Nautilus Magazine:

Several things. People have long wondered, why has the Great Red Spot been around for such a long time? The Great Red Spot is a storm, and we are used to storms on Earth. The average hurricane lasts a couple of weeks at most, and it has a definite mechanism for destruction: It either goes into cool water, which cuts off its fuel supply, or it goes over land, which really cuts off its fuel supply. Tornadoes are quite impressive, but they’re very ephemeral—they only last a few hours. So why do we have a Great Red Spot lasting so long? People used to say, “Oh, it’s clouds hanging around a mountain top.” Or “It’s an iceberg in a sea of hydrogen.” Those theories pretty much stopped around 1979, when Voyagers 1 and 2 flew by the planet. Nobody really knew it was a vortex, a huge hurricane that takes about six days for a single rotation. The United States would fit into the Red Spot a couple of hundred times. I mean, it’s really huge. One of the great things about the Voyager missions was that they took hundreds of pictures of the clouds that make up the Red Spot, so we could finally see the whole thing swirling around, and that’s how we knew for sure it was a vortex. Nobody knew it was really spinning. [...]

The harvest of that energy is what balances the loss of the Great Red Spot’s energy from thermal radiation. In a computer simulation, you can actually measure the direction and magnitude of all the energies that go in and out of the Great Red Spot, and the whole energy budget balances very nicely. You’ve got this great drain of potential energy in the atmosphere in the area surrounding the Great Red Spot due to this circulation of gas, but it’s OK because the sun re-establishes radiative equilibrium in that surrounding area and re-supplies its energy. So, ultimately, the source of energy that prevents the Great Red Spot from being destroyed is the sun. [...]

I am speculating that the Red Spot is, from top to bottom, somewhere between 50 and 70 kilometers tall. From side to side, it’s about 26,000 kilometers. So it’s a pancake. Just like with a tube of toothpaste, if I squish the pancake with high pressure at its center, something is going to squirt out the sides and top and bottom. It’s known that the Great Red Spot has a high pressure at its center, but its gases don’t go squirting out horizontally from its sides because of the Coriolis force in those directions—instead they squirt out vertically from the top and bottom. So, what can prevent the gases from squirting out vertically? The only way that I know to prevent that is if the top of the Great Red Spot has a dense cold lid of atmosphere above it. It’s that extra density that pushes the gases in the Great Red Spot back down. And, below the Great Red Spot, there must be a warm buoyant floor of atmosphere, and that floor prevents the high pressure center from pushing the gases in the Great Red Spot downward and out its bottom. That’s the balance.

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UnHerd: Let loose the lynx!

Red kite are not the only successful reintroduction of a formerly native British species. In Scotland, the sea eagle — also driven to extinction in this country 100 or so years ago — was reintroduced in the 1990s, and have started to breed. Ospreys returned naturally to Scotland and have been reintroduced to England, after being driven extinct in the 19th century.

Perhaps more spectacularly, beavers have been reintroduced in Gloucestershire, Devon and Scotland; they had been extinct in Britain for at least 250 years. Their revival has changed the waterways around there: the dams they build filter the rivers, removing silt from the water; they create big, still pools that fish, insects and amphibians can breed in and waterbirds feed from. The Devon reintroduction saw a 1,000% increase in frogspawn levels and a growth in local bat populations (they feed on the insects that bred in the ponds). Beaver dams also reduce the risk of flooding further downstream, by breaking up the flow of the river. [...]

Ross Barnett’s marvellous book The Missing Lynx tells the story of Britain’s lost megafauna, and it gets much more dramatic than red kite and beavers. There were hyenas in Yorkshire, which coexisted with humans. There were cheetahs, and lions (the bones of which were found when Trafalgar Square was being excavated); there were giant Irish elk, six foot tall at the shoulder. Mammoth, of course. Woolly rhinos. Sabre-toothed cats. Aurochs: vast great deadly wild oxen that could look a tall man in the eye. Hippos in the Thames. [...]

Wolves are generally shy of humans. There are thousands living in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Russia and elsewhere. In some of those countries, they are protected as endangered species; in others, they are not, and in Bulgaria they have a bounty on their heads as though it were the late middle ages all over again. (In Russia, wolves in the south-east are under pressure and occasionally eaten by the increasing tiger population, because Russia is extremely hardcore.)

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National Geographic: Mysterious oxygen spike seen on Mars puzzles scientists

In the Martian spring and summer, the red planet’s oxygen levels spike an extra 400 parts per million, or 30 percent above what researchers expected to see based on the behavior of other gases in the planet’s atmosphere. The oxygen spike seems to partially correlate to another gassy mystery: a seasonal ebb and flow of atmospheric methane on Mars. [...]

Though it’s tempting to think of photosynthesis when hearing about oxygen in a planet’s atmosphere, non-living processes are known to make oxygen on Mars, and these findings are not necessarily evidence of life. Instead, the results highlight gaps in our understanding of the red planet’s surface chemistry—holes that must be filled if we are to hunt for direct evidence of past or present Martians.[...]

Future missions might be able to help, especially if they can take more atmospheric measurements. Because of the many science demands on Curiosity, Trainer’s team obtained only 19 data points across the Martian seasons. While this gives them a sense of the long-term pattern, they can’t see any shorter-term changes. What would researchers find if they could take daily, or even hourly, oxygen and methane readings from Mars?

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Associated Press: France and Germany propose EU overhaul after Brexit upheaval

Paris and Berlin, long seen as the axis of the continent’s post-World War Two unification process, said a “Conference on the Future of Europe” was necessary to make the EU “more united and sovereign” across a range of challenges.

These include Europe’s role in the world and its security, they said in a document that comes amid growing concern that Europe is ill-equipped to deal with new security and economic challenges, especially from a rising China. [...]

The two-page Franco-German paper said other areas where Europe needed to be more united included its near neighbors, digitalization, climate change, migration, the fight against inequality, the “social market economy” and the rule of law.

It said a reflection lasting more than two years should consider reforms that would, among other aims, promote democracy and the functioning of a bloc that will group 27 countries after Britain’s expected departure on Jan. 31.

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Politico: Germany sets out plan for automatic relocation of asylum seekers

The document has some elements that could win favor from both Mediterranean and northern states, but its call for automatic relocation, and the lack of alternative solidarity measures for countries that don't want to take part, could upset Central and Eastern European countries, according to diplomats. Furthermore, countries such as Hungary have always opposed mandatory relocation and, despite the word not being used in the document, it is clear that this scheme would be compulsory. [...]

One of the document's key aims is to scrap the Dublin regulation under which asylum claims are dealt with in the country of first arrival. Dublin creates “clear imbalances” as “in 2018, 75% of all applications for international protection were lodged in only five member states,” the document says, a point that will come as no surprise to Italy and Greece. [...]

In the German plan, EASO, the EU agency for asylum, would play a key role. There's already a Commission proposal to turn EASO into the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) and in the German plan if an applicant gets through the initial assessment, then “the EUAA would determine which member state is responsible for examining the asylum application.” Yet the agency is often criticized for its internal troubles and having “increased powers could be a problem for some member states,” said one diplomat. [...]

The German document looks at other key points, including how to regulate access to the welfare state: “accommodation and social benefits would be provided only in the member state responsible” but “social benefits should be funded EU-wide as far as possible” and “paid according to an index which would ensure that benefits are at an equivalent level across the EU, independent of the member state.”

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Slate: Queer Like Pete

I’ll be the first to admit that Buttigieg is missing a certain warmth. And I’ve critiqued his lack of familiarity with gay history in the past. Even so, as a gay historian, I can’t help but witness his rise with interest and excitement, and in the wake of last week’s presidential debate and a revealing interview with Buttigieg on the New York Times’ Daily podcast, a worry has emerged. I’ve come to believe that those who find his self-presentation off-putting are missing an important bit of context—one that has to do with the set of archetypes through which we (queer and straight folks alike) make sense of gay men. [...]

Viewed through the lens of Schedule Spice, Buttigieg’s persona and life trajectory make complete sense. To my mind, he is the natural end result of a very familiar queer pattern that groomed him for this moment. His religious devotion to mastering the perfect pedigree, his refusal to be single, his denial of any type of popular gay aesthetic (which is, itself, another kind of gay aesthetic) make him legible to me. His academic nerdiness combined with his über-masculine military service is not a genuflection to heteronormativity, as some have claimed, but a familiar gay identity curated among upwardly mobile white gay men who have often turned to politics in one form or another. The only difference is that Schedule Spice is now vying for the presidency. [...]

While his model of gayness might not be widely familiar, Buttigieg’s Boy Scouting, his default of being the best little boy on the stage, is legitimately queer. If it strikes us as odd, it’s only because we have too narrow a definition of how a gay man can be in the world. Understanding Buttigieg through this lens does not, of course, have any bearing on his proposals or problems, such as his poor track record among black voters back home or his campaign’s recent foible of using stock images of Kenyans to represent black Americans. By all means, criticize those. But attacks on his “wonder boy” perfection, his encyclopedic knowledge, and his manner demean him and the many gay men like him—men who marry the first guy they date, who don’t come out till their late 20s, who are socially awkward, who have devoted their lives to work, and whose musical default is not gay pop. Men who, most of all, are raring to discuss politics at any moment, particularly on Sunday morning.

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National Public Radio: Warnings, Wariness Mingle With Joy After Hong Kong's Pro-Democracy Landslide

Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, adopted a conciliatory tone. She pledged to respect the election's results, which represented a veritable drubbing of her preferred slate of candidates. After months of massive protests, voters turned out in record numbers and give pan-democratic, or pro-democracy, candidates more than three-quarters of the total 452 district council seats. [...]

Chinese officials, for their part, reacted more tersely than their ally in the chief executive's office. At a briefing Monday, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry did not mention the results, instead choosing to reassert Beijing's sway over Hong Kong's governance. [...]

Still, the newly elected councilors aren't entirely bereft of ways to make their weight felt. District councilors represent a sizable chunk of the Election Committee, the roughly 1,200-member body of politicians and business figures responsible for deciding the chief executive.

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The Conversation: Men feel stressed if their female partners earn more than 40% of household income

The findings are based on an analysis of over 6,000 married or cohabiting heterosexual couples over a period of 15 years. Levels of distress are calculated based on feeling sad, nervous, restless, hopeless, worthless, or that day to day life is an effort. [...]

Men who are the only earners are relatively unhappy but they were not as stressed as men whose partners are the principal earners. Neither of the extreme scenarios is good for male mental health.

The exception is men who knowingly partner with a high-earning woman. These men do not appear to suffer from higher psychological distress when their partners earn more. People do not pick their partners at random, so if the woman was the higher earner before marriage, then the potential income gap was already clear to the man – perhaps even a reason to partner with them. [...]

For generations, in many cultures, there has been an expectation that men will be the primary income provider in the family, and masculinity is highly linked to fulfilling this expectation. Faced with a change in this outcome by being outearned by their partners, means men are likely to experience high levels of psychological distress.

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The Atlantic: Why the Strongest Argument Against Impeachment Fails

Last week, National Review’s Jim Geraghty offered an argument against removing Donald Trump that even those of us who believe him to be guilty of bribery should ponder. If you see danger in Trumpism or think Trump is an authoritarian menace, he argued, then you have the most to lose if his presidency ends with impeachment and removal, making Trump “a martyr in the eyes of his supporters” rather than a defeated loser––and leaving a sizable faction convinced that but for removal, he would have won reelection. [...]

For the record: Multiple members of the Trump administration and Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, participated in an effort to pressure Ukraine into announcing an investigation of the Biden family. When confronted, Trump not only declared his phone call with Ukraine’s leader “perfect,” but he defiantly gave a statement publicly calling on another country to investigate Joe Biden. Trump told television cameras, “China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.” [...]

If the House nevertheless votes down impeachment, or if the Senate declines to convict, what seems more likely? That Trump will stop pressuring foreign regimes to undermine his challenger in the next presidential election, or that, having faced no consequences, he will redouble his efforts to get that foreign help?

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UnHerd: Is the British jobs miracle fake news?

Let’s start with the facts. Employment levels didn’t just recover after the deepest recession in living memory: they’ve gone on to exceed the high point before the crash when we were supposedly at full employment. As the report sets out, there are three million more people in work now than in 2008 and the employment rate is three percentage points higher. [...]

One might also add the growing ease with which employers can offshore production, not to mention the onward march of automation. Indeed, this is an era in which pundits breathlessly predict wholesale replacement of the human workforce with robots. They may be proved right — eventually; but thank goodness for authors like Bell and Gardiner, who attend to things that are happening on a relevant timescale. [...]

As the report itself makes clear, the employment surge is concentrated among lower income groups, who also saw stronger earnings growth than the rest of the population. So while the authors make a strong case for the income shock hypothesis, they under-emphasise the role of welfare-to-work policies. [...]

Instead of organising UK economic policy around access to a limitless supply of cheap labour, the priorities need to be reordered around investment in people and the communities they live in. Therefore we should be open to global talent, but not use immigration as a tool for suppressing wages; rather than weakening workers’ rights, we should strengthen their preparation for the world of work; and instead of funding transport links that facilitate outsourcing, we should concentrate on local infrastructure that boosts the competitiveness of domestic supply chains and thus the market power of British workers.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Time

Time: Laurie Taylor considers the extent to which the way we spend our time has changed over the last fifty years. Is it true that we are working more, sleeping less and addicted to our phones? What does this mean for our health, wealth and happiness? Oriel Sullivan, Professor of Sociology of Gender at the UCL, has taken a detailed look at our daily activities and found some surprising truths about the social and economic structure of the world we live in. Also, Daniel S. Hamermesh, Distinguished Scholar at Barnard College, examines the pressure to do more in less time. Which people are the most rushed & why - from France and Germany to the UK and Japan.

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99 Percent Invisible: Ubiquitous Icons: Peace, Power, and Happiness

The CND continued to use the design in the U.K., but the symbol also made its way around the world, and it came to symbolize peace more broadly. In the United States, a pacifist protester shined a spotlight on the symbol in 1958, hoisting it up on a small boat he piloted into a nuclear test zone. A few years later, a delegate from America’s Student Peace Union (SPU) returned from a trip to Britain and convinced his group to adopt the symbol and distribute it on college campuses. Absent copyright, the symbol’s usage has continued to expand over time. It has since been described as “probably the most powerful, memorable and adaptable image ever designed for a secular cause.” Holtom, though, came to question the negativity of the implied figure in his graphic, a reflection of his own mood at the time that also looked like the runic symbol for “death” (an inversion of the “life” rune). But he also realized something: if the symbol were inverted, it could look like a “tree of life,” representing hope and optimism — and the upward-reaching arms could signify the letter U in semaphore. Coupled with the D, this flipped figure could stand for “unilateral disarmament,” too, Holtom’s ultimate dream. [...]

Meanwhile, variations on the smiley have appeared on clothes and art. It’s appeared everywhere from the Dead Kennedys single art to the now-classic Watchmen comic series, later turned into a feature film. Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons explains the appeal, “It’s just a yellow field with three marks on it. It couldn’t be more simple. And so to that degree, it’s empty. It’s ready for meaning. If you put it in a nursery setting… It fits in well. If you take it and put it on a riot policeman’s gas mask, then it becomes something completely [different].” [...]

The iconic “Power Symbol” consists of a line emerging from a circle and it often appears on buttons designed to toggle the power state of a device, like a computer, turning it off or on. The design is derived from the numbers 1 and 0, which respectively mean “on” and “off” in binary and variants on the design have proliferated, too, like switches labeled with a separated line and circle — the line, or 1, symbolizes “on, “while the circle, or zero, symbolizes “off.”

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BBC4 Analysis: NATO at 70

NATO’s military strength and unswerving trans-Atlantic solidarity enabled it to contain and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union. But with Vladimir Putin’s Russia resurgent, and eager to restore some of its past glory, people speak of a new “Cold War”. But this one is very different from the first. It is being fought out on the internet; through propaganda; and by shadowy, deniable operations. It is not the kind of struggle that plays to the Alliance’s traditional strengths. Worse still, NATO – currently marking its seventieth anniversary - is more divided than ever; its member states having very different priorities. President Trump has added additional strains, raising a question-mark over Washington’s fundamental commitment to its European partners. So can NATO hold together and adapt to the new challenges it faces or will it sink into a less relevant old age?

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The Guardian: Why are poor Americans more patriotic than their wealthier counterparts?

If we define patriotism not only as an attachment to country but also as a belief in its greatness, if not superiority – the brand of patriotism expressed by America’s poor is extraordinary. Data analysis from the authoritative General Social Survey (run by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago) shows that over 90% of America’s poorest would rather be citizens of the United States than of any other nation. The figure is higher than that for working-class, middle-class and upper-class Americans. About 80% also believe that America is a “better” country than most other countries. [...]

First, America’s poor still see their country as the “last hope” for themselves specifically and for humanity more generally. Because of its foundational social contract, the country offers each citizen a sense of dignity. As Ray (all names have been disguised), an older African American man in Birmingham, Alabama, told me, only in America is everybody equal in principle to everyone else. [...]

Second, to many, America is seen as the land of “milk and honey”. It’s perceived as a rich and generous place, where those who work hard can achieve much. The people I spoke with took personal responsibility for the difficult trajectories they had experienced, even if in fact all odds were stacked against them. As Kysha, an African American woman in her 60s in a shelter in Birmingham, told me, “It’s on you … you got a chance like anyone else … everybody got a chance. Some people don’t wanna do right. You gotta realize that.” America, moreover, gives money to countries all over the world: it’s a place of abundance, that attracts people from all over the world. Under this reasoning, anyone who’s poor in America should be thankful to be here.

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Associated Press: Facts Poll: Facts missing from American democracy

A meager 9% of Americans believe that campaign messages are usually based on facts, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Opinion Research and USAFacts. Only 14% think policy decisions are often or always fact-based, or that Americans’ voting decisions are rooted in facts. [...]

Overall, 53% of the public thinks voters sometimes cast ballots based on facts, while 32% say they rarely or never do. Hamm-Oliver said voters in her home state of Idaho did so when they voted to approve a ballot measure last year that forced the state to accept the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which had previously been rejected by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature. [...]

McKee’s view is widespread, with 55% of Americans saying policy decisions are sometimes based on fact while 3 in 10 think they rarely are. Republicans are more skeptical than Democrats that public policy is even sometimes fact-driven, with 33% saying it rarely or never is compared to 23% of Democrats.

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The Atlantic: An Alarming Discovery in an Astronaut’s Bloodstream

The study was designed to study different, well-known side effects of space travel. A decade ago, scientists started noticing that astronauts who spent months on the International Space Station came home with swollen optic nerves, slightly flattened eyeballs, and changes in vision. NASA started putting glasses on board the station for astronauts who found that their eyesight had worsened. Scientists have suspected that the cause involves an accumulation of the body’s fluids such as blood and water. Free from the steady tug of gravity, the fluids float toward the head and can increase pressure inside the skull. [...]

Scans showed that blood flow in the vein stalled in five of the 11 astronauts. “Sometimes it was sloshing back and forth a bit, but there was no net-forward movement,” Marshall-Goebel says. Seeing stagnant blood flow in this kind of vein is rare, she says; the condition usually occurs in the legs, such as when people sit still for hours on a plane. The finding was concerning. Stagnant blood, whether it’s in the neck or in the legs, can clot. Blood clots can dissolve on their own or with the help of anticoagulants, but the blockages can also cause serious problems, such as lung damage. [...]

The researchers attribute the effects they observed to the space environment. All the astronauts were considered to be in good health before they launched. And when they came home, the conditions vanished in nearly all of them. When the researchers analyzed the data, they found that a second astronaut may have developed a blood clot no one had seen while they were in orbit. But no one experienced any health troubles. “None of the crew members actually had any negative clinical outcomes,” Marshall-Goebel says.

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The Guardian: How liberalism became ‘the god that failed’ in eastern Europe

No single factor can explain the simultaneous emergence of authoritarian anti-liberalisms in so many differently situated countries in the second decade of the 21st century. Yet resentment at liberal democracy’s canonical status and the politics of imitation in general has played a decisive role. This lack of alternatives, rather than the gravitational pull of an authoritarian past or historically ingrained hostility to liberalism, is what best explains the anti-western ethos dominating post-communist societies today. The very conceit that “there is no other way” provided an independent motive for the wave of populist xenophobia and reactionary nativism that began in central and eastern Europe, and is now washing across much of the world. [...]

Liberalism’s reputation in the region never recovered from 2008. The financial crisis greatly weakened the case, still being made by a handful of western-trained economists, for continuing to imitate American-style capitalism. Confidence that the political economy of the west was a model for the future of mankind had been linked to the belief that western elites knew what they were doing. Suddenly it was obvious that they did not. This is why 2008 had such a shattering ideological, not merely economic, effect. [...]

Yet focusing on the corruption and deviousness of illiberal governments in the region will not help us understand the sources of popular support for national populist parties. The origins of populism are undoubtedly complex. But they partly lie in the humiliations associated with the uphill struggle to become, at best, an inferior copy of a superior model. Discontent with the “transition to democracy” in the post-communist years was also inflamed by visiting foreign “evaluators” who had little grasp of local realities. These experiences combined to produce a nativist reaction in the region, a reassertion of “authentic” national traditions allegedly suffocated by ill-fitting western forms. The post-national liberalism associated with EU enlargement allowed aspiring populists to claim exclusive ownership of national traditions and national identity. [...]

The extent of post-1989 emigration from eastern and central Europe, awakening fears of national disappearance, helps explain the deeply hostile reaction across the region to the refugee crisis of 2015-16, even though very few refugees have relocated to the countries of the region. We might even hypothesise that anti-immigration politics in a region essentially without immigrants is an example of what some psychologists call displacement – a defence mechanism by which, in this case, minds unconsciously blot out a wholly unacceptable threat and replace it with one still serious but conceivably easier to manage. Hysteria about non-existent immigrants about to overrun the country represents the substitution of an illusory danger (immigration) for the real danger (depopulation and demographic collapse) that cannot speak its name.

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Cautionary Tales Ep 1 – DANGER: Rocks Ahead!

Torrey Canyon was one of the biggest and best ships in the world – nevertheless its captain and crew needlessly steered it towards a deadly reef known as The Seven Stones. This risky manoeuvre seems like utter madness, but the thinking behind it is something we are all prone to do when we fixate on a goal and a plan to get us there.

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99 Percent Invisible: How To Pick A Pepper

Sarah Taber is a crop scientist based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and she says the great recession scrambled the familiar labor paradigm, in which migrant workers would arrive in the US looking for work on farms. Increasingly, potential foreign workers are staying put in their home countries to work in places like call centers. And Sarah points out that the children of immigrants who came to the US and went into agriculture are not following suit. [...]

After a decade of testing, Walker finally found a machine that showed promise called the Moses 1000. But even after discovering her dream harvester, Stephanie’s work still wasn’t over. Finding the machine was actually the easy part. Walker also had to deal with a larger problem, one inherent to agriculture that, despite the successful automations of the past, still makes many crops — including asparagus, cherries, apples, saffron, and chocolate — difficult to harvest with a machine. [...]

This means if you want to automate a harvest, you can’t just find a great machine. You have to make your plants more standardized, like cars. So for the past five years, most of Stephanie’s work has been about breeding a whole new plant, one that is designed specifically to be picked by a machine.

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The Guardian: Why do people hate vegans?

In the 21st century the terminology may have changed but the sentiment remains much the same. The 2015 study conducted by MacInnis and Hodson found that only drug addicts were viewed more negatively among respondents. It concluded: “Unlike other forms of bias (eg, racism, sexism), negativity toward vegetarians and vegans is not widely considered a societal problem; rather, [it] is commonplace and largely accepted.” [...]

In the internet age, the consumption of meat is visibly aligned with a certain kind of conservative alpha-masculinity. Before he found infamy eating raw flesh, Gatis Lagzdins was best known for hosting a YouTube channel peddling racist ideology and rightwing conspiracies about the Illuminati. Among the alt-right and affiliated circles online, the derogatory term “soy boy” has been adopted along with other terms such as “cuck” and “beta” as a way of mocking so-called social justice warriors for their perceived lack of vigour. This echoes a finding in the MacInnis/Hodson study, in which respondents from a rightwing background, who seek to uphold traditional gender values, see something alarmingly subversive and worthy of derision in any man who prefers tofu to turkey.[...]

But in coining the term “ecocide” – and classing it as a crime against humanity – Mansfield framed the debate in different terms. We might portray the current moment as a precipice, and the growing interest in plant-based diets as the surest way back to safety. In this interpretation, the war on vegans is the act of a doomed majority fighting to defend its harmful way of life. Vegans might well be vociferous and annoying, holier-than-thou, self-satisfied and evangelical. But as their numbers grow beyond the margins, perhaps the worst thing they could be is right.

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WorldAffairs: Susan Rice Reflects: Life in the Situation Room

Susan Rice worked for the US State Department during some of the most challenging periods this country has ever faced, from Black Hawk Down in Somalia to the Iran Nuclear Deal. In her new book, “Tough Love, My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For,” she describes the family struggles, ancestral legacies, and personal experiences that led her to the White House and the United Nations. Susan Rice joins Jane Wales, Vice President at The Aspen Institute, to share her experiences, and offer her perspectives on today’s foreign policy challenges.

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The Guardian: How immigration became Britain’s most toxic political issue

When New Labour came to power in 1997, just 3% of the public cited immigration as a key issue. By the time of the EU referendum in 2016, that figure was 48%. During those intervening years, the issue came to dominate and distort British politics – exactly according to the script established by Bigotgate. Brown’s gaffe both consolidated and gave credence to a political coding that would shape everything that came after: the “hostile environment”, the Windrush scandal, the EU referendum and the revival of Britain’s far right – deploying a narrative in which sneering, out-of-touch, big-city politicians who favour foreigners and open borders are hopelessly oblivious to the struggles and the so-called “legitimate concerns” of ordinary working people (who, in this scenario, are always white).[...]

Just as communities were exposed to the shocks of an unrestrained free market and a shrinking state, they were simultaneously bombarded with stories about “Slovak spongers” and cheating Czechs. Politicians of all stripes fell in line, producing hostile rhetoric and policies in response – and defining the issue as a reflection of supposed concerns over the exact number of arrivals, the “pace of change” in local communities and the need to exert control over migration. This was the catalyst for David Cameron’s foolish 2010 election pledge to introduce a target figure for “net migration” – which the Conservative party failed to meet, again and again, only enflaming public resentment and mistrust over the issue (this impossible target underpinned the Conservative’s hostile environment policy and produced the Windrush scandal). [...]

But what if this narrative is the wrong way around? Perhaps it wasn’t immigration itself that was such a defining issue of those 20 years – but rather, the way political parties and journalists discussed it and the policies implemented in response. The big assumption is that it was a foregone conclusion that there would be hostility to immigration, which in turn would become politically explosive in the UK. While Britain has always received migrants with initial suspicion, it was not inevitable that the issue would become so damaging or derail our politics so comprehensively. [...]

It was later painted as a crisis, but in truth, the British economy needed even those unexpected numbers. David Blunkett tried at the time to explain that migrants would in any case be coming to Britain in high numbers and it was better to have them in the labour market legally, paying tax. Study after study has showed that EU migration, in particular from A8 countries, produced a net economic gain for the UK. According to one authored by economists Helen Lawton and Danny Blanchflower in 2008: “The fact that the UK opened its borders to a flow of highly skilled, motivated, educated, low cost mobile workers upon EU-enlargement was a stroke of genius, for which the UK government should be given credit.”

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The Guardian: I wish I'd never been born: the rise of the anti-natalists

Samuel subscribes to a philosophy called anti-natalism. The basic tenet of anti-natalism is simple but, for most of us, profoundly counterintuitive: that life, even under the best of circumstances, is not a gift or a miracle, but rather a harm and an imposition. According to this logic, the question of whether to have a child is not just a personal choice but an ethical one – and the correct answer is always no.[...]

The notion that having children may be a bad idea seems to be gaining mainstream popularity. But when we hear about it, it’s most often in the context of the climate crisis: activists are worried about bringing children into a world threatened by rising seas, mass displacement and other calamities. Anti-natalists, however, believe that procreation has always been and always will be wrong because of life’s inevitable suffering. What is similar about both anti-natalists and climate activists is they are seeing an increase in attention due to general pessimism about the state of the world, giving both more opportunities to gain support.[...]

While Benatar also sought to discourage reproduction, his ideas grew out of different premises. The objective of anti-natalism, as Benatar sees it, is to reduce human suffering. Since life inevitably involves some amount of suffering, bringing another person into the world introduces the guarantee of some harm. He argued that “the quality of even the best lives is very bad – and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.” [...]

Anti-natalists and climate change activists have intersected in some ways, and each has drawn more attention to the other. Anti-natalist forums, for instance, often include information about how childlessness can reduce carbon footprints. But ultimately, the goals of the two camps diverge sharply. BirthStrike grew out of a group called Extinction Rebellion, which is protesting against the threatened extinction of millions of species, potentially including our own. By contrast, for true anti-natalists, extinction is the dream.

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Politico: What Impeachment Will Cost the GOP

On policy matters, Clinton’s notion of the center involved pushing both major parties against old natural instincts. For Democrats, that meant going against the grain on spending and trade, among other issues. For Republicans, it meant if they would surrender their instinctual hostility to government in general, Clinton would work with them in practical ways to create a society in which a robust, technology-driven public sector would work with an efficient future-oriented government to create more opportunities for average Americans. [...]

A year later, these high-minded ambitions collided with the scandal surrounding his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Once the battle began, Clinton lost all leverage to push his own party—he needed every vote, including those of liberals who had scant interest in his centrist vision—and he had zero pathway to engage even with sympathetic Republicans, whose party leaders brooked no opposition to their plan to evict Clinton from power. The new political and cultural center Clinton tried to create in the 1990s died during impeachment and is still dead. [...]

Lastly, most Republicans do not face a high cost within their own party for defending Trump. But, in a country becoming younger and more diverse, there’s little chance even these internal GOP politics remain static. The isolationists of the 1930s had the popular position at the time, but had considerable explaining to do for years after. So did the McCarthy backers of the 1950s. So did the civil rights opponents of the 1960s.

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Bloomberg: Liberated Saudi Youth Wonder Where All the Wahhabis Have Gone

Today the muttawa are nowhere in sight. What’s visible instead is a younger generation of tech-savvy Saudis fired up by a sense of national, rather than religious, identity. “Saudi identity is us. The Wahhabi identity is not us,” says Mashael al-Baoud, who’s in her 30s. She’s standing behind her display of green crocodile-skin charms in the shape of Saudi Arabia and mobile phone cases embossed with the image of the crown prince or the national emblem, two crossed swords and a palm tree. “They have vanished,” she says. “Since they’re not here, we’re showing who we really are.”

But the contrast with the religiously repressed old kingdom is still dramatic. From cinemas to the lively activity in Riyadh’s King Abdullah Park to a top-floor hookah lounge in Jeddah, businesses have sprung up to cash in on the new tolerance. There’s even talk among some Saudis of the alcohol ban being lifted, possibly before the nation hosts the Group of 20 next year. What comes next depends on whether the economy can make enough strides to meet the expectations of a country where three-quarters of the population, including the crown prince himself, is under the age of 35. While they’re excited by the new liberalization, most young Saudis have one nagging concern: Where have the Wahhabis gone, and what are the chances of them coming back? [...]

And among the young, there are a few who are outright against the changes or worry the kingdom is moving too fast. Saudi Arabia is potentially at the “gates of too far,” says Zaid, the man looking for funding for his sandboarding business. From the eastern city of Dammam, he spent seven years in the U.S. and graduated in chemical engineering before returning home in 2017. “The whole society has loosened up. Loosening up is good, but we don’t want to take it to an extreme. You have to keep your culture.”

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The Guardian: The US and Britain face no existential threat. So why do their wars go on?

Most conflicts start macho and popular. The three most recent American presidents, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, were all hesitant about military intervention before taking office, and yet supported it in power. But the worm is turning. A recent Pew survey reveals that 62% of Americans feel in retrospect that the Afghan war was “not worth it”, 59% feel the same of Iraq and 58% agree in the case of Syria. This disillusionment is in each case two points even higher among military veterans. Soldiers don’t like wars they can’t win.[...]

The US has spent a staggering $6.4tn on almost two decades of interventions, with more than 7,000 military dead. Britain has lost 634. In addition, unknowable thousands of civilians have died, and billions of pounds’ worth of property been destroyed. Christianity has been all but wiped out in the region, and some of the finest cities in the ancient world have been bombed flat. No audit has been made of this. The opportunity cost must be unthinkable. What diseases might have been eradicated, what climate crisis relieved? [...]

The assumption is that at least the public and the military establishment are “behind the troops”. That is clearly not the case. As long ago as 2004 Lord Bramall, who died this week and was once Thatcher’s favourite soldier, challenged the government to prove that the Iraq war, then just a year old, was worth the cost. It had, he said, already proved “erroneous and counter-productive” despite promises that it would bring democracy to Iraq. He added: “One can but wonder what legal – or, now, even moral – mandate the [western] coalition really has to do that.” Bramall was emphatic that he spoke for many in the military establishment opposed to Tony Blair’s mission, undertaken to please the Americans. In the 15 years since he made that speech nothing has changed.

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euronews: European Investment Bank will stop funding fossil fuel projects by end of 2021

The European Investment Bank will stop funding fossil fuel projects at the end of 2021, it announced on Thursday, in a landmark decision for the fight against climate change. [...]

Under the new policy, energy projects applying for EIB funding will need to show they can produce one kilowatt-hour of energy while emitting less than 250 grams of carbon dioxide, a move which bans traditional gas-burning power plants.

Gas projects are still possible but would have to be based on what the bank called “new technologies,” such as carbon capture and storage, combining heat and power generation or mixing in renewable gases with the fossil natural gas.[...]

Still, 93% of Europeans think climate change is a serious problem, according to recent Eurobarometer research. The survey also suggests climate change has overtaken international terrorism as the second most serious concern in Europe after poverty, hunger, and lack of drinking water.

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99 Percent Invisible: The Kirkbride Plan

Today, there are more than a hundred abandoned asylums in the United States, many of them not all that different from Buffalo State. It’s one of the reasons we’re all so familiar with the idea of the big empty asylum in the woods. Few stop to wonder where all these structures came from, but, in fact, all of this was part of a treatment regimen developed by a singular Philadelphia doctor, a physician who was obsessed with architecture and how it could be harnessed therapeutically to cure those who’d become insane. [...]

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when someone was deemed insane, it was often thought to be the person’s own fault. “The assumption was they were […] forsaken by God or they were possessed by demons or they had done something to deserve to be in such a desperate condition,” says Carla Yanni, an architectural historian at Rutgers and author of the book The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States. She says that what happened to someone labeled insane in the early 19th century would have depended mostly on their class. Wealthy families often kept insane relatives at home or paid for them to live in private madhouses. Poorer people fared worse. They were cast out alone, and a lot of them ended up in jails or hospices. [...]

By the mid 20th century, the buildings had become overcrowded. Buffalo’s asylum, which was was designed for 600 was treating 3,600 patients in house. The state mental hospitals constructed during the early 20th century grew even larger, resembling institutional buildings, even prisons, the very thing Kirkbride had wanted to avoid. The largest, Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island, at one point housed over 14,000 patients. By 1955, over half a million Americans were confined in state mental hospitals.

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The Guardian: The cult of Columbine: how an obsession with school shooters led to a murder plot

I am not alone in my appetite for dark stories. The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men. Most murder victims are also male. Homicide detectives and criminal investigators: predominantly male. Attorneys in criminal cases are also mostly men. Put simply, the world of violent crime is masculine, at least statistically. But the consumers of crime stories are decidedly female. Women make up the majority of the readers of true-crime books and the listeners of true-crime podcasts. Women are not just passively consuming these stories; they are also finding ways to participate in them. Start reading through one of the many online sleuthing forums where amateurs speculate about unsolved crimes – and sometimes solve them – and you will find that most of the posters are women. More than seven in 10 students of forensic science, one of the fastest-growing college majors, are women. A few years ago, two undergraduates at the University of Pittsburgh founded a cold case club so they could spend their extracurricular hours investigating murders; the group is, unsurprisingly, dominated by women. [...]

Before the late 1990s, plenty of kids were furious and suicidal, but few of them dealt with their feelings by taking a gun to school. In 1977, Stephen King (writing under his pseudonym Richard Bachman) published a novel called Rage, which told the story of an angry young man who shot his algebra teacher and took his classmates hostage. Throughout the 1980s and into the 90s, a handful of school shootings roughly followed this formula – violence directed at teachers and classrooms taken hostage by teenagers, who were later discovered to be fans of the novel. After a 1997 school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky (whose perpetrator had a copy of Rage in his locker), King asked his publisher “to take the damn thing out of print”. [...]

A few weeks after my return home to Texas, I was still obsessing about Lindsay’s punishment. Court proceedings are supposed to provide some sense of closure, but this situation felt unfinished. I kept getting stuck on this one thing: how in imposing the strictest sentence possible, one usually reserved for the most violent criminals, the judge was validating Lindsay’s virtual self, giving too much credence to the part of her that loudly proclaimed how frightening she was, how unlike other people. She had never touched a gun; her flimsy plan had collapsed almost as soon as it was put in motion. A Canadian firearms expert publicly claimed that the massacre she had helped mastermind was virtually impossible, given her and James’s weaponry and lack of experience. I was told that, in prison, she seemed to be retreating even further into her internal world.

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WorldAffairs: Globalization and Robotics: Will AI Cripple the Global Workforce?

By 2030, up to 800 million global workers may lose their jobs to automation. Technological advancement in an ever-globalized economy is changing both service-sector and professional jobs at a staggering pace. How can governments help workers remain vital to the global economy? Richard Baldwin, author of the new book, The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work, is in conversation with WorldAffairs co-host Markos Kounalakis.

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Independent: As Saudi Arabia grows desperate, this could be the beginning of the end of the war in Yemen

The Yemen war is about to come to an end. A Saudi official admitted this week that for the first time since 2016, Riyadh is in talks with the Houthi rebels. The talks have surfaced despite the Houthis being in charge of the capital Sanaa and the other most populous parts in Northern Yemen, which indicates that the Saudis are coming to terms with this status quo. The radical approach of effectively flushing the Houthis out of the north has been abandoned. The new approach of accepting the Houthis as part of the new post-war reality in Yemen, on the other hand, is much more sophisticated. [...]

Instead of the endless fighting, Saudi Arabia is trying to convince the Houthis to sever ties with its regional rival, Iran. After all, all the Houthis want is legitimacy of their new strategic posture in Yemen. This, in their view, must be cited in a similar power-sharing agreement that guarantees their share in a federation-like new system that includes president Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi’s government and separatists in the south. [...]

The attack on the Saudi Aramco oil installations in September, which knocked out half of the Kingdom’s production, was a tipping point. This week, Aramco launched an initial public offering (IPO) to be listed on the local stock market, abandoning Mohamed bin Salman’s original plan to list it on overseas markets. The escalation with Iran began to have a direct effect on the Saudi economy.

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The Guardian: ‘Completely bizarre’: Grieve campaigns to overturn his Tory majority

The former Tory MP, who was stripped of the Conservative whip by Boris Johnson for trying to stop a no-deal Brexit and in effect barred by his local association from standing for the party again, is not going quietly. To the horror of Conservative HQ, Grieve, the articulate and charming former attorney general, is contesting as an independent the normally safe Tory seat of Beaconsfield, which he has represented for his former party since 1997 – and he seems to be in with a chance. The constituency has included Marlow since 2010. 

The challenge is not a small one, and the mountain he has to climb is partly of his own creation. In 2017, he retained the seat with a huge 24,000 majority over Labour. “This area is Tory, Tory, Tory,” says one of his helpers, Katie Breathwick. “But the reason he can win again is that Brexit has made the whole thing much, much more complicated.”[...]

On Saturday night local Conservatives selected Joy Morrissey, an ardent Brexiter and Ealing councillor, to replace Grieve and take him on. He will not worry too much. He is happy on the stump sticking to his own views and principles, under the banner of independence. “I just think the Boris Johnson deal would be a catastrophe for the country, so what else can I tell people? What else can I do?”

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UnHerd: Has Brexit really divided Britain?

Places such as Boston (on one end of the spectrum), where 76% of people voted Leave, or Lambeth (at the other), which was 79% Remain, really are the exceptions. Most areas are just not that polarised. And even in these outliers, once you factor in the non-voters, the apparent overwhelming hegemony of the “winning” side is much reduced. Walk down a street in Boston, for example, and under 60% of people you encounter will have voted Leave. In Lambeth, the most Remain-voting authority in the UK, only 53% of all those who could vote, voted Remain. [...]

Multiple pieces of research have shown the extent to which this can make us judge people or not want them as their friends. A new study, in a book we’ve edited (and which is available for a very reasonable price) shows that the referendum vote can even affect how who you want to move in next door to you, far more so than any of the other variables that were tested. [...]

These two errors frequently come together when discussing the relationship between political parties and the referendum. Just because a majority of people in a constituency voted Leave, and just because a constituency returned a Labour MP, this does not mean that a majority of Labour voters in that seat voted Leave. This has now been pointed out so often that it should not need repetition, but it clearly does, because people keep on making this mistake.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Immortality - transhumanism

Immortality: Pursuing a life beyond the human. Anya Bernstein, Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, talks to Laurie Taylor about the Russian visionaries and utopians who seek to overcome the limitations of our material bodies. Also, Alex Thomas, Lecturer in Media Production at the University of East London, explores the ethical dilemmas relating to transhumanism. Who will benefit from technologies which assist the desire to transcend our mortal state?

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BBC4 Analysis: Can I Change Your Mind?

There’s a widespread belief that there’s no point talking to people you disagree with because they will never change their minds. Everyone is too polarized and attempts to discuss will merely result in greater polarization. But the history of the world is defined by changes of mind –that’s how progress (or even regress) is made: shifts in political, cultural, scientific beliefs and paradigms. So how do we ever change our minds about something? What are the perspectives that foster constructive discussion and what conditions destroy it? Margaret Heffernan talks to international academics at the forefront of research into new forms of democratic discourse, to journalists involved in facilitating national conversations and to members of the public who seized the opportunity to talk to a stranger with opposing political views.

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BBC4 In Our Time: The Treaty of Limerick

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 1691 peace treaty that ended the Williamite War in Ireland, between supporters of the deposed King James II and the forces of William III and his allies. It followed the battles at Aughrim and the Boyne and sieges at Limerick, and led to the disbanding of the Jacobite army in Ireland, with troops free to follow James to France for his Irish Brigade. The Catholic landed gentry were guaranteed rights on condition of swearing loyalty to William and Mary yet, while some Protestants thought the terms too lenient, it was said the victors broke those terms before the ink was dry.

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PolyMatter: The Economics of K-Pop

The Guardian: Survey: Tory poll lead over Labour drops by four points

The Tories still hold a 12-point advantage over Labour but their lead is down four points since last weekend. The Conservatives now stand on 41%, down one point on a week ago, while Labour is up three on 29%.

The Liberal Democrats are down one point on 15%, while the Brexit Party has fallen sharply by three points in a week to 6%, since party leader Nigel Farage announced he would not stand as an MP.[...]

Some 66% of Labour Leavers now plan to vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s party on 12 December, up nine points compared with a week ago. Similarly, 48% of Labour Remainers are planning to vote for the party, sharply up on last week.[...]

Opinium said that there had been some changes among Leave voters that brought their opinion of the two main leaders more in line with their views before the 2017 election. The proportion of people saying they are satisfied with Johnson dropped seven points to 53%. The proportion saying that they prefer Corbyn has risen by two points to 10%, with those saying they don’t know also increasing.

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euronews: Police arrest at least 25 after clashes at gay movie premiere in Georgia

A few hundred demonstrators blocked the road outside a cinema in the city centre of the country's capital, Tbilisi, on Friday ahead of the first screening of "And Then We Danced". The film tells the story of two young male Georgian ballet dancers falling in love.

The protesters chanted slogans such as "Long live Georgia" and "Shame" and tried to force their way inside the cinema but where held back by riot police. Some were holding crosses and religious icons.[...]

Tickets for the scheduled three days of screenings at a handful of cinemas in Tbilisi and the port city of Batumi sold out quickly, but the country's influential Orthodox Church denounced the film as an attempt to undermine Christian values and legalise "sin".

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CNN: Iran has called Trump's bluff

Iran's latest provocation is further evidence that Trump's policy on Iran is turning into a disaster. That may offer some comfort to Trump's critics, but it should not. Iran's actions, which put it closer to a nuclear bomb, are extremely troubling because they raise the risks of war in the world's most unstable region and boost the incentive for further nuclear proliferation among its Sunni Arab rivals. [...]

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sounded the alarm on Thursday, saying, "Iran is positioning itself for a rapid nuclear breakout." That was a far cry from his swaggering response last year, when he predicted the sanctions in Iran would force Tehran to change its behavior. When asked what the administration would do if Iranians restarted their nuclear program, he replied, "We're confident that the Iranians will not make that decision." He was wrong. [...]

Instead of achieving the goal of moving Iran's nuclear capability further into the future and persuading the regime to restrain its aggressive behavior against its neighbors, American policy has aggravated all the ills that made Iran a regional threat. Iran is steadily breaking the restrictions imposed by the nuclear deal and showing no restraint in its regional interventionism, another area of concern for the deal's critics.

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openDemocracy: Who’s afraid of Greta Thunberg?

The climate activist does not relate well to the irony of American television programs. When asked for her impression of New York when she arrived on the Malizia yacht, she replied that it smelled bad. Her lack of understanding of irony and her seriousness are probably related to her Asperger’s syndrome (a condition she speaks openly about) and dose of Nordic frankness. All of these qualities have influenced the new environmental movement. It is a group that speaks very seriously and uses scientific research to support their arguments. It is, in fact, the antithesis of the ironic language used by generation X or millennials. [...]

The activist triggered not only a political movement, but also fury from powerful media outlets. The media and commentators have become obsessed with her. According to some observers, the adoration towards Greta Thunberg is similar to a religious awakening. But this is not her problem. It is, on the contrary, a problem of the people and the media that react to her actions and her words. Within the political spectrum, environmentalism is found mostly on the left and in the academic world. The right and many liberals deny Greta Thunberg and her colleagues the right to formulate their own political ideas and goals, instead treating them as immature and spoilt. The Argentine journalist Sandra Russo calls this the first case of “global bullying”, an idea which she discussed long before September 23rd when Donald Trump, the president of the United States, sent out a tweet which made fun of the 16 year old.[...]

Everything seems to suggest that the more popular and disruptive the climate movement become, the more virulent the rejection from those who consider climate change as a conspiracy and the protection of the climate as pure nonsense becomes. The severity of reactions to a 16 year old teenager should make us reflect. Some psychologists try to explain it by saying the ‘old’ white men won’t change their attitudes towards the environment, so instead attack Greta for her illness, for her age or because of the apparent manipulation of her activism. But behind these criticisms there is much more than the intransigence of a whole male generation. The attacks may be a sign that she, alongside the youth involved in the movement, have managed to hit a sensitive nerve. Is Greta Thunberg questioning the system?

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Aeon: It’s impossible to see the world as it is, argues a cognitive neuroscientist

Many scientists believe that natural selection brought our perception of reality into clearer and deeper focus, reasoning that growing more attuned to the outside world gave our ancestors an evolutionary edge. Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, thinks that just the opposite is true. Because evolution selects for survival, not accuracy, he proposes that our conscious experience masks reality behind millennia of adaptions for ‘fitness payoffs’ – an argument supported by his work running evolutionary game-theory simulations. In this interview recorded at the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival from the Institute of Arts and Ideas in 2019, Hoffman explains why he believes that perception must necessarily hide reality for conscious agents to survive and reproduce. With that view serving as a springboard, the wide-ranging discussion also touches on Hoffman’s consciousness-centric framework for reality, and its potential implications for our everyday lives.

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Aeon: We all know that we will die, so why do we struggle to believe it?

Let’s consider the way in which my inevitable death is old news. It stems from the uniquely human capacity to disengage from our actions and commitments, so that each of us can consider him or herself as an inhabitant of the mind-independent world, one human being among billions. When I regard myself ‘from the outside’ in this manner, I have no trouble in affirming that I will die. I understand that I exist because of innumerable contingencies, and that the world will go on without me just as it did before my coming to be. These reflections do not disturb me. My equanimity is due to the fact that, even though I am reflecting on my inevitable annihilation, it is almost as if I am thinking about someone else. That is, the outside view places a cognitive distance between myself as the thinker of these thoughts and myself as their subject. [...]

In order to fully digest the fact of my mortality, I would need to realise, not just intellectually, that my everyday experience is misleading, not in the details, but as a whole. Buddhism can help identify another source of radical distortion. As Jay L Garfield puts it in Engaging Buddhism (2015), we suffer from the ‘primal confusion’ of seeing the world, and ourselves, through the lens of a substance-based metaphysics. For example, I take myself as a self-contained individual with a permanent essence that makes me who I am. This core ‘me-ness’ underpins the constant changes in my physical and mental properties. Garfield is not saying that we all explicitly endorse this position. In fact, speaking for myself, I reject it. Rather, the primal confusion is the product of a non-rational reflex, and typically operates well below the level of conscious awareness. [...]

The Buddhist alternative to a substance-based view of persons is the ‘no-self’ account, which was independently discovered by David Hume. Hume introspected only a constantly shifting array of thoughts, feelings and sensations. He took the absence of evidence of a substantial self to be evidence of its absence, and concluded in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) that the notion of a ‘self’ is merely a convenient device for referring to a causally linked network of mental states, rather than something distinct from them.

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ChickenWire: UK Election 2019 - The Polls are Right!

So the UK Election 2019 is going on and guess what? ChickenWire is back and Ill be going deep into the election with my research designed for you the voter to make up your mind about who your going to vote for and more importantly who will win. The UK general election 2019 looks set to be a tight race polls are showing Boris Johnsons and the Conservative party are on course to win a small majority or hung parliament. With Jeremy Corbyn in 2nd place the SNP taking Scotland and the Lib dems eating into Labour seats while the Brexit party will eat into Tory seats. But will these third and fourth parties be enough to defeat the two main parties. Well watch the video to find out.

Rare Earth: The Nazi Pedophile Apocalypse Cult

openDemocracy: What we talk about when we talk about trafficking

Both evangelical organisations and some self-proclaimed feminist groups regard every form of sex work as exploitation, and therefore as the main cause of human trafficking. They seek an end to the entire sex industry, and their method of choice at the moment is the so-called Nordic model, or the criminalisation of buying sex. The association Terre des Femmes has split over this dispute.

Individual situations are frequently more complicated. Many women decide to work as sex workers, but are later on deceived regarding the actual working conditions and find themselves in situations that meet the legal criteria of trafficking. Legally speaking this initial consent does not erase the responsibility of the perpetrators, but it does make the question of desired remedies less clear than abolitionist organisations would like.[...]

The problem with conflating sex work and trafficking in human beings is that women are made to be victims even when they have consciously decided to work as sex workers. The ‘rescue industry’, as the scholar Laura María Agustín calls it, attributes victim status to persons, mostly women, who have rationally and consciously decided to engage in sex work and who, at least in the moment of making their decision, do not see themselves as victims.[...]

According to Luca Stevenson, the coordinator at the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, this position reflects a very white middle class approach. "Very few people are free to choose their jobs and many factors contribute to someone working in informal, precarious or even dangerous industries such as sex work. The criminalisation of sex work does not create economic options, but makes sex workers more vulnerable, more precarious."

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99 Percent Invisible: Great Bitter Lake Association

The convoy of 14 ships came from 8 different nations: the UK, West Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, France, Bulgaria, and the United States. In the beginning, the crews weren’t told anything because there was a complete lockdown on information reaching the ships. Despite the lack of communication, the shipping companies were working in the background to get their crews home, while the United Nations tried to work out a deal to reopen the canal. Months dragged on, and the boats still hadn’t been released. They were stranded for so long, the convoy earned the nickname the Yellow Fleet because the sandstorms in the region stained the hulls of the ships. [...]

Soon, they started hanging out a lot, and because they were a bunch of young sailors, they started partying a lot. Some of the captains became worried that with the amount of idle time on the ships, people would start to get bored and acting badly. “There was of a lot of drinking, and […] hanging out, and sleeping and they were thinking it would be good to get together and organize some social activities,” explains Senker. The captains figured a little structure would curb the worst behavior of their sailors, so in October of 1967, five months after the start of the Six-Day War, they founded the Great Bitter Lake Association.

The Great Bitter Lake Association was a way to regulate the unofficial marketplace that had sprung up between the ships, and bring some order to their makeshift community. It was also a social committee. Membership in the GBLA included events hosted each week by a different vessel. Ships modified their lifeboats into sailboats and took turns hosting regattas. One ship built a functional soccer pitch on its deck and held tournaments. The Polish ship had a doctor and became the de facto medical center. The Swedish ship had a gym.

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Nautilus Magazine: Can You Overdose on Happiness?

Yet there it was in a publication from 2012. The article was written by two Germans and an American, and they were grappling with the issue of how we should deal with the possibility of manipulating people’s moods and feeling of happiness through brain stimulation. If you have direct access to the reward system and can turn the feeling of euphoria up or down, who decides what the level should be? The doctors or the person whose brain is on the line? [...] 

The neurologist refused. He gave the patient a little lecture on why it might not be healthy to walk around in a state of permanent rapture. There were indications that a person should leave room for natural mood swings both ways. The positive events you encounter should be able to be experienced as such. The patient finally gave in and went home in his median state with an agreement to return for regular checkups. [...]

Young Schläpfer thought about his superior’s remark and actually began to ask his patients questions. He still does. Today, he believes that anhedonia is the central symptom while everything else, including psychological pain, is something that comes in addition to that. It is only when their anhedonia abates that people suffering from depression feel better. And this is not strange, because desire and enjoyment are driving engines and a key to many of our cognitive processes. Desire pushes, so to speak, all the other systems and even makes it possible to have motivated behavior and to work toward a goal.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Constitution Doesn’t Give Presidents Any Protections During Impeachment

The basic sentiment is that the president is being railroaded. But the reality is that when it comes to impeachment, there aren’t any protections for the president laid out in the Constitution. In fact, experts told me that pretty much any rights Democrats give Trump are above and beyond what they’re required to do. Trump hasn’t been charged with a crime and impeachment isn’t a legal proceeding, so he doesn’t have any of the rights you hear about on “Law and Order,” including due process. In the world of impeachment, “fairness” means whatever the majority party in the House of Representatives thinks it should mean. [...]

It’s easy to see a presidential impeachment as something akin to a criminal prosecution — evidence is marshaled, a trial is held, and the president’s fate hangs in the balance. But impeachment is a political process, not a legal one. As a result, it has entirely different rules that make certain protections that are reserved for criminal defendants — like due process — irrelevant. “As a matter of law, a president has essentially no claim to any kind of participation in the impeachment process,” said Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri and the author of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump.” [...]

All of these protections only kick in when impeachment moves into the Judiciary Committee, though — and unlike past impeachments, a significant portion of the action this time around will happen outside that committee. Importantly, Trump’s lawyers won’t be allowed to participate in the next phase of the inquiry, which will involve public hearings run by the House Intelligence Committee. But Binder said that made sense, because unlike the House majority in the Nixon and Clinton impeachments, Democrats don’t have a voluminous special counsel probe to draw from, so the next round of hearings are arguably the public distillation of the House’s investigation, not its case for impeachment. On a practical level, though, it means that Trump’s legal team likely won’t be able to get involved for several weeks — which leaves plenty of time for his defenders to complain about how he’s been boxed out of the process.

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The Guardian: 'Did I ever really know him?': the women who married gay men

Megan is one of a potentially dying breed of women: those who married closeted gay men. As countries such as Australia and Britain progress towards LGBTQI equality, it’s a social phenomenon that could vaporise within a generation. 

When a married man comes out later in life, positive reactions can be heartening. Rainbow garlands are unfurled. People applaud his bravery. They empathise with his struggle. They marvel at how he came through it and celebrate that he can finally be himself. They express gratitude we live in more enlightened times.

Often entirely missing from this narrative is the woman’s voice. [...]

She says women present with depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, high blood pressure, eating issues and fears their children will be bullied. “Some women contact the service before their husband is even aware they know he’s gay,” she says. “Some women found out because they were diagnosed with HIV or another STI. And yes, some women say the group saved their lives; they were suicidal when they contacted us.” [...]

Roxanne remembers, as Australia’s marriage equality postal vote was happening, clients contacting the service asking: have you done it yet, have you voted? I ask her if any were no voters, given their experiences. “Absolutely not,” she says. “They were enthusiastic about creating a new world – so no other woman would go through what they did.”

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Vox: A federal appeals court just demolished Trump’s claim that he is immune from criminal investigatio

Yet, as Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, a Clinton appointee, explains for his court, Trump’s immunity claim is especially weak because Vance seeks personal documents that are unrelated to Trump’s conduct in office. Though prior Supreme Court decisions establish that the president enjoys “absolute immunity from damages liability predicated on his official acts,” this case does not involve Trump’s conduct in office. Nor does it even involve an “order that compels the President himself to do anything.” [...]

This decision is undoubtedly correct, at least under existing precedents. “The most relevant precedent for present purposes is United States v. Nixon,” Katzmann notes, a 1974 Supreme Court decision requiring President Nixon to “‘produce certain tape recordings and documents relating to his conversations with aides and advisers’ for use in a criminal trial against high‐level advisers to the President.” [...]

It’s important to note just how narrow this decision is. “This appeal does not require us to consider whether the President is immune from indictment and prosecution while in office,” Katzmann writes. It also does not require the court “to consider whether the President may lawfully be ordered to produce documents for use in a state criminal proceeding.” Rather, the Vance opinion dealt only with Trump’s sweeping claim that he is immune from criminal investigation altogether.

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The Guardian: 'Amused us for years': Rob the unappealing albatross finally finds a mate

Rob, 35 and named after the red, orange and blue bands around his leg, is part of the world’s only mainland breeding colony of royal albatross – majestic birds with wingspans of about three metres – at Taiaroa Heads on the Otago peninsula, near the bottom of the South Island. [...]

Four of Rob’s previous partners have died, while others have not stuck – and no one knows why. Langsbury noted that the dating pool was small, with about 200 adults in the colony. [...]

Langsbury hoped Rob, who has raised three chicks so far, would breed with his new partner, who also had a chequered relationship history. “She’s a successful breeder,” he said. “She’ll know what to do.”

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