Haaretz: Why Trump Poses No Threat to the Global Order, and China Does

Less than five months into his presidency, there is ample evidence that: (1) He doesn’t have any real program to achieve his goals, (2) By dint of his own problematic personality, he has created a state of perpetual crisis in Washington that precludes anyone in his administration who might have some ideas to advance his goals, and: (3) In any case, the big boys in his administration are Wall Street, military and corporate types who don’t really share his America First ideas. [...]

U.S. business, even the oil companies, supported staying in the Paris agreement. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, an oil man himself, urged the president not to withdraw and a raft of American states, cities and even oil companies have vowed to do their share as though America had stayed in the pact.

Even an archetypal American institution like Walmart said it was keeping to its plan to reduce its carbon footprint with or without the U.S. party to Paris. Meanwhile, the other six members of the G-7 remain committed to the accord and in all events, the U.S. is committed to remaining in it until at least November 4, 2020, coincidentally a day before America’s next presidential election. So Trump’s America isn’t really exiting and may never. [...]

The Israelis who are cheering on Trump - and for that matter Brexit and the EU crisis - see it all as part of brave new world where countries can do what they want without being answerable to pesky international organizations. That way the settlements to be left alone to grow and prosper, which is their only real interest. But they’re on the same wrong side of history as their hero.

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Politico: Grenfell Tower disaster, a symbol of broken Britain

For an extra £5,000 during recent refurbishments, it was claimed on the front page of the Times, the 24-story Grenfell Tower in west London could have been clad in fireproof panels. Instead, the contractors went for the cheaper option — a decision which may have contributed to the deaths of at least 30 people in Wednesday’s deadly blaze and probably many more.

Five minutes walk away from the block of council flats, a five bedroom semi-detached family home is for sale. Asking price: £15 million. [...]

The move may go some way to shoring up the political damage, but May’s initially flat-footed response to the tragedy reminded critics of her performance in the election campaign. One senior Conservative campaign official watched with dismay as May imploded in the public glare in the run-up to the election. If the fire, and her response, had taken place before polling day, “she would have lost…and Corbyn would have deserved it,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A backlash against May within her party — already furious over the botched campaign — now appears positively dangerous for her short-term, let alone long-term, future. [...]

Tobias Ellwood, the defense minister, told the BBC’s Question Time that “security concerns” had prevented the prime minister from visiting survivors. Hours later the queen arrived to meet the survivors, making a mockery of the excuse.

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Vox: Americans should be more afraid of HPV

While public health campaigns about STDs have helped to dramatically reduce HIV rates and improve condom usage, many Americans are still ignorant about the risks of HPV. It’s the most common STD in the country that will infect almost every sexually active person at some point in their lives — and the only STD that can cause cancer. [...]

To Tomlinson, the opportunity to prevent oral or genital cancers should be a no brainer for parents and young people. “There are parents who don’t inoculate their kids because they think it’ll make them more promiscuous. I ask them: ‘Would you rather your kids be sexually promiscuous or would you rather they be dead’?” Tomlinson said. “It’s a simple choice.” [...]

There are a couple of things we know about the people who get HPV-related cancers: They tend to have a high number of oral sex partners over their lifetime, and they also tend to be male and white. (Both HPV infection and related cancers are about three to five times more common in men than women.)

Researchers haven’t been able to figure out why men are more susceptible, but suspect it might be caused by the fact that women’s immune system seem to be able to ward off the virus’ cancer causing properties more readily.

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The New York Review of Books: The New Face of Russian Resistance

The new face of Russian protest is barely pubescent. Reports from the June 12 demonstrations, which brought hundreds and sometimes thousands of people into the streets of just about every Russian city, feature teenagers: a boy in shorts being tackled by police in riot gear, a girl charging a police line, and a paddy wagon full of adolescents. One Russian Facebook user posted a photograph of the teenagers in the paddy wagon with the caption, “Russia has a future.” He posited that “every mass arrest of young people strengthens youth protest,” which, in turn, is sure to bring about the end of the regime.

There is a feverish tone to Russian blog posts in the aftermath of Monday’s protests, a sense of hope struggling to defy fear. Without a doubt, Monday’s protests—often in open defiance of Russian authorities, who in many cities refused to give permits to hold them—were the most geographically widespread in all of Russian history: eight people, including five minors, were detained in the sleepy southern resort town of Yeysk (population 88,000), and nine people were detained five thousand miles across the country, in Blagoveshchensk, on the border with China. In all, more than 1,700 people were thrown in jail—nearly half of them in Moscow—the single largest wave of arrests in many decades. In Moscow, some of the detainees had to spend the night on benches in a police courtyard because there was no room for them inside the precinct. On the other hand, this means that enough people took to the streets on Monday to make that many arrests possible. Most of the detainees were released within hours; many were sentenced to fines and between five and thirty days behind bars; a few will certainly face several years in a prison colony. This is how post-totalitarian terror works—by punishing a randomly chosen few to frighten the many. What is giving some Russians hope is that a new generation of people who are not yet frightened seems to have burst onto the scene. [...]

Still, Navalny seems to have found the key both to staying alive and out of prison and to getting people into the streets. Indeed, it is his ability to mobilize protesters that has kept him out of prison: the regime fears mass protest. Navalny’s single-minded focus on corruption allows him to avoid more controversial issues such as the war in Ukraine, and to appeal to a maximum number of Russians directly: corruption affects everyone, all the time. It was Navalny who called for the protests on June 12. In Moscow, he got a boost from the city administration, which is pursuing a giant urban-renewal project that will cost tens of thousands of Muscovites their homes. This, too, is corruption: Muscovites are convinced that the mayor and his circle will personally benefit from turning city lands over to developers.

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The Atlantic: An Artificial Intelligence Developed Its Own Non-Human Language

In the report, researchers at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab describe using machine learning to train their “dialog agents” to negotiate. (And it turns out bots are actually quite good at dealmaking.) At one point, the researchers write, they had to tweak one of their models because otherwise the bot-to-bot conversation “led to divergence from human language as the agents developed their own language for negotiating.” They had to use what’s called a fixed supervised model instead.

In other words, the model that allowed two bots to have a conversation—and use machine learning to constantly iterate strategies for that conversation along the way—led to those bots communicating in their own non-human language. If this doesn’t fill you with a sense of wonder and awe about the future of machines and humanity then, I don’t know, go watch Blade Runner or something. [...]

Already, there’s a good deal of guesswork involved in machine learning research, which often involves feeding a neural net a huge pile of data then examining the output to try to understand how the machine thinks. But the fact that machines will make up their own non-human ways of conversing is an astonishing reminder of just how little we know, even when people are the ones designing these systems.

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Quartz: Criminalizing non-violent extremism won’t prevent terrorism

In 2015, the prime minister had written that where “non-violent extremism goes unchallenged, the values that bind our society together fragment”. Going one step further, in its 2017 manifesto, May’s Conservative party called for a new approach where: “We will consider what new criminal offences might need to be created… to defeat the extremists.”

What this push for new legislation targets is not the criminal behaviour of violence, but the ideology behind it. This is based on the problematic assumption that criminalising the motivations behind an action can prevent it from happening: but my research suggests that the opposite may well be the case. [...]

Because politicians like May link certain ideologies to acts of violence, these ideologies are regarded as being just as criminal. All corresponding non-violent expressions of these ideologies—such as certain extreme interpretations of Islam—are to be considered in like terms, as a “pernicious ideology”, as May’s predecessor David Cameron stated following the terror acts in Brussels in 2016.

For instance, during the conflict in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin was censored, as were many advocating their political ideology. This led to a silencing of the political debate. Those challenging the violence of the IRA, but advocating for their goals—a united Ireland—were frequently labelled as terrorist sympathisers. For instance the former leader of the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), John Hume, notably stated: “Listening to honourable members opposite one would think that it [the pursuit of Irish unity] was a crime.” [...]

When non-violent expressions of a political ideology are criminalized this links the very ideology with criminality, and with terrorism. Holding a belief, no matter how disagreeable you may find it, does not make a person a perpetrator. Media headlines after the recent terror attacks in the UK provide disturbing examples of just how demonizing such language can be. One headline in The Daily Mail read: “Another fanatic slips through the net”, while another in The Sun called one of the attackers “The Jihadi next door”.

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Quartz: Refugees in the US quickly pay more in taxes then they get in benefits, according to new research

A recently released working paper (paywall) by the economists William Evans and Daniel Fitzgerald of the University of Notre Dame examines the financial costs of refugees to the federal government. They find that though refugees are initially quite expensive for the government, the average refugee who entered between the ages of 18-45 actually pays $21,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits over their first 20 years in the US—including resettlement costs.

The major innovation of Evans and Fitzgerald’s research was in figuring out how to identify refugees in government data. The US Census does not include a question about refugee status in its nationwide household surveys that ask a variety of economic and demographic questions. But immigrants are asked their year of their arrival and the country they arrived from. Using this information, researchers were able to identify individuals who were highly likely to be refugees and track their progress over time.

The researchers used the data from the census and a tax-payment simulation program to estimate how much refugees pay in tax and receive in government benefits. Their data show that though the average refugee is a financial drain on the government for their first eight years in the US, by the ninth year they become net positive, and continue to be so for the next 11 years (the available data only allow the researchers to track their first 20 years).

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