2014 September 30

British Values

The Times

UK Home Secretary Theresa May said of Islamic State: "They have made clear their ambitions and they have made us their enemies. And the lesson of history tells us that when our enemies say they want to attack us, they mean it. We must not flinch. We must not shy away from our responsibility."

"You don't just get the freedom to live how you choose to live, you have to respect other people's right to do so too and you have to respect British values and institutions: the rule of law, democracy, equality, free speech and respect for minorities. These are the values that make our country what it is. These are our values."

Google Versus Apple

The Telegraph

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt: "I would say that this brutal competition between Apple and Google over Android and iOS has enormous benefits for consumers worldwide. If you look at the innovation on the Apple side and on the Google side, that competition which I think is the defining fight of the computer industry today, it benefits global at the billions of people level."

Philosophy

Prospect

Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is a masterpiece. Russell’s disdain for armchair philosophy and his fondness of empiricism made him blind to many of Plato's deepest insights, a poor interpreter of Kant, and abusive towards Hegel. But he interprets the canon of philosophy in a way that is coherent, articulate and highly personal. He offers the Cynics and Sceptics of ancient Greece and Rome his sympathy for their despair at living in a society where philosophy is seen as useless in politics and culture.

2014 September 29

Internet Freedom

The Times

Big American corporations want to own the internet, says WWW creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Companies such as Google and Facebook have grown big since the creation of the web 25 years ago. Sir Tim says global internet and telecom companies would "love to be able to take control of the internet market" and "use it to establish control of some other markets" but this would be "disastrous" for us all.

Brits and Krauts

Roger Boyes

Neil MacGregor thinks that Germans feel goodwill towards the English. But there is another way of seeing it: the English are becoming the new Germans. Overeager to go to war, ready to work all hours, a bit leaden in our humour. The Germans have long since broken out of our box, yet we seem to fit in it. In the end we are members of the same pale, stubborn, self-righteous tribe.

2014 September 28

War Again

Max Hastings

The Mideast monsters of IS are wedded to a culture of intolerance and death. IS wants not only to create a medieval caliphate in conquered territory but also to attack the infidels of the West.

The threat IS poses to our security is too great to ignore. I recall the Dervish jihad led by "the mad Mahdi" that overran the Sudan and Abyssinia and stormed Khartoum in 1884.

The Mahdi imposed an Islamist regime not much different from that of IS today. This tyranny rewarded every man who questioned the Mahdi's descent from the Prophet by amputating his right hand and left foot. Its army of 100,000 men punished dissent with mass slaughter.

Egyptian troops failed to hold back the Mahdists, just as the Iraqi army has failed to cope with IS. Only with British troops, latterly under Sir Herbert Kitchener, did the Dervish army meet its nemesis.

If Kitchener had simply packed up and gone home after defeating his enemy, Sudan would have lapsed into anarchy. But following his ruthless victory at Omdurman in 1898, the British ruled the Mahdi's former empire for half a century. Imperialism brought order.

The Western powers are the good guys in this struggle. But already more fighters are joining the jihadis, seeing them as winners. We must do what we can to restore order to the Mideast.

The End of History

The Sunday Times

Francis Fukuyama told us that history ended in 1989. Now, 25 years on: "Things are looking very bad."

Frank, 61, a senior fellow at Stanford, is promoting his new book, Political Order and Political Decay. "Back in 1989, there was really a hope that a liberal Russia would emerge that would be European and would integrate. That didn't happen." He thinks our response to Putinism should be to revive NATO.

NATO

Anders Fogh Rasmussen

The world has changed since I became Secretary General of NATO five years ago. The challenges we face are driven by forces that defy our freedom and reject our democracy. NATO must work with partners around the world to uphold the global order.

The barbaric extremism promoted by IS has spread like a cancer across the state boundaries of Iraq, Syria and beyond. NATO allies agreed to work closely together to support Iraq in combating IS and to exchange information on returning foreign fighters.

Russia has shown utter disregard for international law and a brutal determination to redraw borders by force. Its aggression against Ukraine has challenged our vision of Europe. Despite our efforts since the collapse of communism, Russia clearly views NATO as an adversary.

NATO stands ready to act swiftly and decisively to defend all allies against threats from any direction. We will maintain a continuous presence in Eastern Europe, with more planes in the air, more ships at sea, and more troops on the ground.

I leave NATO stronger than I found it. Our armed forces are more effective and more tightly connected than ever before. NATO is an alliance worth investing in. Our freedom must be defended.

2014 September 27

Genius

Tamsin Shaw

The genius answers the human yearning for cosmic reconciliation. The Kantian tradition in philosophy gave rise to a notion of genius that unified the human mind and nature. Newtonian physics could not explain how plants and animals could come into existence, and Kant suggested that they were behaving as if they had an inner purpose. This process at work in art he described as genius.

The German Romantics developed the Kantian conception into a cosmic idea. They understood the mental and the physical as manifestations of the force generating the cosmos. Human creativity brought the whole process to self-consciousness. Genius combines self-conscious reflection with deep unconscious sources of creativity.

For Kant, the mind can grasp infinities that our senses cannot show us. Beethoven conjured this feeling of confronting titanic forces and yet soaring above them. Although Darwin was responsible for a great transformations in human self-understanding, he did not consider himself a genius.

Einstein said the comprehensibility of the world was a miracle. Quantum theorists assailed the assumption that the relationship between the mental and the physical could be modeled as a mind comprehending an objectively existing external reality. Quantum theory defies any sense of what a theodicy of mind would look like.

Mathematical genius helps. Gödel proved that for any finitely specifiable, consistent formal system of sufficient complexity to express arithmetic, there will exist truths of arithmetic that are not provable within that system, and inferred from this that it was impossible to think of mathematics as a human construction.

A new theodicy of mind can be based on mathematics. The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences expands our sense of living in a universe that is intelligible to us. The human mind has evolved to recognize mathematical truths. We are nature looking back at itself.

Johann Sebastian Bach is the musical genius of our age. Douglas Hofstadter suggests that some of Bach's formal devices, mirroring Gödelian self-reference, provide the key to understanding how consciousness can emerge in the physical world.

2014 September 26

UK To Strike IS

CNN

UK parliamentarians meeting in emergency session approved by 524 to 43 votes a motion to participate in airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq.

Cameron speaks
(4:44)

2014 September 25

Airstrikes

CNN

President Obama addressing the UN General Assembly: "It is no exaggeration to say that humanity's future depends on us uniting against those who would divide us along fault lines of tribe or sect, race or religion. ... Collectively, we must take concrete steps to address the danger posed by religiously motivated fanatics, and the trends that fuel their recruitment."

2014 September 24

Religion

Ferdinand Mount

Great religions emerge in conditions of social stress and oppressive state violence. The founder preaches that all men are equal in the sight of God, or do as you would be done by.

Religions are corrupted by success. Every major faith tradition has tracked the political entity in which it arose. None has become a world religion without the patronage of a militarily powerful empire and every tradition developed an imperial ideology.

It is not religion that poisons everything but everything that poisons religion. Under the cumulative pressure of invasion by outsiders and internal oppression, religion is weaponized.

War President

Nobel peace laureate Barack Hussein Obama: "I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism; it is recognition of history, the imperfections of man, and the limits of reason."

2014 September 23

Germany

Neil MacGregor

Pro-British sentiment in Germany is everywhere. Every educated German will know all about Britain. They all speak English and they'll watch British television. They have great admiration for the way things just evolve and the decency of the whole system. They have huge admiration for the way Britain fought the Second World War.

Germany wants allies. One of the things they've learnt from the past is not only that power is dangerous, but acting alone is also dangerous. So they want counsel and friends, and they would be very happy for Britain to play that role. Historically, we are in a far better position to be Germany's friend than France.

A hundred years ago everybody like us would have known all about German culture and history. We’d all have read German at school or university, we'd expect people to read German, we would know about Germany. All that stopped after 1945. The Germany you study at school is not enough to understand what Germany is becoming.

Germany: Memories of a Nation
BBC Radio 4

2014 September 22

MAVEN Orbits Mars

CNN

MAVEN is now orbiting Mars after a journey of over 700 Gm lasting 10 months.

The NASA Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission will study the Martian atmosphere from orbit to answer questions about its climate change and help us understand the history of Martian climate, water and habitability.

2014 September 21

The Sun: Six Facts

Rebecca Boyle

1 It has cooling rain

The sun is a giant ball of hot plasma. As the solar wind streams outward, plasma can fall back to the surface like rain. The coronal rain is not liquid: plasma simply cools enough to fall down again. This all happens very quickly and on a gargantuan scale. Solar tornadoes form as swirling plasma creates a vortex, which causes magnetic fields to twist and spiral into the corona. We think this heats it.

2 It has siblings

The sun once had close family. After their birth in a cloud of dust and gas, the siblings scattered. One of them, HD 162826, is about 110 light years away in the constellation Hercules. It looks like the sun and might have planets but is slightly hotter and more massive. The ESA telescope Gaia may find more solar siblings.

3 It gets into twists

Different parts of the sun spin at different rates. A day at the equator lasts 25 Earth days but polar days are about 10% longer. This uneven spin twists the solar magnetic field into tangles. These periodically snap and release energy in solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). The cycle of twisting and snapping lasts roughly 11 Earth years. During a solar minimum, flares are few and so are sunspots. In solar maxima, more sunspots burst out and spew more flares and CMEs. The current cycle is unusually calm. Every 11 years, the solar magnetic field polarity reverses. We think it is doing so now.

4 It breathes

The solar wind varies as its radiation changes. This changes the size of the huge magnetic bubble of charged particles, the heliosphere, that the wind blows out. The solar cycles help cause warm periods and mini ice ages on Earth. During a solar minimum, the solar wind streams from the poles at a much higher speed and expands the heliosphere. During solar maxima, the magnetic fields are more knotted up and less wind blows, so the heliosphere contracts. The breathing cycle lasts 11 years.

5 It has a hot corona

At 5700 K, the solar surface is much cooler than the corona. The upper corona, more than 1 Gm above the surface, can reach temperatures of several MK, so energy must be flowing into it. Much of the energy appears to come from the transition region between the corona and the next atmospheric layer down. Tornadoes, rain, magnetic braids, plasma jets, and "spicules" are all thought to play a role in bringing heat energy from the lower regions of the sun and dumping it higher up. The NASA Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph mission has been observing all this since 2013.

6 It has visitors

Two new spacecraft will fly closer to the sun than ever before. The ESA Solar Orbiter mission launches in 2017 and aims to fly within 45 Gm of the sun. It will photograph the solar poles to study the magnetic field. The NASA Solar Probe Plus mission is set to launch in 2018 and come within 6 Gm of the sun.

2014 September 20

Verdict

Niall Ferguson

The Scottish electorate's verdict on the Union was unambiguous. Both the main UK parties now find themselves committed to ideas about nationwide constitutional reform and decentralization that have hitherto been the property of the Liberal Democrats. Now there is a chance to move the UK in the direction of federalism.

David Cameron has triumphed. The performance of the UK economy is confounding his Keynesian critics. He has lanced the boil of Scottish separatism. And he has opened up an entirely new front in British political warfare. Devolution for the UK as a whole puts Labour on the back foot and takes everyone's mind off Europe.

"Alex Salmond has certainly given credence to the law of unintended consequences. He has probably succeeded in dividing Scotland, and he appears to have united England. It was not what he planned but it may have considerable benefits for the English."
G.F. Casey

"The present arrangements with regard to the West Lothian question and the Barnett formula are clearly unfair. The time for waiting is over."
Roger H. Vincent

"Congratulations to Scotland for recognising the need for unity in these times. Now we must stop this nonsense about quitting Europe."
John Postgate

2014 September 19

NO

CNN

Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond admitted defeat. Scotland stays in the United Kingdom.
Yes 45%
No 55%

Islamic Art

The Times

The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto opens today. The Aga Khan, 77, is the spiritual leader to 15 million Shia Ismaili Muslims, a multimillionaire, and a philanthropist. His collection of Islamic art includes more than a thousand pieces including exquisite book paintings, ceramics, textiles, and artifacts dating back to the 9th century CE.

The Aga Khan was closely involved in the design of the $300 million site: "We hope that this museum will contribute to a better understanding of the peoples of Islam in all of their religious, ethnic, linguistic, and social diversity."

2014 September 18

NO

2014 September 17

Islamic State

The New York Times

General Martin E. Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "My view at this point is that this coalition is the appropriate way forward. I believe that will prove true. But if it fails to be true, and if there are threats to the United States, then I, of course, would go back to the president and make a recommendation that may include the use of US military ground forces."

2014 September 16

Spirituality Without Religion

Sam Harris

Our minds are all we have. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. Love is a state of being.

Religions are mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but important psychological truths can be found in the rubble. Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.

A spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self.

2014 September 15

Are we alone?

2014 September 14

YUK!

The Sunday Times

Imperial College London physics professor Joao Magueijo spent seven years as a fellow at Cambridge. In a best-selling Portuguese book he writes that England has one of the most rotten societies in Europe: "I never met such a group of animals. English culture is pathologically violent. The English are unrestrained wild beasts and totally out of control."

On a 4-hour wait in the A&E department at a hospital in Blackpool one Sunday afternoon: "It looked like a field hospital after a battle."

On the behavior of drunken young women: "Oral sex is not considered a sexual act among the English. It is something a woman can perform on a stranger whose name she doesn't even know."

On English hygiene standards: "When you visit English homes, or the toilets at schools or in student lodgings, they are all so disgusting that even my grandmother's poultry cage is cleaner."

On the north of England: "Everything is hideous out there: the houses, the streets ... People in the north are incredibly obese, men and women with three-meter waists made of fat and lard."

On whether he had experienced English condescension: "Of course I have. Cambridge was a minefield of such attitudes."

He sees a good side: "Part of the creativity of this country results from her ugliness and hang-ups ... I am thankful to England for the working climate I was offered. But then there is all the rest."

AR After civil life in Germany I was shocked too. Brits need to clean up their act.

2014 September 13

UK

New Statesman

Should Scotland be an independent country? All residents in Scotland over 16 can vote Yes or No.
Would David Cameron survive as prime minister following a Yes vote? He made careless errors.
Even if the Union endures, the desperation of the political class will make victory seem pyrrhic.

Festung Europa

Maximilian Popp

In a skyscraper in Warsaw, Polizeioffizier Klaus Rösler directs operations at the European border agency Frontex. The agency is judged on how effectively it defends Europe against illegal immigrants.

Frontex has been beefing up the external borders of the European Union against an influx of refugees since 2005. There is virtually no legal path to Europe for refugees, yet some 200,000 refugees are expected to arrive in Germany alone this year.

Frontex also counts illegal border crossings and collects information under a €340 million program to monitor EU borders using drones and satellites. Journalists say more than 23,000 people have died attempting to enter the EU in the last 14 years.

Frontex coordinates joint operations between Spanish and Moroccan security forces in the Moroccan-Spanish border zone. Human Rights Watch criticizes Spanish and Moroccan border guards for using excessive violence against refugees.

Frontex invested about €37 million in 2011-12 to secure the Greek-Turkish border. Trafficker gangs have cornered the immigrant business in Turkey. Human rights observers accuse Greek coastguards of using brutal methods to fend off migrants.

Frontex officers patrol the Hungarian-Serbian border. Hungary has introduced asylum prisons to deter refugees. Those who refuse to leave are often deported to Ukraine or Serbia. The Serbian government has granted only three people asylum since 2008.

Outgoing EU commissioner for home affairs Cecilia Malmström: "The EU member states must do far more to help people who are fleeing hunger, poverty and violence in their native countries."

Islamists

Dennis B. Ross

A fundamental division between Islamists and non-Islamists has emerged in Mideast politics.

Of the Islamists, Islamic State and the Muslim Brotherhood are Sunni, while the Islamic Republic of Iran and its militias are Shiite. They all subordinate national identities to an Islamic identity.

The non-Islamists include the traditional monarchies, authoritarian governments in Egypt and Algeria, and secular reformers. They want to know that the United States supports them.

The Obama administration needs to:
1 Focus on security and stability.
2 Do not reach out to Islamists.
3 Press non-Islamist partners on pluralism, minority rights and the rule of law.

The Mideast fault line is an opportunity for America.

2014 September 12

Thinking Like a Conservative

Roger Scruton

Thinking is an unusual and precarious exercise for Conservatives. They believe that good government is not grounded in abstract ideas but in concrete situations, and that concrete situations are hard to grasp. Abstract ideas like equality and liberty raise questions of identity, of who we are.

The language of politics is spoken in the first-person plural. For Conservatives, the duty of the politician is to maintain that first-person plural in being. Conservatives must adapt, but adaptation means survival, and survival means a maintained identity.

Governments must meet our need to be bound to our neighbours in a relation of trust. That is why, in all the postwar political debates in the UK, Conservatives have emphasised the defence of the realm, the maintenance of national borders, and the unity of the nation.

Conservatism does not fit easily with abstract ideals. The socialist ideal of equality has led to the belief that patriotism is racism. And the liberal ideal of universal human rights has led to a downgrading of attachment, since attachment is a form of discrimination.

Conservatism is not a matter of defending global capitalism at all costs, or securing the privileges of the few against the many. It is a matter of defending civil society, maintaining autonomous institutions, and defending the citizen against the abuse of power.

The Conservative view identifies what is now at stake as the survival of our way of life. The hard philosophical task is that of seeing civil society as it is, and recognising that it is easier to destroy good things in the name of an ideal than to maintain them as a reality.

2014 September 11

Time to Act

Barack Obama

I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

America will lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat. We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.

We can't erase every trace of evil from the world, and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm. That was the case before 9/11, and that remains true today.

2014 September 10

Manifesto

ConservativeHome

This is a manifesto for the ordinary working people of Britain. They are the children and grandchildren of the old working class, who escaped prejudice and poverty to become a mass middle class.

Homes. Jobs. Savings. These are the building blocks of personal liberty and a free society. They are under threat. Having lead this country out of the deepest recession since the war, the Conservative Party now faces an even bigger challenge: to halt and reverse the decline of the mass middle class.

Our manifesto for ordinary working people is designed to support home ownership, full employment, and savings for all.

1 Homes: Ownership first
A building boom that sucks in cheap money looking for a quick return will not deliver. We must freeze out the speculators with an ownership first condition on the development of new housing.

2 Homes: New garden cities
We need a vision for the development of strategically located areas. We propose the creation of Garden City corporations, empowered to clear the obstacles to large-scale regeneration.

3 Jobs: Create a Northern infrastructure fund
HS2 is a London-centric mega-project that won't run until the 2030s. We would scrap HS2 and redirect the planned public investment to a Northern infrastructure fund.

4 Jobs: A new deal on immigration
Britain must regain control of its borders, repatriating power over immigration from the European Union. Existing immigration targets should be replaced by a points-based system.

5 Savings: A fair share of pensions tax relief
Tax relief on pensions is worth £20 to £30 billion a year, but this mainly benefits the wealthiest savers. The highest rates of relief should go to savings made from the lowest incomes.

6 Savings: Hands-on financial education
We propose funding to endow every school with the seed capital for an investment portfolio. Dividends would be paid out to every pupil who passed a test and saved the money.

7 Money: Higher National Insurance thresholds
National Insurance contributions are a direct tax on jobs. We would eliminate employee and employer contributions for all under-25s on the minimum wage.

8 Money: A UK sovereign wealth fund
We propose the creation of a UK sovereign wealth fund, mutually owned by all British citizens, into which all new windfall revenues would be paid.

9 Power: Devo-Max for all the home nations
We propose devolved national governments for England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, each with its own First Minister.

10 Power: Direct democracy
Merely electing our MPs and councillors every few years and hoping for the best is not good enough. There should be a right of recall. Work should begin on electronic voting.

2014 September 9

Nuclear Threat

Foreign Policy

A US State Department report says Russia has tested a ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987.

A new mobile GLCM with a range up to 5,000 km enables Russia to threaten US allies in Europe and the Mideast, and to hit targets in China, India, Pakistan, and so on. It also increases the disparity in regional nuclear forces between Russia and NATO. Russia currently enjoys about a 10-to-1 advantage over NATO in nonstrategic nuclear weapons in Europe.

National Intelligence Council: "Russia is pursuing new concepts and capabilities for expanding the role of nuclear weapons in its security strategy."

2014 September 8

No Self

Sam Harris

Consciousness is conceptually irreducible. We spend our lives lost in thought. The feeling of being a self is just another appearance in consciousness. Rare and wonderful experiences are possible. The crucial distinction is between making claims about reality at large or about states of consciousness.

2014 September 7

On Genocide

AR
My review of The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
PDF: 2 pages, 69 KB

Bloody Hell: A Holocaust Novel

2014 September 6

Core Coalition

The Times

Britain has signed up to a US-led core coalition to wipe out Islamic State.

US secretary of state John Kerry: "They're an ambitious, avowed genocidal, territorial-grabbing, caliphate-desiring, quasi state with a regular army. And leaving them in some capacity intact anywhere would leave a cancer in place that will ultimately come back to haunt us."

Kerry chaired a meeting of ten nations asked to make a military contribution: the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Poland, and Denmark.

We Need A Mighty US Military

Mitt Romney

Several arguments are advanced to justify the decimation of our defense. All of them are wrong.

The president wants to replace the old order, where America's disproportionate strength holds tyrants in check and preserves the sovereignty of nations. But before we do so, there must be something effective in its place.

Some say a multipolar world is preferable to one led by a strong United States. But with emerging poles being China, Russia, and Iran, the world would see bullying, invasion, regional wars, and ultimately world war.

Some say the United States should simply withdraw its military strength from the world. No, power-hungry tyrants ultimately feast on the appeasers. Global peace and stability are very much in our national interest.

Some say our military is already so much stronger than that of any other nation. But our military is tasked with many more missions than those of other nations.

The real reason for the cuts: Politicians, and many of the people who elect them, want to keep up spending here at home. Entitlements and programs are putting pressure on the federal budget.

Freedom and peace are in the balance.

2014 September 5

NATO

Barack Obama
1613 UTC

NATO is unanimous that ISIL poses a threat and that there has to be action. There has been significant support from various member states for the action already taken. The US has already launched 100 strikes. The US has to bolster Iraqi government forces and the peshmerga. You can fight from the air, but ultimately you need a strong ground game.

NATO leaders have reaffirmed their commitment to mutual defense. They have committed themselves to deployments in eastern Europe. They have agreed the new spearhead rapid-reaction force. And they have committed themselves to spending more on defense.

NATO is fully behind Ukraine's right to independence. NATO allies will supply security support to Ukraine, including nonlethal equipment and support for logistics. We have sent a message to Russia that actions have consequences. The US and EU are finalizing new sanctions.

Ukraine

Tim Judah

Ukrainian forces in southeastern Ukraine have suffered a catastrophic defeat.

The fortunes of war have changed dramatically in the past two weeks. In spring, anti-Kiev rebels, taking the new and revolutionary Ukrainian government by surprise, seized towns and cities across the two predominantly industrial and mining regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. At first, Ukrainian forces either fell apart, were captured, or defected to the rebel side. By summer, they were better organized and went on the offensive.

In the latter half of August, everything changed again. Ukrainians said regular Russian troops were crossing the border. Mounting evidence of the presence of regular Russian soldiers suggests the rebels have acquired new strength. Today, Donetsk is a much safer city than it was a few weeks ago. The Ukrainian forces have been pushed back. Those attacking them were highly professional and used powerful weapons.

There is now talk of a ceasefire. Ukraine cannot win a war against Russia.

British Housing

Lord Wolfson

House price inflation does not make the nation richer. It merely makes home owners rich at the expense of those who do not own their homes. It widens the gap between rich and poor, young and old, north and south. Even those who have enjoyed seeing the value of their home increase are now beginning to worry about how their children will be able to afford a home.

Demand for more housing in the UK is an economic opportunity. Building on just 1% of the 92% of British land that is undeveloped could provide all the homes we need: well-built homes, spacious, comfortable, affordable, and with plenty of gardens and open green spaces. The right housing policies present an opportunity to improve our quality of life and create hundreds of thousands of skilled jobs.

We have a planning system that doesn't work. It has overcrowded our towns and cities, overloaded our transport infrastructure, inflated land prices, underinvested in quality, restricted competition and crushed innovation. Britons now live in Europe's smallest and most expensive homes. A system that was designed to ensure better homes for all has morphed into an economic straitjacket.

New development does not have to take place within the bounds of our existing towns and cities. An acre of arable land in the South East of England is worth less than £20,000 an acre. With planning permission it is worth over £1,000,000. That gain could be invested in better quality homes, infrastructure, parks, playgrounds, and in compensating the small number who would be adversely affected by the new development.

Garden cities offer a ray of hope. Around 40 existing towns and cities could be expanded and revitalised. Enabling legislation can allow the vast sums currently spent on land to be invested in build quality and infrastructure. This is a chance for all those who aspire to own their own home.

2014 September 4

Truthiness

Katy Waldman

Truthiness is truth that comes from the gut, not books.

The less effort it takes to process a factual claim, the more accurate it seems. When we smoothly absorb a piece of information, we are filled with a sense of familiarity and trust. The information strikes us as credible.

Surrounding an idea with relevant details or photographs can make a claim easier to understand, which adds a halo of truthiness. Cognitive fluency applies to sounds as well. We like and trust what we can comfortably pronounce. The bias toward low cognitive effort even extends to font and color schemes.

Some cognitive biases prompt an overloaded mind toward conservatism:
1 We tend to link behavior to personal character rather than to circumstances.
2 We learn more easily when facts match existing frames or social categories.
3 We tend to assume that existing or enduring states are good and desirable.
4 We default under stress to beliefs that allow faster action in times of danger.

Keep it simple: steer right.

Apocalypse

The Guardian

Islamic State caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his council may be aiming for an apocalyptic showdown, and sooner rather than later.

Quranic teachings include a prediction that Muslims and Christians will fight a battle at Dabek. Murj Dabek is a small village some 50 km south of the Turkish border. For many jihadis, this is ground zero, a place where ancient prophecies will be thrashed out in an existential battle between the faiths.

Iraqi expert Hisham al-Hashimi: "Baghdadi wants to bring the Americans into a war with him so he will prove what was written in the Quran."

2014 September 3

NATO

The New York Times

President Vladimir Putin of Russia has set the agenda for NATO summit meeting this week. He has forced on it a new and urgent purpose by effectively invading Ukraine and demonstrating his utter disregard for the international system.

The summit will agree on a new rapid-reaction force of 4,000 troops, capable of deploying on 48 hours notice to protect any NATO member from external aggression, which under the current circumstances means the Baltic States and Poland. There are no plans for new permanent bases or deployments, but troops will be rotated to that region, supported with pre-positioned logistics and equipment, and enhanced by more military exercises and air patrols.

The United States bears about 75% of the NATO budget, while the contributions from most European countries have fallen. The Europeans obviously have to increase their defense budgets.

NATO
Roger Boyes

Europe is not paying its way in NATO. Since 2008, when Putin invaded Georgia, the Russian defense budget has gone up by 50% while NATO defense spending has dropped by 20%. The last big Russian military exercise involved 150,000 men. The last big NATO outing, in the Baltics, involved 6,500. Only Britain, Greece, and Estonia are currently meeting the defense spending target of 2% of GDP.

Big Data

SAP

Big Data has morphed into a virtual tsunami as the data universe expands. By 2020, about 1.7 MB of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet. The digital universe will have expanded to 44 ZB, up from just 440 EB today.

Enterprises bear responsibility or liability for the vast majority of this data. Yet more than two-thirds of it has been created by individual consumers. Facebook has 829 million users worldwide who log in daily to bring in $2.9 billion in revenue in 2014 Q2 alone.

The vast majority of data never gets used. Only 0.5% of it is ever analyzed. Despite the opportunities it offers, the Big Data tsunami will likely continue to challenge us. But it will also open up new lines of business and create new jobs. Big Data has potential.

2014 September 2

Waking Up

Sam Harris

It was an afternoon on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, and I was atop the mount where Jesus is believed to have preached his most famous sermon. As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self — an "I" or a "me" — vanished. If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly have interpreted this experience in Christian terms.

Waking Up is a guide to spirituality without religion.

2014 September 1

Fortress UK

The Times

The ConservativeHome pre-election manifesto calls for tougher limits on EU migration. Britain would take control of borders back from the EU and existing immigration targets would be replaced by a system like that in Australia. New immigrants would have to buy their own health and welfare cover.

Net migration into the UK was 243,000 in the year to March, up from 175,000 the year before. Two thirds of the increase came from EU citizens.

AR Fortress UK — a quarantine zone for isolationists.

2014 August 31

The World In Flames

Henry Kissinger

Our world order was devised nearly 400 years ago at Westphalia after a century of conflict in Europe. A system of independent states formed an equilibrium of power.

In 1964, the Muslim Brotherhood ideologist Sayyid Qutb declared war against the existing world order. Islam was a universal system offering freedom from governance by other men, manmade doctrines, or "low associations based on race and color, language and country, regional and national interests" and would overthrow them all.

The views of Qutb and his followers have rallied radicals and jihadists in the Mideast and beyond for decades. Purity, not stability, is the guiding principle of this conception of world order. National loyalties represent deviations from the true faith and jihadists feel a duty to transform the world.

The Syrian war is about deciding which sect will dominate the others. Regional powers poured arms, money, and logistical support into Syria on behalf of their preferred sectarian candidates. An uprising has degenerated into a humanitarian disaster and into an imploding regional order.

Zones of non-governance or jihad now stretch across the Muslim world, affecting Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali, Sudan and Somalia. A significant portion of the world's territory and population is on the verge of falling out of the international state system altogether.

The Mideast is caught in a confrontation akin to the pre-Westphalian wars of religion. Religion is weaponized in the service of geopolitical objectives, threatening world stability.

2014 August 30

Bournemouth Air Show

AR
From the Hotel Miramar terrace we saw a Typhoon, two Lynxes, a Tucano, a Lancaster, two Spitfires, a Dakota, a Chinook, a Flying Fortress, a Hunter, a Merlin, a Vulcan, and eight Red Arrows fly by.

UK Security Crackdown

The Times

David Cameron is preparing new anti-terrorism measures after the government raised the official threat level to Severe. Police will increase visible patrols and boost security around key buildings and national infrastructure. Threat level Severe means an attack on British soil is "highly likely".

The government plans to fill "gaps" in the anti-terrorism laws. Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures (TPIM) will replace control orders. The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre operates from MI5.

Cameron: "This threat cannot be solved simply by dealing with perceived grievances over western foreign policy. ... The root cause of this threat to our security is ... a poisonous ideology of Islamist extremism that is condemned by all faiths and faith leaders."

AR Batten down the hatches, Scottie. Storm ahead for HMS Britannia.

Augustus

John Gray

Augustus founded the Roman empire and ruled it from 27 BCE to 14 CE. He was a stoic. He knew an ideal can destroy happiness but he never wavered in his commitment to Rome.

Augustus: "Rome is not eternal. It doesn't matter. Rome will fall. It doesn't matter. The barbarians will conquer. It doesn't matter. There was a moment of Rome, and it will never die."

AR On stoicism, read Marcus Aurelius.

2014 August 29

Resource Revolution

The New York Times

Matt Rogers and Stefan Heck say new advances like 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, modular construction systems, and home automation can improve our lives. Rogers: "What we haven't yet done is put information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology into industrial technology. And once we begin to do that, we'll open up technologies that are equally large as the invention of the airplane."

Heck and Rogers say cars are ripe for improvement because:

1 They waste money. We drive them for less than an hour a day on average, and often alone. The engine wastes most of the energy in the gas tank.

2 They waste land. Roads need a lot of land for a few cars. A freeway is full when only about a tenth of its space is covered in cars. Above that you get traffic jams.

3 They waste lives. In the United States, car accidents kill about 33,000 people every year and cost society at least $300 billion a year.

Technology will cut these costs. An electric car infrastructure will improve the efficiency of our vehicles. Cars that drive themselves will pack roads more efficiently. Robot cars will be safer too. Electric engines, ride sharing, and robot cars together will bring a big payoff.

University of Texas, Austin, Center for Transportation Research director Chandra R. Bhat:
"What we don't know is how we humans might change our behavior and our lifestyles in response to these vehicles."

AR See my 2010 book GLOBORG.

2014 August 28

Knowledge Vault

New Scientist

Google is building the largest store of knowledge in human history. Knowledge Vault autonomously gathers and merges information from across the web into a single base of facts.

This gathered knowledge is becoming the foundation of systems that allow robots and smartphones to understand what people ask them. It promises to let Google answer questions like an oracle rather than a search engine, and even to turn a new lens on human history.

Knowledge Vault uses an algorithm to pull in information from all over the web, using machine learning to turn the raw data into usable knowledge. Google researchers presented a paper on Knowledge Vault at KDD 2014.

2014 August 27

NATO

Anders Fogh Rasmussen

Russia does not consider NATO a partner. We will adopt readiness action plan to be able to act swiftly in this new security environment in Europe. We have the NATO response force and we intend to develop a spearhead within that response force at very high readiness. Any potential aggressor should know that if they attack a NATO ally they will meet not only soldiers from that country but also NATO troops.

The Russians can act swiftly to convert a major military exercise into an offensive military operation. Multiple sources report a lively Russian involvement in destabilizing eastern Ukraine. We have seen artillery firing across the border and also inside Ukraine. We have seen a Russian military buildup along the border. You see a sophisticated combination of traditional conventional warfare mixed up with information and disinformation operations.

Since the end of the cold war we have lived in relatively good weather. Now we are faced with a profound climate change. We are in a completely new security situation.

Israel

Matti Friedman

The latest clash between Israel and Gaza has laid bare the resurgence of an old and hostile obsession with Jews. The volume of press coverage it drew gave the impression that the drama of Israel is the most important story on earth.

The Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews. It was never mentioned. The Hamas decision to construct a military infrastructure beneath Gaza was ignored. What was important was the Israeli decision to attack them.

Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. The fact that Israelis recently elected moderate governments that sought reconciliation with the Palestinians was rarely mentioned.

The Israel story is framed as a quest for a two-state solution. It is accepted that the conflict is taking place on land that Israel controls — 0.2% of the Arab world — in which Jews are a majority and Arabs a minority. The conflict is more accurately described as one between the 6 million Jews of Israel and 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries.

Israel is a tiny village on the slopes of a volcano. The Mideast is the volcano and Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic State and so on are streams of lava. The lava is pumped up by a strain of Islam that is willing to employ extreme violence in a quest to unite the region under its control and confront the West.

2014 August 26

Waking Up

Sam Harris

A spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self.

The Abrahamic religions are incorrigibly dualistic. They conceive the human soul as separate from the divine reality of God. The appropriate attitude for a creature that finds itself in this circumstance is terror, shame, and awe.

The Eastern tradition at its best transcends dualism. Consciousness is identical to the reality that one might otherwise mistake for God. The teachings of Buddhism contain insights about the nature of consciousness that do not depend upon faith.

The teachings emphasize a connection between ethical and spiritual life. How we use our attention largely determines what kind of person we become. Spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present moment. There is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world.

2014 August 25

Afterwords

Martin Amis

Sebastian Haffner saw the critical hinge of the second world war as between November 27 and December 11, 1941.

Hitler, November 27: "If one day the German nation is no longer sufficiently strong or sufficiently ready for sacrifice to stake its blood for its existence, then let it perish and be annihilated by some other stronger power."

By December 6, Hitler had acknowledged that victory could no longer be won. And on December 11, he declared war on the USA. Haffner said he was coveting defeat and wanted that defeat to be as complete and disastrous as possible.

I first read Martin Gilbert's classic The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy in 1987, and I read it with incredulity; in 2011 I read it again, and my incredulity was wholly undiminished. Between those dates I had worked my way through scores of books on the subject; and while I might have gained in knowledge, I had gained nothing at all in penetration.

Primo Levi: "Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify. … Now, no normal human being will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us."

AR I read Haffner's Anmerkungen zu Hitler a few months ago. A classic. Gilbert's classic I too read in 1987: It gave me a psychic low that endured through my entire quarter-century in Germany.

2014 August 24

Apocalypse

Dominic Sandbrook

Britain in 2030: frightened, fractious, and weary, its economy sunk in depression, its people haunted by terrorism and war. The headlines: more bloodshed in the Mideast, more terrorist threats, militant Islamists control local councils, violent street clashes between Caliphists and British nationalists.

In 2014, the United States, Britain, and France began a series of air strikes to hold back the extremists. They were much too late. Iraq collapsed and a civil war of shocking savagery ensued. The new Caliphate launched a war of conquest into Syria and Lebanon and an Iranian army advanced into Iraq. Britain and the United States sent arms to the Saudis and Qataris in vain. Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq soon fell to the Caliphate. Israel was next in line.

Inside the Caliphate, life is hell. All non-Sunni communities have been murdered or expelled. Cities have been reduced to ghost towns, barter has replaced a money economy, and millions scavenge in the ruins. Rape, murder, and kidnapping are common. Female genital mutilation is rife. Most schools, hospitals, and clinics have been demolished. Young men sign up for jihad against Israel and NATO.

Zone

Theo Tait

The Zone of Interest is set in Auschwitz, mostly in 1942. The book positively revels in the bureaucratic euphemisms that shrouded the genocide. The story appears to be about managerial frustrations and amorous intrigues among the Germans at the camp.

Amis has taken various liberties with the history. He reinvents hell on earth in his gaudy, insistent, elaborate prose, and uses a lot of German, which often tips over into absurdity. The book is a nightmare filled with riffs and general observations on Nazi Germany.

2014 August 23

Holocaust

Alex Clark

The Zone of Interest focuses on the Nazi officers at Auschwitz and their increasing difficulty in fulfilling the demands from Berlin.

The blustering KZ Kommandant is a terrific comic creation. He is off his head, sexually incontinent, and loathed by his wife. His struggle to process victims is a personal torment and his struggle to keep head office at bay a bureaucratic headache.

Zion

Anthony Lerman

Zionism today is xenophobic and exclusionary. In the state of Israel, rights for Jews are guaranteed while rights for Palestinians are curtailed. A Jewish majority in perpetuity implies policies of exclusion and discrimination. Human, civil, and political rights must take precedence over religion and ideology.

2014 August 22

Caliphate 'Apocalyptic' Threat

The Guardian

US President Barack Obama called the Islamic State group a cancer and US Secretary of State John Kerry said IS must be destroyed following the killing of James Foley.

US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff General Martin Dempsey said of the militants: "They can be contained, but not in perpetuity. This is an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision which will eventually have to be defeated."

Swelling Numbers

The Times

The number of British Muslims to have gone and fought with Islamic State and other extremist groups in Syria and Iraq may be between 600 and 1,000. About 560 Muslims serve in the British army.

A swelling group of British jihadists reject the legitimacy of the British state. The estimated exodus of British jihadists to Syria is the highest of any European country. If and when they return, many will have learned bomb making and murder.

The radicalization of British Muslims is blamed in the Arab world on policy failures. A new generation believes that British reluctance to use force against President Assad has abandoned Sunni Muslims to a miserable fate. The Islamic State has captured their imagination.

2014 August 21

The Soul of the World

Angus Kennedy

Roger Scruton argues that an acceptance of death allows us to see the world as making a place for us. He makes the case for a transcendence founded on our works in a world we make human by looking for God. He finds hope in our refusal to rest content with the contingency of nature.

Humans have evolved from nature and stand at its edge. Scruton sees the "I" of self-consciousness as poised between freedom and mechanism, subject and object, nothingness and being. When science makes an account of the world, it cannot say what it is like to be me.

I stand forever on the edge of things. As do you. I am always looking for you, trying to attain to that infinite horizon which is your perspective, your uniqueness. Scruton: "I-you intentionality projects itself beyond the boundary of the natural world."

The atheist argument that we can find no evidence of God is as insufficient as attempting to explain love in terms of reproduction or music in terms of vibration. We cannot expect to encounter God any more than we can expect to meet the number one.

2014 August 20

The Curse of the Islamic State

Der Spiegel

The caliphate of the Islamic State is a nightmarish realm stretching from northeast Syria deep into Iraq. Thieves have their hands hacked off and opponents are publicly crucified or beheaded. Women wear the niqab and pants are banned. Livestock merchants must cover the rear ends of goats and sheep to spare men lustful thoughts. Girls are snatched from their families as brides for the warriors.

Journalist Medyan Dairieh made a 45-minute video that provides the first real view of life inside the caliphate. It shows a world of fanatical people in which adolescents shout into the camera, declaring war on infidels. IS spokesman Abu Musa uses his chance to send a message to America: "Don't be cowards who attack us with drones. Send your soldiers instead, the ones we already humiliated in Iraq."

Islamic State flags fly at protests in Paris and Brussels. In London, Islamists hand out leaflets rejoicing that the caliphate is here and calling for men and women to fly out and fight for the cause. The Umm Layth blogger is a British immigrant to the caliphate. She asks women: "How can you not want to produce offspring who may be, God willing, part of the great Islamic revival?"

Another Bloody Shambles

General Sir Michael Rose

There is a powerful case for intervening now against the Islamic State. But our strategists must decide with absolute clarity and precision the objective of the mission. They must also commit sufficient resources to destroy the terrorist organization now running amok in Iraq.

2014 August 19

Monuments

Nikos Konstandaras

The Acropolis still stands. It became a symbol of Western civilization as the architecture of democracy. It inspired Sigmund Freud to introspection. His whole frame of reference was ancient Greece and its myths, archetypes and tragedies. He excavated like an archeologist through layers of consciousness, pursuing the secrets of the mind. If the Parthenon had crumbled, if the works of Greek thinkers were lost, if Freud and his books were lost, what would our world be like today?

Mesopotamia, a cradle of world civilization, is ravaged today by psychopaths with armored trucks, swords and genocidal zeal. Living in an eternal present rooted in an imagined past, the militants are obsessed with destroying all that is unlike them. It is almost impossible to reconcile the progress of the past few decades with the remorseless hatred of the Islamic State. If our symbols are lost, we will be no better than ignorant armies riding pickup trucks through the endless dust.

2014 August 18

The Wisdom of the Exile

Costica Bradatan

There are many types of uprooting. But each person who survives uprooting and finds himself in exile experiences an existential earthquake of sorts. The world around you turns into a ruin.

To live is to sink roots. Life is possible only to the extent that you find a place hospitable enough to receive you and allow you to settle down. When your old world goes down it also takes with it all your assumptions, commonplaces, prejudices and preconceived ideas.

When you lose everything, you gain something else. What you get is the insight that the world does not simply exist, but it is something you can dismantle and piece together again. Uprooting gives you the chance to create not only the world anew, but also your own self.

2014 August 17

Islamic State Threat

David Cameron

The creation of an extremist caliphate in the heart of Iraq and extending into Syria is our concern. If we do not act to stem the onslaught of this exceptionally dangerous terrorist movement, it will only grow stronger until it can target us on the streets of Britain.

We must understand the true nature of the threat we face. This is a struggle for decency, tolerance and moderation in our modern world. It is a battle against a poisonous ideology that is condemned by all faiths and by all faith leaders, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim.

We are witnessing a battle between Islam on the one hand and extremists who want to abuse Islam on the other. This threat cannot simply be removed by airstrikes alone. We need an approach that can defeat the terrorist threat at source.

The so-called caliphate makes no secret of its expansionist aims. A terrorist state bordering a NATO member is a clear danger to Europe and to our security. We must rise to the challenge.

The Zone of Interest

Bryan Appleyard

Martin Amis turns 65 on August 25. His new novel, The Zone of Interest, is about the Holocaust. Saul Bellow described the Holocaust as the terminal point so far in human evil. The novel takes us inside the minds of the Germans who managed Auschwitz. It is also a love story.

"When I was about seven, I asked my mother what all this stuff about railway tracks and smokestacks was all about, and she said, 'Oh, don't worry about Hitler. You've got blond hair and blue eyes — Hitler would have loved you.' I felt a kind of ignoble relief that Hitler would have been on my side. ... Bellow said we must try to see things with our original eyes. You have to retain your childish vision."

2014 August 16

Bitcoin

MIT Technology Review

Bitcoin is now worth $7.7 billion. Gavin Andresen, 48, maintains its code base and created the Bitcoin Foundation in 2013. He says 2014 "is going to be the year of the multisignature wallet".

Andresen graduated from Princeton in 1988 and took a job with Silicon Graphics. He encountered Bitcoin in 2010 and liked the work of its pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoins are "mined" by people running software that races to solve a mathematical puzzle and win a prize of newly minted bitcoins. The prize shrank over time and now 21 million bitcoins exist. A "block chain" log serves to verify transactions.

In 2010, Andresen launched a website handing out free bitcoins to visitors (and shut it down in 2012). He began sending code tweaks to Nakamoto, who persuaded him to work as project manager, paid in bitcoins. Andresen: "I am not Satoshi Nakamoto. I have never met him."

As the price of Bitcoin soared, its stakeholders have widened from the early enthusiasts to investors on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. Andresen: "I hope in 10 years that Bitcoin is really boring."

AR Trust a company like SAP to bring Bitcoin to global business.

2014 August 15

Early Life

New Scientist

Life began around 4 billion years ago. In all life, a protein pump shunts hydrogen ions out of a cell, creating a proton gradient across the cell membrane. Protons flow back into the cell through another protein in the membrane. The cell uses the energy to produce ATP.

Life comes in three empires: eukaryotes, bacteria, and archea. Bacteria and archea have impermeable membranes made of hydrophobic lipids, but their membranes evolved independently.

Life seems to originated on the sea floor at alkaline hydrothermal vents. As warm alkaline fluids well up through cracks in the sea floor and hit the cold seawater, minerals precipitate out to form rocky chimneys full of narrow channels and pores. There molecules evolved into lipids and RNA.

Cells used energy from the natural proton gradient at the interface between the alkaline vent fluid and seawater. A turbine protein in their membranes produced ATP. Lipid membranes formed a leaky membrane that let protons flow from seawater, through the cell, and back out into the vent fluid.

Cells evolved proton pumps and the membrane evolved to be less leaky. A protein in cell membranes swapped protons for sodium ions across the membrane, to form a sodium ion gradient. Sodium ions re-entered the cell via the turbine. Better pumps and less leaky membranes evolved together.

Cells learned to generate their own proton gradient and broke free of the vents. They did this twice, giving rise to bacteria and archea.

2014 August 14

UK Must Bomb IS

Liam Fox

Islamic State militants are tightening their grip on the territory and people they control. They are well funded and well organized. They are barbaric and savage. They pose a direct threat to all who oppose their views, they destabilize the region, and they will create and export young jihadists.

Allowing an extremist caliphate to extend from Syria to the borders of Iran would bring further horrors to innocent people and risk a bigger conflict with global consequences. The caliphate would be a magnet for jihadists and would export terrorism. The fundamentalists need to be defeated.

The US government has decided to use US air power to hit IS bases. We should be ready to do the same. Sending humanitarian aid is right but if we leave the vulnerable unprotected from IS terror then our help is superficial. There are risks, but the cost of failing to act could be high.

AR Fox has what it takes to serve again in government.

Ye Cannae Change the Laws of Physics

Wired

A few years ago, Guido P. Fetta developed what he considered a revolutionary engine technology. His background is in marketing for pharmaceutical companies, though he studied chemical engineering in college. He dubbed it the Cannae Drive.

Instead of relying on fuel or nuclear reactors, the engine bounces microwaves around a carefully shaped container, creating changes in radiation pressure that ultimately generate thrust. The drive could potentially cut travel time to Mars from months to mere weeks, overturning the laws of physics along the way. NASA tested it (blog August 4). It seemed to work.

AR Bet on physics.

2014 August 13

General Relativity

Pedro G. Ferreira

Albert Einstein proposed his general theory of relativity in 1915. His 1905 special theory of relativity had brought together Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell's theory of electricity and magnetism. Space and time became intertwined and the speed of light became invariant. It all worked beautifully, except for Newton's gravitational force. So Einstein came up with a general formulation including gravity.

The new general theory of relativity needed a completely different form of mathematics and a fresh way of thinking about physics. The decade that followed brought amazing discoveries. Arthur Eddington showed that the light from distant stars was bent by gravity, as predicted. Karl Schwarzschild conceived of black holes. Alexander Friedmann calculated that the universe was expanding. And Einstein predicted gravitational waves.

The discovery of quantum physics pushed his theory into the long grass. Decades later, a new generation of mathematical physicists revealed the inner workings of black holes in detail, and observational evidence for them started to amass. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background added weight to the idea of an expanding universe.

Future big ESA missions include eLISA to measure the gravitational waves from collisions between black holes, Euclid to measure universal expansion, and ATHENA to look at X-rays from a black hole. The advanced LIGO will search for the echoes of embryos of black holes. The Event Horizon Telescope may see the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The Square Kilometer Array will test Einstein's theory on galactic and cosmological scales.

AR Quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible. Their union in quantum gravity is an unsolved problem. Quantum spacetime will be granular. Some work here is really exciting.

Fields Medal 2014

The Guardian

Stanford University professor of mathematics Maryam Mirzakhani has been award the Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union. The other Fields Medal winners this year are Martin Hairer, Manjul Bhargava, and Artur Avila.

Born and raised in Iran, Mirzakhani completed her PhD at Harvard in 2004. Her research interests include Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. "I dreamed of becoming a writer," she said in an interview for Oxford University.

AR As a graduate student at Oxford I studied, among other things, the Teichmüller-Tukey lemma, which is equivalent to the axiom of choice in set theory.

SAP HANA

Chris Kanaracus

Some SAP customers remain puzzled over how the SAP HANA platform can fit into their IT strategies. Three-quarters of respondents to an ASUG survey who hadn't bought HANA said they had not been able to pin down a business case that justified the cost.

SAP isn't forcing them. Nearly three-fourths of those who said they had no current plans to implement HANA also said they believed SAP would support their existing environments into the future or for at least five years or more.

SAP hopes to convince its Business Suite customers to migrate their environments to HANA. At the last AGM, SAP said it had more than 3600 HANA customers overall and 1200 for the Suite on HANA.

SAP HANA converges database and application platform capabilities in-memory to transform transactions, analytics, text analysis, predictive and spatial processing so businesses can operate in real time.

AR I worked in the SAP team that developed HANA from 2003 to 2009. In those days it was called the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator and I wrote the SAP Press book on it.

2014 August 12

Endings

Tom Vanderbilt

There is a huge literature on the psychology of first impressions. There is not much of a literature on last impressions. Amid the contemporary frenzy of competing entertainment and information streams, a writer needs to bring readers straight into the story.

Every terminus is also a potential beginning. Not every film opens with someone coming toward the camera or closes in the opposite fashion, but the technique is common enough to suggest that it echoes some kind of cognitive process in the real world.

Our trouble with endings hints at a larger problem: how it all ends. Martin Rees: "It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, six billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae."

2014 August 11

Consciousness as a State of Matter

Max Tegmark

Consciousness can be described in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory. Giulio Tononi proposed that a conscious system must be able to store and process large amounts of information and to unify this information in a whole that cannot be divided into independent parts.

Let perceptronium be the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware. This substance should be able to store and process information in a way that forms a unified whole. We can use this approach to ask why conscious observers living in a quantum reality perceive a classical world.

Information in a conscious system must be unified. The system must correct errors to allow any subset of up to half the information to be reconstructed from the rest. A Hopfield net can do this, but one with 10^11 neurons can only store 37 bits of integrated information. Something wrong here!

AR I mentioned this Arxiv paper on April 11. It is technical and I don't pretend to follow its details, but a moment of "now" in consciousness can only reliably hold a few bytes of information, so the Hopfield limit looks harmless. Our consciousness is layered in time and we use painfully learned heuristics to reduce errors. Max needs to study the phenomenology of consciousness more closely. On the quantum-classical transition and the sense of time flow, see chapter 13 in my book Mindworlds (2009).

2014 August 10

Iraq

Barack Obama

I don't think we're going to solve this problem in weeks. I think this is going to take some time. American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq, because there's no American military solution to the larger crisis there.

The Islamic State

Jessica T. Mathews

The Islamic State has swept almost to the gates of Baghdad. The Sunni insurgency that has risen up against the government of Nouri al-Maliki includes another jihadi group, Ansar al-Islam, as well as the military council of the eighty or so tribes of Iraq, and the army of the Naqshbandi order.

These disparate groups will not fight together for long. The Islamic State and its allies have triumphed because the Sunni populations of northern Iraq have welcomed and supported them. The Sunnis are more afraid of what their government may do to them than of the Sunni militia.

Intervention

Reihan Salam

The war unfolding in Iraq is scary. The Islamic State jihadis are killing because they want to live in a world cleansed of those who do not share their deranged beliefs. By killing Yazidis and Christians and members of other religious minorities, they believe they are serving a noble cause. They are closing in on stranded pockets of people they see as pagans and slowly starving them to death.

President Obama has decided to act. He has authorized a limited bombing campaign as well as a humanitarian effort on behalf of the stranded Yazidis. The decision to intervene militarily is a thorny one, but the prospect of genocide changes things. If the jihadis succeed in collapsing the Iraqi state, there will be no end to the killing. The president is doing the honorable thing.

Humanitarian Aid

The Observer

United States Central Command forces conducted four air strikes against Islamic State armored vehicles and positions to defend Yazidi civilians near Sinjar. Meanwhile delivery of relief to civilians fleeing the IS continues. Aircraft from multiple air bases dropped 72 bundles including more than 14 kl of water and more than 16,000 packaged meals.

Chaldean Catholics in Irbil say fewer than 40 Christians remained in northwestern Iraq after a jihadist rampage forced thousands to flee into Irbil in the Kurdish north. Irbil Archbishop Bashar Warda: "We did not expect that one day Mosul would be without Christians and that the Nineveh plains would be emptied of minorities. Trust is broken between the communities. Especially with the Arabs. For 2,000 years, all these minorities had lived together."

UK foreign secretary Philip Hammond says air sorties from the UK to northern Iraq will continue. Two RAF C-130 transport aircraft flew from RAF Brize Norton to airdrop emergency humanitarian supplies including reusable filtration containers filled with clean water, tents, and solar lights that can also recharge mobile phones.

Mahatma Gandhi

The Times

A statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Parliament Square, London, was announced in July by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and then Foreign Secretary William Hague during a trade mission to India.

Dr Kusoom Vadgama, who is the founder of the Indo-British Heritage Trust and chairwoman of this year's 400th anniversary celebrations of Britain's relationship with India, finds the proposed statue unacceptable: "Gandhi was obsessed with sex and it has all been hush-hushed for all these years. He had a habit of sleeping naked with women including his great niece and other married women to see if he could control himself."

AR He liked women. So what?

2014 August 9

IBM SyNapse

MIT Technology Review

The new IBM SyNapse chip is designed to work like the brain. It is weak at arithmetic but needs very little power, and is good at processing images, sound, and other sensory data. In tests, it can recognize cars, people, and bicycles in a road traffic video 100 times faster and using 100 000 times less power than a standard laptop.

SyNapse has over 5 billion transistors, but in a video test its power consumption was 63 mW. Its efficiency comes from avoiding the Von Neumann bottleneck. A conventional processor works through a program by constantly shuttling data back and forth from memory, wasting time and energy.

SyNapse processes information using a network of just over a million artificial neurons that send electrical spikes to each other via silicon synapses. Its neurons are organized into 4K identical blocks of 250. It has no separate memory or processor and no fixed program. Neurons fire when the sum of input spikes reaches a threshold. It requires a new approach to programming. It is historic.

2014 August 8

Lords

The Times

The House of Lords has been bloated to 850 members by the appointment of 22 new peers. The Electoral Reform Society says the new peers have donated nearly £7 million to their parties. ERS chief executive Katie Ghose: "These appointments further cement the impression that to get into the House of Lords, all you have to do is write a fat cheque to a political party or be a party hack. The second chamber is a crucial part of our political system, with real legislative power. It cannot be right that people are effectively able to buy a seat at the highest level of politics."

AR This looks corrupt. Reform the house.

2014 August 7

Bitcoin

Willard Foxton

In December last year, bitcoins were trading at $1200 a pop. The Winklevoss brothers predicted that the coins could peak at $40,000 each, but now they are worth under $600 each. Bitcoins are still mainly used to buy and sell illegal goods online.

Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust SEC portfolio: "As the sponsor and its management have no history of operating an investment vehicle like the Trust, their experience may be inadequate or unsuitable to manage the Trust." The currency has never been hacked, but the wallets people use to hold their currency have been. Portfolio: "The loss or destruction of a private key required to access a bitcoin may be irreversible."

I'd rather burn my money in a bucket than give it to the Winklevoss brothers to invest in Bitcoin.

2014 August 6

Rosetta

ESA

ESA DG Jean-Jacques Dordain: "After 10 years, 5 months and 4 days traveling toward our destination, looping around the Sun 5 times and clocking up 6.4 billion km, we are delighted to announce finally: we are here. Europe's Rosetta is now the first spacecraft in history to rendezvous with a comet."

Measurements from the Microwave Instrument for the Rosetta Orbiter MIRO suggest the comet is emitting water vapour into space at about 300 ml/s. The Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer VIRTIS measures its average temperature to be about 200 K, indicating that the surface is predominantly dark and dusty rather than clean and icy.

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and Rosetta now lie 405 Gm from Earth and are speeding toward the inner Solar System. Rosetta is orbiting 100 km from the comet's surface. In the coming weeks, Rosetta will attempt a close orbit at 30 km and perhaps closer. The final timeline for deploying Philae will be confirmed in October.

AR Congratulations!

2014 August 6

Rosetta

ESA

Today the European Space Agency Rosetta spacecraft arrives at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The comet is about 4 km wide.

Final rendezvous burn begins at 09:00 UTC. Orbit entry will be triggered by a small but crucial thruster firing lasting just 386 s.

From orbit, Rosetta will on 2014-11-11 drop lander Philae on to the surface. Philae will attach itself with an explosive harpoon and give scientists their first close view of a comet approaching the Sun. As the solar radiation rises, the comet will start spouting a tail of dust and gas that could grow to more than 1 Gm long.

2014 August 5

Extraterrestrial Life

Sara Seager

We can say with certainty that, for the first time in human history, we are finally on the verge of being able to search for signs of life beyond our solar system around the nearest hundreds of stars.

Our own galaxy has 100 billion stars and our universe has upwards of 100 billion galaxies, making the chance for life elsewhere seem inevitable based on sheer probability.

2014 August 4

Qubits

New Scientist

This graph maps the random trajectories of the quantum state of a qubit as it evolves from its initial state to its final one, over many repeated experiments. The work verifies theoretical models of the most likely way in which a quantum system will collapse, proving that the probable path can be predicted.

Mapping the optimal route between two quantum states

Quantum Thruster

NASA

An RF resonant cavity excited at 935 MHz using magnetoplasmadynamics to obtain a propulsive momentum transfer via the quantum vacuum virtual plasma generated a recorded 30-50 μN of thrust.

AR If it really works and scales, this is exciting.

2014 August 3

Europe

The Sunday Times

David Cameron does not want to leave the European Union. He believes it will be possible to negotiate powers back from Brussels and also secure referendum approval for staying in the EU on the back of that renegotiation.

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, believes the prime minister has scuppered his chances of meaningful renegotiation by declaring at the outset that he wants to stay in the EU and lead the "in" campaign in a referendum.

Any sign that the government was planning its exit from the EU would provoke alarm in corporate Britain and among some foreign investors. The London mayor offers the red meat on Europe for which many in the Tory party hunger. The Europe argument is hard for the prime minister to win.

Gaza

Thomas L. Friedman

Iron Dome is smart and frugal. It can calculate whether a Hamas rocket launched in Gaza needs to be intercepted or can be ignored, avoiding the $50,000 cost of an interceptor. If this Israeli government had applied the same ingenuity to trying to forge a deal with the moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Hamas would be isolated.

Hamas developed an underground maze of tunnels in Gaza, with branches into Israel. If Hamas — which has brought only ruin to the people of Gaza, even in times of quiet — had applied that same ingenuity to building above ground, it could have created the biggest contracting company in the Arab world by now, and the most schools.

Israeli and Palestinian Authority officials have been discussing the principles of a lasting deal for Gaza. Hamas is unlikely to stop this war without an agreement to end the blockade of Gaza. Israel is not likely to stop this war without having rooted out most of the Hamas tunnels and put in place a regime that will largely demilitarize Gaza.

The only chance these goals have of being implemented is if the moderate Palestinian Authority is invited back into Gaza. Hamas and Israel will both have to cede something. Israel will have to negotiate in earnest about a withdrawal from the West Bank, and Hamas will have to serve in a Palestinian unity government and forgo violence.

2014 August 2

British Army: 168 Tanks

The Times

Britain will have just one tank regiment from today. The Royal Tank Regiment is armed with 56 Challenger 2 tanks. Two other armoured regiments, the King's Royal Hussars and the Queen's Royal Hussars, also with 56 tanks each, enable the army to field 168 tanks in total.

Lieutenant-General Sir Andrew Ridgway, Colonel of the Royal Tank Regiment: "Defence capability is like insurance: You don't have the insurance you want. You have the insurance you can afford. The crucial thing is to get your priorities right."

The British army now has more horses than tanks.

AR So trooping the colour for the queen has priority over fighting battles.

2014 August 1

David Cameron Visits Poole

Poole Conservatives

UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne visited the Royal Marines base in Hamworthy, Poole, today. They used the occasion to announce a £100 million package of help for military families and related charities, funded by fines levied on banks implicated in the LIBOR scandal.

Prime Minister visits Poole
(1:47)

2014 July 31

It Could Happen Again

Roger Cohen

A century ago, on the eve of World War I, Europe had lived through a long period of relative peace. Rapid progress in science, technology, and communications had given humanity a sense of shared interests that precluded war. World leaders scarcely believed a global conflagration was possible.

The unimaginable can occur. Events cascade. Russians are sure that their national dignity has been trampled by a NATO and EU strategic advance to their border dressed up in talk of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. National humiliation is a tremendous catalyst for war.

Now Europeans contemplate war with revulsion. America is in a period of retrenchment that may last a generation. But the views of power held in Moscow and Beijing are ones Bismarck or Clausewitz would recognize instantly. The Baltic countries are front-line states again.

The credibility of American power remains the anchor of global security. But President Obama has made clear he does not believe in military force. A century ago, it was just this kind of hope and trust that precipitated catastrophe.

2014 July 30

America in 1815

Daniel Walker Howe

Life in America in 1815 was dirty, smelly, laborious, and uncomfortable. Coountry people of ordinary means went barefoot much of the time. White people of both sexes wore heavy fabrics covering their bodies, even in the humid heat of summer. People usually owned few changes of clothes and stank of sweat. Only the most fastidious bathed as often as once a week.

Having an outdoor privy signified a level of decency above those who simply relieved themselves in the woods or fields. A single fireplace provided all the cooking and heating for a common household. During winter, everybody slept in the room with the fire, several in each bed. One third of white children and over half of black children died before reaching adulthood.

The English Language

Melvyn Bragg

Our tongue comes from a unique tectonic clash between Romance and Germanic languages with sprinklings of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and the resulting glorious mess has played havoc with grammar, spelling and meaning ever since.

2014 July 29

Extinguish Hamas Threat

The Times

Israel will expand the military operation in Gaza until the threat from Hamas is extinguished. Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu: "We must be prepared for a lengthy campaign. We will not end this operation without neutralizing the tunnels whose sole purpose is to kill our citizens."

AR Right on.

The New Caliphate

Nadette De Visser

"Death to the Jews" chanted the crowd waving the black flags of the Islamic State. Their cause was the creation of a worldwide caliphate answering to Caliph Ibrahim: a zealot too radical even for Al Qaeda who has stormed through Syria and Iraq carrying out mass executions, crucifying rivals, beheading enemies. But these marchers were in The Netherlands. And their message was to disaffected young Muslims in Europe.

AR We need to arrest these extremists and silence the ringleaders. Nothing less will stop the rot.

2014 July 28

Poole Manifesto 2015

Council Group Meeting, Civic Centre
I presented my vision of how a Conservative approach in line with national priorities can help the Borough of Poole prosper in the coming years and decades.

2014 July 27

The Nice Party

The Observer

Leading Conservative women warn that mocking the Labour leader will put female voters off the Tories and feed their "nasty party" image.

Ed Miliband: "If you want the politician from central casting, it's not me; it's the other guy. If you want a politician who thinks a good photo is the most important thing, then don't vote for me."

Conservative Women's Organisation national chair Niki Molnar: "Women want to hear what someone will do for them and their family, not what shoes a politician is wearing, how they eat a bacon sandwich, or where they went to school."

Women2Win co-founder Baroness Anne Jenkin: "Personal attacks of any kind turn women off."

Conservative MP Charlotte Leslie: "Negative campaigning never, ever works."

2014 July 26

Warm Sea

Sea off southern England: 20C. See at Monica Beach, CA: 19C.

Science

Peter Atkins

The scientific method is doing controlled experiments, setting them into a network of grand ideas, and then progressing toward full understanding. That approach can be applied to understanding the origin of human sentiment by constructing a computer that has the attributes of consciousness.

Science is based on evidence that it is free of cultural conditioning. Science verifies hypotheses and theories. A discovery made in one region of science requires information on discoveries made in other fields of science. It is a supportive articulation of ideas.

One root of religion is the quest for understanding. Once the oppressive authority of the church was overcome, human inquisitiveness could find reliable answers. Science shed that type of authority and found a method that is extraordinarily powerful and effective.

2014 July 25

UK 2014: +3.2%

The Times

The International Monetary Fund upgraded its growth forecast: The UK is now expected to grow by 3.2% this year. This is more than any other member of the G7. Since April last year, the IMF has more than doubled its UK forecast. IMF managing director Christine Lagarde conceded that the fund had "got it wrong" on the UK.

2014 July 24

NATO Versus Russia

The Times

NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Philip Breedlove plans to recommend placing supplies — weapons, ammunition, and ration packs — at a "24/7 fully functioning headquarters" in eastern Europe to support NATO troops in the event of a crisis.The leading contender is Multinational Corps Northeast, in Szczecin, Poland.

AR Good move.

2014 July 23

Concrete Facts

Liel Leibovitz

Israeli troops in Gaza uncovered 18 tunnels used by Hamas to send armed terrorists into Israel and built using an estimated 800,000 tons of concrete, all donated by the international community.

Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest tower, required 110,000 tons of concrete. Hamas could have built seven such towers and still had enough to spare to build a pair of kindergartens with bomb shelters as big as Giants Stadium.

Hamas is not seriously interested in governing Gaza. Its raison d'être is killing people in order to bring about the rule of its fundamentalist and radically intolerant brand of Islam.

Gaza
Unemployment in Gaza is around 50%. It rose steeply since Israel pulled out its troops and settlers in 2005 and tightened border restrictions. Hamas must deliver Gazans a better life. Gazans did not vote for Hamas either to escalate the conflict or to fire rockets from near their homes.

Israel
1 Israel will continue until the job is done.
2 Israel wants to erode Hamas clout.
3 Israel is responding to rocket fire from Gaza.
4 Israel wants to gain a few years of relative peace.

Hamas
1 Hamas says Israel will exist until Islam obliterates it.
2 Hamas wants an end to the Israeli blockade.
3 Hamas wants the release of prisoners.
4 Hamas wants to rally support at home.

2014 July 22

Beyond

George Johnson

Thomas Nagel rejects the idea that there is nothing more to the universe than matter and physical forces. He doubts that evolution, as currently conceived, could produce sentient life. Mind might be a fundamental principle of nature.

David Chalmers calls on scientists to seriously consider panpsychism.

Max Tegmark suggests that mathematics needs to be admitted into science as the most fundamental part of of nature. He sets out to show that the universe is a mathematical structure, and its physics emerges from numbers.

Edward Frenkel notes that most of mathematics seems to be about nothing other than itself.

AR My philosophical works discuss these ideas in some depth. I favor a variant of panpsychism in which the foundations of mathematics are the foundations of mind too.

2014 July 21

Europe

The Guardian

UK foreign secretary Philip Hammond: "If there is no change at all in the way Europe is governed, no change in the balance of competences between the nation states and the European Union, no resolution of the challenge of how the eurozone can succeed and co-exist with the non-eurozone, that is not a Europe that can work for Britain in the future. ... There has to be a repatriation of powers to the nation states."

Human Rights

The Times

Former UK attorney-general Dominic Grieve had advised David Cameron not to pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights. Grieve: "If we are not meeting European convention norms, then the chances are that the European Court of Justice — a completely separate body — will step in and will actually enforce those norms on us. Unlike the court in Strasbourg — where a judgment is just an international obligation — that has direct effect and has to be applied here."

Religion

Matt Ridley

There was deliberate and sustained action to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamist ethos into some schools in Birmingham. Whistleblowers first approached the British Humanist Association with allegations and the BHA passed them on to the Department for Education.

Much of what went on in the schools would have been permissible if the schools had been designated faith schools. Britain is one of only four countries in the world to allow religious selection in admissions to state-funded schools. The others are Estonia, Ireland, and Israel.

Anglicanism is a mild and attenuated form of the faith virus. It may even act as a vaccine against more virulent infections. But Christianity is becoming more evangelical in response to its global competition with Islam. Anglicans should make common cause with humanists in defense of tolerance.

2014 July 20

Global Chaos

Janet Daley

Few politicians in the great Western capitals have any idea of how to get a grip on the current global chaos.

It is safe to assume that Vladimir Putin did not personally order the missile launch that killed hundreds of innocent foreign civilians. What he did do was provide sophisticated missile systems and heavy artillery to a motley assortment of trigger-happy cowboys whose antics have greatly increased his popularity with the folks at home.

In the Mideast, US Secretary of State John Kerry once talked of brokering a peace deal. The Obama administration now looks determined to stay out of international trouble. Israel is on its own.

Britain has no foreign policy worthy of the name. When the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary go on their diplomatic jaunts abroad, they are scarcely more than sales reps for British industry and trade.

UK Defence

Michael Fallon

As a leading member of NATO, the UK is playing a central role in providing reassurance to our allies. Thanks to four years of hard work of my predecessors, we now have the defence budget under control.

Over the next 10 years we will spend over £160 billion on new equipment and equipment support. HMS Queen Elizabeth marks a new era in British maritime power. We are spending £10 billion on seven new submarines, £13 billion on new land equipment including armoured vehicles and tanks, and £3 billion on new fighter aircraft. We are buying the best and most modern kit to deal with the threats of the future.

2014 July 19

Gaza

The New York Times

Israeli troops are again in the Gaza Strip. Israel is targeting tunnels dug to store weapons or stage attacks. The troops operated mainly within about a mile of Gaza's edges and quickly announced they had uncovered more than 20 tunnel exit points.

The IDF uncovered 10 tunnels, struck 240 targets, killed 17 militants, and detained 21 others in the first 24 hours of the ground operations. One Israeli soldier was killed. The IDF counted 135 rockets in the same period, 40 of them blocked from hitting cities by Iron Dome.

Former Israeli advisor Yaakov Amidror: "If nothing bad will happen, we will identify the locations of the tunnels, we will blow them up, and we will retreat. How to finish the whole operation in terms of stopping the rockets and the missiles, this is much more complicated."

2014 July 18

Derek Parfit

David Edmonds

Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit is considered by many of his peers to be the world's most important living moral philosopher. His first book, Reasons and Persons, published in 1984, is routinely described as a work of genius.

Parfit's "repugnant" conclusion: "For any possible population of at least 10 billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living."

Parfit is now 71. His former student Jeff McMahan, who will soon become the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, says Parfit's writings, especially on population ethics, have "forced a rethink on almost everything in ethics, including the value of life itself."

AR I recall Derek from Oxford in the 1970s.

2014 July 17

Science

Carlo Rovelli

Science is about constructing visions of the world. It has nothing to do with the assembling of data and the ways of organizing the assembly of data. It has everything to do with our mental vision of the world. Science is a process in which we keep exploring ways of thinking.

Science is not about certainty. Nothing is scientifically proven. The core of science is the deep awareness that we have wrong ideas. In our conceptual structure for grasping reality, there might be something we have to revise. We have a vision of reality that is the best we have found so far.

Science is not about the data. The data suggest the theory. What interests us is what the theory says about the world. General relativity is interesting not because of its data but because it tells us that there can be black holes and a Big Bang. Science is about continually going beyond common sense.

In quantum gravity, there are two major research directions. String theory is a beautiful theory, but it's not sufficiently grounded in general relativity. Loop quantum gravity is an attempt to take general relativity and quantum mechanics seriously and bring them together. Quantum spacetime requires some change in the way we think.

Scientists who say they don't care about philosophy have a philosophy. They have a headful of ideas.

2014 July 16

UK Cabinet Reshuffle

The Times

The new foreign secretary is Philip Hammond, a hardline Eurosceptic. He is replaced at defence by Michael Fallon. Former education secretary Michael Gove is now chief whip. Nicky Morgan moves from the Treasury to replace him. She is 41.

Liam Fox was offered a junior role at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office but turned it down. Owen Paterson is replaced as environment secretary by Liz Truss, 38.

Cameron: "This is a fresh team with the ideas, the energy, the policy, and the ability to take this country forward, to complete the long-term economic plan and secure our future. I think it is a team that reflects modern Britain."

AR World Cup team? Poor joke. Fox will pray for life after Dave.

2015: Tory Win

Rafael Behr

David Cameron's reshuffle leaves ministerial ranks looking more feminine, youthful, and skewed to the right. Young Tories are devoted to free markets, hostile to the European Union, and unsentimental about the welfare state. There is a changing of the guard on Europe. The task is to win, and to destroy Labour as a force for government.

Europe

Michael Fallon

I think the country is pretty Eurosceptic now. We all want reform in Europe, a different kind of Europe. That's the agenda that's going to be pursued now to get those reforms and then to give people a choice as to whether to continue to be members or not.

AR My EU line: reform or out.

2014 July 15

William Hague

The Times

William Hague is standing down as UK foreign secretary and is to leave politics next year. Defence secretary Philip Hammond replaces Hague today as foreign secretary. Hammond said last year that he would vote to leave the EU if it remained in its present form.

David Cameron: "William Hague has been one of the leading lights of the Conservative Party for a generation, leading the party and serving in two cabinets. Not only has he been a first-class foreign secretary, he has also been a close confidant, a wise counsellor and a great friend."

Hague: "From May 2015, after such a long period in politics, I want to embark on many other things I have always wanted to do."

2014 July 14

Germany

Stewart Wood

We can learn from them Germany. Out of the ruins of the second world war, and the grotesque atrocities of Nazism, the Federal Republic emerged within a decade as the paragon of a stable, inclusive liberal democracy. The German economic miracle was no less extraordinary. Germany has become the productivity powerhouse of Europe.

Britain's economy is characterized by low productivity, a poor record in technical skills, low levels of savings and investment, and relatively weak performance in R&D. We cannot copy the German economy, or transplant the culture in which it is embedded. But we can learn much.

Germany is committed to a free market economy in which capitalism is organized and responsible. Its social market encourages long-term thinking, promotes collaboration in the workplace, incentivizes employers to invest in the skills and productivity of their workers, tries to spread prosperity to Germans in all regions, and supports a welfare system based on the principles of need and contribution.

Britain cannot become Germany. But surely it is time for us to learn lessons from Germany. We may learn how to win another World Cup.

AR This is a central pillar of my new political career (not the World Cup).

2014 July 13

Operation Protective Edge

The Independent

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague spoke to Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman:
"I told Minister Lieberman that continuing rocket attacks from Gaza are completely unacceptable. Israel has a right to defend itself against such attacks, but the whole world wanted to see de-escalation."

Hague also spoke to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas:
"I offered my condolences for the loss of civilian lives in Gaza."

2014 July 12

Voices

Israel

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu: "No international pressure will prevent us from acting with full force against a terrorist organization that calls for our destruction. … No country would accept its civilians being fired at without a harsh response."

Israeli military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner: "Israel uses its weapons to defend its civilians. Hamas uses its civilians to defend its weapons."

Israeli parliamentarian Ayelet Shaked: "Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."

2014 July 11

Rocket Science

Markus Becker

Iron Dome Tourismus: Menschen, die, anstatt bei Luftalarm Schutz zu suchen, lieber im Freien bleiben und das israelische Raketenabwehrsystem bei der Arbeit bestaunen. Israels Behörden können das als Zeichen werten, dass ihre Meldungen über den Erfolg der Iron Dome Wirkung zeigen.

Ob Iron Dome wirklich eine Trefferquote von 90% erreicht ist ebenso zweitrangig wie die Frage, wie weit genau die Raketen der Hamas reichen. Bedeutender ist, dass der technische Rüstungswettlauf zu einem wichtigen Bestandteil des israelisch-palästinensischen Dauerkonflikts geworden ist.

Ausgelöst wurde die erneute Eskalation durch bestialische Morde. Israel setzt seine Armee zur Vergeltung ein, Hamas reagiert mit Raketenfeuer. Israel schickt Kampfjets und verteidigt sich mit Iron Dome, Hamas beschafft sich Raketen mit höherer Genauigkeit und größerer Reichweite.

2014 July 10

Evolutionary Morality

Michael Ruse

Knowledge interprets experience through human cultural understanding and experience. Metaphor is the key to the whole enterprise. A metaphor puts blinkers on us. The metaphor of the world as a machine rules out an answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing.

If God is to do everything through unbroken law, and I can think of reasons why this should be so, then pain and suffering are part of it all. As an evolutionist I think that all organisms are the end product of a long, slow process of development thanks to the causal mechanism of natural selection.

I think morality is a collective illusion, genetic in origin, that makes us good cooperators. Being good cooperators makes each of us better off in the struggle for existence. So I don't buy the moral argument for the existence of God. But I grew up surrounded by gentle, loving Christians.

2014 July 9

The Liberal State

Michael Ignatieff

Communism as a model of state domination is very much alive in China and Russia. The new authoritarians offer an alternate route to modern development: growth without democracy and progress without freedom.

America no longer has the power to shape the international order as it once did. When conservatives win elections, corporate interests often take control. When progressives win back power, they make the state more domineering. A continuing dynamic of political alternation leaves the state unreformed.

The fiscal crisis of the liberal state is due to rising income inequality, money power in politics, and systemic tax avoidance by big corporations. The cost of carrying the liberal state falls on the middle class. The institutions of the state have been hijacked by the interests they were created to control.

2014 July 8

Operation Protective Edge

Jerusalem Post

IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz: "We will now activate all of our force and take all the time that is needed in various stages in order to reach victory."

AR V is the answer.

2014 July 7

Islam and Education

Roger Scruton

Children born and raised in Britain must be integrated into British society. Schools and teachers have a duty to ensure that children understand and adhere to the basic principles of the surrounding society.

Our society is governed by a secular law defined over the territory of the United Kingdom. This territory is our home to defend. The Church of England has defined itself in national terms.

Sunni Muslim law is not defined over territory. It is a religious law. Islam provides an experience of identity at variance with the nation state. Muslims find things that repel them in modern Britain.

Islamists want to see Muslims define themselves against their country. Christianity is an institution, but Sunni Islam is an identity. I say when it comes to identity, it is nationality and not religion that counts.

AR Sorry, Roger, but when it comes to identity, I am a rational human being who lives on planet Earth, where a variety of polities, such as British and German, support only superficial distinctions.

2014 July 6

Superintelligence

Nick Bostrom

Superintelligence: An intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains.

Nobody knows how long it will take, but once AI scientists become more capable than human scientists, progress will be rapid. There is thus the potential for an explosive Singularity.

We can distinguish three forms of superintelligence:

1 A speed superintelligence could do everything a human mind could do, but much faster.

2 A collective superintelligence composed of a large number of human-level intellects organized to outstrip that of any current cognitive system could could drive technological progress much faster.

3 A quality superintelligence would be cleverer than humans in the same sense that we are cleverer than other animals.

Superintelligent machine brains would have many fundamental advantages over biological brains, just as engines have advantages over biological muscles. We cannot hope to compete with such machine brains. We can only hope to design them so that their goals coincide with ours.

AR This was my big concern in G.O.D. Is Great and Globorg.

2014 July 5

The Creative Brain

Nancy Andreasen

For my latest study, I scanned the brains of some illustrious scientists, mathematicians, artists, and writers. I examined 13 creative geniuses and 13 controls. Both groups had an average IQ of about 120. Creative genius is not the same as high IQ. The creative subjects and their relatives have a higher rate of mental illness than the controls and their relatives do. Eureka moments tend to be precipitated by long periods of preparation and incubation, and to strike when the mind is relaxed.

2014 July 4

The New Caliphate

Ahmed Rashid

On the first day of Ramadan, ISIS declared that it was reestablishing the caliphate. ISIS successes are built around military competence that includes excellent command and control, sound intelligence, well prepared logistics support, training, high mobility, and rapid maneuver. ISIS is prepared to play a long game and is appealing for educated and skilled Muslims to join it to rebuild the caliphate.

Western governments continue to view the collapse of Muslim states as something to be countered by military action and counterterrorism operations. The United States and its allies need to get Iran and Saudi Arabia to deal with the crisis in the Muslim world. The Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Arab League should both be acting to bring Iran and the Arab world closer together.

2014 July 3

The Caliphate

Khaled Diab

The Islamic State appears well on the road to restarting the caliphate. But even the earliest caliphs bear little resemblance to jihadist mythology. Muhammad composed a Constitution of Medina stipulating that Muslims, Jews, Christians, and pagans had equal political and cultural rights.

Now Islamists misdiagnose the weakness and underdevelopment of contemporary Arab society as stemming from its deviation from "pure" Islamic morality, as if the proper length of a beard and praying five times a day were a substitute for science and education, or could affect global inequalities.

The Islamist dream of transnational theocratic rule appeals to a dwindling number of Arabs. Rather than a caliphate presided over by arbitrarily appointed caliphs, subjected to a rigid interpretation of Shariah law, millions of Arabs strive simply for peace, stability, dignity, prosperity, and democracy.

2014 July 2

Mideast Redline

David Rothkopf

The soldiers of the new caliphate might cross into Jordan. The Jordanian military would step up in a way that the Iraqi military has not. But how far into Jordan would an ISIS incursion have to go before alarms went off in Washington? How far before Israel felt it must act to defend itself?

If we are to avoid a regional meltdown, the United States, Europe, the Turks, and those from across the region must act. The White House must send a clear message that Jordan is a real red line.

European Federalism

Charles Kennedy

While David Cameron was being defenestrated in Brussels, I was in Strasbourg at the Council of Europe, speaking on a new report into the future of the European Union. The council comprises 47 countries and 800 million citizens, and was formed in the aftermath of WW2 to guard and promote human rights.

Report author Andreas Gross: "Rather than constituting a model for an ever closer political union or a European state, federalism implies a process of balancing power in a differentiated political order which enables unity while guaranteeing diversity."

Most continental politicians would endorse that definition.

2014 July 1

The Caliphate

J.M. Berger

ISIS claims that it had fulfilled all the legal requirements for the caliphate and that all Muslims around the world are religiously obliged to swear loyalty to the new Caliph Ibrahim. Muslims worldwide are likely to react negatively to the pronouncement.

Prior to the pronouncement, ISIS could have fallen back with little loss of face and a huge increase in its warfighting capabilities, thanks to captured weaponry and stolen funds. Now, if ISIS is driven back, the loss would highlight the hubris of ISIS.

ISIS appears to be standing on the edge of a precipice with an adolescent faith in its ability to keep its balance. A US military strike would give ISIS a new line of jihadist argument: The caliphate was restored, but it was destroyed by the United States.

The God Helmet

Julia Llewellyn Smith

The God helmet simulates religious experiences by directing complex magnetic fields to the parts of the brain that include the parietal lobe. More than 80% of those who wore the helmet reported sensing a presence in the room that many took to be their deity.

Oxford University Regius Professor of Divinity Graham Ward: "Religion is at the root both of so many great civilizations and of so many wars, it has so much mythological power, we have to understand how it works and be alert to how dangerous it can be."