WorldAffairs: The Remains of ISIS

While the Islamic State no longer has any territory in the Middle East, its ability to recruit soldiers and engage in violence remains. In fact, its newly decentralized nature may make it even more effective in carrying out terrorist attacks. On this week's episode, Ali Soufan, former FBI special agent and author of “The Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State,” and Robin Wright, contributing writer to The New Yorker and fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, discuss the future of ISIS and the fate of tens of thousands of captured fighters and their families with WorldAffairs Co-Host Ray Suarez.

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The Guardian: Is fair trade finished?

Back then, the countries that grew these commodities and many others were still known as the Third World, and the habit of not caring about their farming conditions was a legacy of their colonial past. For centuries, trade propelled the colonial project, and exploitation was its very purpose. The farmers of Asia, Africa and South America were forced to raise the crops that the empire’s companies wanted, to work the crops in abject conditions, and to part with them at ruinously low prices. In the last century, the empires melted away but the trade remained lopsided – with the imbalance now rationalised by the market, which deemed it “efficient” to pay farmers as little as possible. In the 1970s, a Ghanaian cocoa farmer often received less than 10 cents out of every dollar his beans earned on the commodities market; as a proportion of the retail price of a chocolate bar, his take was smaller still. Child labour was common. The chocolate companies prospered and their customers shopped well; the farmers stayed poor. [...]

So Fairtrade works by forming a kind of “virtuous triangle” of ethical business. It recruits farmers and farming cooperatives as members, asking them to meet its standards; periodically, Fairtrade sends inspectors to these farms around the world, ensuring they are still compliant. At another vertex of the triangle, Fairtrade enlists companies to pay a minimum price for commodities from these member farms if market prices plunge, and offers to certify products made from such ethically sourced commodities. The final corner is the customer, who can, with a little counsel, be galvanised to shop consciously, and to buy Fairtrade-certified products even if they cost a few pence more. [...]

For shoppers, this promises bewildering times ahead at the supermarket: more and more instances of what people in the industry call “label fatigue”. The shelves already crawl with sustainability logos: more than 460 of them on food and beverage packages, and a third of them created over the last 15 years. There are little chromatic decals to testify that tuna is dolphin-friendly; that coffee is bird-friendly; that “wild-collected natural ingredients” are up to FairWild standards; that a slice of salmon is Salmon-Safe and follows Best Aquaculture Practices; that a bottle of wine is LIVE, which means that it fulfills Low Input Viticulture and Ecology benchmarks. One logo promises a carbon-free product, another a carbon-neutral one, and a third a carbon-reducing one. The more labels there are, the less we know about them – about what they stand for, and about how meaningful they are.

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BBC4 In Our Time: The Rapture

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the impact of the idea developed by John Nelson Darby that believers will vanish suddenly, 'to meet the Lord in the air' before the Second Coming.

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Jakub Marian: Map of ‘vegetarian friendliness’ (number of vegetarian restaurants) in Europe by country

The original idea of this article was to create a map showing the percentage of the population following a vegetarian diet, but it turned out to be impossible to find a reliable source of data for more than a handful of countries. Since there is correlation between supply and demand, I decided to create a map of the supply part instead (which, however, is affected by many other factors than just the percentage of vegetarians, e.g. tourism and overall wealth).

The following map is based on the number on entries at HappyCow, the largest directory of vegetarian restaurants in the world, and shows the number of vegetarian restaurants per 1 million inhabitants. It should be noted that the number can be somewhat misleading for tiny countries. For example, according to happycow.net, there is just one vegetarian restaurant in Andorra, but since it has only around 80,000 inhabitants, the figure shown here is “12.6 vegetarian restaurants per 1 million inhabitants”.

Note: The previous version of this map (from 2014) was inaccurate because it included also health food stores (which HappyCow includes in the number of listings shown for each country). To create the updated version, I checked the number of listings for all cities manually to make sure that only restaurants are included.

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PBS NewsHour: Is France's groundbreaking food-waste law working?

A third of the world's food goes to waste, but France is attempting to do something about it. Since 2016, large grocery stores in the country have been banned from throwing away unsold food that could be given away. NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Christopher Livesay reports from Paris as part of our "Future of Food" series, which is supported in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

Science Magazine: Turkish scientist gets 15-month sentence for publishing environmental study

The study was commissioned by Turkey’s Ministry of Health to see whether there was a connection between toxicity in soil, water, and food and the high incidence of cancer in western Turkey. Working for 5 years, Şık and a team of scientists discovered dangerous levels of pesticides, heavy metals, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in multiple food and water samples from several provinces in western Turkey. Water in several residential areas was also found to be unsafe for drinking because of lead, aluminum, chrome, and arsenic pollution.

In 2015, after the study was completed, Şık testified that he urged government officials to take action during a meeting to discuss the findings. After 3 years of inaction, Şık testified, he decided to publish his findings in Cumhuriyet, an Istanbul newspaper that has been a high-profile target in the government’s crackdown on media. (Bülent Şık is the brother of Ahmet Şık, an opposition member of Parliament and former investigative journalist at Cumhuriyet who was previously jailed for criticizing the government.) [...]

“[H]iding data obtained from research prevents us from having sound discussions about the solutions,” Şık said in a statement to the court provided to Science by his lawyer. “In my articles, I aimed to inform the public about this public health study, which was kept secret, and prompt the public authorities who should solve the problems to take action.”

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Associated Press: Russian minister: West out of step, can’t accept its decline

He pointedly scorned much of the “West,” a term Russian officials typically use to refer to the United States and its traditional allies in Europe. He accused them of manipulating their citizens, disseminating false information, and preventing journalists from doing their work — all charges that the West has long lobbed at the Russian government and its predecessor, the Soviet Union.

“It is hard for the West to accept seeing its centuries-long dominance in world affairs diminishing,” Lavrov said. “Leading Western countries are trying to impede the development of the polycentric world, to recover their privileged positions, to impose standards of conduct based on the narrow Western interpretation of liberalism on others.” [...]

Lavrov accused the West of maintaining a double standard: promoting liberal values where they’re convenient but discarding them when they’re not. “When it is advantageous, the right of the peoples to self-determination has significance. And when it is not, it is declared ‘illegal’,” he said.

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Nautilus Magazine: Why Symbols Aren’t Forever

Archaeology is often assumed to be limited to the realm of the ancients. However, the point of archaeology is not to dig up static moments in time from long ago but to use material items to track the ebbs and flows of human culture: to show how things change, how values change. We build statues, then later deface or demolish them. We create symbols, then alter their meanings. Some argue vehemently that monuments, such as Confederate statues, should be left in place—that their part in history should not be “erased.” But change is not an erasure of history; it is a part of it. [...]

People give symbols meaning, and as cultures change, so do the representations of that culture. Archaeologically, the swastika has been found in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, most often representing the cyclical and the positive: sun cycles, well-being, good fortune, auspiciousness, and consciousness. In 2019, we recognize the swastika as a symbol of hate and oppression—a symbol that is sadly being used ever more often in the era of Donald Trump’s United States presidency. To prevent further harm, my community acted quickly to remove the one spray-painted on our local school. [...]

Future archaeologists will find and interpret our community’s symbols to understand the values of our time. Perhaps thinking about the deep mark our actions will leave on the future historical record will hammer home the importance of the signs, names, statues, and symbols that we allow to persist in our society. We should ask what these cultural symbols say about our identity or our comfort with past ideologies. And if we don’t like the answer, then we should invest in a change.

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The Guardian: The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world

As the world gets hotter, scenes like these will become increasingly common. Buying an air conditioner is perhaps the most popular individual response to climate change, and air conditioners are almost uniquely power-hungry appliances: a small unit cooling a single room, on average, consumes more power than running four fridges, while a central unit cooling an average house uses more power than 15. “Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity was going to air conditioning,” says John Dulac, an analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA). “These are ‘oh shit’ moments.” [...]

What fuelled the rise of the air conditioning was not a sudden explosion in consumer demand, but the influence of the industries behind the great postwar housing boom. Between 1946 and 1965, 31m new homes were constructed in the US, and for the people building those houses, air conditioning was a godsend. Architects and construction companies no longer had to worry much about differences in climate – they could sell the same style of home just as easily in New Mexico as in Delaware. The prevailing mentality was that just about any problems caused by hot climates, cheap building materials, shoddy design or poor city planning could be overcome, as the American Institute of Architects wrote in 1973, “by the brute application of more air conditioning”. As Cooper writes, “Architects, builders and bankers accepted air conditioning first, and consumers were faced with a fait accompli that they merely had to ratify.” [...]

As the rate and scale of building intensified, traditional architectural methods for mitigating hot temperatures were jettisoned. Leena Thomas, an Indian professor of architecture at the University of Technology in Sydney, told me that in Delhi in the early 1990s older forms of building design – which had dealt with heat through window screens, or facades and brise-soleils – were slowly displaced by American or European styles. “I would say that this international style has a lot to answer for,” she said. Just like the US in the 20th century, but on an even greater scale, homes and offices were increasingly being built in such a way that made air conditioning indispensable. “Developers were building without thinking,” says Rajan Rawal, a professor of architecture and city planning at Cept University in Ahmedabad. “The speed of construction that was required created pressure. So they simply built and relied on technology to fix it later.” [...]

One step towards solving the problem presented by air conditioning – and one that doesn’t require a complete overhaul of the modern city – would be to build a better air conditioner. There is plenty of room for improvement. The invention of air conditioning predates both the first aeroplane and the first public radio broadcast, and the underlying technology has not changed much since 1902. “Everything is still based on the vapour compression cycle; same as a refrigerator. It’s effectively the same process as a century ago,” says Colin Goodwin, the technical director of the Building Services Research and Information Association. “What has happened is we’ve expanded the affordability of the air conditioner, but as far as efficiency, they’ve improved but they haven’t leaped.” [...]

Researchers have also shown that people who live in hotter areas, even for a very short time, are comfortable at higher indoor temperatures. They contend that, whether it is a state of mind or a biological adjustment, human comfort is adaptive, not objective. This is something that seems obvious to many people who live with these temperatures. At a recent conference on air conditioning that I attended in London, an Indian delegate chided the crowd: “If I can work and function at 30C, you could too – believe you me.”  

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The Guardian: The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media

The problem is that widespread knowledge of the dangers of addiction does not stop it from happening. Likewise, we know by now that if social media platforms get us addicted, they are working well. The more they wreck our lives, the better they are functioning. Yet we persist. Some of this can be explained away by the manner in which addiction organises our attention. The platforms, like gambling machines, are experts at disguising losses as wins. These work thanks to an effect similar to that exploited by practitioners of “cold reading” and psychic tricks: we attend to the pleasurable hits and ignore the disappointing misses. We focus on the buzz of winning, not the cost of playing the game, and not the opportunities lost by playing. And if occasionally the habit threatens to crush us, we can fantasise that one day a big win will save us. But to explain away behaviour is not really to explain it. It is to collude in the rationalisation of behaviour that may not be rational. [...]

With social media addiction, there are many more variables than with drugs, so it is hard to know where to begin. The designers of the smartphone or tablet interface, for example, have made sure that it is pleasurable to engage with, hold, or even just to look at. The urge to reach, irritably, for the device during meals, conversations, parties and upon awakening, can partly be attributed to lust for the object and the soft, nacreous glow of the screen. Once we have navigated to the app, it is the platform designers who take control. For the duration of our visit, life is briefly streamlined, as with a video game, into a single visual flow, a set of soluble challenges, some dangled rewards and a game of chance. But the variety of possible experiences include voyeurism, approval and disapproval, gaming, news, nostalgia, socialising and regular social comparisons. If we are addicted, we might just be addicted to the activities that the platforms enable, from gambling to shopping to spying on “friends”. [...]

The platforms don’t organise our experience according to a masterplan. As the sociologist Benjamin Bratton puts it, the mechanism is “strict and invariable”, but within that “autocracy of means”, the user is granted a relative “liberty of ends”. The protocols of the platform standardise and order the interactions of users. They use incentives and choke points to keep people committed to the machine. They manipulate ends for the benefit of their real clients – other firms. They bombard us with stimuli, learning from our responses, the better to teach us how to be the market demographic we have been identified as. But they do not force us to stay there, or tell us what to do with the hours spent on the platform. Even more so than in the case of drugs, then, the toxicity is something we as users bring to the game.

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BBC4 In Our Time: Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how, in September 1812, Napoleon captured Moscow and waited a month for the Russians to meet him, to surrender and why, to his dismay, no-one came. Soon his triumph was revealed as a great defeat; winter was coming, supplies were low; he ordered his Grande Armée of six hundred thousand to retreat and, by the time he crossed back over the border, desertion, disease, capture, Cossacks and cold had reduced that to twenty thousand. Napoleon had shown his weakness; his Prussian allies changed sides and, within eighteen months they, the Russians and Austrians had captured Paris and the Emperor was exiled to Elba.

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Politico: The End of the German-American Affair

At both the official and unofficial level, the foundation that has supported the transatlantic alliance since the 1950s is crumbling. About 85 percent of Germans consider their country’s relationship with the U.S. to be “bad” or “very bad,” according to a recent study, while a clear majority want Germany to distance itself from the U.S.

Angela Merkel is in the United States this week for the United Nations climate conference but a meeting with the U.S. president, who is also in New York, is not on her agenda. Merkel didn’t see Trump during her last visit to the U.S. in May either. [...]

Merkel's role in America's culture wars, where — depending on the stage — she plays either the villain who opened the floodgates to uncontrolled Muslim migration, or the saint who rescued people in need, has complicated Germany's PR effort. That was apparent during the German leader's May visit, when she was celebrated like a lost savior during her commencement speech to Harvard graduates. [...]

But the “difficult topics” that Merkel referenced dominate the official conversation. Whether the question is Iran, trade, defense spending or climate change, Berlin and Washington are at loggerheads. Even in areas where strategic logic should make them natural allies — such as confronting China’s growing influence — the two have failed to move beyond their differences. [...]

In truth, the U.S.-German alliance has never been a partnership of equals. Tension has been part of the mix throughout the post-war era to varying degrees. If Konrad Adenauer and John F. Kennedy shared a mutual dislike, Helmut Schmidt and Jimmy Carter absolutely despised one another. [...]

The German distrust began to take hold in the aftermath of 9/11. Though Germany joined the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan against the Taliban, Berlin refused to participate in the Iraq War, arguing there wasn’t enough evidence to support claims that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

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The Memory Palace: Safe Passage

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Vox: The gun solution we're not talking about

It seems like after every mass shooting, politicians talk about expanding background checks for gun buyers. But background checks don't actually do a great job of keeping dangerous people from getting guns. What does? A licensing system, where before you can buy a gun, you need a license from the state.

The Guardian: Why can’t we agree on what’s true any more?

Much of the outrage that floods social media, occasionally leaking into opinion columns and broadcast interviews, is not simply a reaction to events themselves, but to the way in which they are reported and framed. The “mainstream media” is the principal focal point for this anger. Journalists and broadcasters who purport to be neutral are a constant object of scrutiny and derision, whenever they appear to let their personal views slip. The work of journalists involves an increasing amount of unscripted, real-time discussion, which provides an occasionally troubling window into their thinking.  [...]

This mentality now spans the entire political spectrum and pervades societies around the world. A recent survey found that the majority of people globally believe their society is broken and their economy is rigged. Both the left and the right feel misrepresented and misunderstood by political institutions and the media, but the anger is shared by many in the liberal centre, who believe that populists have gamed the system to harvest more attention than they deserve. Outrage with “mainstream” institutions has become a mass sentiment. [...]

This is not as simple as distrust. The appearance of digital platforms, smartphones and the ubiquitous surveillance they enable has ushered in a new public mood that is instinctively suspicious of anyone claiming to describe reality in a fair and objective fashion. It is a mindset that begins with legitimate curiosity about what motivates a given media story, but which ends in a Trumpian refusal to accept any mainstream or official account of the world. We can all probably locate ourselves somewhere on this spectrum, between the curiosity of the engaged citizen and the corrosive cynicism of the climate denier. The question is whether this mentality is doing us any good, either individually or collectively. [...]

The ubiquity of digital technology has thrown all of this up in the air. Things no longer need to be judged “important” to be captured. Consciously, we photograph events and record experiences regardless of their importance. Unconsciously, we leave a trace of our behaviour every time we swipe a smart card, address Amazon’s Alexa or touch our phone. For the first time in human history, recording now happens by default, and the question of significance is addressed separately.

This shift has prompted an unrealistic set of expectations regarding possibilities for human knowledge. As many of the original evangelists of big data liked to claim, when everything is being recorded, our knowledge of the world no longer needs to be mediated by professionals, experts, institutions and theories. Instead, they argued that the data can simply “speak for itself”. Patterns will emerge, traces will come to light. This holds out the prospect of some purer truth than the one presented to us by professional editors or trained experts. As the Australian surveillance scholar Mark Andrejevic has brilliantly articulated, this is a fantasy of a truth unpolluted by any deliberate human intervention – the ultimate in scientific objectivity.

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Spiegel: Germany's Vanishing Monasteries

There was a time when as many as 300 monks lived here, in the Archabbey of the Benedictines in Beuron, in the southwestern corner of Germany. But that was 90 years ago. Now, that number has shrunk to 39 -- and is likely to continue to fall. The monks' average age is 68. The oldest is 91. Archabbott Tutilo Burger, who has headed the abbey since 2011, has no illusions. "We'll be around for another 30 years," says the 53-year-old.

Around 1960, there were still about 110,000 nuns and monks in Germany. Twenty years ago, there were 38,348. Now, there are about 17,900.

German society is moving away from spirituality, from religion, and especially from the church. This development is felt particularly strongly among religious orders. They are dying out. Everywhere, monasteries and convents are disappearing. [...]

Germany's monasteries are also placing a greater emphasis on tourism. In Beuron, the guest wing is now the most economically successful division of the archabbey. It offers a space for contemplation for stressed out city-dwellers. Archabbott Burger finds it important that the Benedictines offer visitors "hospitality, not wellness." [...]

Monasteries are being disbanded and their buildings put up for sale. They can often be found on real-estate portals, listed as "property with character." Specialized agents can get prices in the millions for the old buildings. They are then turned into co-working spaces or luxury housing.  

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Politico: America, the Gerontocracy

It doesn’t stop there. We heard a lot last November about the fresh new blood entering Congress, but when the current session began in January, the average ages of House and Senate members were 58 and 63, respectively. That’s slightly older than the previous Congress (58 and 62), which was already among the oldest in history. The average age in Congress declined through the 1970s but it’s mostly increased since the 1980s. [...]

America’s ruling class is of course more nimble than the Politburo ever was. And indeed, the two Democratic presidential candidates proposing the most dramatic departure from the status quo are Bernie Sanders, who’ll turn 78 on September 8, and Elizabeth Warren, who’s 70. Still, there’s something to be said for youth and vigor. John F. Kennedy (then 43) tapped into that feeling in his 1960 bid to succeed Dwight D. Eisenhower (then 70) when he campaigned on the slogan, “Let’s get America moving again.”  [...]

In a November 2015 Atlantic article, Rauch plotted experience level for presidential candidates from 1960 to 2012. His graph showed a clear increase in experience level among the losers and a corresponding decrease among the winners. Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter. George H.W. Bush won with more political experience than Michael Dukakis, but four years later lost to Bill Clinton, who had less. John McCain lost to Barack Obama, who’d been in national politics a mere four years. [...]

It also may help explain why racial tolerance seems in some respects to be in decline, as measured, for instance, by the unnerving quasi-respectability afforded white nationalism by some mainstream players in national politics (including Trump). The elderly, polls show, are in the aggregate less concerned about racial prejudice than the young. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found a 21-point spread between the elderly and young adults (18-29) when they were asked whether racial discrimination was the “main reason many blacks can’t get ahead,” with 54 percent of young adults answering in the affirmative but only 33 percent of the elderly. The age divide on this question was almost as wide as the 24-point divide between black respondents and white.  

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The Atlantic: The End of Netanyahu’s Unchecked Reign

Then, something odd happened: Avigdor Lieberman, who had been Netanyahu’s right-hand man in the 1990s and later served under him as foreign minister and then defense minister, refused to join the right-wing coalition with his small party unless a bill was passed aimed at military conscription of ultra-Orthodox men. This was an act of political theater—the bill would not have changed very much—but to everyone’s surprise, Lieberman held out until Netanyahu’s mandate to form a government expired. Legally, the president of Israel would then have had to task another member of Knesset with forming a government, essentially barring Netanyahu from the role. To prevent this, Netanyahu pushed the Knesset to dissolve itself and call for a second national election in less than six months.[...]

In the elections to the 11th Knesset in 1984, the Alignment (based around Labor) received 44 seats to the Likud’s 41. Neither bloc had a majority. The country was deadlocked, with no coalition in sight. The president at the time, Chaim Herzog, intervened, twisting arms and cajoling both parties to form a joint government. The two parties even agreed to a rotation in the prime minister’s post: Shimon Peres of Labor was prime minister for the first two years, and Yitzhak Shamir of the Likud led the country for another two (and then beyond). The government could agree on nothing in terms of negotiations with Israel’s Arab neighbors, producing a “national paralysis government” in foreign affairs, but it was one of Israel’s most successful governments in terms of domestic policy. Inflation, which hit an astounding 445 percent in 1984, was brought down to 16.4 percent by 1988. Israel also withdrew from most of Lebanon’s territory, downscaling a bloody intervention. [...]

Most Israeli policy would not change with a different prime minister. The basic attitudes of Lieberman, Likud, and Blue and White on Iran, on Hezbollah, on Hamas, on world relations, and even on the prospects of achieving peace with the Palestinians, are all more or less in consensus. A Gantz government would at least hope for a different outcome with the Palestinians and would take a slightly different approach to managing the protracted interim—a small but meaningful difference. But in terms of actionable policy, continuity would be the rule. [...]

In the days leading up to the elections, Amos Harel and Chaim Levinson of Haaretz reported that Netanyahu was actually prepared to launch a major escalation in the Gaza Strip, necessitating the postponement of the election, all without properly consulting the security chiefs. Only after their adamant objections and the intervention of the attorney general, who demanded a proper process for such a decision, was the plan set aside. The cautious Netanyahu of old, who held national security above any other considerations, is simply gone.  

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The New Yorker: The Right Wing’s War on the L.G.B.T.Q. Community

An Arizona Supreme Court ruling on Monday provided further evidence that gay rights are under siege in this country. Other recent events show that the Trump Administration is leading the assault. The Arizona court held that Brush & Nib Studio, a Phoenix-based company that makes customized wedding invitations, has the legal right to reject a gay couple as customers. Even though Phoenix has a local law that prohibits discrimination against the L.G.B.T.Q. community, the court ruled that the religious convictions of the business owners exempted them from the obligation to treat all customers equally. According to the court, designing wedding invitations is a creative act; to compel the owners to design an invitation against their will violates their rights both to freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

The opinion treats the business owners—two women—as a beleaguered minority. Their “beliefs about same-sex marriage may seem old-fashioned, or even offensive to some,” the court wrote. “But the guarantees of free speech and freedom of religion are not only for those who are deemed sufficiently enlightened, advanced, or progressive. They are for everyone.” This, to put it charitably, is nonsense. The owners of Brush & Nib are free to believe anything they want. What they should not be allowed to do is to use those beliefs to run a business that is open to the general public but closed to gay people.  [...]

Of course, it’s not clear that the Supreme Court will uphold these discriminatory practices. In the famous Masterpiece Cakeshop case, in 2017, which involved a Colorado baker who had refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, the Court dodged the issue. (The Court ruled for the baker, on the ground that Colorado officials, specifically the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, had behaved improperly, in a non-neutral manner.) But anyone counting on the current Supreme Court to protect the rights of any minorities, including the L.G.B.T.Q. community, is almost certainly looking for disappointment. That may become even clearer this term, when the Justices hear three cases on the question of whether the Civil Rights Act forbids employers from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity as it does on the basis of race or sex. These cases will be the first to address the rights of gay Americans since Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was clearly supportive of them, stepped down and was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who is not. The President and his allies boast of their tolerance and enlightenment on L.G.B.T.Q. issues, but facts stubbornly suggest that they are hurting the cause in every way they can.  

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BBC: Germany’s tiny geographic oddity

The village’s eastern border lies a mere 700m from the rest of the Federal Republic of Germany. And while politically this town of about 1,450 inhabitants belongs to Germany, economically it’s part of Switzerland. [...]

Still, for residents, living a binational life brings up daily contradictions and choices. Although commerce is typically conducted in Swiss francs and most residents work in nearby, larger Swiss towns, they still must pay the higher German income taxes. Children go to a local (German) primary school, but parents decide in which country they’ll attend high school. Likewise, Büsingen locals have both German and Swiss postal and international telephone codes: callers can dial either Germany’s +49 or Switzerland’s +41, and still ring a resident. And perhaps most notably, the town’s football club is the only German team allowed to play in the Swiss league. [...]

Others have discovered that too. Because Germany offers a tax break for pensioners, Büsingen attracts retired Swiss residents. The result: “The young people go to Switzerland, and the old people come here. The village gets older every day,” said Rainer Krause, whose daughter runs Restaurant Waldheim on the international border.

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Politico: Bolton unloads on Trump’s foreign policy behind closed doors

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s fired national security adviser, harshly criticized Trump’s foreign policy on Wednesday at a private lunch, saying that inviting the Taliban to Camp David sent a “terrible signal” and that it was “disrespectful” to the victims of 9/11 because the Taliban had harbored al Qaeda. [...]

Speaking on an airport tarmac in Los Angeles, Trump introduced his new top foreign policy aide as “highly respected” and hailed their “good chemistry.” The remarks indicated that in O’Brien, Trump sees a more compatible adviser than Bolton, whose disagreements with the president and clashes with other senior officials often spilled into public view.

After the attack in June, Trump was poised to launch a military response against the Iranians — strongly urged by Bolton — but pulled back after Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others warned him that it was a bad idea. [...]

On Venezuela, a focus of his short White House tenure, Bolton claimed there were 20,000 to 25,000 Cuban troops in the South American country. The day they left, he predicted, the Nicholas Maduro regime would fall by midnight.

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The Guardian: 'It has got worse': Boris Johnson 'hamstrung' by rift with Sajid Javid

They said No 10 was becoming increasingly annoyed by what it regarded as Javid’s intransigence, and was sidelining him in favour of Rishi Sunak, the chief secretary to the Treasury, with departments being directed to talk to him rather than the chancellor.

Insiders said Javid was still without a chief media adviser after Sonia Khan was sacked by Johnson’s chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, and marched out of the building for maintaining contact with an associate of the previous chancellor Philip Hammond. [...]

The episode underlined simmering tensions over the summer between Downing Street and the Treasury. Javid was ordered by No 10 to scrap a planned speech on the economy, while Downing Street took the lead in announcing spending plans for health, police and prisons.

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CNN: The US Navy just confirmed these UFO videos are the real deal

(CNN)The US Navy has finally acknowledged footage purported to show UFOs hurtling through the air. And while officials said they don't know what the objects are, they're not indulging any hints either.

The objects seen in three clips of declassified military footage are "unidentified aerial phenomena," Navy spokesperson Joe Gradisher confirmed to CNN.

The clips, released between December 2017 and March 2018 by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, appear to show fast-moving, oblong objects captured by advanced infrared sensors.

In footage from 2004, sensors lock on a target as it flies before it accelerates out of the left side of the frame, too quickly for the sensors to relocate it.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Christian Right Is Helping Drive Liberals Away From Religion

Researchers haven’t found a comprehensive explanation for why the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans has increased over the past few years — the shift is too large and too complex. But a recent swell of social science research suggests that even if politics wasn’t the sole culprit, it was an important contributor. “Politics can drive whether you identify with a faith, how strongly you identify with that faith, and how religious you are,” said Michele Margolis, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity.” “And some people on the left are falling away from religion because they see it as so wrapped up with Republican politics.”

Over the course of a single generation, the country has gotten a lot less religious. As recently as the early 1990s, less than 10 percent of Americans lacked a formal religious affiliation, and liberals weren’t all that much likelier to be nonreligious than the public overall. Today, however, nearly one in four Americans are religiously unaffiliated. That includes almost 40 percent of liberals — up from 12 percent in 1990, according to the 2018 General Social Survey.1 The share of conservatives and moderates who have no religion, meanwhile, has risen less dramatically. [...]

To be sure, religious belief and practice can still exist without a label. Many people who are religiously unaffiliated still believe in God, or slip back into the pews a few times a year. But liberals are also cutting ties with religious institutions — since 1990, the share of liberals who never attend religious services has tripled. And they’re less likely to believe in God: The percentage of liberals who say they know God exists fell from 53 percent in 1991 to 36 percent in 2018. [...]

Other research showed that the blend of religious activism and Republican politics likely played a significant role in increasing the number of religiously unaffiliated people. One study, for instance, found that something as simple as reading a news story about a Republican who spoke in a church could actually prompt some Democrats to say they were nonreligious. “It’s like an allergic reaction to the mixture of Republican politics and religion,” said David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame and one of the study’s co-authors.

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Vox: Israel’s election results show Netanyahu is in serious trouble

There’s a center-left alliance, which includes down-the-middle Blue and White, center-left Labor, the left-wing Democratic Union, and the Arab minority’s Joint List (which came in a strong third in this election). Then there’s a right-wing grouping, which includes Likud, the ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, and the pro-West Bank settlement Yamina. (Another right-wing party, the Jewish supremacist Otzma Yehudit, failed to get enough votes to enter the Knesset). [...]

Lieberman is extremely hawkish on security and the Palestinians; he supports annexing part of the West Bank. This aligns Yisrael Beiteinu with the right-wing bloc; indeed, Lieberman had served in Netanyahu’s cabinet in the past.

However, Lieberman’s voting base — made up significantly of voters from Russian backgrounds — is also relatively secular and resentful of the privileges the ultra-Orthodox have in Israeli society. After Israel’s last election in April, Lieberman refused to join Netanyahu’s coalition unless Netanyahu agreed to a bill undermining the exemption from mandatory military service provided to ultra-Orthodox men. Netanyahu refused to avoid losing ultra-Orthodox support, but without Lieberman’s backing, he didn’t have enough votes for a parliamentary majority. So he chose to call new elections in September with an eye toward winning a more secure majority. [...]

Netanyahu could remain prime minister in some fashion — perhaps if he agrees to step down when the criminal indictment against him is formally filed. Gantz could end up sole prime minister. Another Likud member could end up with the top job, fulfilling Gantz’s condition that Netanyahu no longer hold the premiership. The wackiest scenario is that the parties could quite literally share power — with Gantz and some Likud leader taking turns holding the top job. This has happened before in Israeli politics, weird as it sounds.

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Reuters: Millions may risk jail as Indonesia to outlaw sex outside marriage

The new criminal code is due to be adopted in the next week after parliament and the government agreed a final draft on Wednesday, four parliamentarians told Reuters.

Lawmakers told Reuters that the new penal code, which would replace a Dutch colonial-era set of laws, was a long overdue expression of Indonesian independence and religiosity.

“The state must protect citizens from behavior that is contrary to the supreme precepts of God,” said Nasir Djamil, a politician from the Prosperous Justice Party. He said leaders of all religions had been consulted on the changes given that Indonesia’s founding ideology was based on belief in God. [...]

The Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, an NGO, said millions of Indonesians could be ensnared by the new laws. It noted a study indicating that 40 per cent of Indonesian adolescents engaged in pre-marital sexual activity. [...]

The code also establishes prison terms for those found to commit “obscene acts”, defined as violating norms of decency and politeness through “lust or sexuality”, whether by heterosexuals or gay people.

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euronews: This report tallied the human and economic toll of gun violence in all 50 states. The cost is staggering.

U.S. teens and young adults, ages 15-24, are 50 times more likely to die by gun violence than they are in other economically advanced countries, according to the 50-state breakdown.

In 2017 — the year of a mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 and injured hundreds — nearly 40,000 people died from gun-related injuries, including 2,500 school children, the report said, noting that six in 10 gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides. [...]

Rural states, meanwhile, have the highest rates of gun deaths and bear the largest costs as a share of their economies. Nationally, the cost of gun violence in the U.S. runs $229 billion a year, or 1.4 percent of the gross domestic product, the report said. [...]

The report noted, however, that the economic toll of gun violence is difficult to measure because of a decades-old federal prohibition on funding for research into the problem. Since 1996, Congress has added a little-known amendment to spending legislation that prohibits the use federal funds to advocate or promote gun control. While lawmakers clarified the provision in aspending package last year, stating that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can conduct research on the causes of gun violence, no money was allocated for such research. [...]

It also found economically deprived areas outside of rural America are also hit hard. About 7,500 African Americans die from gun violence every year, the report said — making it 20 times more likely that a young black male will die by a firearm homicide than a white peer.

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The Guardian: Arlene Foster signals DUP shift on Northern Ireland border issue

In a break with previous rhetoric where she has strongly opposed treating the region differently to the rest of the UK, Foster said the final deal would have to recognise Northern Ireland’s unique historical and geographical position and the fact it will be the UK’s only land border with the EU.

Asked by reporters if it was possible to see Northern Ireland-only solutions that would not affect the constitutional link with Great Britain, she replied: “Well I hope so.” [...]

She made clear that her idea of an acceptable Northern Ireland-only solution was different to mooted proposals for a Northern Ireland-only backstop, which she said “would bring about customs [checks] between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and that is unconstitutional and undemocratic”. [...]

Echoing words of the party’s chief whip Sir Jeffrey Donaldson earlier this week, she said the solution lay in a joint letter she co-authored with the late leader of Sinn Féin, Martin McGuinness, in August 2016, a document rarely referred to by the DUP in the past two years.

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Politico: Kamala Harris bets it all on Iowa to break freefall

The re-engagement in Iowa — where the California senator held a 17-stop bus tour in August but hasn’t returned since — is part of a broader acknowledgment inside the campaign that she hasn’t been in the early states enough. It's designed to refocus her campaign and clarify her narrowing path to the nomination.

Harris has been backsliding since her summer confrontation with Joe Biden, dropping so far in recent surveys that her once-promising campaign appears in danger of becoming an afterthought. [...]

Campaign officials and top surrogates said that she’s unlikely to claw out of the rut with a single breakout moment. They described her upcoming efforts as an attempt at a slow reemergence they hope materializes by stringing together consistent performances. [...]

Harris, who held recent fundraisers in New York, Connecticut and Baltimore, has prioritized fundraising during the third quarter of the year. She didn’t start her campaign with the advantages of her higher-polling rivals, including Biden and Sanders, who came in with massive donor networks, or Warren, who transferred more than $10 million from her 2018 Senate campaign. Warren has since sworn off big-dollar events for the primary, giving her time to stretch the primary map and spend hours and hours with supporters in selfie lines.

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The Guardian: Justin Trudeau: the rise and fall of a political brand

One of the extraordinary things about Trudeau is that he is famous in part because he is Canadian – a remarkably rare kind of fame. Most Canadians who are famous outside of the country have been processed through Hollywood or the US-dominated recording industry. Part of Trudeau’s appeal within Canada, then, is that he assuaged a dual sense of cultural insecurity and superiority, especially with regard to the country’s belligerent southern neighbour. (The majority of Canadians see Trudeau’s fame as a net benefit to the country, according to the Angus Reid Institute.) On the global stage he presented a sort of ideal form – likable, handsome, virtuous – in which the country could see its best self. [...]

As Trudeau took office, his focus on optics was on full display. The often sedate swearing-in of a new government was thrown open to the public and turned into a highly stage-managed, live-streamed event. Trudeau was due to arrive by coach at the prime minister’s official residence, 24 Sussex Drive, where he spent his childhood. (The house has been under renovation since Trudeau took office, and he and his family have been living in a 22-room guest house nearby.) To avoid any inelegant photos or video – “Getting off a bus is such an ugly shot,” Trudeau told his communications director that morning, in comments captured by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – Trudeau’s team misled the media about where they should meet the new prime minister, ensuring that the first images the press got were of him strolling from 24 Sussex to the governor general’s official residence, Rideau Hall, where the ceremony would take place. At another point that morning, Trudeau and his team were preparing to respond to the question of why he was appointing a gender-balanced cabinet. “I think just calling people’s attention to the year is all you really need to say,” Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s right-hand man, told him. The advice yielded one of Trudeau’s most internationally famous lines: “Because it’s 2015.” [...]

A vital part of Trudeau’s brand was the contrast between him and the far-right politicians gaining ground around the world. In the US, Trump was on a journey that in some ways echoed Trudeau’s, parlaying his celebrity status into political power. When it came to optics, though, “Trump was a gift” for Trudeau, says Philippe Garneau, a corporate branding executive whose brother Marc ran against Trudeau for the Liberal leadership and is a minister in Trudeau’s cabinet. “I remember being worried. I said: ‘How can we put a man who has a degree in teaching and [who taught] drama, sit him down with Angela Merkel and across from Putin?’ And in walks Potus and upsets the whole apple cart,” Garneau went on. “So Trudeau got lucky. He was never shown to be the youngest, newest, greenest member at the table, but rather some sort of version of youthful exuberance, enthusiasm, optimism and a lack of cynicism.”[...]

Caesar-Chavannes gave me a number of examples of this sort of policymaking. Trudeau’s government legalised marijuana but rebuffed a call to expunge the records of those convicted of simple possession, even though prosecutions had disproportionately targeted people with low-incomes and Canadians of colour. Trudeau appointed a gender-balanced cabinet, but refused to reform the country’s electoral system, which would have paved the way for more female lawmakers. He promised a “total renewal” of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous communities, but his government has done little to address the mould-ridden housing and lack of clean drinking water that has left many Indigenous communities living in “Haiti at -40C”, as a politician from the New Democratic party has put it. After vowing to prioritise the fight against climate change and criticising Saudi Arabia’s treatment of human rights advocates, Trudeau’s government bought a C$4.5bn (£2.8bn) pipeline to better transport Alberta’s landlocked bitumen to international markets and signed off on the sale of more than 900 armoured vehicles to Riyadh. And, after much of the international hype over its welcoming stance on refugees had died down, the government quietly introduced legislation this April that makes it harder for some migrants to seek asylum. Advertisement

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The Atlantic: A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked

The Bereitschaftspotential was never meant to get entangled in free-will debates. If anything, it was pursued to show that the brain has a will of sorts. The two German scientists who discovered it, a young neurologist named Hans Helmut Kornhuber and his doctoral student Lüder Deecke, had grown frustrated with their era’s scientific approach to the brain as a passive machine that merely produces thoughts and actions in response to the outside world. Over lunch in 1964, the pair decided that they would figure out how the brain works to spontaneously generate an action. “Kornhuber and I believed in free will,” says Deecke, who is now 81 and lives in Vienna. [...]

What the Bereitschaftspotential actually meant, however, was anyone’s guess. Its rising pattern appeared to reflect the dominoes of neural activity falling one by one on a track toward a person doing something. Scientists explained the Bereitschaftspotential as the electrophysiological sign of planning and initiating an action. Baked into that idea was the implicit assumption that the Bereitschaftspotential causes that action. The assumption was so natural, in fact, no one second-guessed it—or tested it.

Libet, a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, questioned the Bereitschaftspotential in a different way. Why does it take half a second or so between deciding to tap a finger and actually doing it? He repeated Kornhuber and Deecke’s experiment, but asked his participants to watch a clocklike apparatus so that they could remember the moment they made a decision. The results showed that while the Bereitschaftspotential started to rise about 500 milliseconds before the participants performed an action, they reported their decision to take that action only about 150 milliseconds beforehand. “The brain evidently ‘decides’ to initiate the act” before a person is even aware that decision has taken place, Libet concluded. [...]

In a new study under review for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schurger and two Princeton researchers repeated a version of Libet’s experiment. To avoid unintentionally cherry-picking brain noise, they included a control condition in which people didn’t move at all. An artificial-intelligence classifier allowed them to find at what point brain activity in the two conditions diverged. If Libet was right, that should have happened at 500 milliseconds before the movement. But the algorithm couldn’t tell any difference until about only 150 milliseconds before the movement, the time people reported making decisions in Libet’s original experiment.

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The Guardian: Inside the bizarre, bungled raid on North Korea's Madrid embassy

Diplomatic defections are one of North Korea’s most visible problems, and in recent years there have been two high-profile cases. Just a few months before the embassy raid, in late 2018, the acting ambassador to Italy had abandoned his post and gone into hiding. Two years earlier, the deputy ambassador in London, Thae Yong-ho, became the most senior North Korean official to defect to South Korea. [...]

After the attackers fled, in the days and weeks that followed, details about their identities and aims started to trickle out, leaving as many questions as answers. The group seemed to be largely comprised of Korean Americans, South Koreans and North Korean defectors. But who were they? What did they want? Why did they fly across the world to attack an embassy in Europe? And what was the significance of the fact that one alleged member of the group turned out to have impressive connections within Washington? [...]

Far from being the bunkered fortress that one might expect, the Madrid embassy is a low, beige and brown building, surrounded by rough land, with rickety- looking security cameras and the sort of low walls that a bored teenager might be tempted to jump. It is an easy, isolated target, sitting on an island of scrubby, undeveloped land in a remote corner of Madrid’s exclusive Moncloa-Aravaca neighbourhood. That, Lankov told me, might help explain why it was chosen for the raid. Apart from three embassy cars, a thief would have found little of value inside. North Korea is poor, and economic sanctions are hitting hard. The cash-strapped embassy housed just one diplomat, his family and three “administrative staff” (plus one staff member’s wife), who also did the gardening and acted as doormen. In sweltering Madrid, the embassy has a single air-conditioning unit that is wheeled out for visitors. The building’s insurance policy lapsed last year.

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UnHerd: A dire warning for our old political system

That’s partly because the barriers to entry for anybody aspiring to replace them are pretty damned high, particularly in plurality systems such as the UK’s. Historically, anyway, it’s been somewhere between difficult and impossible for any party that can’t manage to score around 30% of the nationwide vote here to break through — unless, like the Scottish and Welsh nationalists or the Northern Ireland parties, they can claim to speak for a particular part of the country with a particularly strong identity. Nigel Farage, in offering the Tories some kind of electoral pact with the Brexit Party, isn’t so much doing them a favour as trying to prevent a re-run of 2015 when Ukip won nearly four million votes and only one solitary seat. [...]

What established parties do find difficult to escape, however, is being rendered increasingly irrelevant by social, economic and cultural change. Most of them will have come into being by mobilising identities that once upon a time were not only widespread, and made a lot of sense, but were also institutionally reinforced by relationships with big external players that both anchored them ideologically and supplied them with valuable resources. [...]

It is no accident, then, that it is parties in those traditions which (with a few honourable exceptions) seem to be suffering a slow (and, who knows, possibly in the end terminal) decline: what’s happened to both the Labour Party and Christian democrats in the Netherlands provides possibly the direst warning. This decline has been exacerbated in recent years by a failure to come up with convincing answers to widely-felt cultural anxieties brought about by mass immigration and its exploitation by arguably less responsible, but supposedly more responsive (and often more entrepreneurial) politicians – in their case, Geert Wilders and now Thierry Baudet.

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Nautilus Magazine: What Color Really Evolved For

These studies also have further implications. For one, the finding that melanosomes are so common inside animals’ bodies may overhaul our very understanding of melanin’s function, says McNamara. “There’s the potential that melanin didn’t evolve for color at all,” she said. “That role may actually be secondary to much more important physiological functions.” Her research indicates that it may have an important role in homeostasis, or regulation of the internal chemical and physical state of the body, and the balance of its metallic elements. “A big question now is does this apply to the first, most primitive vertebrates?” said McNamara. “Can we find fossil evidence of this? Which function of melanin is evolutionarily primitive—production of color or homeostasis?”

At the same time, the findings imply that we may need to review our understanding of the colors of ancient animals. That’s because fossil melanosomes previously assumed to represent external hues may in fact be from internal tissues, especially if the fossil has been disturbed over time. McNamara says her research has also shown that melanosomes can change shape and shrink over the course of millions of years, potentially affecting color reconstructions. [...]

Shawkey is looking into such questions, with one of his recent studies indicating that the wing color of birds may play an important role in flight efficiency by leading to different rates of heating. “What started as a novelty of deciphering dinosaur colors has turned into a very serious field which is studying the origins of key pigment systems, how the evolution of colorful structures may have helped drive major evolutionary transitions like the origin of flight, and how color is related to ecology and sexual selection,” said Steve Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh. “When I was growing up, so many of the dinosaur books I read in school said that we would never know what color they were. But as is so often the case in science, it was silly to treat this as impossible.”

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VOX: John Bolton left because Trump wouldn’t let him start a war (Sept 10, 2019)

When Bolton joined the administration in April 2018, the worry was that the arch nationalist hawk would convince the war-averse Trump to see the world as he did. Here was a guy who for decades called for bombing North Korea and Iran, exercising unilateral American power around the world, and cutting tethers to international institutions.

Bolton actually had a thought-out worldview that in many ways mirrored Trump’s. The question was if the top aide could channel the president’s instincts into actions that he has long wanted an administration to embrace. [...]

He has certainly threatened conflict before, going so far as to risk nuclear war with North Korea to persuade Kim Jong Un to come the negotiating table (remember “fire and fury?”). And he’s more willing to use military force than Obama, twice bombing Syria and escalating airstrikes on ISIS and other terrorists worldwide. He’s even continued and augmented US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

Still, Trump has walked back every chance he’s had to escalate to the highest level tensions with adversaries. That was always going to put Trump’s “America First” in conflict with Bolton’s “America Everywhere.”

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Politico: Putin’s party takes hit in Moscow election (9/9/19)

Yabloko, a tiny perestroika-era liberal party, won four seats. Its leader Sergei Mitrokhin was initially banned from standing at the polls but was reinstated after a court in Moscow ruled in his favor. “This is a massive achievement,” said Vitali Shkliarov, a political analyst who advised the party. Shkliarov added it is the first time genuine opposition candidates have been elected to the City Duma since the early 1990s.

Members of United Russia ran as “independents” in Moscow in an apparent bid to distance themselves from their increasingly unpopular party, after its ratings plummeted amid an increase to the national pension age and growing poverty. But neither that tactic nor reported voter fraud in favor of United Russia could save one of the party's heavyweights: Andrei Metelsky, the leader of United Russia’s branch in Moscow, lost his seat on Sunday. [...]

Although it is impossible to judge how much influence Navalny’s Smart Voting strategy had on the vote, a number of triumphant candidates acknowledged their debt to the opposition leader’s backing, and noted that had candidates affiliated with him been allowed to run, they would have won instead. Yandiev Magomet, who defeated United Russia’s candidate in central Moscow, admitted that in a fair vote he would have lost to Ilya Yashin, a blacklisted opposition politician. Yashin had a 28-percentage point lead before he was barred from the race, according to an opinion poll.

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The Art of Manliness: Life Hacking, A Reexamination

In an effort to get more done and be our best selves, many of us have turned to “life hacks” that we find in blogs, books, and podcasts. I’ve personally experimented with several life hacks in the past decade, and we’ve even written about some on AoM. But are there downsides to trying to hack your way through life?

My guest took a look at both the positives and negatives of life hacking in his book, Hacking Life: Systemized Living and Its Discontents. His name is Joseph Reagle, and he’s a professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. We begin our conversation with a history of the life hacking movement and how blogging in the early 2000s made this obscure cultural movement amongst computer programmers go mainstream. Joseph then discusses how he distinguishes between “nominal life hacking” and “optimal life hacking” and between “geeks” and “gurus.” We then discuss some of the beneficial productivity and motivation hacks out there, but also how there are ways they can go astray — including only working for a certain class of people and becoming too much of a focus in life. We also discuss how the minimalism movement can sometimes lead to contradictory impulses, and end our conversation talking about how using spiritual practices like meditation or Stoicism as hacks can strip them of their deeper contexts.

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Extremities: Howland Island

The story of America's most unlikely town.

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The New York Times: Boris Johnson Finds His Party Loyalists Aren’t as Loyal as Trump’s

The uprising in Westminster came even though British political parties enforce discipline far more strictly than their American counterparts. Mr. Johnson punished the 21 renegades by throwing them out of the party. Mr. Trump can ostracize Republican dissidents and dry up their funding, but he cannot expunge them from the party rolls. [...]

But Mr. Johnson offers little to supporters beyond a promise to leave the European Union next month. His other policies — tax cuts, more money for the police, tighter immigration rules — are standard-issue Conservative fare. Several of his rivals for the party leadership this spring ran on substantively similar platforms. [...]

While Mr. Johnson’s flamboyant image and populist appeals bear a surface similarity to Mr. Trump, he has not mobilized a grass-roots political movement anywhere near that of the president. Nor does he enjoy the prerogatives of a presidential system with a fixed four-year term. This past week, he wasn’t even able to call an election without the assent of the opposition Labor Party. [...]

American Republicans vote against their party far more regularly than British Conservatives. Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont made a career of voting against fellow Republicans on issues like tax cuts, arms control and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton before leaving the party in 2001 and starting to caucus with the Democrats.

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Europe Elects: Austria | Parliament Election 2019

SciShow: Are Electric Cars Really More Environmentally Friendly?

Some people say that buying an electric car is a great way to fight climate change - but if they use electricity that is made by burning fossil fuels, are they really more environmentally friendly than gas powered cars?

Associated Press: Johnson and Salvini: 2 soaring stars lose big political bets

Instead, analysts and fellow politicians say, both men badly miscalculated the crucial role of democratic institutions like parliament in the age of populist politics and underestimated the time-tested tactic of bitter enemies ganging up together in countermoves.

“They confused their popularity with power, and they thought because of their popularity they would be able to ram through their plans,” said Wolfango Piccoli, an analyst and co-president of Teneo intelligence, based in London. [...]

One of the lawmakers who was suspended from the Conservative group in Parliament this week after voting against Johnson’s government blamed the prime minister’s mistake on hiring as key advisers those who ran the successful “leave” campaign in the 2016 referendum on EU membership. But those advisers have scant experience in working with Parliament. [...]

During his “wild, two-week vacation,” Salvini “lost touch with reality to some extent, political reality,” said John Harper, a history professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna.

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UnHerd: How could Jesus have let the dinosaurs die?

Does Jesus love dinosaurs? No metaphysical question haunted my childhood more than this one. Raised by my mother in her own caring and compassionate understanding of Christianity, I desperately wanted to believe that Jesus – wherever he sat enthroned in heaven – shared my passion for stegosaurs and iguanodontids. Yet I had my doubts. [...]

At Sunday School, our illustrated children’s Bible showed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden alongside a Brachiosaurus. That no human being had ever seen a sauropod – a source of the intensest grief to me – seemed not to worry my teacher one little bit. When I asked her how Adam could possibly have lived alongside dinosaurs, bearing in mind that they had all died out 65 million years ago, she shrugged the question aside. The older I got, the more the question niggled. God, speaking to Job from the whirlwind, had told him of drawing Leviathan with a hook, and with a cord pressing down his tongue. [...]

Dinosaurs had played a notable and glamorous role in the Victorian crisis of faith. To Edward Drinker Cope, a Quaker from Philadelphia whose genius as a palaeontologist served to revolutionise the understanding of prehistory, they were literally the stuff of nightmares. In 1876, fossil-prospecting in the badlands of Montana, where the bones of dinosaurs stretched for miles in an immense and uncharted graveyard, the monsters he had been excavating by day would come to visit him in his sleep, “tossing him into the air, kicking him, trampling him down”. [...]

In 1822, when William Buckland, another clergyman, published a paper demonstrating that life on earth, let alone the deposition of rocks, was infinitely older than Noah’s Flood, it was his dating of the fossils he had found in a Yorkshire cave that enabled him to demonstrate his point. Two years later, he wrote the first full account of a dinosaur. In 1840, he argued that great gouges across the landscape of Scotland bore witness to an ancient – and decidedly unbiblical – Ice Age. Buckland, a noted eccentric with a taste for eating his way through every kind of animal, from bluebottles to porpoises, saw not the slightest contradiction between serving as Dean of Westminster and lecturing on geology at Oxford.

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The Atlantic: Elite Failure Has Brought Americans to the Edge of an Existential Crisis

Twenty-one years later, the same pollsters asked the same questions of today’s 18-to-38-year-olds—members of the Millennial and Z generations. The results, published last week in The Wall Street Journal, showed a major value shift among young adults. Today’s respondents were 10 percentage points less likely to value having children and 20 points less likely to highly prize patriotism or religion. [...]

One interpretation of this poll is that it’s mostly about the erosion of traditional Western faith. People under 30 in the U.S. account for more than one-third of this nation’s worshippers in only three major religions: Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. This reflects both the increase in non-European immigration since the 1970s and the decline of larger Christian denominations in the latter half of the 20th century. It also reflects the sheer increase in atheism: Millennials are nearly three times more likely than Boomers to say they don’t believe in God—6 percent versus 16 percent. If you think that Judeo-Christian values are an irreplaceable keystone in the moral arc of Western society, these facts will disturb you; if you don’t, they won’t. 

A second interpretation of this poll is that it’s mostly about politics. Youthful disinterest in patriotism, babies, and God might be a mere proxy for young people’s distaste for traditional conservatism. For decades, the Republican Party sat high on the three-legged stool of Reaganism, which called for “traditional” family values (combining religiosity with the primacy of the nuclear family), military might (with all its conspicuous patriotism), and limited government. [...]

Second, their detachment from religion flows from a feeling that elites have lost their credibility. “Mistrust of religious leaders was often cited as a reason for eschewing a childhood faith,” the authors write, and “some viewed clergy as little more than scam artists.” Francis told me that his research has uncovered a similar distrust among the working class for political elites—hardly a surprise, given the fact that white members of this group broke hard for a president who delights in skewering elite sentiment. 

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Mental Floss: A Lost Japanese Village Has Been Uncovered in the British Columbia Wilderness

The site is located on the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve, about 12 miles northeast of Vancouver. It’s approximately the size of a football field and contains the remains of more than a dozen cabins, a bathhouse, a road made of cedar planks, and a cedar platform that may have been a shrine. Muckle and his students have also unearthed more than 1000 items, including sake and beer bottles from Japan, teapots, game pieces, medicine bottles, clocks, pocket watches, clothing buttons, coins, and hoards of ceramics. [...]

Muckle believes that at least some of the 40 to 50 camp inhabitants chose to remain there, protected from rising racism in Canadian society, until 1942, when the Canadian government started moving Japanese immigrants to internment camps in the wake of the outbreak of World War II.

Muckle thinks the residents must have evacuated in a hurry since they left so many precious and personal items behind. “When people leave, usually they take all the good stuff with them,” he told North Shore News. His team even uncovered parts of an Eastman Kodak Bulls-Eye camera, a house key, and an expensive cook stove that someone had hidden behind a stump on the edge of the village. “They were probably smart enough to realize people might loot the site,” he added.

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The Guardian: German tourist sued for complaints about hotel's Nazi portraits

The man, named in court documents as Thomas K, and his wife visited the hotel in the village of Gerlos in the Tyrolean Alps last August. After check-in, they noticed two framed pictures on a wall near the hotel’s entrance, hung above a flower arrangement. One showed a young man wearing a uniform with an eagle and swastika badge, the other an older man.

Using a pseudonym, K posted reviews on Booking.com and TripAdvisor about a week after his visit, one in German and one in English, under the subject header: “At the entrance they display a picture of a Nazi grandpa.” [...]

Booking.com, which is based in the Netherlands, deleted the post, but the US-based TripAdvisor declined to comply with the request. Matching the Booking.com booking number to the pseudonymous review, the hotel owner then contacted K and filed a lawsuit against him with a regional court in Innsbruck. [...]

After researching the identity of the two men in the photographs at the German National Archives in Berlin, K was able to prove that both of the men had in fact joined the Nazi party, in 1941 and 1943 respectively. The hotel’s owners said they had not been aware of their relatives’ membership.

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Independent: I recognise Boris Johnson’s coup for what it is because I’ve seen this before – in Turkey

Britain is experiencing a slow-moving coup d’etat in which a right-wing government progressively closes down or marginalises effective opposition to its rule. It concentrates power in its own hands by stifling parliament, denouncing its opponents as traitors to the nation, displacing critics in its own ranks, and purging non-partisan civil servants. [...]

This new method of seizing power has largely replaced the old-fashioned military coup d’etat in which soldiers and tanks captured headquarters and hubs in the capital and took over the TV and radio stations. Likely opponents were rounded up or fled the country. The military leaders sought popular passivity rather than vocal support.

I first witnessed the new type of coup in action three years ago in Turkey when it took place in reaction to an old-fashioned military coup. Part of the Turkish army tried to stage a military putsch on 15 July 2016 and provided the then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with what appeared to him to be a heaven-sent opportunity to install an elective dictatorship in which subsequent elections and the real distribution of power could be pre-determined by control of the media, judiciary, civil service, security services and, if people still stubbornly voted against the government, by outright electoral fraud. [...]

Could the same thing happen here in Britain? This is one of the strengths of the Johnson coup: many people cannot believe that it has happened. British exceptionalism means that foreign experience is not relevant. Few knew or cared that Turkey had a strong tradition of parliamentary democracy as well as a grim record of military takeovers. But it is these slow-burn civilian coups which are such a feature of the modern world that we should be looking at – and trying to learn from – and nor what happened in Britain in the 1630s when Charles I sought to impose arbitrary government.

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UnHerd: Was it The Sun wot won Brexit?

The trouble is that it’s very hard to study. If you see that readers of Right-wing papers are more likely to vote for Right-wing parties, you can’t conclude that the one causes the other; it could just be that people who vote for Right-wing parties enjoy reading that they’re right to do so.

That’s why there’s been some excitement about a new report, not yet published or peer-reviewed but available in preprint form. Its authors saw the opportunity for a natural experiment: the impact of Merseyside’s post-Hillsborough boycott of The Sun on Eurosceptic attitudes in the region. [...]

I am pretty sceptical. For one thing, when you look in the paper at the graph of attitudes towards Europe on Merseyside, Euroscepticism was declining pre-1989, and it continued to decline post-1989. There doesn’t seem to be a noticeable change at or shortly after 1989 itself; it levels off in the 1990s. The “control” group – a “synthetic Merseyside”, or conglomeration of other English areas weighted for similarity to the Liverpool area – also declines in Euroscepticism, just rather more slowly, and then increases for a bit in the early 1990s. Eyeballing it, at least, it doesn’t scream “Hillsborough did this” to me; it looks like some longer-term trend. [...]

In general, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Labour was the more Eurosceptic of the two main parties. And, in Liverpool in particular, the Labour council was heavily influenced by Derek Hatton of the Militant Tendency, who voted No in 1975. It was only in 1983 that Neil Kinnock made Labour explicitly pro-Europe, but Militant and Bennite Labourites still fought back (Denis Healey and others formed the Labour Against The Euro group as late as 2002, although that was specifically against joining the single currency). Meanwhile, Tory Eurosceptics became ever more vocal over the same period.

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