Just what you want around nuclear missiles

'Bad trip': air force members guarding nuclear missiles took LSD, records show

Interestingly, the article notes that sitting around all day looking after a stationary weapon that never gets used makes for an unhappy workplace:

None of the airmen was accused of using drugs on duty. Yet it’s another blow to the reputation of the Air force’s nuclear missile corps, which has struggled at times with misbehavior, mismanagement and low morale.

Although seen by some as a backwater of the US military, the missile force has returned to the spotlight as Donald Trump has called for strengthening US nuclear firepower and exchanged threats last year with North Korea. The administration’s nuclear strategy calls for hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending in coming decades.

Slow news

That investigation into the Malaysian plane shot down over Ukraine is taking so long, I had assumed it was over. 

Investigators looking into the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, say the Russian missile that hit the plane originated from a Russian military unit.

The passenger jet crashed, killing all 298 people aboard. Moscow has denied being responsible.

I wonder if Trump will have anything to say about it.

Some humour for a Friday

Seen at The Onion:

Joining the club

From the Guardian:

For kids in Greece, Spain and Italy, the Mediterranean diet is dead, according to the World Health Organisation, which says that children in Sweden are more likely to eat fish, olive oil and tomatoes than those in southern Europe.

In Cyprus, a phenomenal 43% of boys and girls aged nine are either overweight or obese. Greece, Spain and Italy also have rates of over 40%. The Mediterranean countries which gave their name to the famous diet that is supposed to be the healthiest in the world have children with Europe’s biggest weight problem.

Yet other European countries are still doing OK, although these lines are obviously confusing about what the true rate for Ireland is:

France, Norway, Ireland, Latvia and Denmark also have low rates, ranging from 5% to 9%. Ireland’s rate is 20%. The UK does not contribute data to the study, but about one in three children are overweight or obese when they leave primary school at the age of 11.

I'm betting Ireland would be 20% - all those potatoes and Irish stews.

Trump and the stupifying circle of Right

This article at AP explains how Trump deliberately is using "branding" to rile up his dumb sucker base, and Republican congressmen and the Wingnut media are along for the ride:

Trump has told confidants in recent days that the revelation of an informant was potential evidence that the upper echelon of federal law enforcement has conspired against him, according to three people familiar with his recent conversations but not authorized to discuss them publicly. Trump told one ally this week that he wanted “to brand” the informant a “spy,” believing the more nefarious term would resonate more in the media and with the public.

He went on to debut the term “Spygate” on Wednesday, despite its previous associations with a 2007 NFL scandal over videotaping coaches.

So, much of this time, you can't tell where within this self stupefying circle of Right wingnut spin an idea has originated - did someone at Fox News put it into Trump's head, or Andrew McCarthy's more high brow (but just as scurrilous and unfounded) conspiracy columns - but in this case it seems to be Trump's own idea.   (Probably discussed during a bed time phone call with Hannity, though.)

And once the idea is out there, you only have to read the likes of Catallaxy threads, including the comments by rich, gullible and kinda dumb JC who swings by here occasionally, to see how Trumpkins lap it all up, just as Trump intended.   [Monty, just give up.  Too. Dumb. To. Engage. With.]

We have never really seen anything like this, I reckon - particularly the role of Fox News in encouraging authoritarianism in the US. 

[Oh - and now starting to make excuses for other, murderous, authoritarians.  They're just misunderstood, it seems.]

On Roth

I haven't read a thing by Philip Roth, and the descriptions of his work and style in this article in Slate doesn't really encourage me to try him, either.   I don't know - the whole intense American Jewish introspection thing just doesn't appeal to me. 

I was struck by this paragraph regarding his most infamous book:

What you can’t really feel anymore is the shock, or the funniness. Portnoy’s problem is that it was too successful: It remade the culture in its own smutty image. Today the bawdy set pieces—crude masturbation jokes involving raw liver—seem as American as American Pie. What remains, under the antic comedy, is the familial sadness of the Portnoys, so much love leading to so much misery, and the hectoring voice that would carry so much of Roth’s subsequent work.

Yeah, thanks for nothing, Mr Roth...

Edging towards modernity

From NPR:

The Philippines, where roughly 80 percent of the population is Roman Catholic, is one of only two countries in the world where divorce remains illegal (with exemptions for the roughly 5 percent of the population that's Muslim). The only other country where divorce remains illegal is Vatican City.

I guess there's not that much need for divorces within Vatican City.

Anyway, change may be on the way in the Philippines:

But a bill passed in March by the Philippines House of Representatives is giving hope to proponents of divorce. It would allow divorce for a variety of reasons, including irreconcilable differences, abuse, infidelity and abandonment....

To become law, the bill needs to be passed by the Senate and approved by the president. But the House bill, which passed by a vote of 134 to 57, is significant since no divorce legislation has ever made it this far in the Philippines, says sociologist Jayeel Cornelio of Manila's Ateneo University. He calls the bill "unprecedented," but also logical in a country where a recent survey showed more than half of Filipinos are in favor of allowing divorce "for irreconcilably separated couples."

"The influence of the Catholic Church, when it comes to political matters and private moral affairs, is becoming weaker and weaker in the country," Cornelio says. "The resistance of the Catholic Church to the divorce bill is increasingly seen as not in the interests of the public but only the interests of the Catholic Church."

Cornelio says a divorce bill is a sensible, and even "inevitable" next step after the passage of the country's reproductive health law in 2013, which allowed poorer Filipinos in particular access to birth control. Many municipalities have been slow in implementing the reproductive health law, which took more than a decade to pass — evidence of how much power the Church still enjoys.
Still, there is an unusual level of bipartisan support for the divorce bill — a matter of concern for the Catholic Church.

China and children

Good post at The Interpreter:  Will China finally end its one child policy?

It makes the point that China has two clear demographic problems - not enough workers and not enough women:

By 2050, one in four people in China will be a retiree. This will definitely put an incredible strain on China’s one-child generation, who will have the 4-2-1 problem of taking care of kids and elderly parents, with but a nascent social safety net for support. With fewer workers paying into the system and more pensioners drawing from it, China’s pension shortfall could by 2050 reach trillions, according to a Deutsche Bank estimate.

There are, of course, other countries with greying populations. Japan takes the lead, but it has a far smaller population and a per capita GDP four times larger than China’s. That is why there’s the common saying in China, “We’ll get old before we get rich”.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that China shot itself in the foot demographically with the one-child policy. From having five people to support one retiree, the country will soon have 1.5 workers per retiree. Its bachelors need brides, its elderly need caretakers, yet its women were reduced by the one-child policy. Coupled together with a long-standing cultural preference for sons, this has led to a shortage of 40–60 million females.

 

Reform already finished?

The modernisation of Saudi Arabia has hit a road bump.  (Or, perhaps more accurately, the government car of modernisation has swerved to deliberately hit a few women who were cheering it on to go faster.)

For months, Saudi Arabia had been enjoying a public-relations windfall. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MbS, the kingdom’s charismatic future leader, seduced the world with his vision for a new, modern nation. There have been live concerts, and cinemas are opening, with many more planned. Women can attend soccer games. Last September, MbS announced a bold promise to overturn the country’s ban on women driving, a change that is set to go into effect on June 24.

Then, late on Friday, it all came crashing down: Reports emerged that the women activists who pressed for the policy change had been arrested and imprisoned. As of this morning, 13 are reported to have been arrested; most are women. Apart from the driving issue, they have campaigned against so-called guardianship rules which require Saudi women to receive permission from a male relative before making many life decisions, like traveling. One of those detained was Loujain al-Hathloul, who was photographed at the 2016 One Young World Summit with none other than Meghan Markle, who married Britain’s Prince Harry on Saturday.

The same article notes a widely told story about the modern prince:

One anecdote about MbS that seemingly every ambassador in Riyadh tells is the “bullet story.” When MbS was 22 (roughly 10 years ago), he wanted to build a business career. On one occasion, he needed a Saudi judge to sign off on a deal. But there was a problem with the contract, so the judge declined. MbS, the story goes, pulled a bullet out of his pocket and put it on the man’s desk. “You will sign or this is for you,” he said. The man signed the contract, but complained to then-King Abdullah, who banned MbS from the royal court.

I won't be booking my holiday visa to Riyadh anytime soon.   

Under pressure

I never would have thought that the concept of "pressure" would apply to the inside of a proton, but apparently it does.  And it's very, very high.  The abstract of a Nature paper just published (my bold):

The proton, one of the components of atomic nuclei, is composed of fundamental particles called quarks and gluons. Gluons are the carriers of the force that binds quarks together, and free quarks are never found in isolation—that is, they are confined within the composite particles in which they reside. The origin of quark confinement is one of the most important questions in modern particle and nuclear physics because confinement is at the core of what makes the proton a stable particle and thus provides stability to the Universe. The internal quark structure of the proton is revealed by deeply virtual Compton scattering^1,2, a process in which electrons are scattered off quarks inside the protons, which  subsequently emit high-energy photons, which are detected in coincidence with the scattered electrons and recoil protons. Here we report a measurement of the pressure distribution experienced by the quarks in the proton. We find a strong repulsive pressure near the centre of the proton (up to 0.6 femtometres) and a binding pressure at greater distances. The average peak pressure near the centre is about 10³⁵ pascals, which exceeds the pressure estimated for the most densely packed known objects in the Universe, neutron stars³. This work opens up a new area of research on the fundamental gravitational properties of protons, neutrons and nuclei, which can provide access to their physical radii, the internal shear forces acting on the quarks and their pressure distributions.

Why I am skeptical of Nassim Taleb

I look at Nassim Taleb's twitter feed from time to time, and sometimes read other stuff about his ideas.

I think he has a touch of the Jordan Peterson's about him - he does a very hard, overly self-confident, sell of his own ideas using somewhat opaque or idiosyncratic terminology, and some people are very impressed by that.  Both seem readily overcome by emotions - Peterson can be weepy and sound distraught by Lefty ideology; Taleb is surely one of the angriest, and most arrogant sounding,  Tweeters on the planet.  (I reckon he would deny being emotional, though, and claim all of his angry sounding outbursts are purely intellectually driven.)

I pretty much have to rely on what other people explain as his positions, and here is a useful one by Arnold Kling on Taleb's recent book about "Skin in the Game".   One part:

In his latest book, Skin in the Game, Nassim Taleb offers an approach to social and political philosophy that he believes will encourage socially constructive change and increased freedom. He starts with "double-negative utilitarianism," which means to minimize harm. This leads to a focus on the proper management of risk.

Taleb argues that only when people are, themselves, exposed to the adverse consequences of their choices do they take risks that are constructive for society. When they do not have "skin in the game," they take risks that are harmful and dangerous. This leads Taleb to advocate libertarianism, in which decentralized entrepreneurs are heroes, while those who impose centralized decisions are villains.

Hmmm.  "Decentralised entrepreneurs are heros" sounds a bit Randian to me.  You know how much I like Randian capitalist hero-worship.  [Sarc].

But you know what makes me most skeptical - Taleb spends a lot of time on Twitter fretting about GMO food and Monsanto (a topic on which I have some interest, as I have long thought it plain that some GMO ideas - food crops that allow for more and more herbicide to used on them - are dubious long term propositions that people ought to be skeptical of), but he seems to spend no time on climate change, which is clearly the most important global medium to long term risk of all.

As far as I can tell, Taleb is not a climate change skeptic; or at least, he has argued strongly for a precautionary approach to climate policy.   But Arnold Kling is a skeptic, and I reckon he and other libertarians like Taleb because he is part of the libertarian "do nothing" club - he manages to find (more or less) politically tribal reasons to not be concerned about politicians who deny or want to do nothing about climate change.   So, for such enlightened liberations who are not so crass to want to be aligned with Monckton, Singer or other loser and nutty sounding denialists, they can shrug their shoulders and say "no, of course I believe in climate change.  But meh, what can you do?  Now those bicycle helmet laws, anti-vaping regulation, and lower taxes - now that's what really gets me perturbed."    

Readfearn Fisks Bolt

Graham Readfearn does a rather excellent job at detailing how Andrew Bolt's editorial piece on Peter Ridd (which was likely only viewed by his small echo chamber of viewers anyway) was wrong in all key aspects.

(Incidentally, haven't had the chance to use the verb "to Fisk" for a long time.   Whatever happened to Fisk anyway.  I see he still does some reporting, but he is much more ignored than he ever used to be...)

More Peterson skepticism

A Slate article:   Jordan Peterson seems like a terrible therapist.

I think he might deny that what he was doing in these Skype sessions was therapy.  But the more I read about him, the nuttier he seems. 

In other denialists news

Wingnutty climate change denialists are fools easily parted from their money - whether it be for laying out for echo chamber denialist tomes published by the IPA, or an academic wanting hundreds of thousands of dollars for legal fees for a case which, I strongly suspect, he's going to lose.   (That really is a very large amount for legal fees for an employment dispute case, by the way.)

Denialists don't have the best track record when it comes to litigation.

Climate change denialists in trouble

Climate change denialists were motivated right from the start of the disastrous South East Queensland floods of 2011 to try to find humans to blame for the exceptional scenes of mayhem which led to many deaths in a type of sudden flood we just hadn't really seen in this region before.

Hence, apart from dam management, they latched onto one family's ground works as being the cause of deaths, and ran with it in a way that has led to a defamation action that anyone objective would have to say is not going well for Alan Jones and Nick Cater.

Good.