union Nautilus International.

AR Easy: Make them catamarans. That way you get lots of extra deck area too. Also, the U.S. Navy could use cats for future aircraft carriers.

4
Wikipedia goes black but
Beyoncé goes white for
her new album 4

Censorship Alert

The Wikipedia community has chosen to blackout the English version of Wikipedia for 24 hours, in protest against proposed legislation in the United States: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States.

Wikipedia Statement

Rich Bullshit
Tom Whipple

The Institute of Economic Affairs, a right-wing free-market think tank, commissioned a report on economics and happiness. The report concluded that, to be happy, we should become more right wing and more free market.

A graph in the report appears to show that happiness increases in proportion to salary. But the income scale is logarithmic, doubling at each step. So the graph actually shows exponentially diminishing returns of happiness, the more you earn. It might take £8,000 to increase a nurse's happiness by 10%, but to increase the happiness of bank boss Bob Diamond by the same degree requires enough money to fund a hospital's worth of nurses.

If happiness is what we want, the report makes a compelling case for mass wealth redistribution.



Established science publishers
are under attack from online
upstarts

Golden Globes
Los Angeles


AP
George Clooney and his girlfriend Stacey Keibler. Clooney won the best actor prize in the drama category for his role in The Descendants.


AP
Meryl Streep won the prize for best movie actress in the drama category for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.







Photo: The Observer
Karen Gillan played Amy Pond
in Doctor Who. Now she plays
Jean Shrimpton, 18, loving photographer David Bailey in a BBC TV drama based on their historic 1962 photoshoot for Vogue.

PHOTO: MICHAEL ZILKHA
Hitchens, Voltaire, Rushdie
April 2011

Christopher Hitchens
Salman Rushdie

God saved Christopher Hitchens from the right. Nobody who detested God as viscerally, intelligently, originally, and comically as he did could stay in the pocket of god-bothered American conservatism for long. On his 62nd birthday we were photographed standing on either side of a bust of Voltaire. That photograph is now one of my most treasured possessions.

www.plusmodelmag.com
Katya Zharkova
PLUS Model Magazine
likes big fashion models



War Horse
Directed by Steven Spielberg

"The best thing Spielberg has
made in at least ten years"
The Telegraph

Margaret Thatcher
was right, says
Daniel Finkelstein


My review of One Day
by David Nicholls

"Tonight we made history. Americans know that our futures are brighter and better than these troubled times."
Mitt Romney

 The Ring Of Truth
The Times

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, IAEA inspectors are monitoring the Mordor facility concealed in a mountain near the city of Doom.

The Israeli INSS says an Iranian nuclear test would transform the Mideast:
1
The United States may invite Israel to join NATO
2
Russia would align with the United States
3
Saudi Arabia would develop
its own nuclear arms
4
If Israel joined NATO,
Turkey would leave

AR Nuke Mount Doom.

ASSC 16
Sussex, UK
2012 July 2-6

2012 January 17

Five Steps To Happiness
Matthew Syed

1 Whatever you do, don't try to be happy. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl: "Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself."

2 Good experiences or great memories? Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman discovered that we recall our experiences like a story and love a happy ending. When mothers measure their happiness hour by hour, they score lower than women without children. But when they give an overall happiness rating, they forget the hourly grind and score far higher.

3 Fast cars are overrated. Economics professor Richard Easterlin discovered that rich nations are no happier, on average, than poor ones, once basic needs are met. A recent study by Princeton University shows that contentment increases in line with pay until a threshold of £58,700, then levels off. The problem is that the rat race is in our genes.

4 Don't live under a flight path. Humans adapt quickly to new situations, but there are some nasty things to which we never adjust. Pain and depression are examples, but so is loud noise. Noise pollution is a catastrophe for happiness.

5 Would you live in a fantasy? Most people say no. We prefer a real life, even one less happy, provided it is authentic. In this sense, truth is more fundamental than happiness. We should decide on what we really believe before living our lives, not the other way around.

To Hell In A Shopping Basket
Robert Reich

The crisis of capitalism marks the triumph of consumers and investors over workers and citizens. Modern technologies allow us to shop in real time for the lowest prices and best returns. Yet the goods we want or the returns we seek can often be produced more efficiently elsewhere by companies offering lower pay and fewer benefits. Great deals can have devastating environmental consequences or offend common decency. But nothing trumps the lure of a bargain.

The best means of balancing the demands of consumers and investors against those of workers and citizens has been through democratic institutions that offer some protection for jobs and wages, communities, and the environment. But the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that under the First Amendment to the Constitution money is speech and corporations are people. So consumers and investors are doing increasingly well but job insecurity is on the rise, inequality is widening, communities are becoming less stable, and climate change is worsening. None of this is sustainable.

AR Money talks: I am Globorg. I cite the Supreme Court.

2012 January 16

Dreamcatcher
Slate

"Share your story," says Barack Obama's Pennsylvania website to voters. "Tell us why you want to be involved in this campaign," read the instructions. A project in Chicago codenamed Dreamcatcher is turning their input into valuable data for the next election.

Dreamcatcher is led by Rayid Ghani, who last worked as chief scientist at Accenture Technology Labs. There he mined the mountains of consumer data that collect on corporate servers to find statistical patterns for forecasting. He would help businesses find patterns in consumer behavior so they could improve their customer relations management.

In 2008, Obama's campaign saved lots of hard voter data plus an unprecedented quantity of voter interviews it regularly conducted using paid phone banks and volunteer canvassers. Analysts used the data to build sophisticated statistical models that allowed them to sort voters by their relative likelihoods of supporting Obama.

But the 2008 algorithms have trouble picking up voter positions, or the intensity around those positions, with much nuance. Before the 2008 Iowa caucuses, every Democrat's top concern seemed to be opposition to the Iraq war. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, the economy became the leading issue across demographic and ideological groups. But the surveys were unable to burrow beneath the surface.

As part of the Dreamcatcher project, Obama campaign officials are redesigning the notes field for individual records in the database of voters so that it sits at the top of the screen and is large enough to include stories submitted online. Those familiar with Dreamcatcher describe it as a bet on text analytics to make sense of a whole genre of personal information that no one has yet put to use in politics.

AR My former SAP team, now the HANA team, may be interested by this deployment scenario.

War Horse
David Gritten

Steven Spielberg, 65, is the most commercially successful director in the history of cinema and a sucker for schmaltz. His films include Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET the Extraterrestrial, The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, AI Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, War of the Worlds, Munich, The Adventures of Tintin, and now War Horse. Spielberg can still make movie magic.

AR Like many of us, I can mark out the stations of my adult life with his movies. The brilliance of his creative genius is splendid to behold.

Geert Wilders' new book, Marked for Death, is scheduled for release in April

Iran Oil Warning
Financial Times

Iran is warning Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members not to boost oil production: The Iranian OPEC representative said Tehran would consider a boost "unfriendly". The Saudi oil minister said the kingdom would meet customer demand for more oil. In the last 10 days, the British prime minister, the Chinese premier, a Japanese minister, and a US lawmaker have all visited Saudi Arabia for oil talks. The kingdom is already pumping around 10 million barrels a day, at prices above $110 a barrel.

Downward Spiral
Wolfgang Münchau

The eurozone is spiraling downward into recession. Greece will default and may leave the eurozone. Next in turn will be Portugal. The EFSF faces downgrade too. By downgrading France and Austria but not Germany and the Netherlands, S&P hinted at the geography of a breakup. Germany is now the only large AAA country in the eurozone. Merkel's top priority is to conclude the fiscal treaty, but this will only reinforce pro-cyclical austerity. The system is unraveling. We need a strong central fiscal authority.

Europe: Mess And Success
Nicholas D. Kristof

Europe is in an economic mess. Rigid labor laws cause high unemployment and generous welfare states create budget problems as baby boomers retire. Yet GNP per capita in France rose from 64% of the American figure in 1960 to 73% by 2010, and in France the average working week is still almost a day shorter than in America. There are 172 European corporations among the Fortune Global 500, compared with 133 from the United States.

Europe has addressed energy issues and climate change far more seriously than America has. It now has more economic mobility than the United States, and France has a higher proportion of college graduates than America. French life expectancy is longer too: back in 1960 the lead was just a few months but by 2009 it was almost three years. Europe is no failure.

AR Europeans need a more vibrant vision of a more glorious future.

2012 January 15

Goldman's Trojan Horse
The Sunday Times

In the closing months of 2001, a Goldman Sachs trader in London exploited an EU loophole to help Greece massage down its national debt. Greece paid Goldman handsomely for the help.

Greece gambled that interest rate rises would devalue its debt. Before joining the euro, Greece had to pay interest rates of about 18% to borrow money on the open markets. After joining the euro, that would fall to about 5%. The Goldman plan agreed exchange rates for currency swaps that made it look like Greece owed Goldman €2.8 billion less than it did. This cut the Greek debt-to-GDP ratio by 1.6% and made it seem that Greek debt was falling, when in fact it had risen.

Goldman expected its €2.8 billion to be repaid and agreed to excuse Greece for two years, then stagger repayments over 18 years. The pricing assumed interest rates would rise, but they fell after September 11 and increased the Greek debt. In 2005, the National Bank of Greece bought the whole package back from Goldman. By 2009 the debt for the deals was up to €5.5 billion and will not be cleared until 2037.

Goldman did not cause the Greek crisis. The sums involved in the swap deals are not even a rounding error. Yet the lack of transparency in such trades lies at the heart of the eurozone crisis.

AR And Cameron expects Merkozy to let London trade in Europe without regulation?

2012 January 14

The End Of War
John Horgan

The United States is the problem when it comes to the persistence of war in the world today. It is engaged in wars overseas, it is the largest arms dealer in the world, and it spends roughly a trillion dollars a year on military stuff.

In the 20th century, by far the most destructive ideas were fascism and communism. These were secular ideologies that shared with fundamentalist religion the fierce conviction that theirs is the right way to view reality.

Together
Mark Pagel

Richard Sennett worries that humans are tribal and explores how people can be encouraged to cooperate. Modern capitalist societies promote conditions leading to social withdrawal or hibernation, such as economic inequality, broken workplace relations, and the psychology of uncertainty.

To rescue cooperation, Sennett champions the repetitive shared experience of ritual, from religious ceremonies to workplace routine, but cautions that it requires empathy and commitment to community. Together is the second in a planned trilogy starting with The Craftsman.

AR I enjoyed The Craftsman.

Jews And Globalization
Ira Rifkin

Globalization is the flow of capital and commerce across international borders and the monoculture of personal fulfillment and material advancement as the highest values. A World Jewish Congress paper noted in 2001 that Jews "have always promoted globalization, and have served as its agents."

Jewish Renewal rabbi Michael Lerner says "if globalization is just the latest twist on the worship of materialism, then it has become idolatry, the antithesis of monotheism." Orthodox rabbi Asher Meir says globalization is a neutral phenomenon but Jews are not to surrender their identity to it.

Eurojunk
Financial Times

Standard & Poor's cut the credit rating of France and Austria from AAA to AA+ and downgraded seven other eurozone nations including Italy and Spain. Portugal was cut down to junk.

AR Credit is trust is psychology. Euroleaders have made a poor job of convincing the hard and sharp money men of this fallen world that they have the smarts and the guts to lead anything.

2012 January 13

U.S. Warns Iran
The New York Times

The Obama administration has warned Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that closing the Strait of Hormuz is a red line that would provoke an American response. Iran has the military capability to close the strait. For two decades Iran has been investing in mines, fleets of heavily armed speed boats, and antiship cruise missiles hidden along its Persian Gulf coastline.

Estimates by naval analysts of how long it could take for American forces to reopen the strait range from a day to several months. The consensus is that Iran’s naval forces would be destroyed. The Iranian state navy is for the most part professional and predictable, but the Revolutionary Guards navy is not. The Revolutionary Guards navy has been deploying faster missile boats and stockpiling naval mines.

American naval forces might encounter layers of simultaneous attacks. The Iranians could launch antiship missiles and surround any American ship with armed speedboats. The United States could take out the missile launchers but this could take time. The strait is less than 35 miles wide at its narrowest point. The inbound and outbound shipping lanes are two miles wide, with two miles separating them.

1000 Dollar Genome
MIT Technology Review

Connecticut-based biotech company IonTorrent has unveiled a new tabletop gene sequencer with a
DNA-reading chip that can sequence an entire human genome in a day for $1,000.

12 Atom Memory
MIT Technology Review

IBM has unveiled a magnetic memory device made of just 12 iron atoms. The atoms can hold a bit for a few hours and at temperatures close to 0 K. The team is pushing the limits set by quantum physics.

84 Qubit Computation
MIT Technology Review

How many people do you need to invite to a party to ensure that m of them will know each other and n of them will not know each other? A natural answer is the two-color Ramsey number R(m,n).

A team at D-Wave Systems used 84 qubits to calculate R(3,3) and R(m,2) where m = 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Their quantum computer uses superconducting circuits in which currents going in opposite directions code 1 and 0 superposed as a qubit. Their calculation for R(8,2) used 84 qubits, of which 28 were used in the computation and the rest for error correction. The computer took 270 ms to get the (known) result 8.

Religion for Atheists
Terry Eagleton

Alain de Botton assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense but that they remain indispensable to civilized existence. He claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion sporadically useful and consoling. He advocates secular versions of sacred ceremonies and billboards carrying moral or spiritual messages. This enterprise is both impudent and unoriginal. Christopher Hitchens would have scorned any such project. He found religion disgusting.

PHILOSOPHER
I am working on providing a wealth of online illustrations for my new book. When you read it, be sure to admire the images. Links here

2012 January 12

Physicists Need Genesis
New Scientist

Physicists shy away from a singular cosmic genesis, but Alexander Vilenkin says we need it.

1 Inflation says that in the primordial yoctosecond the universe inflated exponentially before settling down to its present expansion. Eternal inflation says that the universe grows fast forever, by constantly creating smaller bubble universes within the multiverse, each of which then settles down. Vilenkin and Alan Guth found that inflation cannot be eternal in the past.

2 In a cyclic universe, the big bang is a bounce back from a previous collapsed universe, and the universe cycles forever. Vilenkin looked at universal entropy and found that after an infinite number of cycles, the universe would be in a state of maximum disorder.

3 Perhaps the cosmos existed eternally as a cosmic egg, which cracked to create the big bang. Vilenkin and Audrey Mithani showed that quantum instabilities would crack or collapse the egg after a finite time.

Vilenkin's bottom line: "All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning."

2012 January 11

The Market Economy
Financial Times

The business leaders of today are not capitalists in the original sense. Modern titans derive their authority and influence from their position in a hierarchy, not their ownership of capital. They have won power through their political skills, in the ways bishops and generals rise in their hierarchies.

The value of raw materials is only a small part of the value of the production of a complex modern economy, and the value of physical assets is only a small part of the value of most modern businesses. The critical resources of modern companies are not their buildings and machines but their competitive advantages. These attributes are not owned by anyone at all.

The typical reader of this article works in front of a computer at a desk in an office block. It is quite likely that each is owned by someone different. People do not know who owns their work tools because the answer does not matter. By continuing to use the term capitalism, we are liable to misunderstand the strength of the market economy.

Banking
Financial Times

Before the crisis, banks morphed from social utilities into machines for making money by taking risks. Big financial institutions managed to absorb the gains from risky trading while socializing their losses. Pay practices that grew up on Wall Street and in the City of London added insult to injury.

Unless they can find a way to demonstrate their usefulness, and to curb the practices that alienate outsiders, banks face a long struggle against new regulation. Banks made high profits for a while but did nothing useful. Banks that had been bailed out paid large bonuses to employees, causing resentment.

Central bankers are imposing higher capital and liquidity requirements. The market has also disciplined institutions with highly leveraged balance sheets and fragile funding. Banks will become less profitable. Banking will again look more like a utility industry. Banks may then earn more respect.


LP
Surfers in California yesterday

2012 January 10

Capitalism In Crisis
Financial Times

A modern economy has two tracks: a fast one for the super-rich and a stalled one for everyone else. The wealthiest citizens have collected the bulk of the income gains in the last three decades. Most of them are finance professionals and top executives. Finance is a cash cow for a global elite.

Rising income inequality has been variously attributed to globalization, changing technology, regulatory reforms in markets, changing household structures, and insufficiently redistributive taxation. The costs of inequality include the stifling of upward mobility and the rise of protectionist sentiment.

The money motive in wealth creation detracts from the legitimacy of capitalism unless there is an implicit social contract between the rich and the rest of society, whereby the wealthy temper ostentation and engage in philanthropy. In business, top executive rewards are poorly related to performance and tend to rise even when profits fall. The accountability of management is fundamentally flawed.

Finance professionals in New York and London have bought themselves protection from proper societal accountability. In the Nylon world there is a greater mistrust of big government than of business. Tackling such interest groups is a big task.

2012 January 9

Iran Is Weak
Fareed Zakaria

The Islamic Republic of Iran is weak and getting weaker. Sanctions have pushed the economy into a nose-dive. The political system is fragmenting. The Gulf monarchies have allied against Iran.

The Iranian government's reaction to the prospects of sanctions shows its desperation. An admiral threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz. But a senior commander of the Revolutionary Guards explained that Tehran has no intention of blocking the strait. Iran would suffer as its oil exports were blocked. The United States does not buy oil from Iran, but European nations, Japan and South Korea do, and new sanctions could put Iran in economic free fall.

The Obama administration seems to have given up on strategic reconciliation with the Iranian regime. Washington wants to build pressure on Iran. This strategy is risky. The price of oil is rising.

AR Act fast. End it.

Plan A is for austerity, for fiscal discipline.

Plan B means borrowing a big bazooka to punch our way to growth.

Plan C consists of contemplating, reflecting, reading, appreciating the arts,
finding the consonance we need to build a more sustainable global order.

Pray we avoid D.

PA
The Royal Navy's £1 billion destroyer HMS Daring, equipped with systems to shoot down any missile in Iran's armory, will sail for the Gulf on a mission to defend the oil lanes.

David Owen on
Thatcher's dementia

PHILOSOPHER
is now available
for purchase via
CreateSpace

Lightning Delay
Wired

The Pentagon will delay buying early-model F-35 Lightning II warplanes to slow spending and to give more time for testers to work out kinks. The military will purchase only around 30 Lightnings a year from 2013 to 2017 before the type becomes combat ready in 2018. In line with the new U.S. military strategy emphasizing air and sea deterrence in the Pacific, the Pentagon still wants nearly 2,500 of the ten-a-billion jet in three versions. Over 50 years, the program will cost $1 trillion.

Photo: Ryan Miller/Getty Images
Jane Fonda kisses
Stephen Hawking,
LA, 2011

In an interview to mark his 70th birthday this weekend, Stephen Hawking, the former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, admitted he spent most of the day thinking about women: "They are a complete mystery."

As for his greatest mistake, Hawking said: "I used to think information was destroyed in black holes. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science."

BBC
Sherlock Holmes

The modern-London BBC TV adaptation of the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lets early evening viewers see actress Lara Pulver nude, either to bump up the ratings or to scotch rumors that Holmes was gay.

2012 January 9

Reinvent Capitalism
Larry Summers

Capitalism has led to increased unemployment combined with increased income for the top 1 percent and reduced social mobility. The roots of the problem are in the evolution of technology.

The agricultural economy gave way to the industrial one because technology let fewer people grow food for all. The same process is now under way in manufacturing and some services. The change lets a lucky few get very rich.

In purchasing power for goods where productivity growth has been rapid, wages have risen over the last generation. But they have stagnated or fallen relative to the price of housing, healthcare, food, energy, and education.

As fewer people are needed to meet basic demand for goods like appliances and clothing, more people work in areas like healthcare and education where outcomes are manifestly unsatisfactory.

The production of healthcare and education is much more involved with the public sector than that of manufactured goods. As workers move, we need to slow the growth of the public sector.

The governments of industrial market capitalist societies seem bankrupt. As markets fail, budget pressures force cuts in the public sector. The solvency of many capitalist states is in question.

The success of capitalism has raised the relative cost of teaching or nursing or administering. The new challenge is to succeed in the areas of health, education, and social protection.

AR The public sector may be the solution. Let all the unemployed become public sector workers as of right but under market discipline: their subsidized labor for private bosses bids down wage rates and shows voters the economic truth.

2012 January 8

John Brockman
John Naughton

John Brockman is a cultural impresario or an intellectual catalyst. He is a literary agent who spotted early on that there was a massive audience for writing about science. He represents a stable of high-profile scientists and communicators and can extract massive advances from publishers, but he's also passionate about big ideas.

Brockman is best known for Edge.org, a site he founded to gather the most brilliant minds in the world and have them ask one another the questions they'd been asking themselves. Edge.org is an online salon with Brockman as its editor and host.

AR Many years ago Brockman took a brief interest in representing my first novel after reading the first chapter but then declined on reading the second (rightly too in my present opinion).

Seventy Earth Years For Mr. Universe
Steve McQueen directed Shame

2012 January 7

U.S. Defense Strategy
Washington Post

President Obama says the need for fiscal austerity coincides with a global moment of transition. His plan is to build capacity in Asia by cutting not Mideast forces but deployments in Europe, benefit and retirement costs, Cold War weapon systems, and the nuclear arsenal.

His plan assumes that the United States will no longer conduct nation building. Though counterinsurgency has produced results in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army and Marines will be reduced in size to prewar levels. Officials say their expertise will be preserved and restored if needed.

One may question the scale of the defense cuts. Another half a trillion in sequestration cuts will take effect in 2013 unless Congress repeals them. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Joint Chiefs say such a fiscal hit would be a catastrophe for U.S. defense.

Islamist Spring
John M. Owen IV

Islamism did not cause the Arab Spring. Authoritarian governments had simply failed to deliver on their promises. But the Arab Spring is bringing forth blooms of Islamists.

From 1820 to 1850, Europe experienced historic rebellions that swept from country to country as frustrated people rallied around an ideology inherited from earlier radicals. The old regimes had long been run by monarchs, aristocrats, and the church, but the revolutionaries overthrew them to create a new liberal polity extending rights and liberties to the commercial classes and small landholders. Absolutist regimes tried to suppress liberalism after 1815, but networks of liberals continued to operate underground, providing a common language for dissent that burst out in the revolutions of 1848.

Today, Arabs have a common language of dissent in Islamism. For years the Islamists have provided a coherent narrative about what ails their world. The Arab Spring is their moment.

Martin Rees congratulates Stephen Hawking on reaching 70 and recalls his achievements

2012 January 6

Ponzi Planet
Alexander Jung

A Ponzi scheme is a mechanism for paying off old debt by constantly taking on new debt. The repayment of the debt is deferred in an endless process of refinancing. It's a snowball scheme, ending in an avalanche that buries everything.

The Western world is like a giant Ponzi scheme. In the first decade of this century, governments worldwide more than doubled the level of debt, to an estimated total of $55 trillion by the end of 2011.

The United States leads the pack with its national debt of $15 trillion, followed by Japan with about $13 trillion. The United States only remains solvent because the Congress in Washington keeps raising the debt ceiling.

Banks in Europe will have to repay about €725 billion in combined debt in 2012. The European Central Bank is creating billions out of nothing to buy bonds from eurozone countries. This financial aid so far amounts to €211 billion. At €440 billion the bailout fund is still too small, so finance ministers will leverage it to make it bigger.

Even in Germany, public debt was over €2 trillion in Q3 2011. German public debt grew by about €120 million a day between July and September. This increase occurred despite high tax revenues and low unemployment. Debts rise in good times and bad.

A government borrows money from citizens in return for bonds that promise repayment with interest. The state then prints new bonds to replace the old ones. Debts are not repaid but refinanced. The bonds are regarded as safe investments. They give banks apparent security on their balance sheets.

Credit depends on belief. The system will only function as long as lenders believe in borrowers. After the belief comes the avalanche. We are living on a Ponzi planet.

Pentagon Plan
The Times

President of the United States Barack Obama unveiled a Pentagon plan to cut half a trillion dollars from projected military spending over the next ten years: "Our military will be leaner, but the United States will maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats."

POTUS said that U.S. military might would still be "larger than roughly the next ten countries combined".
But he emphasized the need to arm up in the Pacific region in face of China's growing regional power. The plan proposes scaling back the Army and the Marine Corps, reducing the nuclear arsenal, and shrinking the U.S. military footprint in Europe.

2012 January 5

Business Analytics
Dennis K. Berman

Analytics harvesting massive databases will improve everyday business decisions. New systems can chew through gigabytes of data, analyze them via self-learning algorithms, and package the insights for immediate use. Wall Street traders can now evaluate mortgage-backed securities by analyzing the ongoing creditworthiness of many millions of individual homeowners.

Company valuations in this space are rising. These technologies will move closer to us all in 2012. The goal is to push all the heavy backend work forward to front-line workers, as dashboard apps on handheld devices. Analytics will become the norm and will accelerate market evolution and business cycles.

AR If I were still at SAP, I'd be riding this wave, making money and losing my mind in action.

Romney Versus Obama
Jacob Weisberg

Self-interest lies behind media promotion of marginal Republican challengers for the nomination. Local television stations count on election-year revenue bumps from political advertising in important primary states. Rooting for the underdog, any underdog, is a matter of wanting a more dramatic story. The strait-laced frontrunner winning Iowa and New Hampshire before securing the nomination early on does not count as a compelling narrative. Hence the media hype of absurd candidates with outlandish views.

The GOP is overwhelmingly likely to nominate Mitt Romney because it is his turn and because he is the most electable candidate available. But the party he is likely to lead into battle is dominated by its activist extreme and deaf to reason about U.S. fiscal choices. To survive a Republican debate you are required to hold the incoherent view that the budget should be balanced immediately, taxes cut dramatically, and the major categories of spending (the military, pensions, healthcare for the elderly) left largely intact. There is no way to make these numbers add up and the candidates mostly do not try.

A proof that Homo sapiens is not rational — my Amazon review of
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

2012 January 4

Global Unrest
Paul Mason

All the recent protest movements center on graduates with no future. The financial crisis of 2008 created a generation whose projected life-arc switched from an upward curve to a downward one. The revolts of 2010/11 have shown what this workforce looks like when it becomes collectively disillusioned.

Members of this generation of graduates with no future form an international class, with behaviors and aspirations that easily cross borders. They reside in global cities among the slum-dwellers and the working class. The sheer size of the student population means that it transmits unrest to a much wider section of the population than before.

Social media and new technology were crucial in shaping the revolutions of 2011, just as they shaped industry, finance, and mass culture in the preceding decade. The ability to deploy a whole suite of information tools has allowed protesters across the world to beam their message into the newsrooms of global media, and above all to assert a cool new identity.

Revolution implies taking power away from its holders by making it impossible for them to keep running their machinery of domination. It is a form of collective practice that bypasses and supersedes the machinery by developing an alternative network of relations. We are in the middle of a global revolution.

Poland and Europe
Jan Cienski

Poland is now a more important trade partner for Germany than Russia. Polish central bank governor Marek Belka: "We have managed to nurture a real entrepreneurial class which is pretty resilient. Almost half of our exports to Germany come not from big multinationals like Volkswagen or Siemens with plants in Poland but from small Polish companies providing consumer and investment goods."

Germany is a strong supporter of the Weimar Triangle, involving Warsaw in a regular tripartite debate with Berlin and Paris. Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski has become the leading exponent of Warsaw's new policy toward Germany of becoming Berlin's indispensable eastern neighbor in the same way that France is in the west.

Poland has the seventh largest economy in the EU and the sixth largest population. Its success in undergoing deep economic reforms could serve as an example both to the eurozone periphery and to countries such as Ukraine and Belarus. The government's goal is to make Poland a part of Germanic northern Europe: punctual, hardworking, and fiscally sober.

Poland is experiencing a catch-up boom similar to that in western Europe after WW2. For 2012, the EU forecast is for Polish GDP to grow by 2.5%, compared with 0.6% for the EU as a whole. Under pressure from ratings agencies, the Polish government promises to drive the public deficit below 3% in 2012. With debt nearing 55% of GDP, there are calls for austerity.

2012 January 3

Downturn 2012
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

A global downturn on all fronts will abort the recovery:

China will devalue the yuan and export yet more spare capacity into a deflationary world, until the West retaliates and starts to turn its back on globalization.

America will look resilient as the payroll tax deal averts a fiscal shock, but M3 money growth has sputtered out and velocity is falling.

Europe will fall into deep recession. The ECB has let M3 money contract, and fiscal tightening will cause a credit crunch as banks shrink loan books by €1 trillion.

Germany must either immolate itself by accepting a debt union and internal inflation to save the euro, or opt for fiscal sovereignty and democracy by letting the euro die.

Economists: Bleak 2012
Financial Times

A large majority of economists polled by the FT think the economic outlook will deteriorate in 2012. There is near unanimity that the UK outlook would be much worse if the euro collapsed. Economists expect that inflation rate would fall if a solution were found in the eurozone.

Goldman Bulls
Matt Taibbi

Goldman's Asset Management department head Jim O'Neill says the United States stock market may go up "15 to 20 percent." Apparently he believes the Fed will print more money: "If QE2 doesn't work, then we'll get QE3."

Goldman is building an impressive record of bullish predictions that later look more like signals that investors should run away fast. When Goldman upgraded European bank stocks a few weeks ago, the folks at Zero Hedge said:

Goldman has started selling European bank stocks to its clients, whom it is telling to buy European bank stocks. ... Our advice, as always, do what Goldman's flow desk is doing as it begins to unload inventory of bank stocks. Translation: run from European bank exposure.

Sure enough, Euro bank stocks plummeted a few days after that ZH post.

AR More Matt on Goldman here.

Leader Of The Free World?
Foreign Policy

President Obama's willingness in 2009 to extend his campaign timeline for withdrawal from Iraq and his initial stewardship of the gains achieved by President Bush's 2007 surge created the opportunity for a victory in the war on terror. As recent events indicate, that outcome is no longer certain.

Similarly, in Afghanistan, the president initially appeared intent on achieving a military victory against the extremists that threaten Afghanistan's stability. His 2009 surge has produced gains, especially in the south. But the president now seems more focused on winning reelection than winning the war.

Compounding these two failures in 2011 was the president's inability to leverage the momentous developments of the Arab Spring. As people seeking their freedom took to the streets in country after country, President Obama stood by, letting others take the lead.

AR Mitt's my man for 2012.

Alex Rosenberg

The Atheist's Guide To Reality
Alex Rosenberg

  1 There is no God. Reality is what physics says it is.
  2 There is no purpose to anything, anywhere. Never was, never will be.
  3 There is no meaning to life. I’m here because of dumb luck.
  4 Prayer doesn't work.
  5 There is no such thing as a soul.
  6 There is no free will.
  7 When we die, everything stays the same except without us.
  8 There is no moral difference between good and bad, right and wrong.
  9 Love is a solution to a strategic coordination problem.
10 Rational choice theories are outrageously bad psychology.

Nice Nihilism
Richard Marshall

Alex Rosenberg thinks that the natural sciences are the best guide to what exists in the world and that its methods are the best ways of extending our knowledge of what exists. He argues for a reductive physicalism: everything is just bosons and fermions. The problem is how we can understand ourselves as having free will and purpose.

The hard problem is to give an account of meaning that is more than merely consistent with the laws of physics. Rosenberg argues that physics and natural selection are more than likely going to be the final word on how to understand reality. He thinks purpose is an illusion. The same illusion that makes us think there's a purpose in the universe governs our self-image as purposive and meaningful. The purpose-driven life is an illusion. In reality there are no statements of meaning. There is no propositional or sentential reality.

Nice nihilism implies that attributing meaning to our lives is an illusion. Natural selection has ensured that everyone is within two standard deviations of the mean of a fun life in the biosphere. We are naturally selected to have fun, be nice to each other, and nurse illusions of free will and purpose.

AR This is a professor's view of reality, with a surfeit of respect for the miphology of mathematics, informatics, and physics (miph), which see reality through a cognitive lens. The logical status of the posthuman miph is analogous to that of human folk illusions (God, meaning, purpose, the self). With my post-Hegelian (set-theoretic) logic, I unfold the analogy in my recent books.

Religion for Atheists
A non-believer's guide
to the uses of religion
Alain de Botton

1
The supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false.

2
Religions still have important things to teach the secular world.

3
We should look to religions for insights on how to build a sense of community, make our relationships last, overcome feelings of envy and inadequacy, and more.

Europe: Tough 2012
Financial Times

European leaders warned 2012 was likely to be tough. French president Nicolas Sarkozy said the gravest crisis Europe has faced since the second world war is not over and German chancellor Angela Merkel said next year will no doubt be more difficult than 2011.

2012 January 2

Sheer Madness
The New York Times

Most European governments are sticking to austerity plans, rejecting the Keynesian approach of economic stimulus, in a bid to show investors they are serious about fiscal discipline. "Every government in Europe with the exception of Germany is bending over backwards to prove to the market that they won't hesitate to do what it takes," said Charles Wyplosz, a professor of economics at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. "We're going straight into a wall with this kind of policy. It's sheer madness."

European End Times
John Gray

Twenty-odd years ago, the end of the Soviet Union was followed by massive conflicts and upheavals. Something similar seems to be happening today. The European Union has long since acquired an unmistakably utopian quality. Current efforts to renew the project are only accelerating its demise.

The Soviet Union suddenly melted down, and something similar could happen again. Many people say they could not go on without the faith that the future can be better than the past. But when we look to the future to give meaning to our lives, we lose the meaning we can make for ourselves here and now.

AR John was always a doom and gloom merchant but this may be overdoing it.

David Hockney

Queen Elizabeth II has appointed Hockney to the Order of Merit, where he joins a band of 24 including Baroness Thatcher and Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Hockney said that the magic of the landscape would always thrill him: "I'm painting landscapes in Yorkshire because you can't photograph them. The camera can't get the beauty — it just can't get the space, the thrilling space that I'm in. No, it can't replace painting at all."

Hockney in front of his painting
Bigger Trees Near Water
Photo by Sang Tan / AP

2012 January 1

PHILOSOPHER is released — Amazon will post it in a few days

The Optimism Bias
Tali Sharot

To think positively about our prospects, we must first be able to imagine ourselves in the future. But conscious foresight came with the awareness of mortality. Despair would have interfered with the activities needed for survival. Conscious mental time travel could only have arisen together with irrational optimism.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we recorded brain activity in volunteers as they imagined specific events that might occur to them in the future. The volunteers reported that their images of sought-after events were richer and more vivid than those of unwanted events. This matched enhanced activity in two critical regions of the brain: the amygdala and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex. These regions show abnormal activity in depressed individuals. People with severe depression tend to be pessimistically biased.

Our brain is wired to place high value on the events we encounter and put faith in its own decisions. Once you make a decision, you will esteem and affirm it and stave off regrets. When you process good and bad stuff about the future, your neurons faithfully encode the good stuff but flub on the bad stuff.

AR I need the bias to contemplate my book!

Photo by Germaine De Capuccini
Irina Shayk recalls the joy of
saunas for those who don't
winter in the Caribbean

2011 December 31

Mindful Reading
Tim Parks

What a strange art form writing is. There is no image to contemplate. Only the sequence of signs matters. The writing is in the sequence of the signs. This is the one thing we can't change. The experience is the sequence. The experience is not in any one moment of perception, but in the movement through the sequence from beginning to end. We are locked into a journey.

Every self has a story. It exists in relation to other selves and other stories. The self exists in a web of words spun out of the mind, separate from the world of sense.

Writers telling their stories exploit this state of affairs. Using thousands upon thousands of signs, they mimic the way we are forever constructing our lives and the lives of others, in words. This is why we get interested. We refer every story that we read to ourselves, our lives, because the medium of written narrative is intimately involved with the way we make up ourselves.

Learning how to take intense pleasure in reading makes it also useful for us, really useful and really exciting. Enchantment is only part of it. The opening sentences of a novel are an invitation to enter a separate world of rhythm and sound, mental activity and social positioning.

However fast you like to read a book overall, make very sure you read the opening page or two with care. The pleasure here is of entering into enchantment slowly, consciously, with vigilance. You have every right to put a book down after a couple of pages. Life is simply too short for the wrong books, or even the right books at the wrong time.

There are two sources of pleasure that you suppose to be in competition with each other. If you learn to blend them, they intensify each other. The first is enchantment, but the second pleasure is awareness. We read with a new awareness, watching how the spell is being cast. This approach sets us up for the most wonderful and life-changing reading experience of all: when we come to a book with suspicion, only to discover that the writer has hooked us.

The excitement of reading is the precarious one of being alive now, intensely mentally silently alive, and reacting from moment to moment, in the most liquid and intimate sphere of the mind, to someone else's elusive construction of the precarious business of being alive now.

The Need To Read
Gail Rebuck

Psychologists from Washington University used brain scans to see what happens inside our heads when we read stories. They found that readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. The brain weaves these situations together with its own experiences to create a new mental synthesis in neural pathways.

The discovery that our brains are changed by the experience of reading is something many of us will understand instinctively, as we think back to the way a good book had a transformative effect on us. This transformation only takes place when we lose ourselves in a book, abandoning the chatter of the outside world.

Reading is the foundation of all education and an essential part of the knowledge economy. But more significant is its emotional role as the starting point for individual voyages of personal development and pleasure. Books can help create and reinforce our sense of self.

If reading were to decline, it would change the nature of our species. If we were no longer wired for solitary reflection and creative thought, we would be diminished. But technology throws up solutions: the ability of new devices to put an entire library in your hand is an amazing opportunity.

AR Reading is magic — hence my new book PHILOSOPHER, out next week or so.

Photo by Sam Frost
Roger Scruton in front
of his pigsty

Green Philosophy
Jonathan Rée

Roger Scruton is a champion of traditional English conservatism.
In Green Philosophy, he appeals to the idea of a moral economy.
He signs off his new book from Scrutopia.

More on Scruton

Goodbye Europe
David Aaronovitch

Judging by its newspapers and its politicians, the people of Britain don't get Europe, don't like Europe, and don't want Europe.

2012 should be the year when we start the process of applying to join the United States of America. It should be a year of homecoming, of rejoining, of putting back together what should never have been separated.

Like parents whose children have all gone to live in Australia, sometimes it's best to cut your losses and follow them.

AR Yes, the time is ripe for this.

I suggest we also bring in the former British Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, revise a few state boundaries, revamp the U.S. Constitution, clean up Washington, and call the new entity the United States of the Anglogenic World.

We can all sing The Star-Spangled Banner and wave an Old Glory with a hundred stars on it.

Higgs And Me
Lisa Randall

The excitement from Europe earlier this month was palpable. Experiments had hinted at the discovery of the Higgs boson. Named for the British physicist Peter Higgs, the particle — if it exists — would tell us that the Higgs mechanism is correct. Higgs and his colleagues theorized that space itself contains a sort of charge. Particles acquire mass through their interaction with the charge.

For me, a physicist whose work for the past quarter century has focused on the mysteries of matter, any clue about the Higgs boson would provide valuable and long-awaited insight. For a moment I even believed the Higgs boson might really have been found.

The Damage Done
Foreign Policy

In 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, Brookings Institution researchers followed the progress of the war. Ten metrics reveal the damage done and the current state of Iraq:

1
At least 4,487 U.S. soldiers died during the war and 32,226 U.S. troops were seriously wounded in action. Most of the casualties were due to IEDs.

2
More than 115,000 Iraqi civilians died as a result of war, and over 10,000 Iraqi security force personnel have died since June 2003. Bombings are still common.

3
The first free elections were held in 2005 but led to political turmoil. In 2010, the second series of national elections resulted in a government in crisis.

4
Prewar oil production was around 2.5 million barrels per day. Current production is only marginally more. Insurgents often attack oil infrastructure.

The British Civil Service
Sir Gus O'Donnell

The Civil Service is the smallest since the Second World War.
The initiative to do away with unnecessary regulations is of critical importance. I believe successive governments have been far too quick to solve problems with regulation and legislation. We must be more creative and innovative in the way we solve problems. The more we can innovate, the more we can ensure the Civil Service is an engine room for growth. I would be proud of that legacy.

AR Sir Gus is Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service
until the end of the year. He joined the Civil Service in 1979.
I joined in 1977.

2011 December 30

The Golden Future
The Times

Goldman Sachs says the relative fortunes of the UK will improve sharply in the coming decades. The investment bank's latest long-term forecasts show Britain leapfrogging Germany, France, and Japan in terms of wealth by midcentury.

Goldman says only the United States and Canada will have higher national income per head by 2050. In terms of the overall size of the economy, China will be #1, followed by the United States, India, and Euroland, with Britain as #10.

Goldman projects more investment in the UK than in countries such as Germany. Thanks in part to high immigration, Britain has a younger demographic profile and its working-age population will rise more than in Germany or Japan.

AR Watch out, all you gullible Brits! You're about to get sucked dry by the vampire squid squad!

Euroland
John Plender

Germany has emerged as the pre-eminent power in Euroland. The German solution to the sovereign debt crisis is that other eurozone members must accept fiscal orthodoxy and financial conservatism. Debt is condemned as immoral. But there is a reciprocal relation between debtors and creditors. No one can run persistent current account surpluses without someone else running up deficits. There is a double standard here.

AR Indeed. Germans must recall that Adelheit verpflichtet, or as they say on the Sceptred Isles, noblesse oblige, or as I say, if you want the job you have to act the part.


KNCA
Pyongyang: The son takes over, hopes of "foolish political leaders in the world" are dashed, and military retaliation is threatened for South Korea's "unpardonable sin" of dissing dad's funeral.

2011 December 29

Iran's Dangerous Game
Michael Adler

Both the United States and Europe are moving toward new sanctions to cut off Iran's ability to sell its oil. Iran is warning them about trying to cut off its oil exports, but closing the Strait of Hormuz would backfire, as all its export oil ships via the strait.

The Israelis view an Iranian bomb as a threat to the existence of their country, and the Americans see such a weapon as a massive regional threat to the Middle East and beyond. The Israelis seem now to be convinced that the United States is not just trying to calm them down from attacking but is serious about preventing Iran from getting the bomb. Iran says it will not bow to sanctions.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says the United States will do what's needed to stop Iran from getting the bomb. President Obama and his administration have already pointed to an attack if Iran insists on developing nuclear weapons.

AR We have a fight on our hands. Let's finish it and get the oil spike behind us as soon as possible.

War With Iran
Trita Parsi

Iran warns that it will close the Straits of Hormuz if an oil embargo is imposed. It has sent oil prices soaring. Closing the Straits would choke off Iran's ability to export oil and antagonize Russia and China, but makes oil prices rise due to the increased risk premium. Higher oil prices are good for Iran but bad for the United States and the European Union.

More aggressive measures will likely be pursued by Iran in the next phase of this standoff with the West. Such is the logic of pressure politics as both sides increasingly lose sight of their original goals. As the conflict escalates, the psychological cost of restraint rises, while further provocations appear increasingly logical and justified. Soon the governments will no longer control the dynamics.

Contrary to some perceptions, diplomacy has not been exhausted. President Obama's room for diplomatic maneuver with Iran was limited, and was quickly eaten up by pressure from all sides and by the Iranian government itself in the fraudulent 2009 elections. By then, Obama's entire Iran policy had become "a gamble on a single roll of the dice." It would work either right away or not at all.

Diplomacy needs time, patience, perseverance, and a clear under-standing that the cost of abandoning diplomacy is greater than the cost of sustaining it, because of the catastrophic repercussions of the military confrontation that will follow collapsed talks. This might have escaped decision makers in Washington and Tehran earlier but there should be no doubt now.

2011 December 28

2012 Economic Outlook
Zachary Karabell

In late 2011, every major indicator of economic health in the United States showed marked improvement. American manufacturing remains highly productive, but it employs far fewer people and far more technology. The digital economy and social media will continue to thrive in 2012. In a country of 300 million people, the number doing well exceeds the number struggling by a considerable margin.

The American economy has no problem funding its needs. Government debt has ballooned, but very low interest rates mean that servicing the public debt costs less than before. The financial system is still burdened by home foreclosures and a bank credit squeeze, but that system is more stable and sober than in many years. And the financial industry is slowly contracting and becoming less profitable.

Americans are facing a competitive global environment fueled by China. We have the means to address unemployment by creating work programs and educational initiatives. We have the means to invest in the future, spend on applied and abstract research, and use the financial and natural resources we have more efficiently. We are not in desperate economic times.

The F-35 Mess
Walter Pincus

The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter will be the most advanced fighter-bomber in U.S. history, and at about $385 billion so far the most costly U.S. weapons program ever. The plane has the most sophisticated stealth technology and the most complex mission software ever planned for an airplane.

Two weeks ago in the Senate, John McCain described the F-35 fighter program as "a mess." The cost of each plane has almost doubled to $133 million, testing is only one fifth complete but more than 90 planes have already been bought, the software won't be ready for another four years, and yet the Pentagon had "sold this program as a fifth-generation strike fighter that would — more so than any other major defense procurement program — be cost-effectively developed, procured, operated and supported."

The original plan was to build 3,000 F-35s to replace the fighter-bombers in each of the three services and also be sold to foreign allies. For the Air Force, the conventional takeoff and landing
F-35A would replace the F-16 and the A-10 and add to the stealth
F-22A. The Navy's version, the F-35C, was to fly from carriers and complement the F-18E/F Super Hornet. The Marines wanted the
F-35B, a short takeoff and vertical landing version, to replace the F/A-18C/D and AV-8B Harrier aircraft.

Changes from 1986 to 2006, such as the end of the cold war, cut the original F-22 Raptor plan by almost half. We should expect more changes, such as the introduction of unmanned aircraft, to affect the F-35 plans between now and 2031.

AR Don't scrap the F-35B — that's the one with Harrier technology. But do give Lockheed Martin a hard time for cost overruns.

2011 December 27

bnps.co.uk
Astronomers worldwide watched Comet Lovejoy as it passed within 140 000 km of the surface of the Sun last week. Amateur stargazer Alex Cherney used a simple digital camera with a long exposure to make this image at Cape Schanck, Victoria, Australia.

2011 Christmas Day

HR
AR Thanks, Ma!

2011 December 24

Simon Dale
The Hobbit House
Built for less than $5K, plus over a thousand hours of hard but creative work, for sustainable living in a natural environment.

AR My Christmas tradition:
      Dec 24 — watch Lord of the Rings I
      Dec 25 — watch Lord of the Rings II
      Dec 26 — watch Lord of the Rings III

2011 December 23

L to R: Hitchens, Dennett, Dawkins, Harris

Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens come together for the last judgment in the Christmas [sic] issue of the New Statesman:

Richard Dawkins: Modern society requires and deserves a truly secular state, by which I do not mean state atheism, but state neutrality in all matters pertaining to religion: the recognition that faith is personal and no business of the state.

Daniel Dennett: Societies are complex in more ways than colonies of bacteria are. What does shine through is a principle of good design. Darwin showed us that the secret of life is the differential reproduction of effective designs for fending off dissolution.

Sam Harris: Free will doesn't even correspond to any subjective fact about us, for introspection soon grows as hostile to the idea as the equations of physics have. Apparent acts of volition merely arise, spontaneously (...), and cannot be traced to a point of origin in the stream of consciousness.

Christopher Hitchens: I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialize. I remember once going to an evening with Umberto Eco talking to Susan Sontag and the definition of the word "polymath" came up. ... I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.

UK Breakup
Mary Dejevsky

Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond, is committed to holding a referendum on independence in the next three years. The response of all three major British parties so far has been to reaffirm their support for the Union. Maybe a majority of Scottish voters will vote No, or will prefer an economic separation within the Union.

The Scottish Nationalist Party gained an absolute majority at the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood this year. Over the past 15 years, Scotland has become ever more distinct from the rest of Great Britain. On all sorts of policies it is spinning off at high speed in pursuit of something that looks like the Nordic model.

Alex Salmond was abrasively against David Cameron's veto in Brussels. Membership of the European Union has made devolution, and even independence for Scotland, less risky. An independent Scotland might even join the euro. Several recent breakups in Europe have been peaceful and left all parties satisfied.

2011 December 22

Gingrich On Shariah
The New York Times

"I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it."
Newt Gingrich, July 2010

Gingrich was airing a thesis in vogue with conservative thinkers but rejected by many American Muslims. The antisharians say radical Islamists are working to impose Shariah in a stealth jihad.

Obama administration officials decline to label terrorism carried out in the name of militant Islam as Islamic or jihadist. They say such labels can imply religious justification for a distortion of doctrine that most Muslims abhor.

Gingrich: "The left's refusal to tell the truth about the Islamist threat is a natural parallel to the 70-year pattern of left-wing intellectuals refusing to tell the truth about communism and the Soviet Union."

Shariah is the law of Allah, as derived from the Koran and the example of the Prophet. It has far wider application than secular law but is subject to interpretation by religious authorities.

American University in Washington chairman of Islamic studies Akbar Ahmed says the notion of a threat from Shariah to the United States "takes your breath away, it's so absurd."

"We're not going to have Shariah law applied in U.S. courts. That's never going to happen."
Mitt Romney, June 2011

War With Iran
The Times

Iranian VP Mohammad Reza Rahimi: "If sanctions are adopted against Iranian oil, not a drop of oil will pass through the Strait of Hormuz."

A spokesman for the U.S. Fifth Fleet: "The free flow of goods and services through the Strait of Hormuz is vital to regional and global prosperity. Anyone who threatens to disrupt freedom of navigation in an international strait is clearly outside the community of nations; any disruption will not be tolerated."

A spokesman for EU foreign affairs chief Baroness Ashton of Upholland: "The EU is considering another set of sanctions against Iran and we continue to do that."

Higgs And Us
Martin Rees

One nanosecond after the big bang, every particle in the universe carried as much energy as can be generated by the Large Hadron Collider. But to confront the overwhelming mystery of what banged and why it banged, Einstein's theory isn't enough. A complete understanding of all the particles and forces in the universe would be the summit of an intellectual quest that began with the Greeks.

Most educated people still somehow think that humans are the culmination of the evolutionary tree. That hardly seems credible to astronomers. Post-human evolution could be far more rapid than in the past, driven by technology rather than natural selection.

5
The Iraqi electricity supply is inadequate. Power disruptions are common and complaints rampant. Iraq hopes to be self-sufficient for electricity by 2014.

6
Today, Iraq has more than 22 million phone subscribers and about 2 million people online. Satellite television has had a massive impact.

7
Over two-thirds of the population can now access drinkable water, but most still lack modern sanitation. Iraq's GDP has expanded fivefold since 2003.

8
More than 1 million U.S. troops served in Iraq. When the U.S. combat mission ended in August 2010, Iraqi forces on duty numbered 670,000.

9
Millions of Iraqis were displaced and an additional 2 million left the country. Many Iraqis who returned regret coming back.

10
A majority of Iraqis now think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

A New Europe
Gérard Errera

The recent Brussels meeting portends a new Europe. The Franco-German proposals on the debt crisis and Europe's economic governance were the result of hard negotiation. Germany now defends the right to have national interests and French elites realize that Europe can no longer be a mere extension of French ideas and interests. Franco-German cooperation will not be sufficient to lead the new Europe, but Cameron cast a veto against British influence in European affairs.

AR Gérard Errera is a former French ambassador to the UK.

British troops yomping toward
Port Stanley, Falkland Islands,
June 1982

Argie-Bargie Again 30 Years On?

Britain dusts off war plans after Argentina joins forces with Brazil and Uruguay to blockade the Falkland Islands.

Daily Mail
British war plans: How about a peace plan?

 Let The City Whinge
Vince Cable

David Cameron's veto exposes two views of the City of London:

1
It is a vital national interest, a unique network of innovators and workaholics who generate revenue for the UK.

2
It is a source of systemic instability, unfettered greed, and industrial-scale tax dodging.

Europhobes go for 1,
Europhiles for 2.

Both caricatures are true. A great deal of the European drive to tax and regulate the City is prompted by protectionism. And much of the City's flag-waving disguises special pleading on behalf of banks that have caused immense damage to Britain's productive economy.

The British financial services sector accounts for around 8% of GDP and employs around a million people. But most of this is largely untouched by the threatened EU regulation. Within the City itself there is a complex ecology, much of it uncontroversial.

(continued)

Consciousness and Complexity
Christof Koch
Scientific American
August 2009

University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist Giulio Tononi has an "integrated information" theory (IIT) of consciousness, based on two axioms:

1
Conscious states are differentiated and informationally rich. Think of all the frames from all the movies you have ever seen. Each frame, each view, is a specific conscious percept.

2
This information is highly integrated. Underlying this unity of consciousness is a multitude of causal interactions among the relevant parts of your brain. If areas of the brain start to disconnect or fragment, consciousness fades and might cease.

Britain Distrusts Germany
Spiegel Online

British distrust of the European Union goes with distrust of Germany. The Daily Mail headline "Welcome to the Fourth Reich" shows how Eurosceptics see the German-French plans to rescue the monetary union as the economic colonization of Europe by the Germans. The continuing obsession with Nazis in Britain stifles almost all interest in Germany.

For the British, the fact that the Germans still produce and export goods is a reminder of their own days as major exporters during the Victorian age. The British financial sector is not a source of national pride. There is a growing hostility toward Germany.

2011 December 21

Havel And Orwell
John Kay

Václav Havel described a greengrocer with a placard in his window saying: "Workers of the World Unite!" The shopkeeper was not expressing his enthusiasm for such unity. And the leaders of the system had no desire to unite the workers of the world. The sign was there to signal conformity and avoid trouble. Havel translates the slogan as: "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient."

George Orwell identified the corrupting influence of discourse based on the repetition of pre-packaged phrases. The vacuous rhetoric traps the leaders as well as the led. Havel: "Both are objects in a system of control, but at the same time they are its subjects." Orwell insisted that the meaning should choose the word, and not the other way about. For Havel, the issue was the rehabilitation of human values.

Havel Right, Hitch Wrong
Daniel Finkelstein

Václav Havel said communism relied on the telling of lies, one citizen to another. In the Stalin years, my grandmother worked on a collective farm in Siberia. Her story corroborates his view.

Christopher Hitchens always told you what he thought. He saw with great clarity that Islamism was a totalitarian doctrine and its demands non-negotiable. He argued that freedom, democracy and respect for human life should be universal and that those who offended against them must never be allowed to succeed when offering a cultural or historical excuse.

Hitchens was a Trotskyist for much of his life. Trotskyists advocate permanent revolution to destroy the bourgeois class and its values, upon which liberalism depends. Whereas liberal societies that respect individuals and human rights are built on property rights, the rule of law, the suburbs and the middle class, religious faith, marriage and family, the work ethic, social convention and tradition, ancient seats of learning, respect for older people.

My grandmother had a saying: "While the Queen is safe in Buckingham Palace, I'm safe in Hendon Central." I was never sure that Christopher Hitchens could see that.

RG (comment 2011-12-20-23-55) I think Hitchens clearly disavowed inflexible thinking, leader worship and totalitarianism in his later thinking and writing and became a truly independent thinker who recognized that freedom depends on stable, friendly, and predictable institutions that are subject to the rule of law.

AR Trots were and are extremists. It was and is the extremism that appeals to a certain kind of person. Hitch was in a cult named after a minister of war in a rebel regime, then late in life he rebelled against his former self and became an apologist for a war of invasion led by a born-again president (Bush 43) that ruined America. I think Finkelstein is right to have his doubts. His grandmother and our queen represent a kinder social order.

Alan Lightman laments the contingency of the anthropic multiverse

2011 December 20

Anesthesia
MIT Technology Review

General anesthesia is a drug-induced reversible coma, says Emery Brown, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). But what happens in the brain during general anesthesia is a mystery. Brown, who is also a neuroscientist and professor at MIT, aims to use anesthesia as an instrument for studying basic questions about the brain. He heads a research laboratory focused on developing signal-processing algorithms to extract information from electroencephalogram (EEG) data for anesthetized patients.

Brown is impressed by how quickly and completely drugs like propofol can alter brain activity. As patients enter an anesthetized state, the normal pattern of low-intensity but high-frequency waves shifts to one of less frequent but more intense pulses, as if the constant chatter of the brain had given way to a chant. The location of activity shifts from the back of the brain to the front. Some drugs decrease the frequency of brain waves seen in EEG readings, resulting in slow, regular oscillating waves across large areas of the brain. Other drugs cause certain areas to show fast, regular oscillations. Either way, the different parts of the brain can't communicate.

Other EEG studies suggest that anesthesia doesn't shut the brain down but interferes with its internal communication. It interrupts feedback between the front and back of the brain, disconnecting different brain networks. Both EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) show response to light and sounds, but somehow that sensory information is never processed and integrated into conscious awareness. The studies cast doubt on a theory that links consciousness to brain waves with frequencies around 40 hertz. These waves can exist even when patients are unconscious. The patterns anesthesiologists see support the theory that consciousness emerges from the integration of information across large networks in the brain.

Devalue The Euro
Martin Feldstein

The large current account deficits of Italy, Spain, and France can be reduced without lowering their incomes or requiring Germany to increase domestic demand. The key is to expand the net exports of those trade deficit countries to the world outside the eurozone.

Politicians wanted the euro as a means of accelerating political integration. They believed that the single currency would somehow cause productivity trends to converge. But productivity in Germany rose much faster than it did in Italy, Spain, and France. Germany also placed limits on wage growth. Now Germany has a current account surplus and the rest have deficits.

German officials and the ECB argue that the trade deficit countries need to cut wages and prices to make their products competitive. This could require a 30% wage cut, slower wage growth, a decade or more of high unemployment, and declining GDP.

The current account deficits of Italy, Spain, and France can shrink without austerity, internal devaluations, or German expansionary policies if the euro is devalued. To eliminate existing current account deficits, the trade-weighted value of the euro might have to fall by 20%.

AR Devaluing the euro raises German costs but increases export competitiveness, so this idea has wings.

2011 December 19

Vaclav Havel
(1936—2011)

Former Czech President Václav Havel opposed the Communist government in Czechslovakia before emerging as a leader of the Velvet Revolution that swept it aside in 1989.

The playwright turned political activist came to prominence as co-author of the Charter 77 declaration in protest at the arrest of a rock band. He remained active in anti-Communist causes from Cuba to China until his death.

Havel was unanimously elected President of Czechoslovakia by the last Communist parliament in 1989. He resigned after national politicians agreed to divide the country in two in 1992, but went on to be twice elected President of the Czech Republic.

Charter 77 co-signatory Martin Palouš: "Havel was the man who was able to stage this miracle play. The sacrifice was to cast himself in the main role."

Vaclav Havel
Havel not only opposed the Communist regime, he articulated a theory of opposition. In his essay The Power of the Powerless, he asked the inhabitants of totalitarian countries to "live in truth" by going about their daily lives as if the regime did not exist, and by founding small institutions that would prevent them from being totally controlled from above. He practiced what he preached not only before the fall of communism but also afterward. He became an establishment politician and recreated the Czech presidency.
Anne Applebaum

In October 2001, Jürgen Habermas started talking about religion

(continued)

After 2008 no sensible government (and few bankers) deny the need for regulation. EU financial market rules are necessary since the single market must apply to finances. The EU proposals cover areas in need of reform but also include more damaging ideas. All these issues could be negotiated in a calm environment.

The proposed EU transaction tax is a technically challenging proposal wrapped up on the EU side as a high ideal. But it is in reality a cynical raid on UK financial services to fund the EU budget. It is not a serious threat to the City since taxes are governed by unanimity. There is scope for taxing banks in other ways.

The issue of EU financial services regulation is a sideshow compared to averting a catastrophic outcome to the eurozone crisis and a deep European slump. And in the UK we need to ignore City whingeing and concentrate on achieving growth by rebalancing the UK economy.

AR Vince Cable is the
UK Business Secretary
and a Liberal Democrat.

AR I talked with Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi at ASSC XIII, Berlin, 2009. My photonic theory of consciousness looks at the physics of decahertz brainwaves:

1
Brainwaves form resonances, extended quantum entangle-ments, and superposed states.

2
These states stretch from classical (past) brain states to virtual (future) states and hence define "now" states whose durations of order 100 ms suggest realization in quantum states of decahertz waves (e.g. 40 Hz photons).

In Mindworlds I look at phenomenal consciousness, not complexity. The IIT is good for cognition, the waking state, and anesthesia studies, but it doesn't tackle the hard problem. My theory does.

A German In London
The Times

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said on a visit to British Foreign Secretary William Hague in London: "My main message is for the British people — you can count on us and we can count on you." He recalled his childhood in postwar Germany to expound the ideals behind the EU and insist that all its members had to move forward together.

Dr Westerwelle urged Britain to act in unison with the EU, which was "not only the answer to the darkest chapter of our history but also a life insurance in times of globalization because no country is strong and big enough to face the challenges of globalization alone."

North Korea

With Kim Jong Il gone, his son Kim Jong Un will likely take over. A letter from the NK Workers' Party called him "the great successor". Pyongyang urged increased NK military capability.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak cleared his schedule and put the SK military on "emergency alert" to monitor NK troop movements and tighten security measures at sea.

Following the Korean War in 1950, NK and SK never formally signed a peace treaty and remain technically at war, separated by a tense DMZ.

DPA
North Korean missile tests, January 2009

Korean War

The Korean War between SK and NK was a result of the division of Korea by the Allies in 1945, when US troops occupied SK and Soviet troops occupied NK.

NK invaded SK in June 1950. UN and US forces were pushed back, then pushed up almost to China. The PRC went to war beside NK and pushed UN forces back south. The USSR supplied both NK and PRC forces. Hostilities ended in July 1953 with an armistice that restored the border near the 38th Parallel and created a DMZ between NK and SK.

Total killed: 3-4 million

Lockheed Martin
Raptors
Wired

On November 10, 2010, a USAF
F-22 Raptor crashed in Alaska, killing its pilot. The Raptor fleet was grounded while the problem was investigated.

The official crash report cites mid-flight failure of the on-board oxygen generating system (OBOGS). Many Raptor pilots have experienced air shortages and blamed the OBOGS.

This is only the latest in a series of problems with the Raptor. Lockheed Martin recently rolled out the 196th and final F-22 after 14 years of production. Each Raptor cost the taxpayer $377 million.

Entente Glaciale
The Times

London is the seventh-largest French city. It is also, after Paris, the city with the best-educated French population. It is time to set aside the gibes and name-calling in the search for a solution.


Clegg Fraps Fillon
The Times

The basic difference,
you should know,
Between GB and poor Sarko
Is this, that we have got
The printing press
And they have not!

UK To Observe EU Talks
Financial Times

The UK is invited to participate in negotiations on a new European treaty to govern eurozone economies. The invitation will allow London to check whether EU institutions will be used to monitor and enforce the new pact. The move is the first EU opening to the UK since the Cameron veto.

India And China
Financial Times

India: Emerging market
economies are beginning
to "falter"

Indian finance minister
Pranab Mukherjee said India
must turn its attention to
"reviving growth as quickly
as possible".

China: The global outlook is
"extremely grim and
complicated"

The Communist Party of China agreed to focus on maintaining fast growth amid the
worsening outlook.

The Eurocrash
Wolfgang Münchau

A eurocrash is all but inevitable. When the euro will collapse is hard to say, but that it will is easy. National interest takes precedence. No one wanted the first world war, but it happened anyway. We have north against south, east against west, the British against everyone.

A plausible scenario is that we take a while to work out the legal basis of a new treaty, fight for a while over the details, and next summer, if all goes well, get a new stability pact. But the IMF and the OECD forecast a collapse of the world economy in 2012. Europeans cannot just export more to the rest of the world. And if Europe cannot earn a surplus on its current account, the whole adjustment takes place within the eurozone and the south sinks into deep depression. This is the outcome of forcing austerity on a weak economy.

To avert disaster, a lot of very improbable things must happen very quickly. This is not realistic. What we need to solve the crisis is way beyond what is politically and legally possible. So the euro is in danger. We just don't know how long we have before the crash.

2011 December 18

Europolitics
Kathleen R. McNamara

Europe is suffering from a political crisis. Almost all the EU countries under attack by financial markets are basically strong and productive. Yet the fiscal orthodoxy agreed to at the Brussels summit is only likely to hasten the demise of the euro. European polities under stress need to grow their way out of debt. EU leaders need to commit to a true political and fiscal union.

Debt and deficit figures diverge widely across the European Union, yet debt levels do not scale with the amount bond markets charge sovereign borrowers in Europe. Arguing that Europeans need to live within their means is nonsense in a world where there is flexibility in how markets perceive what appropriate debt levels mean.

European countries are not too economically divergent to be in a currency union. Currencies are determined by politics, not convergent economic zones. From a purely economic standpoint, the United States should not have a single currency. It survives because it has a true fiscal and political union.

The Eurosummit agreement is a rehash of the Stability and Growth Pact, which Germany and France both violated to boost their economies. Merkel and Sarkozy must recognize the need to pool sovereignty by agreeing to a Eurobond and true fiscal union.

AR Europeans are working on it, but you can't just unite by fiat. It comes as a response to a shared sense of crisis.

War Is Going Out Of Style
Joshua S. Goldstein and Steven Pinker

The invasion of Iraq may have been the last war between two national armies. World War III was canceled and the Korean War was the last war between great powers.

Overall, the annual rate of battle deaths worldwide has fallen from almost 300 per 100,000 of world population during World War II, to almost 30 during Korea, to the low teens during Vietnam, to single digits in the late 1970s and 1980s, to fewer than 1 since 2000.

Atrocities against civilians are on a smaller scale too. During World War II, in response to enemy atrocities, Allied forces repeatedly and deliberately firebombed Axis cities, incinerating tens of thousands of civilians in a night. Now we are repelled by war.

AR The years 1815 to 1914 seemed peaceful too. Until the Mideast is sorted out, I prefer to hold back from agreeing with Pinker here.

Is Higgs The End?
John Horgan

Discovering the Higgs would be a modest achievement relative to the grand ambitions of theoretical physics. The Higgs would serve merely as the capstone of the Standard Model. But the model is incomplete anyway.

The dream of a theory of everything will never be entirely abandoned. But fewer smart young physicists will be attracted to an endeavor that has vanishingly little hope of an empirical payoff. The quest for a unified theory will come to be seen not as a branch of science but as a kind of mathematical theology.

AR This is too pessimistic. Supersymmetry is both interesting and scientific. Gravity wave detectors and other new experimental rigs will push out the envelope for as long as the money holds out.

2011 December 17

On Faith
Matthew Parris

British PM Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Endymion:
"Sensible men are all of the same religion."
"And pray what is that?"
"Sensible men never tell."

British PM David Cameron: "The knowledge that God created man in his own image was, if you like, a game changer for the cause of human dignity and equality ... When each and every individual is related to a power above all of us, and when every human being is of equal and infinite importance, created in the very image of God, we get the irrepressible foundation for equality and human rights."

MP: "Religions do not create altruism or fellow feeling, they direct these instincts. Morality born of a humanist impulse to love and care for others is a higher and purer ethic than Christianity and Islam's reliance on celestial rewards and hellish punishments. But for many, and for all practical purposes, faith can and does act to reinforce morality, both public and private."

Cameron To Archbishop: Speak Up For Christianity
Daily Mail

David Cameron last night called on the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to lead a return to the "moral code" of the Bible. Cameron accused Williams of failing to speak "to the whole nation" when he criticized Government austerity policies. Cameron declared Britain "a Christian country" and said politicians and churchmen should not be afraid to say so.

AR In my opinion, being a Christian is a political choice.

Pubic hair in America (adult content)

2011 December 16

PR
Ian McEwan, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis

Christopher Hitchens
1949—2011

"The next morning, at Christopher's request, Alexander and I set up a desk for him under a window. We helped him and his pole with its feed-lines across the room, arranged pillows on his chair, adjusted the height of his laptop. Talking and dozing were all very well, but Christopher had only a few days to produce 3,000 words on Ian Ker's biography of Chesterton. Whenever people talk of Christopher's journalism, I will always think of this moment."
Ian McEwan

Nuke Spy Drones
Wired

Stealthy drones like the RQ-170 Sentinel that crashed in Iran are very good at loitering over a target of interest for hours on end. Unnamed military sources confirmed that the RQ-170 was conducting nuclear surveillance over Iran.

2011 December 15

PHILOSOPHER

Last read and final corrections completed
Text and cover files delivered to publisher
Estimated publication date January 2012

AR This is a historic milestone for me.

Europe Needs A Firewall
John Paulson

The European banking sector is exposed to a sovereign credit crisis. I suggest the ECB consider a sovereign debt guarantee program as a firewall. The program would immediately calm the credit markets. In return for a 1% annual guarantee fee, and compliance with the ECB and/or IMF on implementation of structural reform programs, Italy and Spain would be able to refinance all maturing debt with an ECB guarantee. The program would be open for two years for maturities of up to 10 years. The firewall is needed now.

Eurozone Fiscal Union
Financial Times

Angela Merkel says member states of the eurozone have set themselves on an "irreversible course toward a fiscal union" to underpin their common currency. "We are not just talking about a fiscal and stability union. We have begun to create one." She expressed "great regret" at the British veto but said a new treaty for "at least" the 17 eurozone members was a big step forward.

SDP leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier said "this is no breakthrough to more Europe" and the isolation of Britain is "no cause for joy". Before the summit Europe faced a debt crisis. "After the summit, we have a real constitutional crisis. This estrangement process between Britain and Europe will not end."

Top Germans Like Merkel
Spiegel Online

A new survey of 500 German leaders finds that about 70% see Angela Merkel as a strong chancellor who is managing the crisis well and successfully promoting German interests at the EU level:

78%  support an economic and fiscal union
21%  support the introduction of eurobonds
13%  want the ECB to purchase all eurozone government bonds
74%  of those in business are concerned about the euro
42%  of those in politics are concerned about the euro
90%  believe austerity is the right policy for indebted countries
95%  like the joint Merkozy leadership of in the eurozone
92%  think floating eurozone government bonds will get harder
11%  think the eurozone will break up

A clear majority of the managers would like to see the return of the grand coalition that brought together the Christian Democrats and the SDP from 2005 to 2009.

2011 December 14

Not Worth A Fig
Anatole Kaletsky

The Franco-German fiscal compact is no more comprehensive or final than all the previous failed summit deals. Problems:

1 Finance: A fiscal union of the kind required to save the euro requires strong central control over national budgets. The Germans want this but the Club Med countries resist. But a fiscal union also needs to create collective responsibility for sovereign debts and bank solvency in all the member countries. The Club Med countries need this but Germany resists.

2 Politics: The proposed treaty can only exacerbate the tensions and uncertainties threatening eurozone cohesion. The agreement will not even be worth the paper it is written on until after the French election next May.

3 Economics: A fiscal compact would aggravate the economic nightmares of unemployment and stagnation in southern Europe. It is arithmetically impossible for the entire eurozone to deflate its way out of a debt crisis.

A Disastrous Failure
Martin Wolf

The UK veto took attention away from the failure of eurozone leaders to devise a credible remedy for the ills of the currency union. Germany and France have agreed to build a "stability and growth union" with more fiscal discipline. Problems:

1 The eurozone heads of government state that budgets shall be legally required to be balanced or in surplus and that an automatic correction mechanism be triggered by a deficit. A body of unelected bureaucrats would impose sanctions on elected governments. This is a constitutional monstrosity.

2 It is also an economic monstrosity. The balance of payments between eurozone members has to add up to zero, by definition. It is hard to eliminate structural fiscal deficits without prolonged recessions or big improvements in external competitiveness.

3 The single currency will come to stand for wage falls, debt deflation, and prolonged economic slumps. The eurozone has no credible plan apart from austerity.

AR Two damning verdicts. What's the truth?

Principles of Biology
An Interactive Textbook
By Nature Education

Principles of Biology consists of 200 university-level modules collectively covering chemistry, genetics, cell biology, animal physiology, plant physiology, and ecology.

Each learning module is self-contained experience, combining textual instruction, figures, simulations, exercises, and tests. Accessible from a wide range of platforms at $49 per student.

Anglo-German Split
Financial Times

The German chancellor was determined to form a fiscal union. But treaty change was a big political problem for the UK prime minister.

Merkel found British politics "incomprehensible" but said she would look for "sweeteners" to seal a deal in Brussels. Cameron: "What about France?" Merkel: "Nicolas will agree."

A British gamble was born. Downing Street thought the German "G1 in the eurozone" would prevail.

Spoils of Iraq War
Financial Times

After almost nine years, a trillion dollars spent, and thousands of American lives lost, the United States is withdrawing from Iraq, leaving the spoils to others. Turkey, Iran, China, South Korea, and Arab states have already invested billions in Iraq, far outpacing the US and UK in every non-oil sector.

Heavyweight
The Daily Beast

Former Delaware Senate candidate and Tea Party favorite Christine O'Donnell endorsed Mitt Romney for president.

She cited his executive experience: "I trust him to
do the right thing."

On his flip-flopping:
"He's been consistent since
he changed his mind."


Jews and Jesus
Reflections on the Doctrine
of the Twelve Apostles and
the Epistle of Barnabas

Credit: Mario Sorrenti
Pirelli Calendar
2012

Saskia de Brauw
demonstrates the posture
to adopt when the euro
tsunami hits us.

Stratolaunch
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen unveils his new company Stratolaunch with plans for a commercial spaceship.
The spaceship will be launched at a height of 10 km from a carrier aircraft with six 747 engines and a wingspan of 117 m.
The spaceship is being designed by Burt Rutan and the spaceship and booster will be built by SpaceX.

Clegg Versus Cameron
Financial Times

British deputy PM Nick Clegg refused to sit alongside David Cameron in the House of Commons as the PM defended his veto. Liberal Dem leader Clegg said the veto was bad for British business and would leave the UK isolated. But Tory MPs cheered the PM and claimed he had shown "bulldog spirit".

Cameron's veto is causing anger across Europe. Britain also refuses to take part in an urgent €200 billion funding boost for the IMF to tackle the crisis.

Cameron promised an "open mind" on whether the new euro-plus group could use EU institutions like the European Court of Justice and European Commission.

2011 December 13

Hint of Higgs at 125 GeV
New Scientist

The Large Hadron Collider may have seen the Higgs boson at a mass of about 125 GeV. Both of the main detectors, ATLAS and CMS, have found hints of Higgs. The standard model firmly predicted the Higgs boson.

Today, CERN presented results from trillions of collisions in the last year. ATLAS saw a hint of the Higgs at 126 GeV with a statistical significance of 2.3 sigma. CMS saw one at 124 GeV with a significance of 1.9 sigma. A discovery is defined as a 5 sigma signal, for less than 1 in a million chance of a fluke.

Theorists are relieved. The observed masses of the W and Z bosons imply a Higgs mass between about 115 and 130 GeV. A Higgs at 125 GeV or so "is just what the doctor ordered," says Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek.

Higgs Boson Podcast
Alok Jha

Today the European particle physics laboratory CERN holds a
seminar on the latest results in the search for the Higgs boson.
Guardian science correspondents Ian Sample and Alok Jha quiz
UK ATLAS team lead Professor Jon Butterworth:

Podcast (34:19, 33 MB)

End of an Era
Marco Evers

The UK will soon have less influence and more adversaries in Europe. Since joining the European project in 1973, the British have annoyed Europeans with their constant demands for special treatment and rebates and their blocking tactics. They have backed the internal market but sabotaged a common foreign policy and recoiled from a European constitution.

Cameron's veto marks the beginning of the end of Britain's days as a member of the EU. Britain will then be proud and free. It was no surprise. Cameron had already announced what he would do if his EU partners refused to back off from taxing financial transactions.

Cameron is a eurosceptic. He was held back by his Liberal Democrat coalition partners but his own party pushed him into confrontation. The Tories are campaigning against the European project more ferociously than they did in the days of Margaret Thatcher. Many people in the UK view the EU as another USSR.

AR EUSSR was big in the Berwick manifesto.

Cameron Woos Clegg
The Times

David Cameron is preparing to give ground to Nick Clegg over Europe. Deputy PM Clegg said he and Cameron "clearly do not agree".

Cameron: "Our membership of the EU is vital to our national interest. ... I believe in an EU with the flexibility of a network, not the rigidity of a bloc."

Labour leader Ed Miliband said the outcome was "bad for business, bad for jobs, bad for Britain". It was not a veto "when the thing you wanted to stop goes ahead without you", he said. "That's called losing."

Clegg: "There are many issues in the coalition where the parties differ."

Iraq
The New York Times

Polls show Americans approve of the U.S. Army withdrawal from Iraq by a ratio of three to one.
A NATO training mission had hoped to remain longer but could not agree with authorities in Baghdad in "robust negotiations conducted over several weeks."


Iraq
Foreign Policy

<< A U.S. Army soldier from the 1st Cavalry Division, at Camp Virginia, near Kuwait City, after arriving from Camp Adder, Iraq. All U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by the end of the year.

AR If that's the sort of armor we need there, we're better off out.

Franglospat
The Times

Two European leaders basked in praise over the weekend. In Britain, David Cameron enjoyed accolades from some quarters for his bulldog triumph against the new fiscal regime for the eurozone. Across the Channel, Nicolas Sarkozy was admired for kicking the troublesome Perfide Albion from Europe's high table.





Catastrophic Decision
Jonathan Powell

The government has made the catastrophic decision to opt out of a treaty that will shape Europe over the next several decades. Britain will be excluded from all decision-making on the key economic policies of Europe. How long are the other 26 likely to put up with obstructionism by one member wielding the veto again and again?

Foreign Policy Down The Drain
Paddy Ashdown

Long years of anti-European prejudice from the Tory Eurosceptics, laced with insults from their supporting press, have generated a growing anti-British prejudice in many European capitals.

If the Franco-German plan doesn't work, things will not be better for Britain, they will be much, much worse as our main trading zone collapses. Yet we have rejected being in, helping prevent collapse, in favour of being out, hoping for the best.

AR The best solution is for David Cameron and his Tories to be replaced by David Miliband (not Ed) and a Lib-Lab team.

Pity Those In Euroland
Janet Daley

So we are isolated. Britain has stood alone before. We defended the idea of democracy in Europe then too. This putative treaty so triumphantly proclaimed by Merk and Sark is an agreement to work toward an idyll of anti-competitive regulation and tax harmonization. The United States of America has nothing like this. If Britain is at all culpable for the nightmare implosion to come, it is only that we did not argue hard enough for the integrity of democratic nationhood and the value of free markets.

Britain Isolated
The Guardian

David Cameron deployed the ultimate weapon in European summitry yesterday. EU leaders promptly agreed to bypass Britain and establish a new accord on the euro among themselves. The EU appeared poised to line up 26-1 against Cameron in support of the Franco-German blueprint, leaving Britain utterly isolated.

AR End of an era. No more
pussy-footing from London to
hide its contempt for the
European Union. Fortress UK fights on alone.

Cameron Played Poor Hand
John Lichfield

Britain is not leaving the European Union, just yet. But the EU may already have abandoned Britain. The fog of the Battle of Brussels, 8-9 December 2011, is still clearing. But the possibility of a UK departure from the EU is no longer unthinkable. Cameron wanted Britain to become a kind of Cayman Islands within the EU: enjoying the benefits of being part of a European single market for financial services but not subject to EU oversight or regulation.

AR The idea that Britain can
survive as the world's bankers
is an illusion.

Revised EC Statement
Edited Extract
1300 CET

The objective remains to incorporate these provisions into the treaties of the Union as soon as possible. The Heads of State or Government of Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Sweden indicated the possibility to take part in this process after consulting their Parliaments where appropriate.

AR Leaving UK and Hungary.

2011 December 12

Merkelization
Foreign Policy

Germany's one-woman show could doom the continent's beautiful project. Merkel may look like the big winner today, seemingly with Europe at Germany's feet, but this turn of events could well prove to no country's detriment more than than Germany's. The prospect is of a joyless union of penalties, punishments, disciplines, and seething resentments, with the EU elites increasingly under siege from anti-EU populists.

Merkel's audacious reaction to staunch the eurocrisis is the Germanization of European monetary and fiscal policy, foremost the codification of its obsession with tight money, fiscal purity, and budgetary orthodoxy. She's doing it with Sarkozy at her side and over the heads of European voters. This catastrophic mistake vastly expands the EU's centralized authority while robbing it of even a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy.

AR People like a strong leader who does "the right thing" — and
tight is right for my money.

Desert Sun Power
Leo Hickman

In 1986, German physicist Gerhard Knies estimated how much solar energy was required to meet our global demand for electricity: in just six hours, the world's deserts receive more energy from the sun than humans consume in a year. An area of Saharan desert the size of Wales (2 Mha) could power the whole of Europe.

Dii is an initiative founded in Munich in 2009 that currently includes more than 55 companies and institutions. Dii aims to provide 15% of Europe's electricity by 2050 through a vast network of solar and wind farms stretching across the MENA region and connected to Europe via highly efficient DC transmission cables. The total cost is estimated at €400 billion.

AR Bring the Desertec vision into reality: back Dii.

Has Europe Lost Its Soul?
Jonathan Sacks

When a civilisation loses its faith, it loses its future. When it recovers its faith, it recovers its future. We must help Europe to recover its soul. The market economy emerged in a Judeo-Christian Europe.

Capitalism is a sustained process of creative destruction. The market undermines the values that gave rise to it. The consumer culture is antithetical to human dignity. Instead of being a means of directing self-interest to the common good, it can become a means of empowering self-interest to the detriment of the common good. Instead of the market being framed by moral principles, it comes to substitute for moral principle. The market becomes an ideology in its own right.

The current financial and economic crisis is an opportunity to pause and reflect on where we have been going and where it leads. The financial instruments at the heart of the current crisis were so complex that bankers failed to understand their vulnerability. Financial failure is the result of moral failure and a symptom of a wider failure to see the market as a means not an end.

Markets need morals. The keywords of a market economy are religious. Credit comes from the Latin for belief. Confidence comes from the Latin for shared faith. Trust is a religious and moral concept. It was a breakdown of trust that led to the banking crisis. And trust depends on an ethic of honour and responsibility. Markets were created to serve humankind.

AR Hear, hear. Fiscal duo Merkozy 1, City gent Cameron 0.

2011 December 11

Dear Prime Minister Cameron
Silke Burmester

I would like to heartily thank you! Your "No!" to the rescue plans of the EU countries to date and may well thoroughly in the future probably fly around your ears, but for me, whom I would describe myself as a great lover of your country, it's a relief. For too long you have been under the heel of the EU cucumbers and children's policies and bulbs dictation, made small, much too long you can spoon-feed from norms and treaties, that of a former world power like yours is not worthy.

You see, I had the good fortune to live at the time of the Iron Lady in your country and at that young age was very impressed with the coolness of Margaret Thatcher divided the country and forced the working class to its knees. And now, dear Mr Cameron, you also make the clear message and take the step away from European folklore and mishmash in which we all love and we act as if we also like to play with the grubby children.

The Britain of my youth you knew from the "After Eight" ads, the TV series "Upstairs, Downstairs" and music by the punk. And of course, by Monty Python, so it was ready for anything that distinguishes your kingdom like this: stubborn old ladies, strange ministries, parrots and, of course, perfectly shaped queuing. Their compatriots always spoke of the "continent" if they thought Europe apart from onions and cabbage was unknown.

All this has been lost in the last 20 years. Her beautiful, weird traditions are increasingly global standards of conduct from queue jumping, from eating a croissant instead of porridge given way, people have turned their beautiful capital to a sort of Disneyland Park. Only the money, your beautiful pounds, reminds one still working to be a guest in a country whose traditions established identity and always the latest adjustment avoided.

And now you come! Like Superman stops the train with his bare hands, threatening to take the dilapidated bridge, hold the European rescue shuttle on alone. One word from you is enough and all that what your colleagues have been working feverishly on, which will force the EU countries to more fiscal discipline is worthless. "No!" You have said a word and rarely has promised more delight. For now Great Britain is perhaps the back, from which arises is admirable that marked your country once: quirky.

We, lovers of the weird, quirky the kingdom, which had lost its identity under increasingly global whip. With joy we would sail across the English Channel and come to an island whose inhabitants are once again proud of their empire. And who are we owe it? You, Prime Minister Cameron! Even now I would like to express my thanks. I am sure one will pay homage to you. A rose for you or a street name. At least one-way street should probably be in there.

(thank Google for the translation)

Iron Man Cameron
The Times

Liberal Democrats condemned David Cameron’s decision to veto a new EU treaty. Lib Dem party leader and deputy PM Nick Clegg said he was "furious" at the way the PM handled the summit. Clegg feared Britain would now be the "lonely man of Europe", with waning influence for the City of London, less influence with the USA and reduced foreign investment.

Lib Dem business secretary Vince Cable accused David Cameron of going to war with Europe over the wrong issue: "I simply don’t buy the view that the British national interest is synonymous with banking and financial services." Cable called the veto a "pyrrhic victory" for Eurosceptics "because nothing has really changed — certainly with the financial services sector".

Lib Dem peer and former Treasury spokesman Lord Oakeshott said many in the party remained quiet on Friday because they were stunned and appalled: "It was Black Friday for every Liberal Democrat and for our future in Europe."

The Conservative party hailed Cameron as a hero and a true heir to Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher. Conservative foreign secretary William Hague said Cameron had done the "right thing for Britain".
Conservative chancellor George Osborne said Cameron's veto was the "right thing for our country".

2011 December 10

German Vision Prevails
The New York Times

A new European Union is pushing Britain to the sidelines and creating a more integrated core of nations under the auspices of a resurgent Germany. Angela Merkel persuaded every current member of the union except Britain to endorse a new agreement calling for tighter regional oversight of government spending.

The agreement was a clear victory for Merkel and it prompted a sharp rally in stock markets in Europe and the United States. Obama administration officials welcomed the overhaul of the eurozone but argued that stronger measures were needed in the short run. Germany has argued that the solution to the euro crisis is an overhaul of the rules that govern European integration. Germany is using market turmoil as a cudgel to force more austerity. But critics say such steps risk a deep recession.

The big loser in Brussels was Britain. David Cameron was perceived as having made a poor gamble in opposing the push by Merkel and Sarkozy, embittering relations and possibly damaging his standing at home. Some other countries were initially skeptical but only Britain rejected the agreement.

Britain and Europe
Wolfgang Kaden

Britain and the European Union was a mismatch from the start. When the union was founded, Britain still clung to dreams of empire. Economic arguments then led British industry to urge the government to join. When the empire dreams evaporated, they were replaced by a sentimental alliance with the United States. The British held back in the Europe of Brussels, caricatured for decades in the British press as a bureaucratic monster.

The UK is an EU member but never really wanted to be. From the start, the political establishment and the media were skeptical about the single currency. Much of what they said was accurate, but it was simple monetary nationalism that kept the UK out of the euro. Now Euroland stands apart from the UK with its financial autonomy. The British need to ask why they are in the union. Without a fundamental change in British policy, they should leave.

Bye Bye Britain
Roland Nelles

The European Union on Thursday night dropped the hypocrisy. No longer is harmony the overriding goal. The United Kingdom may no longer have a place at the table. London must decide whether it wants to remain part of Europe or not.

The European Union has reformed itself. The common currency union is following the Franco-German desire to grow together. The UK stands alone. It is a new development. The British have been the fly in the European soup for a long time, having their say and wielding their influence. In past EU summits all this was glossed over. No longer. The UK has been backed into a corner.

The euro crisis has exposed a momentum that is creating a new Europe. Chancellor Angela Merkel calls it a fiscal union. In reality, Europe is on the path toward becoming a federal country. Germany and France will lead but all are included.

The preferred outcome is that Britain should become part of an integrated Europe. But Europe can work fine without the British. The UK can focus on its alliance with the United States. They don't have much time. If the Brits wait too long, history will move on. Then we say bye bye Britain.

Great Britain Saves Itself
Niall Ferguson

David Cameron's stand in Brussels was the culmination of a consistent Conservative policy to resist any steps that would lead to Britain's becoming a member of a federal Europe. The eurozone members and the states that have chosen to follow them have just agreed to create a federal fiscal union.

This is the founding charter of the United States of Europe. It is not clear how the existing European institutions can police a fiscal union that is not covered by any treaty. And the balanced-budget rule is a recipe for excessive rigidity in fiscal policy, unless there is a significant centralization of fiscal policy.

Twelve years ago, I warned that a monetary union without a fiscal component would fall apart after about ten years. Four years ago, I pointed out that German banks were in worse shape than American banks. Incompetent leadership has brought the eurozone economy to the edge of a precipice.

The only way to save the monetary union is:
1 Massive quantitative easing by the ECB
2 Restructuring to reduce absolute debt burdens
3 Creation of a mechanism to transfer resources
4 Recapitalization of ailing eurozone banks

The Brussels agreement only does these things half-heartedly.
In the absence of sufficient resources for the new federal model,
the new rules will lead to pro-cyclical policies that deepen the recession. The continent has now embarked on a course for a chronically depressed federation. Cameron did the right thing.

AR Niall left the UK, loves the USA, and hates the USE.

2011 December 9

Eurosplit
The Times

The European Union fractured today at a rancorous summit when 23 countries signed up to a new euro-plus group without Britain. Britain was left out with Hungary, Sweden, and the Czech Republic, as France and Germany led the rest to form Core Europe.

Cameron said safeguards for the City of London were the price of his support for new rules in EU treaties. Both the Swedish and the Czech governments are expected to sign up to the new pact after gaining parliamentary approval. Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt joked on Twitter that Britain might form an alliance with Hungary.

AR Many Brits will think this is a victory for freedom. But Cameron has only acted to protect the selfish interests of the moneymen who made a crisis out of the Greek drama in the first place. Britain has sided against Europe and chosen irrelevance in the EU future.

No EU Treaty Change
Financial Times

Leaders of the 27 EU countries failed to agree to change the EU treaties in order to impose tighter fiscal rules on the eurozone and instead chose to create a new intergovernmental treaty.

ECB president Mario Draghi approved the deal. The ECB can now move more aggressively in eurozone bond markets.

David Versus David
The Times

David Miliband criticizes David Cameron for using the V-bomb in Europe without benefit to Britain: "David Cameron didn't actually stop anything because the other 26 are going on and the provisions of the treaty would not have weakened our rights and freedoms one iota."





Balls Attacks Walkout
Financial Times

UK shadow chancellor Ed Balls attacked a "catastrophic failure of leadership" by David Cameron and others at the EU summit. He said Cameron should have played a lead role in trying to resolve the eurozone crisis instead of "walking away" from the talks.

BMW
The Best BMW Ever
Bill Caswell, Wired

I think the 1 Series M Coupe is
the best BMW I've ever driven.
I've been racing BMWs for over
10 years in everything from
local races to the World Rally Championships, and my daily
drive is currently an E30 M3.

BMW 2011 M1: $46,135

David Confronts Europe
Robin Harris

David Cameron saved his leadership by his brave and stylish performance in Brussels. The British, and not just the Conservative Party, like a champion who smiles while he sticks a finger in a foreigner's eye. Lord Salisbury once decried a feeble foreign policy of "floating lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boathook to avoid collisions". In European affairs, the time for boathooks has gone, and the time for ironclads has arrived.

British Demand Unacceptable
Financial Times

David Cameron left the European Union divided. Angela Merkel said the agreement still marked a "breakthrough to a stability union" that would open the way for full fiscal union in the eurozone. Cameron demanded safeguards for UK-based financial services. Nicolas Sarkozy said the demand was unacceptable.

AR Cameron 0, Merkozy 1,
time to move on. British people say no to the EUSSR, Europeans fence off the rabid bulldog.

Europe's Blithering Idiots
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The leaders of France and Germany have more or less bulldozed Britain out of the European Union for the sake of a treaty that offers absolutely no solution to the crisis at hand, or indeed any future crisis. The EU may soon be reduced to a shell, with a new union forming among the core. Utter confusion will ensue over the legal structures of the EU. And what for? All this upheaval for a flimflam treaty?

AR Who's the blithering idiot? Ambrose seems to have
forgotten to take his
medication.

Two-Speed Europe
Spiegel Online

European leaders agreed surprisingly quickly to fiscal union. But the new pact leaves out Britain. David Cameron will not be able to prevent the UK from becoming a second-class EU member.

British riots: an analysis
by Theodore Dalrymple



The Shiites have enacted
bloody riots for centuries

NASA
The NASA Dawn spacecraft was launched in 2007 to encounter Vesta in 2011 and Ceres in 2015.
Dawn uses ion propulsion
powered by solar energy.



NASA
This NASA Dawn image of the asteroid Vesta is dominated by the Caparronia impact crater. It was obtained on October 23, 2011. The crater is about 55 km in diameter and the distance to the surface of Vesta is 700 km.

Bethlehemian Rhapsody
YouTube, 4:46

AR Jesus would love it,
but what about Freddie?




The Muppets sing Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody
YouTube, 4:47

Sleeping Beauty is a movie about power and control. Lucy's lack of money requires her to relinquish control again and again. She answers a want ad and a madam employs her to enact the fairy tale of the film's title.


Freeman Dyson
on the psychology of
Daniel Kahneman

War With Iran

1
Süddeutsche Zeitung

Hopes for a comprehensive reconciliation between Iran and the West have evaporated. It is important that the issue is not reduced to a choice between the Iranian Bomb and bombing Iran.

2
Berliner Zeitung
The Israelis know that attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities would, at best, slow down development of a nuclear bomb, and not halt it. The Americans can still hope that the Israelis will hold back.

2011 December 8

Lecture by Dr. Seth Jones, RAND Corporation:
Afghanistan Beyond the Bonn Conference
Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut, Heidelberg

The Merkozy Letter
Reuters

Edited extracts from a letter to EC President Herman Van Rompuy:

We need to reinforce the architecture of Economic and Monetary Union. The current crisis has uncovered the deficiencies in the construction of EMU. Alongside the single currency, we need a renewed contract between the Eurozone states.

We need more binding and more ambitious rules and commitments for the Eurozone states. They should reflect that sharing a single currency means sharing responsibility for the Eurozone as a whole. They should pave the way for a new quality of cooperation and integration within the Eurozone. We propose that those new rules and commitments should be enshrined in the European treaties.

Eurozone governance needs to be substantially reinforced. We should provide for more integrated and more efficient institutions based on regular summits of the Eurozone heads of state and government with a permanent president.

— signed by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy

AR Core Europe is on the way. The British "divide and conquer" approach to Europe of previous centuries is obsolete. A politically united mainland Europe is natural, inevitable, and good.

2011 December 7

Yes To Treaty Change
David Cameron

Resolving the eurozone crisis requires three things:

1 Tighter fiscal discipline and closer fiscal coordination
    within the eurozone

2 A big firewall to prevent contagion along with
    properly capitalized banks

3 Improved competitiveness in the eurozone economies
    that are struggling

A change in the treaty governing all 27 members of the European Union is the most comprehensive and credible way to provide tough sanctions to ensure that eurozone countries stick to the rules on debt. Britain requires rules to keep the single market fair and open for financial services.

The eurozone has a problem of competitiveness. Countries that have large trade deficits coexist with Germany, which has a huge trade surplus. These imbalances have to be addressed.

Clarke: Resolve Crisis
Financial Times

UK Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has put himself at odds with David Cameron by saying Britain should focus on "how to maintain the financial stability of the western world" at the EU summit.

Clarke said it would be a distraction to try to open up discussions about the "wider structures of the union".

Merkozy Failed
Martin Wolf

Germany has a plan but it is something of a blunder.
Good: Eurozone opposition will block its full application.
Bad: Nothing better seems to be on offer.
Ugly: Germans believe fiscal malfeasance caused the crisis.

Truth: This is a balance of payments crisis.
It requires huge adjustments on both sides.

Hunting the Higgs
The Guardian

Rumors have hit the physics blogs that CERN may have seen the Higgs boson. CERN scientists say that if the particle exists, it was most likely to have a mass somewhere between 114 and 141 GeV. Rumors are that the Atlas and CMS teams see Higgs-like signals around 125 GeV. That fits with supersymmetry.

AR Wow! Just in time for Xmas.

2011 December 6

Merkozy Agreement
Financial Times

France and Germany agree on new fiscal rules for the eurozone:
1 Change EU treaty change, at least for eurozone members
2 Impose automatic sanctions for budget deficits over 3% of GDP
3 Set a constitutional "golden rule" requiring balanced budgets
4 Have the European Court of Justice verify the golden rule
5 Let private bondholders avoid haircuts in future restructuring
6 Bring forward the launch of the ESM from 2013 to 2012

The measures must be agreed at the EU summit on Friday.

Rating Downgrade
Financial Times

Standard & Poor's has put 15 eurozone countries on negative CreditWatch. The AAA members Germany, France, Austria, Finland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg are under review for downgrade to AA+ if their plans fail to convince S&P experts.

Politicians accuse the ratings agencies of exacerbating the crisis. But the agencies worry about who will pay for a eurozone solution.

British Decline
Aditya Chakrabortty

In the past week, the UK has received two bits of bad news:

1 The Office for Budget Responsibility believes that the British economy is around 13% smaller than the government assumed at the height of the boom.

2 The Institute for Fiscal Studies forecasts that the average British family will be poorer in 2016 than they were in 2002.

In modern times, the only other rich country that has undergone the kind of decline that now awaits the UK is Japan.

2011 December 5

BIFA
British Independent Film Awards
The Guardian

Tyrannosaur won the best film award. Directed by Paddy Considine, this study of rage stars Peter Mullan as a drinking, gambling, washed-up widower who early in the film kicks his dog to death.
Considine won the Douglas Hickox award for best debut director.
Olivia Colman won best actress for her role in the film.
Michael Fassbender won best actor for his lead role in Shame, Steve McQueen's second feature film after Hunger.

2011 December 4

Iran Says It Shot Down U.S. Spy Plane
The New York Times

Iran's armed forces have shot down an unmanned U.S. spy plane that violated Iranian airspace along the country's eastern border, says the official IRNA news agency. The report quoted a military official: "An advanced RQ-170 unmanned American spy plane was shot down by Iran's armed forces. It suffered minor damage and is now in possession of Iran's armed forces."

NATO Accuses Pakistan and Iran
Spiegel Online

NATO says Pakistan and Iran support the Taliban. In a confidential report, NATO-ISAF military intelligence services raise serious allegations against the the Pakistani intelligence service ISI and Iran's secret police. The report says Pakistan and Iran provide financial and logistic support for armed resistance to the ISAF in Afghanistan, such as a training camp for insurgents in a project financed by Iran and Pakistan.

Suspicion of Pakistan and Iran is not new. For years, the ISI has had close ties to the Taliban and supported the armed struggle of the Taliban against the Afghan government and ISAF. The government of Pakistan denies the ties, but ISI still works with the Taliban and is cooperating directly with the insurgents. The Iranians are cooperating with Pakistan and support the insurgents with training, weapons, and money.

NATO officers in northern Afghanistan say the findings come from "fusion cells" of intelligence staffs from Germany, the USA, Sweden, and other nations. The German commander for northern Afghanistan, Major General Markus Kneip, has described the influence of Iran and Pakistan in his command area and warned against trained terror squads from Chechnya and Pakistan that supported the Taliban.

2011 December 3

German Calm
Spiegel Online

The endgame for the euro has begun. Fear is growing in the financial markets and in the capitals of Europe. But Germans seem calm. They are not blind to the depth of the crisis and most even think the worst is yet to come. But they are still happy to go shopping. The crisis is too complex for many of them.

European partners accuse the chancellor of shamelessly dominating the ongoing EU reform process. But Angela Merkel's approval ratings have gone up during the crisis. Most Germans are behind her and want her to take a strong leadership role in Europe. Germany should take the lead and the eurozone should follow.

War Histories
Joanna Bourke

  Peter Englund
  THE BEAUTY AND THE SORROW
  An Intimate History of the First World War

  Max Hastings
  ALL HELL LET LOOSE
  The World at War 1939-45

Englund and Hastings seek to draw readers into the intimate lives of people who suffered through the First and Second World Wars. The books both excel in depicting the horrors of war. Both solicit affect, so that readers are mesmerized by horror. But affective history fails to provide new understanding.

United States of Europe, Part 3

Britain Outside Europe
Anatole Kaletsky

The Prime Minister should encourage the 17 euro members to agree a separate treaty among themselves, outside the existing EU treaties. Such a new treaty would confirm that euro member-ship and political federation are distinct from the single market. The new treaty would turn the EU back into a primarily economic organization. Britain could lead the outer group.

German Europe
Spiegel Online

Germany is at the center of Europe. Officials in Berlin say it is important to stand side by side with France to avoid creating the impression that Germany is dominating Europe.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy: "France and Germany have decided to unite their fate." Earlier: "All my efforts are directed towards adapting France to a system that works: the German system."

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski: "I'm less worried about Germany's power than about its failure to act. It has become Europe's essential nation. It must not fail in its leadership. Rather than dominate, it must lead the reform process."

Kepler Finds New Earth
New Scientist

The NASA Kepler telescope had found a new Earthlike planet. Named Kepler-22b, the planet lies 600 light years away around a star like the sun. It is about 2.4 times as wide as Earth and orbits its star every 290 days, right in the middle of the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on its surface, and has a surface temperature of 22°C.

AR Let's launch a starship.

AFP/ Liberation/ Secret Defense
Unmanned U.S. spy planes of
type Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel are deployed in Afghanistan.

War With Iran

3
Financial Times Deutschland

An oil embargo will worsen the social and economic situation in Iran. But an oil embargo could also hurt the West. Higher oil prices would be poisonous for the European economy. To get the Iranian regime to give in, support from Russia and China is needed.

Vogue Italia
12/2011
Cover girl Karlie Kloss

AR Vogue is a fashion mag
but it tries to be more —

CNN
The Sovereign superyacht is the latest brainchild of Gray Design.
Bottom line: Sovereign can be yours for about €100 million.

AR I guess the fan in the tower is a wind turbine to advertise
the owner's environmental credentials.

Vogue Italia
Karlie Kloss again
in the December issue

— by working hard to distract
us from the euro crisis.

Print Money
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The eurozone economy is in imminent danger of crashing into deflation. This would wreck Europe's €31 trillion bank nexus. But the crisis can be stopped very easily by printing money. The ECB can halt the crisis immediately by reflating Club Med off the reefs. It chooses not to act because this would mean higher inflation for Germany.

AR Keep pressing until the
olive pips squeak.

Islamists
Financial Times

Qatari PM Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani says the West should embrace the rise of Islamist movements. Hamad played a role in the Libyan revolution and spoke after the first round of the Egyptian elections. Indications are that the Muslim Brotherhood party Freedom and Justice is in the lead.The puritanical Salafist party Nour also did well.

2011 December 2

PHILOSOPHER
Done. Plan:
1 Chill
2 Reread
3 Publish

Eurogeddon: Ten No-Nos
CNN

  1 Thou shalt not lack political vision and strategy
  2 Thou shalt not lead via two member states
  3 Thou shalt not neglect European foreign policy
  4 Thou shalt not let austerity be the only policy
  5 Thou shalt not fail to put people first
  6 Thou shalt not accept technocratic governments
  7 Thou shalt not run a democratic deficit
  8 Thou shalt not impose cuts that cause recession
  9 Thou shalt not cause panic in financial markets
10 Thou shalt not ignore economic differences

The Spirit of Enterprise
David Brooks

Germany and the United States are rich because many of their citizens believe that people who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Work and self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not.

This ethos is being undermined from all directions. People see lobbyists using connections to divert money, traders making millions in devious manipulations, and governments stealing money from future generations to reward current voters.

European nations like Germany and the Netherlands have played by the rules and practiced good governance. Now they are being browbeaten for not wanting to bail out nations that did not do these things. They are being asked to paper over fundamental economic problems by printing money.

Our sympathy should be with the German people. They are not behaving selfishly by insisting on structural reforms in exchange for bailouts. They are defending the values upon which the entire prosperity of the West is based.

In a financial crisis you do what you have to do. But as soon as the crisis passes, you repair the system. After the American financial crisis of 2008, the people who caused the crisis were never held responsible, there was no strategy to pay off the debt, and structural problems were not addressed. We can do better.

Was ABB Insane?
Simon Baron-Cohen

Anders Breivik committed mass murder to draw attention to his manifesto aimed at saving Europe from the Muslims. The killings were part of a carefully planned political project. He claimed to have worked on the plan for nine years. His manifesto is the work of a man with a single vision. The question is whether a man who is so cold and calculating in executing his logical plan is insane.

Empathy is both cognitive and affective. Cognitive empathy is the drive to identify someone else's thoughts and feelings and imagine what is in their mind. Affective empathy is the drive to respond to someone else's thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. Cruelty results from low affective empathy, plus other factors.

In Breivik's case, deeply held ideological convictions may have been the extra ingredient. Breivik appeared to have many parallels with the young Hitler. Hitler's Mein Kampf is a diatribe against the "Judification" of Europe that parallels Breivik's diatribe in his manifesto against the "Islamification" of Europe.

2011 December 1

War With Iran
David Miliband

A nuclear-armed Iran would mean the end of non-proliferation. But that is not an argument for military action. Diplomacy must take the lead. The regime faces challenges:

1 Sanctions, cyberwar, and covert operations have impaired Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapons capability.

2 IAEA inspectors continue to monitor key installations and operations, providing a tripwire to signal any dramatic change.

3 Iran's strategic influence in the region is waning. Among the Arab public, Iran's popularity has plummeted since 2006.

4 The Iranian people aspire to the same kinds of open government that the youth of the Arab world are reaching for.

Now is the time to put pressure on a weakened regime. A concerted diplomatic effort on Iran is needed now to prevent another war in the Mideast.

UK Pu To Burn
The Guardian

General Electric proposes to build a new nuclear reactor at the Sellafield site to convert the British stockpile of plutonium into electricity. The multibillion pound project would burn fuel from nuclear waste in a 600 MW PRISM reactor. The GE Hitachi Power Reactor Innovative Small Module reactor has been in use for more than 30 years in the US.

But the UK government has not yet decided how to deal with its plutonium. Options include long-term storage, converting it for use in a thorium reactor, or building a new mixed oxide fuel (MOX) processing plant. Some in government want the plutonium to be classed as an asset rather than a liability.

A thorium reactor is an alternative to current nuclear plants that experts say is safer, cleaner, and more environmentally friendly.

AR Iran would pay billions for our Pu.

ECB Rescue
Financial Times

ECB president Mario Draghi said a "fiscal compact" could pave the way to a eurozone rescue plan. An agreement binding governments to strong rules on public finances would be "the most important element to start restoring credibility" with financial markets. A fiscal compact would anchor confidence and boost investor trust.

AR First the new rules,
then the new money.

Vogue Paris
Kate Moss as Ziggy Stardust
(David Bowie, 1972)

FISH & CHIPS
To Go Global

Harry Ramsden's, the popular fish and chip chain, is about to close the first restaurant it opened, in Guiseley, Leeds, UK, in 1928.

CEO Joe Teixeira: "Whilst the Harry Ramsden's brand remains strong nationally, it is not immune from the challenging economic environment."

Food magnate Ranjit Boparan has acquired Harry Ramsden's chain and says he plans to expand it to a further 100 UK sites over the next five years and maybe export it to India and China.

AR Fish and chips — yum yum!

Honey Money
Catherine Hakim

"Feminist theory often erects a false dichotomy: either a woman is valued for her human capital (her brains, education, work experience and dedication to her career) or she is valued for her erotic capital (her beauty, elegant figure, dress style, grace and charm). Women are not encouraged to do both."

Export Boom
Financial Times

The German business club BGA says German exports will rise by at least 6% in 2012.








Apocalypse
Financial Times

Germany is the only country in Europe that can act to save the eurozone and the wider European Union from "a crisis of apocalyptic proportions", warned Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski in Berlin on Monday.

2011 St. Andrew's Day

Good News
CNN Money

The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Canada, and the Swiss Central Bank announced a coordinated plan to lower prices on dollar liquidity swaps. A swap takes place when the Fed provides U.S. dollars to a foreign central bank in exchange for the equivalent amount of foreign currency. The plan is meant to "ease strains in financial markets and thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit to households and businesses and so help foster economic activity."

AR At last: a glimmer of sense from the financial hand of GOD.

Euro: IMF Hope
Spiegel Online

Eurozone finance ministers agreed on two levers to take the EFSF over €250 billion:

1 Raise insurance on government bond purchases to reduce
    investor risk.
2 Open the fund to investors outside the eurozone.

Leverage of 3 to 5 times is needed to finance Italy and Spain.
Ministers expect a max of 3. They hope the IMF can help out.

To drive down interest rates, eurobonds are a long-term solution.
A short-term fix is for the ECB to buy more bonds.

ABB Declared Insane
New Scientist

Forensic psychiatrists say Anders Breivik was insane when he killed 77 people in July. They say he had suffered for years from paranoid schizophrenia and was psychotic. If the verdict is confirmed, he will escape criminal charges and be committed to psychiatric care.

To meet the legal definition of insanity in most countries, the defendant would have to be proven to be psychotic to the point where they could no longer distinguish between legal definitions of right and wrong, and no longer appreciate the nature of their actions at the time of the offense.

Professor Paul Appelbaum, Columbia University, New York, says that even though Breivik carefully planned and executed the killings, he could still have lost contact with reality to the point that he was no longer in control of his own actions. If he felt he was fighting oppression, he might expect to be treated as a hero.

AR Breivik's manifesto shows he was psychotic but by everyday standards he was sane.

2011 November 29

German Europe
Richard J. Evans

Germany refuses to let the ECB print money. Quantitative easing would stimulate demand as people spend the extra currency.

Germans remember the Weimar Republic. The government printed money and in 1923 inflation spiraled out of control. The depression then destroyed the republic. Between 1943 and 1948, Germans ran a black market economy to survive under the threat of inflation. It took decades of hard work to create an economic miracle.

Germany will not let the ECB print money because of inflation. But entrenchment and austerity are deepening the recession. Fiscal discipline is all very well but we need to revive Europe.

AR The original (long) article went on about Nazis.

New Physics
New Scientist

Do neutrinos travel faster than light? Why is the universe dominated by matter not antimatter? Why is our universe so comfortable to physicists?

On neutrinos, we still await independent verification.

The CERN Large Hadron Collider reports that mesons decay differently from anti-mesons. If so, this would help explain why we have more matter than antimatter.

The existence of multiple universes solves the comfort problem by saying we just happen to live in one that's friendly to physicists.

Theorists say dents in the cosmic microwave background might show that our universe once collided with others. The ESA Planck satellite is looking for the dents.

AR At least the ESA knows how to spend our euros.

2011 November 28

Eurozone: Days to Collapse
Wolfgang Münchau

The banking sector is broken. Parts of Europe are cut off from credit. Contagion has reached the EFSF. The eurozone must:

1 Agree an ECB backstop and increase liquidity for banks to head off bankruptcy.

2 Set up a eurozone bond to end the insanity of cross-border national guarantees.

3 Form a fiscal union, with new institutions and partial loss of national sovereignty.

The European Commission produced a smart proposal last week. Angela Merkel can get her fiscal union but only with a eurobond. Then the problem is solved. Or we go down.

Europe Funding Freeze
Fubancial Times

The funding hole for European banks is deepening following a sharp fall in bond issuance. European banks have sold only two-thirds of the sum due to be returned to investors in 2011 as debts mature, leaving the banks with a $241 billion funding gap.

AR Creak, bang — OMG — I'm on the Titanic!

2011 November 27

Lecture by MIT Professor Frank Wilczek (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2004, for work on the basic theory of the strong force, QCD):
Quantum Beauty
Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut, Heidelberg

Genesis
New Scientist

Three billion years ago on planet Earth, Luca (the last universal common ancestor) filled the oceans. Cells in the waters exchanged useful stuff in an open-source paradise to form a global organism.

A search in a database of proteins shows that almost one in ten protein structures are universal. Luca seems to have had enzymes to extract energy from nutrients and nanomachines to make proteins but not enzymes for making and reading DNA molecules.

Luca was made of cells with leaky isoprenoid membranes that let them share stuff. She probably also had organelles. Tiny granules in some archaea are precursors to modern acidocalcisomes, suggesting that these organelles date back to Luca.

Luca made lots of errors when she made proteins from gene templates. So early cells must have shared genes and proteins. Remnants of this gene-swapping system are seen in communities of microorganisms that can only survive in mixed communities. Any cells that dropped out of the global swap shop were doomed.

When cells learned to live independently about 2.9 billion years ago, Luca gave birth to the trinity of archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes. The eukaryotes evolved into plants and animals.

AR Luca = Ur-Globorg

Manuel Bauer was once a
neo-Nazi thug, heavily involved in far-right paramilitary organizations and guilty of numerous assaults against foreigners and immigrants in Germany. He has since turned his back on the scene.

Pension Strikes
The Guardian

More than 2 million public sector workers are staging a nationwide strike over cuts to public sector pensions. The TUC said it was the biggest stoppage since the mass strike in 1979.

AR The 1979 "winter of discontent" was the event that put Margaret Thatcher in power.

Export Boom
Der Spiegel

This year, for the first time, German companies will export goods worth over €1 trillion.








Firepower
Financial Times

European leaders need to provide "credible and large enough firepower" to halt the sell-off in the eurozone sovereign debt market or they will risk a severe recession, sys OECD chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan.

NASA

Europe
Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas has no desire to see Europe consigned to the dustbin of world history. Europe is the project of his generation. The longer the crisis continues, the more confusing it gets.

Habermas calls the system that Merkel and Sarkozy have established during the crisis a post-democracy. The European Parliament has hardly any influence. The European Commission is not responsible for what it does. The European Council engages in politics without being authorized to do so. States are driven by the markets. Everything about Europe is topsy-turvy.

Habermas is an optimist. He believes in the rationality of the people. He believes in a public sphere that serves to make things better. He believes in the power of words and the rationality of discourse.

BP
Meteor Bentley

Bob Petersen constructed this masterpiece on an original Bentley Phantom II chassis with bespoke coachwork by giving it a Rolls-Royce Meteor engine. The Meteor was derived from the legendary Merlin of Spitfire fame, in essence by leaving off the supercharger. The 27-litre V12 turns out a leisurely 660 bhp, ample for British tanks like the Centurion that once used it.

Photo: Brian Aris
Twiggy

Model, singer, and actress Twiggy, 62, was born Lesley Hornby and brought up in Neasden, London. At 16 she was discovered, nicknamed Twiggy, and declared "the face of 1966".

"You shouldn't want to be famous. You should want to be good at what you do."
Twiggy

Fly e-volo!

The e-volo multicopter is an electric copter with 16 engines and propellers. Flight time is up to 30 minutes, depending on payload and battery charge. Its empty weight is 80 kg including the lithium batteries. Electricity for a full charge costs about €3.

The pilot uses a joystick to control attitude and direction in 3D via multiple fail-safe onboard computers for independent control of motor speeds. The software can be integrated with GPS or obstacle detection and can land the craft safely if up to four motors fail. The craft can even pack a safety parachute.

QE Trillion
Financial Times

ECB president Mario Draghi says the eurozone crisis is political so he will not bail out anybody.
TFEU Article 123 says the ECB shall not give overdrafts to governments. But the ECB could launch a very large program of quantitative easing.

AR Print money?
Just say no.

Pool photo
The Osprey takes off like Clark Kent and flies like Superman

V-22 Osprey
The New York Times

The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey is a $70 million aircraft that Marines use for assaults in Afghanistan. After years of problems, its builders now run ads celebrating its 100 000 flight hours and say it is the safest Marine rotorcraft of the last ten years. Of the 458 Ospreys on order for U.S. forces, nearly 300 are in service or in production, with some $36 billion spent of a projected $54 billion.

AR Osprey Olé!

Foto: picture-alliance / Wiktor Dabkow
Bundeskanzlerin Merkel
und UK PM Cameron

Breaking Dawn
Wired

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1 is a nerd movie if there ever was one. And geeks should get behind it. Breaking Dawn was made for a certain type of geek and it succeeds wildly at appealing to their needs.

Picking up where Eclipse left off, the film starts with the wedding of Edward and Bella. It goes on to the romantic honeymoon where, yes, hot, bed-breaking sex is had, many times. Bella then inexplicably becomes pregnant. Then things get freaky.

Breaking Dawn is an entertaining film. Yet it's still seen as largely uncool amongst geeks to like Twilight films. Twilight fans are predominantly women. If being a geek means loving what you love unabashedly, collecting all of its related schwag, attending the related conventions, and sleeping outside before a new film comes out, then Twihards are geeks of the highest caliber. Breaking Dawn isn't going to appeal to anyone who isn't already geeked out on the subject matter.

AR Uh?

German Growth
Spiegel Online

German GDP grew by 0.5% in Q3 over Q2. The Federal Statistical Office estimates that GDP grew by 2.6% compared with 2010 Q3. The office also revised its 2011 Q2 estimate upward from 0.1% to 0.3% of GDP.

Reasons for good growth:
1
Labor market developing
robustly
2
Interest rates on corporate
loans very low
3
Wages rising for millions
in Germany
4
Inflation forecast below 2%
for 2012

Untitled, Georg Herold
Gesamtkunstwerk:
New Art From Germany
Saatchi Gallery, London
2011-11-18 — 2012-04-30

Strengthen Europe
David Miliband

The British decision to repatriate powers is deluded and dangerous.

Britain needs an alliance
with Germany.

Britain needs to help move
the EU forward.

The eurozone crisis needs to be
a spur to budgetary reform.

Britain should be making the
Lisbon treaty work.

Britain needs a positive
vision for Europe.

Eva Braun
Mrs Hitler
A new biography

Silvio Berlusconi by Tiziana Fabi
Bye Bye Bunga Bunga



Israel Won't Tell
Adrian Blomfield

President Obama was rebuffed last month when he demanded private guarantees from Israel that it would not launch a military strike against Iran without White House notification. In the wake of the IAEA report Israeli leaders have all but lost hope for a diplomatic solution.

IAEA Report on Iran

One, Two, Er

Rick Perry isn't letting a little "oops" bring him down. After his debate brainfreeze he went on a media blitz. Will he quit the race? Perry: "Oh, shoot, no. This ain't a day for quitting nothing."

AR Leader of the free world?
I wouldn't vote for him to be
town mayor.

2011 November 26

Sex Addiction
Newsweek

Sex addiction can destroy a life much as addictions to alcohol or drugs can. Substance abusers and sex addicts alike form a dependency on the neurotransmitter dopamine. Chronic masturbators who engage with online porn all day can suffer a hangover from the dopamine fall. An estimated 5% of the U.S. population could be sex addicts.

AR Is this simplistic neuroscience or a very American neurosis?

Buddhism Is Bad
John Horgan

Buddhism is not much more rational than the Catholicism. It espouses reincarnation and a law of moral cause and effect. Together, these tenets imply the existence of a cosmic judge.

Western Buddhists say Buddhism is a practical way to achieve happiness. The main vehicle for achieving enlightenment is meditation. But research shows meditation to be unreliable. It can reduce stress, but no more so than sitting still does.

Meditation leads to the idea that the self is an illusion. But this perspective may not transform you into a saint. Human suffering and death may appear trivial. Buddhists hold that enlightenment makes you morally infallible, but some Buddhist masters have behaved more like nihilists than saints.

Buddhism implies that detachment from ordinary life is the surest route to salvation. It exalts male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality. The concept of enlightenment suggests that life is a problem that can be solved and should be escaped.

Science tells us that we appeared by chance and we could vanish in the same way. This is not comforting, but science seeks truth.

Yoga Is Satanic
Father Gabriele Amorth

Vatican chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth says practicing yoga is Satanic and leads to evil, just like reading Harry Potter books. He says science is incapable of explaining evil and that sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church are proof that the Antichrist is at war against the Holy See.

European Transfer Union
Sebastian Mallaby

Germany is the eurozone winner and Club Med countries are losers. The currency union that caused pain in the periphery gave Germany its export boom. And once the euro crisis began, Germany enjoyed the stimulus of capital inflows from the periphery. European currency union involves transfers. Germans need to rescue it.

United States of Europe, Part 2

2011 November 25

Simply Baroque!
Dorothee Oberlinger and the La Folia Baroque orchestra played
works by Händel, Sammartini, Telemann, Vivaldi, and Corelli
in the Mozart Theatre, Schwetzingen Palace

Eurofix
Financial Times

Leaders of the Eurozone big powers (D, F, I) made tougher fiscal governance a top priority in their battle to stem the sovereign debt crisis. Their performance failed to impress the market. Angela Merkel (D) and Mario Monti (I) spoke of creating a fiscal union to drive economic integration and enforce budgetary discipline.

AR Ignore the market and do it right, but do it fast.

Nothing
Brian Greene

Isaac Newton imagined two rocks tied together with a string whirling around their common center. The string pulls taut. But how can we explain the taut string if the rocks are spinning in an otherwise empty universe? Newton concluded that the string pulls taut because the rocks are moving relative to empty space — absolute nothing.

Albert Einstein was puzzled by gravity. How does the sun keep the Earth tethered in orbit? His answer was that space and time warp in response to the presence of matter and energy, which guides the motion of objects like the Earth. Einstein concluded that gravity is the shape of spacetime — relative nothing.

Quantum mechanics implies that some features of the microworld are subject to random fluctuations. In a region of space that seems empty, such quantum fluctuations make particles pop in and out of existence and fields fluctuate wildly. Two metal plates close together in otherwise empty space are forced together by an imbalance in the quantum jitters outside and between them — quantum nothing.

This year's Nobel prize in physics is for three astronomers who discovered that the expansion of space is accelerating. The prizewinning data suggests an unseen energy permeating space called dark energy that yields a repulsive gravitational push. Its identity remains a mystery. Most of the mass of the universe is in dark energy — cosmic nothing.

The Large Hadron Collider is being used to find evidence for the Higgs field, which is believed to permeate empty space. Instead of driving the expansion of space, the Higgs would exert a drag on particles, giving them their mass. According to theory, colliding protons should produce a Higgs particle — a dot of nothing.

2011 November 24

The New Crisis
Spiegel Online

The eurozone is in crisis. Investors are no longer buying sovereign bonds. Banks holding them are in trouble. States can no longer expect capital markets to finance their budgets.

European banks are doing all they can to clear their books of state bonds. Most of the bonds have likely landed with the ECB, which now holds €195 billion in bonds but doesn't want more.

The comparison with 2008 is frightening. The crisis has eaten deep into the credit system and the situation is unsustainable. A loss of faith in European sovereign bonds could lead to a death spiral.

The German government has the key. Germany is the only eurozone country that investors still trust. Either Germany guarantees eurozone debt via eurobonds or the ECB buys bonds from debtors. There is no other way.

German Bond Failure
Financial Times

A German bond auction Wednesday was a "disaster" — nervous buyers fear the eurozone debt crisis is spreading to Berlin.

AR Oops.

Three Pillars of Union
Manfred Schepers

European leaders should build a permanent structure for eurozone governance. The new structure must assign responsibilities clearly. My proposal:

1 ECB: The European Central Bank safeguards monetary, financial, and price stability as the lender of last resort to the eurozone banking system, but not to sovereigns.

2 EMF: A European monetary fund oversees medium term debt sustainability by assessing performance, providing support, and policing reform.

3 EDA: A European debt agency finances eurozone member states by issuing eurozone sovereign debt, mutualized only to a level consistent with medium term sustainability.

Changing the EU treaty to establish the EMF and EDA will take time. In the interim, the ECB can fund the EFSF to buy sovereign bonds that later go to the EDA.

AR Can the ECB fund the EFSF?

2011 November 23

Eurozone Unite!
Martin Wolf

The eurozone confronts three challenges:

1 Manage illiquidity in public debt markets. Vulnerable countries cannot prevail with austerity. Interest rates must be capped. The countries will still curb their deficits and lower their debts.

2 Reverse divergence in competitiveness. Peripheral countries must become more competitive. More inflation in partner countries would help them. Too much price stability can be lethal.

3 Ensure stabler economic relationships within the eurozone. The financial sector needs a common regulator and fiscal authority and could use a unified bond market. Eurozone policies need discipline.

AR Memo to Merkel: Your call.

How Good Are German Finances?
Spiegel Online

German national debt is too high. The Maastricht Treaty required governments to bring the ratio of debt to GDP down to the 60%. The German debt ratio is over 80%, only average compared to other EU countries. Even Spain is below 80%.

The primary balance (PB) is the difference between government revenues excluding new debt and government spending excluding debt service costs. If the PB is positive, a country can cover its expenses and meet its obligations. If it is negative, the country faces a growing mountain of debt. To support bailout programs, donor countries expect recipient countries to get PB surpluses.

From 2002 to 2006, the German PB was in deficit. Italy generated a surplus in the same period, and projects a surplus of 4.4% in 2013. Germany expects a surplus of 1.5% in 2013. If yields on German government bonds increased by only 1%, Germany would have to pay €20 billion more in the medium term, but already new German borrowing is only about €10 billion below its limit.

AR Politics trumps economics. If EU rules are (a) sound and (b) followed, yields will go down and smiles return.

2011 November 22

UK Misses Debt Targets
The Times

David Cameron: "Getting debt under control is proving harder than anyone envisaged."

AR Spending cuts alone are not enough. Get people working at something useful. There are surely enough infrastructure and service projects to keep a few million people off the streets. If the finance sector can't find a way to pay them a living wage while they work, tax the financial parasites into exile. The illusion that financial services could save the British economy was what got Britain into this mess in the first place. Hard work on projects that add substantial value — that's the way out.

End Top Pay Deals
Financial Times

UK High Pay Commission recommendations:
1 Restrict top pay to basic salary + discretionary award of shares
2 Represent employees on remuneration committees
3 Publish total pay earned by an executive
4 Publish pay ratio of top-paid executive to company median

AR Publish the facts and shame the pigs.

Lecture by Sir Ian Kershaw:
Das Ende — Kampf bis in den Untergang
NS-Deutschland 1944/45
Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut, Heidelberg

The end of the Third Reich is puzzling. How can we explain the extraordinary cohesion of German society right up to the bitter end? The most obvious explanation — that people really did believe in Him — begs the question: why?

AR Sir Ian wrote the definitive biography of Hitler.
      I read the thousand-page short edition in 2009.

2011 November 21

German Far-Right Threat
Spiegel Online

Today the German parliament debates far-right violence in Germany. Government statistics show 46 homicides committed by right-wing extremists between 1990 and 2008. Journalists have compiled a list of at least 147 dead to date since 1990.

The Federal Court of Justice demands strict proof in convictions for homicide based on political motives. Such convictions are likely to be reversed on appeal. In some regions, politicians and the police have collaborated to play down right-wing extremism.

The Justice Minister proposes consolidating the state branches of the domestic intelligence agency. And politicians are discussing a new attempt to ban the NPD. The last attempt failed in 2001, when it turned out that NPD functionaries had worked in intelligence.

AR Get tougher. Zero tolerance.

Splendid Little England
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon

Britain could have joined the euro in 1997. Instead it devalued and borrowed. Now it not only has to improve competitiveness and produce goods the world will buy but also has to cut a huge deficit. Britain could have helped build a better eurozone.

Britain has now lost its influence in Europe. The PM will swear to defend Britain but achieve too little. Euro members will favor the ins against the outs. A referendum in England will reach a foregone conclusion. Another referendum may let Scotland go its own way.

AR Paddy has a case. If Britain had joined the euro, it would probably now be economically somewhere between France and Germany. Britons would be struggling to keep up with Germany and to keep their AAA rating. British exposure to Club Med debt would be their worst problem. Instead, Brits now watch Europe fall apart, as it did a hundred years ago. If it does, we all go down.

2011 November 20

Lecture by Professor Olga Holtz:
Mathematics as Aesthetics
Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut, Heidelberg

Mathematics is a science that has a lot to do with creativity and aesthetics. Olga Holtz was born in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 1973. She is a winner of the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Technical University Berlin, and a Professor at the Berlin Mathematical School.

David and Angela
The Times

David Cameron's call for a "big bazooka" to blast the euro crisis misfired in Berlin. He pushed for the ECB to print money to save the single currency but Angela Merkel argued for "limited" treaty changes. Cameron repeated calls for "decisive" eurozone action, Merkel insisted on a "step-by-step" approach. The PM said a big bazooka was a "Superwaffe" but was told he had the wrong word.

AR I think David will find the correct word is "Panzerfaust" (lit. "armored fist") but I think Angela will agree that's the last thing we need in Europe right now.

2011 November 19

Britain Versus Germany
The Independent

David Cameron and Angela Merkel struggled to disguise the gulf between them on how to tackle the eurozone crisis. They have fundamental differences on three key issues:

1 New eurozone rules. Merkel wants limited treaty changes negotiated by eurozone members. Cameron wants Britain involved because of the potential impact on the UK.

2 ECB intervention to support the eurozone. Merkel says no, it would fuel inflation. Cameron says all eurozone institutions must do what they can.

3 Taxing financial transactions within the EU. Merkel supports this. Cameron says it can only work if applied globally.

Wolfgang Schäuble: "One day the whole of Europe will have a single currency and perhaps it will happen more quickly than many people on the British island think."

GEHÖREN DIE BRITEN NOCH ZUR EU?
Bild Zeitung

Bei der Euro-Rettung stehen die Briten abseits — und auf der Insel wird immer lauter gegen die EU gestänkert.

Jüngster Anlass: Die Kritik von CDU/CSU-Fraktionschef Volker Kauder am Nein Londons zur EU-Finanzmarkttransaktionssteuer, die u. a. die Banken an den Kosten der Krise beteiligen soll.

O-Ton Kauder: "Nur den eigenen Vorteil suchen zu wollen und nicht bereit sein, sich auch einzubringen, das lassen wir den Briten nicht durchgehen. In Europa wird wieder Deutsch gesprochen."

United States of Europe
Spiegel Online

Former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer wants eurozone countries to form a powerful block in the European Union as an "avant-garde of the United States of Europe."

Fischer: "When the others see how successfully the avant-garde operates, many will want to participate." It would be a major step toward the United States of Europe.

A European federal state would go far beyond the Europe of the Lisbon Treaty. The Brussels technocracy would be replaced by political institutions with the power to shape economic and social policy for all of Europe. This can only work if what happens at the European level is both fair and democratic.

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso was wrong to tell the European Parliament that his commission was the economic government of the union. Europe can run without Barroso.

The most important decisions on rescuing the euro were hammered out by national leaders. Merkozy presented the Brussels machine with a fait accompli.

>> My longer cut

2011 November 18

German Euro Policy
Guido Westerwelle

The eurozone is the economic backbone of the European Union. An erosion of the eurozone would jeopardize Europe as a political project. Stabilizing the eurozone is in the interest of all 27 EU member states, not least the UK.

1 Tackle the immediate crisis. Protect states and banks from contagion. This includes reform of the national economies in crisis. Saving the euro by sacrificing monetary stability would be a mistake. Printing money would raise inflation and dissipate incentives for reform. Price stability is of paramount importance.

2 Plan for competitiveness and growth. Complete the single market by extending it to growing sectors and create a more enterprise-friendly environment. Emphasize innovation, education, and research in EU budgets. Coordinate economic and financial policies more closely.

3 Upgrade the monetary union to a stability union. Sound budgeting is in the interest of Europe as a whole. We need a treaty change to strengthen the economic and currency union. The eurozone needs deeper integration through tighter economic governance and tougher rules for the stability pact.

The British Disease
Spiegel Online

The UK has problems. Unemployment stands at 2.62 million, 8.3%, a million of them under 25, which is 1 in 5 young people. Inflation is over 5%, consumer confidence is at an all time low. Economists talk about a possible relapse into recession.

The Bank of England now forecasts just 1% economic growth in the next two years. The Cameron government needs an economic rebound to reduce the budget deficit. The Labour Party calls for government investment to stimulate the economy.

Currently the risk premium on UK government bonds is no higher than that on German bonds, despite deeper debt and lower growth prospects. But British banks are sitting on their money and small business owners face a credit crunch.

The British economy has serious imbalances. London and its financial sector have weathered the crisis but the rest of the country suffers. As jobs in manufacturing industry were lost, jobs in the new service economy were supposed to replace them, but in many places this did not occur. The diversified German economy is held up as a shining example.

Speedy Neutrinos
Financial Times

Physicists have new evidence to support the claim that neutrinos travel faster than light. They carried out new experiments to rule out possible sources of error as they shot beams of neutrinos from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy. This time they sent neutrinos in short 3 ns bursts. This let them measure their time of flight more accurately. The neutrinos still arrived 60 ns sooner than expected. More experiments will run next year. The result needs to be confirmed independently elsewhere. A team at Fermilab near Chicago will shoot neutrinos to Minnesota.

2011 November 17

TOP Thieves
The New York Review of Books

The One Percent issue is runaway incomes at the very top. Much of this income comes from financial investments, stock options, and other special financial benefits available to the exceptionally rich, who are often taxed at very low rates.

Over the past few decades, almost all the gains for the top 20% were for TOP earners. And half of TOP gains were by the top tenth of TOP (TTT). For earners in the band 80% to 99% the share rose only slightly, and the share for the bottom 80% fell.

Three out of five in the TTT are executives or managers of financial and non-financial companies. All of them are paid in part in stock options. Many TTT earners are lawyers who make money from Wall Street. TTT executives manage their businesses to push up their stock prices. Many cut labor costs and R&D to boost short-term profits.

The United States is more polarized than other countries. American boards give their CEOs and other high level executives big raises and generous stock options. The executives keep wages down to push up stock prices. Corporate takeovers and leveraged buyouts build up cash flow by cutting expenses to pay off the debt they took on for their acquisitions.

Wall Street used to work for business, but now it wastes hundreds of billions in speculation and gambling. Occupy Wall Street is right.

Cold Atoms
New Scientist

Quantum physics lets cold atoms get together to form molecules. UCLA physicist Wade Rellergert and colleagues studied the interaction of calcium atoms with ytterbium ions. At room temperature, either the two elements stay apart or an ytterbium ion takes an electron from a calcium atom. The team cooled the atoms to 4 mK and found that calcium atoms were pairing up with ytterbium ions. At room temperature, calcium atoms move around so fast that an electrons rarely jump onto ytterbium ions. But at ultracold temperatures, an electron can blur out over both a calcium atom and an ytterbium ion. The pair may then emit a photon and relax as a molecule.

Wet Chips
New Scientist

IBM researchers have invented a new type of computer chip that is both powered and cooled by fluid pumping through it. The idea is to stack hundreds of silicon wafers on top of each other to create 3D processors. Between each layer is a pair of fluidic networks: one carrying in charged fluid to power the chip, one carrying away the same fluid after it has picked up heat. The new approach should shrink machines and reduce power consumption.

2011 November 16

Europe
Martin Wolf

Two thousand years ago, half of humanity was under the control of the Roman and Han empires. The Han empire is reborn as the People's Republic of China. The rebirth of the Roman empire is the dream behind the European Union.

Germans believe a united Europe is in the German interest. Chancellor Merkel seems to be following a "just enough, just in time" strategy. [jujitsu — AR]

Italy may need to tighten fiscal policy by more than 5% of GDP to bring public debt down from 120% of GDP. Austerity is not enough. Italy needs export-led growth, but this will take time.

The Monti government needs:
1 Financing to roll over a trillion euros of debt
2 Profitable and dynamic external markets
3 Credible strengthening of the political union

Germany has the power. Now it must take charge.

2011 November 15

No Nuclear Iran
Tzipi Livni

Iran poses a serious threat. Its people have suffered for too long under a repressive regime that holds basic human rights hostage to religious extremists. Now is the time for the international community to stand together and confront the threat.

Biologism
Raymond Tallis

Biologism is the dual claim that the mind is the brain and that Darwinism explains human behavior. If the brain is an evolved organ, then the mind is a cluster of apps or modules securing the replication of our genes.

A brain in good working order is necessary for human consciousness, but many aspects of everyday human consciousness elude neural reduction. A community of minds cannot be inspected by looking at the activity of the solitary brain.

Terrence Deacon says we are influenced by "absentials" such as beliefs and possible states or events. Living organisms are shaped and defined by the constraints placed on their development. Mind emerged not from matter but from the constraints on matter.

Michael Gazzaniga says mental activity is not reducible to neural events. Minds emerge from the group interactions of many brains. The community of minds is where our human consciousness is to be found. We are people, not just neural machines or smart apes.

AR Consciousness in community — this is good. The absential halo invites the quantum treatment I sketched in Mindworlds.

Greece and Italy
Gideon Rachman

Greek PM Lucas Papademos and Italian PM Mario Monti are at home in the world of yield curves and markets. We must hope they can work miracles. For if they fail, the extremists are waiting.

Collectively, the political extremes in Greece now muster more support than either of the two mainstream parties. And Italy is no stranger to powerful communist and far right movements. In the other nations of Europe, rising radical parties rail against elites and are hostile to globalization and immigration. All the populists are deeply sceptical of the European Union.

Across Europe, there is no extreme party that looks close to winning power. But imagine what would happen if banks started to collapse, people lost their savings and their jobs, and there was another deep recession. Voters would turn to the extremists.

BARF: The Brown Army Faction
Spiegel Online

A bomb wrecked a house a week ago in Zwickau. Z left the house shortly before the explosion and disappeared. Hours earlier, M and B robbed a bank and then shot themselves in a burning vehicle.

Police found four DVDs in the wreckage. A video by the National Socialist Underground (NSU) was burned onto them. The authors form a network of comrades who value action above words.

The BMZ trio may be the hard core of a Brown Army Faction. This sort of terrorism was last seen forty years ago with the Red Army Faction. For each of its attacks, the RAF wrote a letter explaining why they killed their latest victim. BARF fits the pattern.

2011 November 14

Romney On Iran
The Times

Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney says America must be ready to go to war with Iran. He hints that the outcome of the 2012 presidential election will be decisive: "If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. And if we elect Mitt Romney — if you elect me as the next President — they will not have a nuclear weapon." He said America must not shirk its responsibility as leader of the free world: "If all else fails ... Then of course you take military action."

AR Right on, Mitt.

Fixing Italy
Financial Times

Italy and Europe can now look forward to a new administration led by Mario Monti. It must rebuild confidence among investors and allies by fixing both the Italian economy and the broken trust between voters and politicians. The new team must reform the labour market, open up the service sector, change the tax system, and try to balance the budget and reduce the debt burden.

02011-11-13

Confidence Man
Ezra Klein

In 2008, Barack Obama was presented with an economic crisis of astonishing severity. He underestimated it. Almost everyone did. But then the problem was political. Having passed a very big policy that you promised would revive the economy, the country blames you when the economy does not revive. Barack Obama was the greatest confidence man of the last few years. He gave America hope. He made America believe he could deliver change. But the president needs to do more than lead. He needs to govern.

APEC TPP

President Obama said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Honolulu that the new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with eight other Pacific states can be a model for future trade agreements elsewhere. The TPP will ensure that state-owned enterprises compete fairly with private companies and will address digital technologies. The 21 members of APEC account for 55% of global GDP, 43% of world trade, and 58% of U.S. exports.

AR Europe is fading — long live Globorg!

2011 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prizewinner
The Nocebo Effect
Penny Sarchet

The nocebo effect is the flip-side to the placebo effect. When volunteers feel nocebo pain, brain scans show they really are responding to neurological pain. One of the neurochemicals responsible for converting the expectation of pain into pain perception is cholecystokinin. When drugs block cholecystokinin from functioning, patients feel no nocebo pain. But telling volunteers who had been given a strong opioid painkiller that the drug had now worn off was enough for their pain to return.

If doctors try to avoid lawsuits by overemphasizing side-effects to their patients, the nocebo effect can cause a treatment to fail before it has begun. Many illnesses like allergies or back pain could be physiological in some people and nocebo effects in others. We should think twice before medicalizing them. We should not build up our everyday worries into psychological syndromes and we should make health warnings on new drugs specific and accurate.

AR This is my short cut of a much longer essay.

02011-11-12

Photo: Rolfe Horn
The Ten Thousand Year Clock
IEEE Spectrum

The 10 000 Year Clock is a monument-size mechanical clock designed to measure time for ten millennia. Designed by MIT engineer and Thinking Machines supercomputer guru Danny Hillis, the clock is the flagship project of his Long Now Foundation, founded in 01996 with help from Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.

02011-11-11

Simply Baroque!
Jan Vogler and the La Folia Baroque orchestra played
works by Händel, C.P.E. Bach, Fasch, and Telemann
in the Mozart Theatre, Schwetzingen Palace

AR Simply heavenly!

The Big Lie
Barry Ritholtz

Wall Street has a Big Lie. It is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. The entire boom and bust was caused by misguided government policies. It was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or misguided compensation packages, but housing policies that were at fault.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg built Bloomberg Data Services on the notion that data are what matter most to investors. He put the Big Lie like this: "It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp."

Banks present a systemic risk to the economy, but reducing that risk by lowering their leverage and increasing capital requirements lowers profitability. Congress deregulated the financial sector and the Fed turned a blind eye to bank abuses. The Big Lie is that free markets require no adult supervision.

The One Percent
George Monbiot

TOP people have extraordinary intelligence or creativity or drive, they say. Nobel economics laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman studied the performance of wealth advisers and found that those who got the biggest bonuses had just got lucky. Wall Street traders and fund managers are paid millions for gambling.

In another study, senior British managers and CEOs were tested against patients at Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane. The bosses were often worse than the patients. Egocentricity, a sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others, and a lack of empathy and conscience are good for business.

Not all executives are psychopaths. But the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. Chief executives are paid sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate. They are no more deserving of their wealth than oil sheikhs.

TOP bandits have been stealing our wealth for decades. In the United States between 1947 and 1979, both productivity and the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by about 120%. From 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80% and the income of the bottom fifth actually fell, but TOP income nearly trebled.

AR We 99ers need to get angry.

Europe
Timothy Garton Ash

The economic and financial crisis is accelerating the shift in the balance of power from West to East. The West is now forced to ask the Chinese to invest and purchase government bonds. But this is not the Red Army. The Chinese are showing up not with tanks but with investments.

We have to build this Europe with the material we have at our disposal. And this material is national democracy. Today, the key to Europe's renewal lies in the national democracies. We should apply Churchill's words about democracy to Europe: We have the worst of all Europes, except for all those others that have been tried.

For the first time in its history, Europe has a union of politics, economics, and security policy, in which most people are free and also enjoy prosperity, freedom of movement, and social justice.

Priestmangoode
Moving Platforms
Priestmangoode

Future rail travel can use a rail infrastructure where local trams connect to a network of non-stop high speed trains enabling passengers to travel from their local stop to a local address at their destination (even far away) without getting off a train.

A tram picks you up from your local stop, runs fast alongside a high speed train, and docks to let you cross. Near your destination, you cross to another docked tram and ride to your destination. The high speed train need never stop. This reduces journey times.

Economics Is No Science
Stephen Cave

Behavioral economists think policymakers need better models of human behavior.

Economists try to keep up with psychology but research on human irrationality suggests they are still way behind.

We have evolved to inflate our achievements, play down our failings, and rationalize away our mistakes.

Neuroscience shows that the structures of our brain are ill adapted for modern life.

Economics should be rebuilt on evolutionary biology.

OUT

Transgender supermodel
Andrej Pejic on cover of
OUT November 2011

In the last year of World War II, as many people died in Europe as on all military fronts throughout all of World War I.
Ian Kershaw

LEGO
The Lego Technic 1/12 model of the Unimog has 2048 pieces.
Price ca €160

OH
Olga Holtz

Sex And Porn
Slate

Sex education should value sexual pleasure. If teenagers don't learn much about sex beyond how to use a condom from trusted adults, they're going to turn to porn. And porn is no good on women's pleasure.

AMM
Egyptian student Ms al-Mahdi
makes a political statement
with her online photos.

AR Long live the revolution:
Have no sex, speak no mind,
see no truth.

QE Prize for Engineering
The Times

The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, announced today, will be awarded for an engineering achievement that an international panel of judges decides has created the most significant benefit to humanity.

The £1 million prize will be:
1
First awarded in 2013
then biennially
2
Shared by up to three people
of any nationality
3
Not awarded
posthumously
4
Managed by the Royal
Academy of Engineering

UK Libel Law Reform
libelreform.org

Campaigners crowded in the House of Commons to press MPs to reform the libel laws in the public interest.

AR MPs: Just do it, now.

Strengthen Europe
Angela Merkel

It is time for a breakthrough
to a new Europe.

Our task is to complete economic and monetary union.

If the euro fails, then
Europe will fail.

We need a rescue fund to
hold the euro together.
 
We need to build a firewall if Greece reschedules its debts.

We need better budgetary control throughout the eurozone.

Splash News
Jennifer Nicole Lee, 36,
mother of two, fitness guru

AR This is news?

Tracey Emin by Jonathan Hordle

Tracey Emin,
Royal Academician and recent Visionary victor at the Women of the Year awards, met the Queen on Friday.

AR This counts as news in the British Sunday papers.

Market Spikes Rescue

Market upheaval in Europe has made it difficult to increase the firepower of the eurozone rescue fund to the trillion euros that leaders wanted. Luring investors back by offering insurance on losses will be expensive.

AR Leaders must supply vision. Then investors will risk losses.

Cool To Be Kind

When you perform an act of kindness your brain produces dopamine, associated with positive thinking, and endogenous opioids that make you feel good. If you do an act of kindness face-to-face with someone, your body produces oxytocin, the bonding hormone. Kindness benefits your blood pressure and your nervous system.

November 13 is
World Kindness Day

Lightning Delays
Wired

The U.S. Air Force has confirmed that the Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II probably won't be ready for combat until 2018. The new fighter has been beset by parts failures, design changes, and a 64% increase in overall cost since development began in 2001. At nearly $400 billion and counting, the program still needs thousands more test flights before the first batch of regular pilots can begin training. The effects of the delay are cascading through the USAF. The Force must keep its cold-war-era F-15s and F-16s in service far longer than originally planned.

Activision
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
Latest instalment of the best- selling game franchise ever

Clocks
New Scientist

Nuclear clocks could be 60 times as accurate as atomic clocks. The idea is to use an atomic nucleus as a tuning fork. A nucleus jumps up and down between energy states only when primed with a specific frequency of light. Tuning a laser to prime it sets the frequency with high precision. Atomic clocks are similar but electrons do the jumping. The most accurate atomic clocks drift by an amount equivalent to 4 seconds since the big bang (1 part in 10^17). A nuclear clock based on thorium would drift by 1 second in 200 billion years.

Big Bang Boom
The Observer

A California TV comedy is being credited with making physics "cool" among British teenagers. There has been a 10% boom in the number of students accepted to read physics since 2008/09, when The Big Bang Theory was first broadcast in the UK.

Fast Young Pulsar
New Scientist

Millisecond pulsar J1823-3021A is 25 million years old, spins 185 times per second, and is 28 000 light years away. The NASA Fermi space telescope has confirmed from its copious gamma rays that it is losing energy fast. Pulsars are neutron stars that beam signals like lighthouses. Millisecond pulsars are supernova remnants that spin fast. Most seen so far are about a billion years old.

End Times
Niall Ferguson

The great divergence began half a millennium ago. Westerners got richer than everyone else. A century ago, a few Western empires controlled most of the world and its riches. The gap between the West and the Rest widened until thirty-odd years ago. Now it is shrinking fast.

The West surged ahead
thanks to six killer apps:
Competition
The scientific revolution
The rule of law
Modern medicine
The consumer society
The work ethic

Western predominance is ending on our watch.
The Rest has figured out
how to download the apps.

TED talk video
Niall Ferguson

Google Translate
Slate

Google Translate mines
existing translations and
uses probability to deliver
the best match based on
context.

Today, it understands
language as well as a
child of ten, but it is
learning fast.

2011 November 10

Italy May Go Down
Nouriel Roubini

Italy may soon lose market access. This could lead to a forced restructuring of its public debt of €1.9 trillion. That would not solve its flow problems. Italy may need to exit the eurozone. Italy and other illiquid sovereigns need a big bazooka. But there is none.

Italy needs a primary surplus of over 5% of GDP just to cap its debt. Output is in free fall and the austerity that Germany and the ECB are imposing will make the debt worse. Restructuring the debt won't restore growth and competitiveness.

To head off disaster:
1 Make the ECB an unlimited lender of last resort
2 Let the euro fall to parity with the dollar
3 Give the eurozone core a fiscal stimulus
4 Impose austerity in the eurozone periphery

The Origin of Sex
Thierry Lodé

My theory is that sex originated from an archaic horizontal gene transfer process among prebiotic bubbles on the ocean surface. Bubbles exchanged genetic material freely, leading to more bubbles with membranes allowing meiotic recombination of DNA. Bubbles exchanging genes were selected for adaptive variation. Primitive interactions selected the most libertine bubbles.

2011 November 9

Five Reasons Not To Bomb Iran
Foreign Policy

1 There's no good end state. Striking Iranian nuclear sites is like mowing the grass. Even in the best case, the Iranians would react with the kind of legitimacy and urgency that can only come from an attack by an outside power.

2 No one can prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon except Iran. Denying Iran a weapon means changing the national calculation and motivation of a power that historically has imagined itself as a great nation.

3 There are severe costs to the United States. The price of oil would spike exponentially. The Iranian capacity to wage a clandestine war against American and Israeli interests across the Mideast is formidable.

4 It will legitimize and popularize Iran in the Mideast. Sanctions may never stop the Iranians but they do have some impact. An Israeli attack could undermine all that good work and would enrage the Arab street.

5 If the Israelis strike, the United States is involved. Tehran will assume that the attack was coordinated with the United States. The United States is involved in two wars in two Muslim countries. The last thing it needs is another one.

Eurozone Exit
Martin Wolf

Greece would introduce a new drachma. New contracts executed under Greek law and taxes and spending in Greece would be in this currency. Existing contracts would stay in euros. Banks would have legacy euro accounts and new drachma accounts. The market would set the drachma-euro exchange rate.

The Greek government would strive for fiscal balance. Its central bank would manage the drachma. Hyperinflation could be avoided with external support. Public and private default on euro liabilities would be massive. But the only way to avoid contagion is for the eurozone to grow its way out of the crisis.

Berlusconi To Go
Financial Times

Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi pledged to resign after parliament passes a new financial stability law that will implement fresh austerity measures demanded by the European Union. After his announcement share prices rose worldwide and the euro rallied.

AR An austere Italy without SB — new hope dawns.

2011 November 8

Unconscious Knowledge
David Eagleman

There is a gap between what your brain can do and what you can tap into consciously. Some experts can rapidly ascertain the sex of one-day-old chicks, based on very subtle visual cues, but they cannot say what those cues are. They look at the chick's rear and just know the correct bin to throw it in. The experts teach student sexers by standing over them as they pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the other. The master gives feedback: yes or no. Weeks later, the student is trained.

During World War II, under threat of bombings, the British needed good aircraft spotters. The government tasked the best spotters with training others, but the spotters were unable to explain their strategies. So new spotters were trained by trial and error. A novice would hazard a guess and an expert would say yes or no. Eventually the novices became experts.

Patients with anterograde amnesia cannot consciously recall new experiences. If you spend an afternoon trying to teach them a game, they will say the next day that they can't recall the session. But their performance on the game improves just as much as nonamnesiacs. Their brains learn the game but the knowledge is not accessible to their consciousness. Essentially everything about your interaction with the world rests on this process.

Mental Disorders
New Scientist

In the industrialised world, roughly 1 person in every 25 has severe mental disorder, and nearly half of us will experience some kind of mental illness during our lives.

Conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism, are at least in part inherited. Perhaps natural selection has not eliminated them because they were once advantageous to humanity.

The stone-age tool revolution around 100 000 years ago may have been triggered by people with traits on the autism spectrum, who can be systematic and cherish precision. By about 35 000 years ago modern humans were painting pictures on cave walls that resemble the drawings of some autistic people.

Evidence of religion and spirituality also appear during this period. Shamans painted some of the cave art, and modern shamans tend to be unusual and creative people, who may have schizophrenic traits and often appear to have had mood disorders.

Complex emotions such as compassion set us apart from other species. Neanderthal shared almost all their genes with modern humans, but they carried subtly different forms of genes associated with autism and schizophrenia.

Researchers call such genes orchid genes: nurture them and the carrier thrives, neglect them and a maladaptive trait appears.

2011 November 7

Bombing Iran
Tony Karon

This week the International Atomic Energy Agency is expected to reveal that the Islamic Republic's nuclear program may include a "possible military dimension" enabling Tehran to build nuclear weapons, and that Iran may have conducted work on warhead design and experiments on triggering systems for nuclear weapons.

Israeli headlines last week featured leaked accounts of fierce debates about bombing Iran and warnings that Israel could start a war without first consulting Washington. Media spectacles included a long-range missile test, a long-distance Israeli Air Force exercise, and a civil defense drill.

Intelligence correspondents say the war talk is part of a strategy to raise pressure on Iran. But former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy said Iran represents no existential threat to Israel. New Mossad chief Meir Dagan dismissed bombing Iran as "the stupidest idea I've ever heard" and said Israel could not win the resultant war.

Tragedy of the Commons
Financial Times

Last week the U.S. Senate killed a $60 billion bill to upgrade America's infrastructure. Republicans objected that it would be funded by a 0.7% surtax on millionaires. In 2005 Republicans on Capitol Hill passed a $280 billion Highways Act stuffed with boondoggles. Those were the good old days.

Even U.S. aviation and internet infrastructure is outdated. Last week Washington scrapped a plan to fund a satellite-based air traffic system to replace antiquated radars. Car drivers with satellite navigation systems are years ahead of the aircraft above them. As for the internet, the OECD says average U.S. home connection speed ranks 29th out of its 34 members. Some countries, such as France, Japan, and Sweden, offer speeds more than four times greater than what U.S. citizens endure.

The United States would need to spend more than $2 trillion in the next five years to maintain its existing infrastructure. Obama could find a new way to fund the infrastructure bank but instead he let Republicans vote against a minor surcharge on millionaires. It might work politically but it is bad news for U.S. competitiveness.

2011 November 6

Defending German Sloth
Fareed Zakaria

Europe created a single currency without adequate fiscal policy coordination. Now Germany is trying to force countries like Greece to enact meaningful reforms. If the Germans guarantee eurozone debt, financial panic would end but countries like Greece and Portugal would feel no pressure to balance their budgets, repair their fiscal houses, or become competitive.

Germany is trying to force as much reform in debtor countries as possible in part for political reasons. German taxpayers would revolt if Chancellor Merkel guaranteed the debts of countries like Greece. Greece will likely fail but the European Central Bank can stabilize the euro. Recapitalizing the ECB sounds much better in German than bailing out the Italians.

2011 November 5

Today in 1605, Guy Fawkes was arrested in London and charged with high treason. He was hanged, drawn, and quartered in January 1606. He had been involved in a Catholic "gunpowder plot" to blow up the British Houses of Parliament. His image is now used by the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

2011 November 4

The World from Berlin
Spiegel Online

Handelsblatt:
Either Greece accepts European help or it leaves the eurozone. If Greece left, attention would move on to the next weak link in the chain. A domino effect could reach France.

Die Welt:
Merkel and Sarkozy bet the house with the Greek prime minister. They said the Greek referendum would be a vote on Greek membership in the eurozone.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
Merkel, Sarkozy, and Juncker seem to have run out of patience. The dangers are obvious. It could become a slippery slope. Europe is experiencing a crisis of confidence.

Berliner Zeitung:
Regardless how the Greek drama ends, confidence in the euro has been damaged. The message sent by Merkel and Sarkozy was that the euro was not built to last.

Süddeutsche Zeitung:
The Italians will determine whether the euro survives. Italy has 60 million inhabitants, the third-largest economy in the euro club, and €1.9 trillion of debt. Blame the Berlusconi government.

Die Tageszeitung:
How do you build a firewall in Europe? How do you protect Italy and Spain? Italy is close to bankruptcy. But who will buy Italian bonds? The eurozone is facing a crash.


Foto: DLR/ESA
Mars 500
Spiegel Online

A Russian team has just ended the longest manned mission in the history of space flight. After 520 days of isolation in a container in Moscow, six men ended their "Mars 500" simulation of a flight to Mars. The German Center for Air and Space Travel participated in the experiment and called the windowless container a mixture of Finnish sauna and seventies loft apartment.

Scientists and Autism
Nature

Autism spectrum disorders can range from profound autism to Asperger's syndrome. The idea is popular that many people in professions such as science and engineering are on the spectrum.

Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge, UK, thinks the parents of autistic children have an aptitude for understanding and analyzing predictable, rule-based systems. He thinks the genes that give parents such minds could lead to autism in their children.

In a survey of Cambridge undergraduates he found that those studying mathematics were more likely to have been diagnosed with autism than were students majoring in medicine, law, or social science. And students in science and maths had higher scores on measures of autistic traits than did students in the humanities and social sciences. He says systemizing is part of a broad autistic phenotype.

Other researchers suggested that fathers of children with autism are just more educated. A 2010 analysis of autism diagnoses in California found clusters in areas where parents were older and more highly educated. People with more education tend to have children later in life. Perhaps age is the key.

The autism enigma

2011 November 3

Image: Martijn van den Heuvel/University Medical Center in Utrecht
Connectome with hubs: green—red = fewer—more connections

Brain Hubs
New Scientist

Researchers have found that 12 well-connected hubs orchestrate neural traffic in your brain. The hubs form six pairs, with one of each pair in each hemisphere:

1 The precuneus seems to integrate high-level information from
    all over the brain.
2 The superior frontal cortex plans actions and governs where
    to focus attention.
3 The superior parietal cortex is linked to vision and locates
    nearby objects.
4 The hippocampus processes, stores and consolidates memories.
5 The thalamus interlinks visual processes, among other things.
6 The putamen coordinates movement.

The hubs enable the brain to integrate information for decisions.

Cannes 2011
Financial Times

The OECD predicts weak GDP growth in the USA, negative growth in parts of Europe, and slower growth in emerging economies.

The USA did its best to win the Cannes G20 summit award for the most incompetent decision making. But eurozone leaders take the prize by letting Greek debt get out of hand.
G20 action items:

1 Exchange rates. Protectionism is creeping back as currency manipulation. Countries in surplus should let demand rise.

2 Monetary policy. The Bank of Japan should scale up its asset purchases and the ECB should lower interest rates.

3 Fiscal stimulus. Countries in surplus should increase public spending. China must move to a consumer-driven model. Germany should think about Europe. The USA needs more stimulus.

For the global economy, 2012 could be dismal. World leaders must rise to the challenge.

AR The G20 is currently the top political organ of Globorg. Google is currently the top functional organ.

The Quantum Universe

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw tell those uncomfortable with quantum theory: "It is the resistance to new ideas that leads to confusion, not the inherent difficulty of the ideas."

Asteroid YU55
CNN

An asteroid "the size of an aircraft carrier" passed within
the moon's orbit Tuesday, the closest approach by an object that large in over 30 years.
The asteroid passed within 202,000 miles of Earth.

AR A lump of rock some 400 m in diameter (that's something like 100 megatons in mass, whereas aircraft carriers have mass in the 100 kiloton range) passed with about 320 Mm of Earth. The more relevant fact is that if it had hit Earth it would have caused a magnitude 7 earthquake.

National Gallery, London
Salvator Mundi
Leonardo da Vinci

Biography
Geoff Dyer

After reading half of the manuscript of Richard Bradford's biography of him, Martin Amis didn't like what he saw and the original publisher pulled out. Amis is hyperallergic to bad writing and seeing his life half-swaddled in Bradford's sentences must have induced anaphylactic shock. As the subject of this biography has pointed out, style is not something added after the fact, like nice wrapping paper. It is the thing, the gift, itself. And once the sentences start running away from a writer, everything else goes as well.

New British Muslims
The Independent

Since 9/11, some 100 000 British people, 75% of them women, have converted to Islam. Most of the women, of average age 27, said they felt confused after conversion. A quarter of them liked Islam because of the rigid gender demarcation.

Nostradamus
Colin Dickey

Nostradamus was born in France in 1503 and worked as a pharmacist. In 1534 his wife and children died of the plague. For years he battled the plague.

In 1550 he began to publish weather almanacs that brought him wealth and fame. In 1555 he published The Prophecies and the queen of France, Catherine de Medici, began to consult him.

He died in 1566 but his writings lived on. People said Napoleon was the first prophesied Antichrist, the second Hitler. The third is yet to come.

Revelations
Elaine Pagels

The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible. It doesn't have any ideas, stories, or moral teaching. It only has visions, dreams, and nightmares. How do we account for the fact that ever since it was written the book has been enormously influential in western culture?

I chose the book of Revelation as the toughest test case for the question: Why is religion still around?

The Book of Revelation
Edge Master Class 2011
Elaine Pagels

No Quantum Jerks
New Scientist

Quantum mechanics may soon explain why wave functions collapse on measurement. The GRW approach said collapses are random and rare for any given particle, but measuring a particle quangles it with the measuring equipment so any collapse triggers collapse of the whole quangled mass. Refining GRW with continuous spontaneous localization (CSL) triggered by fluctuations in an extended field caused jerks that clashed with special relativity. A new field smooths out the jerks and makes CSL relativistic, says
Daniel Bedingham.

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