Haaretz: A Countdown to War

For more than four decades, Iran has had an ongoing romance with the bomb, but it has not obtained a nuclear weapon. It should be made clear that Iran has not managed to develop a nuclear bomb not because it wasn’t up to the technology. On the contrary, Iran, like North Korea, could have handily dealt with the technological challenge. It was just a few months away from its first nuclear bomb on the eve of signing the nuclear agreement with the world powers in 2015. [...]

Iran doesn’t have the bomb because it never decided that it is a national necessity. The widespread Israeli belief that Iran is determined to go nuclear reflects the politics of fear that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has developed into an art form, but is not based on reality. In fact, Iran’s ongoing battle with a number of countries on the nuclear issue hasn’t been a battle over the atom bomb itself but rather over how close it would be able to come to the “option” to develop a bomb. Iran itself has never publicly addressed the right to develop a nuclear weapon, instead making reference to its right to enrich uranium as a non-nuclear country and signatory of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. [...]

Trump’s decision is more damaging to the agreement than meets the eye. The U.S. president has the ability to establish a sanctions regime – including sanctions against entities that trade with Iran – to such an extent that it could bring about the collapse of the deal even absent the withdrawal of the other world powers. Trump is even prepared to do damage to the foundations of the transatlantic alliance, which has been the basis of the world order since the end of World War II, just to prevail over his European allies and force them to also abandon the agreement. He is easily prepared to destroy what exists without proposing a positive alternative, other than a vague aggressive assurance that he has the capacity to bring Iran to its knees and to achieve a better deal. [...]

But it’s important for Israelis to understand that the alliance with Trump and his administration is likely to be shown as unreliable in short order. It should be remembered that there has not been a single president in the history of the United States whose public standing has been so fragile. Trump could find himself in a battle for his own survival within months in the face of attempts to remove him from office.

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openDemocracy: Understanding the rise of Orban: a lesson for western democracies in crisis

Viktor Orban’s electoral victories did not happen in a vacuum – they were direct consequences of the disillusionment that most Hungarians felt after 20 years of democracy. In the wake of the fall of communism, the early 1990s made Hungary the poster child for the post-communist transition: free-market capitalism backed by democratic institutions was swiftly adopted, and after a sluggish start, the economy experienced stable growth.

All this change was led by urban, technocratic elites, who as ardent followers of the neoliberal orthodoxy, promised people that Hungary would catch-up with the west in 15 years. As good students of the then dominant deregulation theory they focused all their energy on creating a textbook neoliberal wonderland: austerity measures, privatization, deregulation, and courtship of multinational corporations ruled the land. As a result, the country consistently ranked high in international rankings. So what went wrong, what made people turn to a rising autocrat? [...]

As unchecked privatization and deregulation gave all the fruits of growth to multinational corporations and their small upper-middle class workforce, austerity measures took a heavy toll on the education and health-care systems. Accordingly, social mobility froze, and millions found their dreams for a better life crushed. The biggest victims of these trends were working-class and small town communities. Forsaken by the triumphant public discussions, these people’s everyday reality was steadily rising mortality rates, crumbling hospitals, and schools, structural unemployment, and status anxiety.

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Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: The Deadliest Being on Planet Earth – The Bacteriophage

A war has been raging for billions of years, killing trillions every single day, while we don’t even notice. This war involves the single deadliest being on our planet: The Bacteriophage.

Vox: Why Stradivarius violins are worth millions

Antonio Stradivari is generally considered the greatest violin maker of all time. His violins are played by some of the top musicians in the world and sell for as much as $16 million. For centuries people have puzzled over what makes his violins so great and they are the most scientifically studied instruments in history. I spoke to two world class violinists who play Stradivarius violins as well as a violin-maker about what makes Stradivari so great. 

Financial Times: What Theresa May can do about her Brexit woes

Aeon: You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to

Beliefs are factive: to believe is to take to be true. It would be absurd, as the analytic philosopher G E Moore observed in the 1940s, to say: ‘It is raining, but I don’t believe that it is raining.’ Beliefs aspire to truth – but they do not entail it. Beliefs can be false, unwarranted by evidence or reasoned consideration. They can also be morally repugnant. Among likely candidates: beliefs that are sexist, racist or homophobic; the belief that proper upbringing of a child requires ‘breaking the will’ and severe corporal punishment; the belief that the elderly should routinely be euthanised; the belief that ‘ethnic cleansing’ is a political solution, and so on. If we find these morally wrong, we condemn not only the potential acts that spring from such beliefs, but the content of the belief itself, the act of believing it, and thus the believer.

Such judgments can imply that believing is a voluntary act. But beliefs are often more like states of mind or attitudes than decisive actions. Some beliefs, such as personal values, are not deliberately chosen; they are ‘inherited’ from parents and ‘acquired’ from peers, acquired inadvertently, inculcated by institutions and authorities, or assumed from hearsay. For this reason, I think, it is not always the coming-to-hold-this-belief that is problematic; it is rather the sustaining of such beliefs, the refusal to disbelieve or discard them that can be voluntary and ethically wrong.

If the content of a belief is judged morally wrong, it is also thought to be false. The belief that one race is less than fully human is not only a morally repugnant, racist tenet; it is also thought to be a false claim – though not by the believer. The falsity of a belief is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a belief to be morally wrong; neither is the ugliness of the content sufficient for a belief to be morally wrong. Alas, there are indeed morally repugnant truths, but it is not the believing that makes them so. Their moral ugliness is embedded in the world, not in one’s belief about the world.

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Politico: 7 takeaways from the election of a new Catalan leader

His election shows that Puigdemont’s strategy of confrontation with the Spanish state has prevailed over the more moderate voices within the independence camp in Catalonia. That will likely mean more attacks on Spain, with the Catalans portraying it as an authoritarian state, especially when the trials of pro-independence leaders get started.  [...]

The Catalan crisis is taking its toll on the popularity of the prime minister and his Popular Party and feeding its liberal rival Ciudadanos, which many polls now put in the lead. Albert Rivera’s party is now calling for Madrid to continue with direct rule over Catalonia, an attempt to portray Rajoy as too soft on the nationalists. [...]

While both sides have called for dialogue, they mean different things by that. Catalan secessionists have refused to take part in a national process looking to reform the territorial structure of the country or in a conference on the financial system of the regions. Rajoy, meanwhile, refuses to engage in talks with the government in Barcelona that go beyond the framework of the country’s constitution. [...]

Torra mentioned the creation of a “Council of the Republic” — a body that Puigdemont wants to lead from the Belgian town of Waterloo, if German courts allow him to — which will seek to gain international support for the independence process. The new Catalan chief also mentioned an “Assembly of Elected Officials,” an unofficial chamber of pro-independence politicians who would take charge of the more defiant actions against the Spanish government.

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Politico: Europe’s ultimate Trump strategy: Appeasement

“The West, as we knew it, exists no more,” Der Spiegel editor Klaus Brinkbäumer wrote in the magazine’s opening piece, subtly illustrated with the Stars and Stripes engulfed in flames. “Our current relationship to the U.S. can’t be considered a friendship, or even a partnership.” [...]

Beyond Iran, what worries many European officials, particularly in Berlin, is that Trump’s move offers further proof of his willingness to follow through on his threats toward them. In Germany’s case, Trump has been lambasting its relatively low defense spending since before he came into office and as recently as last month during a visit by Chancellor Angela Merkel to the White House.  [...]

Merkel told Trump in Washington that Germany was on course to reach the 2 percent target by 2030, six years after the agreed deadline. Grenell said convincing the Germans to move faster would be his “No. 1 issue” in Berlin. [...]

But how? European efforts to create “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. are in their infancy. The Continent, as European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker bemoaned last week, can’t even agree on a common foreign policy. What hope does it have of forming a credible military force any time soon?

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IFLScience: Plumes Of Water From Europa's Ocean Found By Dead NASA Spacecraft

And they found that on December 16, 1997 the spacecraft appears to have flown straight through a plume on Europa, ejected from a suspected ocean beneath its icy surface. This corroborates with previous findings from the Hubble Space Telescope that suggests Europa is ejecting plumes. [...]

This spike is thought to be consistent with a plume coming from the moon. As the water was ejected out from the surface, it would have droplets and material ranging in size from molecules to dust grains. These become ionized as they travel into space, turning into charged particles known as plasma. [...]

One of the most intriguing things about the E12 flyby is the location of the suspected plume. The team thinks it was coming from a region near a big crater on Europa called Pwyll Crater, which is just south of the moon’s equator. And this is a similar region to where Hubble saw its plumes before.

This suggests there is some sort of “thermal anomaly” in this area, notes Jia, from which Europa is emitting plumes. It’s unclear at the moment how continuous this process is, though, and that could be vital to scientists on two upcoming missions. [...]

And that has all kinds of crazy implications. Because the interior of Europa, and other icy moons like it, may contain the necessary ingredients for life, including water and energy in the form of heat. If they have hydrothermal vents at their ocean floor, as some suggest, then these could be prime locations for life to arise.

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