Things watched

*  I haven't finished it yet, but gee, the second series of Korean zombie, old timey fashion, and palace intrigue series Kingdom has been really good - really well made action, plot surprises (not always welcome ones, actually) and (for its kind of show) well acted.   My only criticism is that it should come with a map - the geography of where the zombie hoards are chasing the heroes to gets very unclear.  

* Have started watching the Belgium made (yes, another foreign show) slightly science fiction-y present day apocalypse show Into the Night, and I'm enjoying it so far.   It has a pleasing narrative push to it which comes inherently from the scenario - the sun has gone rogue and started shooting out gamma rays which kills life at sunrise, and one passenger plane - an Airbus 320 I think (it is Europe, after all) -  has to keep flying West to avoid the sun catching up with it.   Not entirely plausible, in more than one respect, but I hope it keeps up the quality of the first couple of episodes.   Here's a positive review that seems accurate to me.

* Also just started watching Tiger King.  Yeah, it's good, the first episode, but I do get the feeling that the story to be told shouldn't take 8 episodes.   I am anticipating tiring of it.

* On Youtube, recently discovered the idiosyncratic travel vlogger Bald and Bankrupt.  He's a very unusual character, naturally good at the narration to camera on a selfie stick that is his thing (no beautiful drone footage on this channel, that's for sure), and I see that he is pretty well known.   It's odd to see a more mature age character who seems to want to experience somewhat dangerous situations for the fun of it.  And who is the woman he is with sometimes?  Why would she follow him into some of the crappiest countries around?   This video was one of the most remarkable ones I have seen:

I'm calling it

Unless there are some major errors going on in today's reporting about Trump and the Russia activities in Afghanistan, I reckon it's extremely likely that this is the scandal that is the nail in the coffin of the Trump presidency:

Top officials in the White House were aware in early 2019 of classified intelligence indicating Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, a full year earlier than has been previously reported, according to U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the intelligence. 

The assessment was included in at least one of President Donald Trump’s written daily intelligence briefings at the time, according to the officials. Then-national security adviser John Bolton also told colleagues he briefed Trump on the intelligence assessment in March 2019.

Update:

Yes, I think this is right, even though I have already seen some Republicans saying that you can't expect a President to read what's in the briefing book every day.  

Still, if, as some predict, this ends up with Trump saying "I've spoken to Putin and he denies it, and you know, that's good enough for me",  that example (on top of others) of Trump disbelieving his own intelligence services over what an autocrat tells him may be the straw that breaks Republican support.

Hell revised

Oh, back to a favourite topic - how reliably Christian is the idea of a never ending Hell, as discussed by that Eastern Orthodox theologian I have mentioned before, David Bentley Hart.  This is from a review of a book of his on the topic:

A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, hardly a radical leftist, Hart is nevertheless on the side of the angels. In recent years, he has thrown the traditionally minded into a tizzy, principally via two arguments: that hell is not eternal—that all shall be saved—and that an honest adherence to the Gospel of Jesus Christ would require Christians to be “communists,” in the strict sense given by the Acts of the Apostles (“omnia sunt communia”—a favorite verse of Müntzer’s).

 As Hart expounds in That All Shall Be Saved, it is impossible to wrest a coherent doctrine of hell from Jesus’s and Paul’s scattered and figurative references to a final judgment, or from Revelation’s fevered phantasmagoria. As the biblically literate know, since the Wycliffe Bible, which appeared in the fourteenth century, the words that English translators of the New Testament have rendered as “hell” are “Hades,” the familiar realm of the dead, and “Gehenna.” This last is the Greek form of “Ge-Hinnom,” the Valley of Hinnom, which is a real place near Jerusalem. This valley had long been associated with child sacrifice and evil gods and perhaps served as a charnel pit for burning carrion. Readers of the New Testament wishing to extrapolate the conventional picture of hell have very little to go on:

Certainly no one now can say with confidence precisely what Jesus’s understanding of the Gehenna’s fire was . . . what duration he might have assigned to those subjected to it, or even how metaphorically he intended such imagery to be taken. It is obvious that metaphor was his natural idiom as a teacher, and that he employed the prophetic and apocalyptic tropes of his time in a manner more poetic than precise.

Hart traverses this ground in order to construct a daedal and extremely learned defense of the doctrine of apocatastasis (the word means “restoration”), which is as old as Christianity itself, though it has always been a minority position. It is the belief that all souls—even Old Scratch himself—will ultimately be reconciled to God through Christ. Its proponents in the early church include Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, two of the subtlest minds in the history of Christian thought. Though they arrive at universalism by very different routes, a touchstone for both is 1 Corinthians 15, in which Paul writes that at the end of days God will be “all in all.” For these early Christians, as for Hart, the first preachers of universal salvation in the Christian tradition were Jesus and Paul. On this view, there is no eternal perdition. If hell exists, it is a state of temporary purgation. Gregory insisted that this would not be “a harsh means of correction,” as the “thoughtless” speak of it, but “a healing remedy provided by God, to restore his own creation to its original grace.”

I will skip some paragraphs then get to this:

And predestination, that pillar of Reformed theology, doesn’t enter the picture. Hart reserves his most damning rhetoric for Reformed arguments about humanity’s exposure to destruction. Would that every Christian might read Hart’s elegant exegesis of Paul’s notoriously complex language of election in Romans 9–11, often read as justifying a division of humanity into called and rejected. Unlike the Augustinian tradition’s tortured interpretations of this epistle, Hart’s reading allows Paul’s promise that God will “have mercy on all” to mean what it plainly says. Hart is similarly attentive to 1 Timothy 4, where Paul (more likely a later author writing in Paul’s name) calls Jesus “the Savior of all human beings, especially those who have faith”—all human beings, and what could that “especially” mean if only believers are saved?

I lack space to address all of Hart’s arguments for universal salvation. For me, and I suspect for many of this magazine’s readers, his book is hardly of pressing doctrinal concern anyway. But a lot of folks sure do like them some hellfire. The editors of First Things, an influential conservative Christian journal, ran no fewer than three attacks on That All Shall Be Saved, the last one accusing Hart of having committed “theological fraud.” It would be unchristian to suggest that this enthusiastic response might be related to Hart’s having broken with the journal, to which he used to contribute a frequently delectable column, because he “could not remain on good terms with a collection of editors who had embraced the politics of the alt-right.”

Unsuprising

Carl Bernstein writes at CNN:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

As I have said for a long time, if White House insiders have been so willing to talk now about how terrible Trump is in the job, can you imagine how much more will come out when he is no longer there? 

They really need to stop doing that

This report is from the Jerusalem Post, so it's not an anti-Semitic source:

A three-weeks-old baby is currently in serious condition at the Bnei Zion Medical Center in Haifa due to a herpetic infection, which began in the genital area and has spread to the brain, leading to convulsions and seizures.

Laboratory tests found that the infant likely contracted the Type 1 herpes virus during his brit, directly from the mohel, who performed the ceremony using the controversial Orthodox method of blood cleaning known as "Metzitzah B'Peh," or oral suction....

 

The professor explained that "evidence of newborn herpes infections accompanied by brain infections, and their connection to the oral suction in circumcisions, have been widely described in medical history for the past 200 years.

 

"The herpes virus can cause a skin infection, which can spread to the brain and cause severe inflammation of the brain and even death," Sarugo said.

Do you think Graeme might make a comment about this?  He (along with everyone else) is in comment moderation, so I'll let you know...

Too stupid to be told

This may well be the explanation:

Are cult members always this stupid?

I love it when Trump cult member Steve Kates goes on about how everyone else is wrong (climate scientists, economists, anyone who doesn't support Donald Trump) about everything, and that's because they're like cult members:

It is like dealing with members of a cult, except they are now the mainstream.

He's at it again today.  He's citing an article from American right wing, pro market think tank sort of place I have never heard of before.

Seems that the idea that the mainstream might be mainstream because they are not the ones analysing everything with intense bias has never occurred to him.

More details

The Washington Post writes now:

Russian bounties offered to Taliban-linked militants to kill coalition forces in Afghanistan are believed to have resulted in the deaths of several U.S. service members, according to intelligence gleaned from U.S. military interrogations of captured militants in recent months.

Several people familiar with the matter said it was unclear exactly how many Americans or coalition troops from other countries may have been killed or targeted under the program. U.S. forces in Afghanistan suffered a total of 10 deaths from hostile gunfire or improvised bombs in 2018, and 16 in 2019. Two have been killed this year. In each of those years, several service members were also killed by what are known as “green on blue” hostile incidents by Afghan security forces sometimes believed to have been infiltrated by the Taliban.

The intelligence was passed up from the U.S. Special Operations forces based in Afghanistan and led to a restricted high-level White House meeting in late March, the people said.

The meeting led to broader discussions about possible responses to the Russian action, ranging from diplomatic expressions of disapproval and warnings, to sanctions, according to two of the people. These people and others who discussed the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity because of its sensitivity.

The disturbing intelligence — which the CIA was tasked with reviewing, and later confirmed — generated disagreement about the appropriate path forward, a senior U.S. official said. The administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, preferred confronting the Russians directly about the matter, while some National Security Council officials in charge of Russia were more dismissive of taking immediate action, the official said.

It remained unclear where those discussions have led to date. Verifying such intelligence is a process that can take weeks, typically involving the CIA and the National Security Agency, which captures foreign cellphone and radio communications. Final drafting of any policy options in response would be the responsibility of national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien.

So, it seems no one from within the administration or military is yet directly fingering Trump as lying  when he says he was not briefed on it - so maybe he wasn't?

But as lots of people are saying - how could this possibly be the subject of a meeting at the White House and then not have the issue briefed to the President (or Vice President)?  Even if they were still "formulating policy options", surely such a sensitive issue would be notified to him.

There are two ways it still hurts Trump - first, makes him look the head of an incompetent administration, and secondly, when he does (apparently) find out about it via the media, his first reaction is to suggest it might be all "fake news", showing how un-serious he is in the job.  I mean, look at this:

As this guy writes:

Administration in trouble (or, more trouble than usual)

This story is very surprising:

A Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan, including U.S. and British troops, in a striking escalation of the Kremlin’s hostility toward the United States, American intelligence has found.

The Russian operation, first reported by the New York Times, has generated an intense debate within the Trump administration about how best to respond to a troubling new tactic by a nation that most U.S. officials regard as a potential foe but that President Trump has frequently embraced as a friend, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive intelligence matter.

That terrible White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany had said that the President and VP were not briefed on this, and lots of people on Twitter think she (or the administration) is lying.

But the Washington Post story (from which I am quoting above) says:

In a statement late Saturday Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said he had “confirmed that neither the President nor the Vice President were ever briefed on any intelligence” related to a Russian bounty, and that all news reports “about an alleged briefing are inaccurate.”

Ratcliffe’s statement, and an earlier statement by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, did not address the accuracy of the reported intelligence information.

But remember, this guy has just been appointed amidst lots of warning like this:

John Ratcliffe is the least-qualified director of national intelligence in history—and a staunch partisan as well.

Yet surely he would not outright lie about something like this, when whistleblowers would be ready to contradict him?
 
 So, if Trump and Pence did not know, that leads to an alternative scandal:  how the hell can the intelligence community not get them briefed on this?   That would reek of scandalous maladministration.

So, whichever way it goes, it's a pretty popcorn worthy bit of news.

Too many satellites for too little benefit

I posted earlier this week about the increasing number of satellites and the increasing number of systems that all do the same thing.   It seems even worse than I realised, if this article is anything to go by:

The UK government’s plan to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in a satellite broadband company has been described as “nonsensical” by experts, who say the company doesn’t even make the right type of satellite the country needs after Brexit.

The investment in OneWeb, first reported on Thursday night, is intended to mitigate against the UK losing access to the EU’s Galileo satellite navigation system.

As I said in my last post, I don't understand how this civilian access to competing GPS systems works - given that most mobile phones specs say they can use two or three of the current systems.   How does the EU stop phones accessing their signal?

Anyway, back to the story of too many satellites:

But OneWeb – in which the UK will own a 20% stake following the investment – currently operates a completely different type of satellite network from that typically used to run such navigation systems.

“The fundamental starting point is, yes, we’ve bought the wrong satellites,” said Dr Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy expert at the University of Leicester. “OneWeb is working on basically the same idea as Elon Musk’s Starlink: a mega-constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, which are used to connect people on the ground to the internet.

“What’s happened is that the very talented lobbyists at OneWeb have convinced the government that we can completely redesign some of the satellites to piggyback a navigation payload on it. It’s bolting an unproven technology on to a mega-constellation that’s designed to do something else. It’s a tech and business gamble.”

Giles Thorne, a research analyst at Jeffries, agreed. “This situation is nonsensical to me,” he said. “This situation looks like nationalism trumping solid industrial policy.”

Every major positioning system currently in use – America’s GPS, Russia’s Glonass, China’s BeiDou, and Galileo, the EU project that the UK helped design before losing access to due to Brexit – is in a medium Earth orbit, Thorne said, approximately 20,000km from Earth. OneWeb’s satellites, 74 of which have already been launched, are in a low Earth orbit, just 1,200km up.

Bowen said: “If you want to replace GPS for military-grade systems, where you need encrypted, secure signals that are precise to centimetres, I’m not sure you can do that on satellites as small as OneWeb’s.”

Rather than being selected for the quality of the offering, Thorne suggested the investment was made to suit “a nationalist agenda”. OneWeb is nominally a UK business, with a UK HQ and spectrum rights registered in the UK through Ofcom.

OK, I just realised - maybe the UK loss of access to Galileo is more to do with military access rather than civilian access?  Yes, that seems right, according to this UK government page:

In the event of the UK leaving the EU without a negotiated agreement, the majority of position, navigation and timing services provided by Galileo and European Geostationary Navigation Overlay will continue to be freely available to all UK based users. The Prime Minister has made clear the UK will not use Galileo (including the Public Regulated Service) for defence or critical national infrastructure.

The UK will no longer play any part in the development of Galileo or European Geostationary Navigation Overlay programmes. This means that UK-based businesses, academics and researchers will be unable to bid for future EU Global Navigation Satellite System contracts and may face difficulty carrying out and completing existing contracts. For example, it may not be possible for businesses or organisations which currently host Galileo and European Geostationary Navigation Overlay ground infrastructure to continue to do so.

To prepare for this scenario the UK is exploring alternatives to fulfil its needs for secure and resilient position, navigation and timing information. These contingency options are made possible by the expertise of the UK space sector and will be assessed on their own merits. The government will invest £92 million from the Brexit readiness fund on an 18-month programme to design a UK Global Navigation Satellite System. This will inform the decision to create an independent system as an alternative to Galileo.

Still, this loss of access to Galileo's more sophisticated services sound like one of those issues that would have been completely glossed over when the populists were running their pro-Brexit campaign, and it sounds like it will cost a lot to replicate.

Intelligence that makes me do that Homer Simpson drool

My God.  I am watching Planet America Fireside Chat on ABC News, and once again it's such exquisitely intelligent commentary it makes me want to do that Homer Simpson drool when he thinks of pork chops.

"Smart, witty people being reasonable....gaaaaaah!"

Conservatives and their social media

I see that even at Catallaxy, the first attempt at a Twitter/Facebook alternative that wasn't going to "censor" conservative opinion - Gab - has been derided as being so taken over by (I think) white nationalist nutters that even the routinely offensive members of Catallaxy are warning each other not to try it.   (I wouldn't know - I see no reason to switch from reading Twitter.) 

So the second attempt at freedom to be as offensive as they want - Parler - is currently getting a lot of promotion from conservatives.   I reckon the prediction here will be correct:

Two things - conservatives continue their attempt to reinvent the meaning of censorship; and they seem gormlessly intent on proving via these attempts at alternatives that there is extremely good reason for companies providing social media platforms to have standards that they will enforce in order to make them want to be used, and commercially viable. 

Exactly

It's why I moved the link to his blog to the section "Gone Completely Stupid and Offensive".

Women and sport and my confusion

As readers would know, I pay very little attention to sport.   It's only occasionally of interest - State of Origin rugby league; the spectacle of Olympic openings and of some individual sports - how can you not be impressed by how people learn to pole vault or ski jump?   And if an athlete seems a nice enough person, it can be good to see them win and get some benefit out of years of what would otherwise be more-or-less wasted effort.

But when it comes to women's team sports, I cannot muster any interest, let alone enthusiasm, at all.  Hence today's excitement about Australian and New Zealand hosting the FIFA Women's World Cup leaves me completely cold, and once again baffled as to how they have become popular. 

I like to think my inability to want to watch a team of women is sound in evolutionary biology terms.   Men's team sports, particularly the only one I ever watch (if only a few times a year), rugby league, is readily interpreted as a substitute to watching a team of hunters planning and moving as a pack to hunt their quarry.   Or, to update the analogy, as a substitute for watching competing lines of men trying to acquire ground in battle.   (This is why it makes so much sense to me as to why it should be my preferred code - not like soccer or AFL where clear lines moving up and down a field of play don't exist.)

This reasoning leaves little room for an explanation for people liking ball hitting games like cricket, baseball, or even tennis; although with the latter, it is so concentrated on the individual's stamina and talent, I can see why it has some appeal.  With cricket and baseball - well, they both often have the crowd amusing themselves while the play itself is boring, so they have their own weird dynamic of crowd solidarity that is not exactly part of my make up, but it's obviously a thing.

But back to team sports - I can't shake the feeling that gender really matters to why I don't have any interest in them because what is happening on the field is nothing like what women have ever done in an evolutionary sense.   It's different from watching a woman who is good at an individual sport - I see nothing wrong with that, unless it's something like weightlifting.  (But hey, I couldn't care less about what men do in some obscure sports, either.)

Yet, I seem to be alone in this, and lots of men (increasingly, on both sides of political spectrum, too) will say they are enthusiastic followers of women's team sports.

I really don't understand how that has happened.   I find it so strange, especially when in quite a few sports there is a high proportion of lesbian players, rendering any more base evolutionary biology explanation irrelevant, that I am starting to wonder if there is something weird going on, like plastics chemicals in drinking water, or something.  [I am joking.  Sort of.   Seriously, I find this more surprising and inexplicable than Western societies' turnaround on gay relationships.]

   

Could be a fair summary?

The Economist has an article behind its paywall, but here is the headline:

Sounds about right, is my hunch.  And it makes for a very real problem for politicians.   Of course, I am very glad that it is Trump caught in the dilemma.  

World War 1 (and a gripe about education)

I find myself full of admiration for the people who put together these witty, all age friendly, largely accurate, summaries of history.  I encourage you to view these two videos summarising (in barely 15 minutes, combined!) the rather notoriously hard to simplify history of World War 1, and hopefully you will agree they are both dense with information and give an overview that is so often lacking in education:





It also makes me feel that schooling in my life time, and probably before it, is not so great at the Big Picture when it comes to history and historical developments.    I guess you could say, if you are a conservative, that the move away from teaching the Western canon is a key example of failure to give an overview:  but I guess there are overviews, and then there are narrowly biased overviews which modern educationalists think are important to avoid.

It is a tricky area, but as I say, I am very impressed by those people who are trying to make learning more about complicated history more digestible.  

I had been wondering the same thing

World's greatest democracy still can't get democracy right

What the hell do Americans find so hard about having polling stations stay open until all of those who arrived before closing get a chance to vote??   Why do we see so regularly this theatre of urgent applications to judges to get the polling station to stay open to let long delayed voters vote? 

I would be really embarrassed about this if I were an American:

So long to the Segway (and my plans for electric scooters to help save the world)

Well, this is really going to date people in the future:  grandparents will be able to tell kids about the start of the 21st century when you could see sometimes see police (or mall cops, or tourists) riding a dangerous standing electric thingee:

Segway, which boldly claimed its two-wheeled personal transporter would revolutionize the way people get around, is ending production of its namesake vehicle.

The Segway PT, popular with tourists and police officers but perhaps better known for its high-profile crashes, will be retired on 15 July, the company said in a statement.

The funniest thing, of course, was all the build up to its disclosure as a "revolutionary" device that will change our cities.  And then the vastly underwhelmed TV host with her (justifiably) dismissive  "is that all?".  Is that clip on Youtube?    

As for what is effectively its successor - the electric scooter - I still haven't tried one, but it keeps occurring to me that in my not-so-radical-but-why-does-no-one-else-think-of-this plans to reduce carbon emissions, the government could probably do a lot worse than give every student who graduates from high school an $800 electric scooter as a personal transport device to tide them over until they can afford to buy an electric car.  Segway makes a good one, but so does Xiaomi, and it is important to please our coming Chinese overlords, so I would go for one of those. 

(I still think three wheel electric scooters would be safer, but seems that few are made.)

Just what we needed...more satellites

I seem to have not noticed this development:

China on Tuesday launched the final satellite in its homegrown geolocation system designed to rival the US GPS network, marking a major step in its race for market share in the lucrative sector....

Beidou – named after the Chinese term for the plow or “Big Dipper” constellation – is intended to rival the US’s Global Positioning System (GPS), Russia’s GLONASS and the European Union’s Galileo.

“I think the Beidou-3 system being operational is a big event,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“This is a big investment from China and makes China independent of US and European systems.”
China started building its global navigation system in the early 1990s to help cars, fishing boats and military tankers navigate using mapping data from the country’s own satellites.

It's been operating at some level since 2018.   I'm not sure how they make money from these services - I presume GPS chip manufacturers pay for access to their particular network.  I notice mobile phone specs do often list the GPS network they can use, but I haven't notice "Beidou" before.   What if I check Huawei phones:

Currently, Huawei mobile devices support the following navigation systems: GPS/AGPS/Glonass/BeiDou/Galileo.

 And this:

On December 27 last year, Ran Chengqi, director of China Satellite Navigation System Management Office and spokesperson of BeiDou Satellite Navigation System, said that 70% of China's smart phones use Beidou system.

So yeah, coming soon to your next mobile phone.

And OK, next question:  if a phone can use any of the different services, how does it pick one to use at any particular time?    Does it look for the first signal from any of the systems it can use and then go with that system?   I just Googled the question, but the answer is not yet clear.

Would be impressive, in an evil overlord sort of way, if the Chinese system allowed them to track anyone whose phone chose to use their network.   Is there already a conspiracy theory based on this? 

Update:  by coincidence, Axios has a short article up about "the looming threats posed by space junk".   It's one of those issues that seems constantly talked about, but with little effective action being taken.