The Atlantic: Nancy Pelosi Is Winning

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.[...]

But Pelosi, then House minority leader, wouldn’t take the bait. She denied that Social Security was in crisis. And she refused to offer a plan for changing it. When a member of Congress asked when Democrats would offer their own proposals, she replied, “Never. Is never good enough for you?”[...]

Still, Pelosi, understanding that policy and politics are inseparable, did nothing. Irrespective of the merits of tweaking Social Security, she realized that offering Democratic proposals would divide her caucus and give Bush a political lifeline. Instead, she forced Americans to choose between Social Security as it was and Social Security privatization, maneuvering Bush into a battle that crippled his second term and laid the foundation for Democrats to retake the House in 2006. “The first thing we had to do in 2005 was take the president’s numbers down. Bush was 57 percent in early 2005,” Pelosi recently remarked to The New York Times’ Robert Draper. “His numbers came down to 38 in the fall, and that’s when the retirements [of congressional Republicans] started to happen.”[...]

But Pelosi knows that the alternative to Democratic compromise isn’t necessarily paralysis. It may be Democratic triumph. Trump, like Bush, has picked a fight that is popular with conservatives but unpopular with the public at large. Most Americans don’t think there’s a border crisis, don’t support a border wall, and blame Trump for the shutdown. As a result, Republican members of Congress are under more political pressure to back down than their Democratic counterparts, and the longer the shutdown continues, the more that pressure should grow. For the time being, at least, conservative opposition has forced Trump to shelve talk of declaring a national emergency. All of which means that the most likely outcome to the current standoff is that Trump caves. And since the wall was Trump’s signature campaign promise, such a retreat could depress conservative enthusiasm and impair his chances in 2020. “If he gives in,” Lindsey Graham recently warned, “that’s probably the end of his presidency.”

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Aeon: Whys of seeing

Today, experimental philosophers and philosophically inclined psychologists are designing experiments that can help to answer some of the big philosophical questions about the nature of art and how we experience it – questions that have puzzled people for centuries, such as: why do we prefer original works of art to forgeries? How do we decide what is good art? And does engaging with the arts make us better human beings? [...]

According to the formalist position, when the original and the forgery are visually indistinguishable, they are not aesthetically different. For example, Monroe Beardsley in 1959 argued that we should form our aesthetic judgments only by attending to the perceptual properties of the picture before us, and not by considering when or how the work was made or who it was made by. So why did people change their evaluation of the Vermeer painting once van Meegeren confessed to being the artist? According to Alfred Lessing, writing in 1965, this response can be chalked up to social pressures: ‘Considering a work of art aesthetically superior because it is genuine, or inferior because it is forged, has little or nothing to do with aesthetic judgment or criticism. It is rather a piece of snobbery.’ This view assumes that artworks have perceptual properties that are unaffected by our knowledge about the background of the work.

According to the historicist position, what we perceive in a work is influenced by what we know about it. Despite the original and the forgery being visually indistinguishable, they are aesthetically different precisely because of what the formalists deny is relevant – our beliefs about who made the work, when, and how. The German critic Walter Benjamin in the 1930s argued that our aesthetic response takes into account the object’s history, ‘its unique existence in a particular place’. He believed that a forgery has a different history and thus lacks the ‘aura’ of the original. The philosopher and critic Arthur Danto took a similar historicist position in 1964 when he asked us to consider why a Brillo box by Andy Warhol that is visually identical to a Brillo box in a supermarket is a work of art. To determine that the box in the museum is a work of art ‘requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld’. Denis Dutton claimed in 2009 that we perceive a forgery to be aesthetically inferior to an original because we take into account the kind of achievement the work represents – the artist’s process – and a forgery represents a lesser kind of achievement than an original. [...]

Clearly, people don’t behave how the formalists thought that they should. What is causing their appreciation to be diminished? One possibility is that our sense of forgery’s moral evil unconsciously influences our aesthetic response. Another is that our knowledge of forgery’s worthlessness on the art market has the same kind of unconscious effect. But if we could strip forgery of its connection with deception and lack of monetary value, would it still be devalued? And, if so, can we demonstrate that the historicist position is correct?[...]

Experimental psychologists have begun to seek evidence of fiction’s power to induce empathy. In one study, after reading a story about an injustice committed against an Arab-Muslim woman, participants were less likely to categorise angry ambiguous-race faces as Arab. But did this translate into kinder behaviour? This was not examined. In another study, after reading an excerpt from Harry Potter about stigma, children reported more positive attitudes about immigrant children at their school. But note that this change of mind (or heart) occurred only for children who identified with Harry, and only after a discussion of the reading with their teacher – and this might have been the deciding factor. Meanwhile, after reading a story about a character behaving prosocially, participants were more willing to help the experimenter pick up accidentally dropped pens. But note that picking up dropped pens is very low-cost helping, and we have no idea how long such an inclination to help lasts.

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Foreign Policy: Iran’s Next Supreme Leader Is Dead

Most Iranians remember Shahroudi as the head of the country’s notorious judiciary between 1999 and 2009, a period spanning Mohammad Khatami and then Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s diametrically opposed governments. During this time, Shahroudi presided over a witch hunt against reformist parliamentarians and newspapers, students and intellectuals, human rights activists and, at the end of his tenure, the pro-reformist Green Movement protesting against the fraudulent elections that handed Ahmadinejad a second term. [...]

On the other hand, Shahroudi was also credited with introducing some reforms, including reinstituting the separation between judges and prosecutors abolished by his predecessor Mohammad Yazdi, suspending stoning as capital punishment, and proposing a bill granting more legal protection to minors. Around the time of his death, reformist-leaning newspapers such as Shahrvand depicted him as an “iconoclast judge of judges” (qazi ol-qazat-e sonnat-shekan), and official government media outlets including the Islamic Republic News Agency-owned Iran called him “progressive.” [...]

Shahroudi, who like Khomeini and Khamenei wore the black turban marking him as a descendent of the Prophet Mohammed, didn’t just possess the required religious scholarship to become supreme leader, the sort that placed one in high standing in Tehran and Qom’s politically charged environment, if not in Najaf. Instead, his unique selling point as potential supreme leader lay as much in his cross-factional appeal among the Iranian establishment as in the continuity he represented—two assets critical to Iran’s future political stability. Unlike Khamenei and many hard-liners, Shahroudi maintained reasonably good ties with all four of Iran’s existing factions: conservatives, neoconservatives, moderate conservatives, and reformists. This was reflected in his 2011 appointment to head a custom-created, five-man body known clunkily as the Supreme Council for Dispute Resolution and Regulation of Relations Among the Three Branches of Government, a response to the spiraling tiffs between then-President Ahmadinejad and an increasingly irate parliament. While an undisputed conservative of the cloth, he was also open enough to earn the grudging respect of the conservatives’ rivals. [...]

But the hard-liners’ longtime stranglehold on the key levers of military, judicial, media, and clerical power will now leave little room for Iran’s reformists and moderates, among them current President Hassan Rouhani, to weigh in on the succession process. Shahroudi’s death thus paves the way for hard-line candidates, notably from the Guardian Council, the Expediency Council, the Assembly of Experts, and the judiciary’s top ranks. Barring the 91-year-old ultraconservative head of both the Guardian Council and the Assembly of Experts, Ahmad Jannati, two other candidates stand out: outgoing judiciary chief and newly appointed Expediency Council head Sadeq Larijani and, of late, Ebrahim Raisi—the current custodian of Mashhad’s powerful Astan Quds Razavi foundation, a 2017 presidential contender, and the rumored next chief of judiciary. Compared to Shahroudi, both clerics have far less patience for their moderate and reformist rivals, who in turn are less likely to accept them in Khamenei’s wake.

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UnHerd: The corruption of Hungary

Orbán took office for the first time in 1998 at the helm of his right-wing Fidesz party, becoming at 35 the country’s second youngest leader. Already his modus operandi was becoming apparent. He had little patience for negotiation, seeking to sweep aside parliament and others who stood in his way. His administration was marked by a number of corruption scandals. In spite of the problems, Western governments saw him as a reliable ally. Hungary was joining Nato and the European Union.[...]

Old school friends, neighbours and football mates (he was obsessed with the sport) made fortunes. The more control he seized, the easier it became to distribute largesse – and to receive loyalty in return. Self-styled entrepreneurs queued up to ‘work’ with him. Except they weren’t particularly entrepreneurial. It was all about state assets, or ‘state capture’ as it came to be known.

Unlike famous Russians such as Roman Abramovich or Oleg Deripaska, their Hungarian equivalents are not household names. Nor do they count their money in billions. For them it tends to be merely hundreds of millions. But as a proportion of national income, it is still not to be sniffed at.[...]

Perhaps the most exotic is Lorinc Meszaros, a former gas fitter and mayor of Orbán’s home village of Felcsut (a village where they built a football stadium to accommodate a crowd more than twice the size of its population). Thanks to a number of state contracts, he jumped to number five on the rich list, his wealth soaring five-fold in just one year to £330 million. Asked by reporters how he had grown his business faster than Mark Zuckerberg, he declared: “maybe I’m smarter”.

Hungary has built this system from within the European Union – with EU funds. Some 60% of state contracts, billions of Euro, are funded by the EU. The Corruption Research Centre Budapest, a non-governmental organisation, analysed all public procurement contracts from 2010-16. It found that the aggregate value of contracts won by four Fidesz-linked businessmen (including the prime minister’s son-in-law) was 13 times larger than the size of other contracts. Their total haul came to £1.8 billion. Sometimes contracts are put out to tender; sometimes tenders take place, but competitors know they are going through the motions.  

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The New Yorker: Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua

Wait. The most unusual fact about it is that it deviates from an orbit that is shaped purely by the gravitational force of the sun. Usually, in the case of comets, such a deviation is caused by the evaporation of ice on the surface of the comet, creating gases that push the comet, like the rocket effect. That’s what comets show: a cometary tail of evaporated gas. We don’t see a cometary tail here, but, nevertheless, we see a deviation from the expected orbit. And that is the thing that triggered the paper. Once I realized that the object is moving differently than expected, then the question is what gives it the extra push. And, by the way, after our paper appeared, another paper came out with analysis that showed very tight limits on any carbon-based molecules in the vicinity of this object.[...]

The only thing that came to my mind is that maybe the light from the sun, as it bounces off its surface, gives it an extra push. It’s just like a wind bouncing off a sail on a sailboat. So we checked that and found that you need the thickness of the object to be less than a millimetre in order for that to work. If it is indeed less than a millimetre thick, if it is pushed by the sunlight, then it is maybe a light sail, and I could not think of any natural process that would make a light sail. It is much more likely that it is being made by artificial means, by a technological civilization.[...]

It’s possible that the civilization is not alive anymore, but it did send out a spacecraft. We ourselves sent out Voyager I and Voyager II. There could be a lot of equipment out there. The point is that this is the very first object we found from outside the solar system. It is very similar to when I walk on the beach with my daughter and look at the seashells that are swept ashore. Every now and then we find an object of artificial origin. And this could be a message in a bottle, and we should be open-minded. So we put this sentence in the paper.

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Bloomberg: Britain’s a Small Country. Get Used to It.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a small country that is about to get even smaller. I know that this simple statement of fact will nevertheless infuriate many English people — and I do mean English people, not Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish. Last week, at India’s Raisina Dialogue, the Spanish foreign minister said that there were two types of countries in Europe: countries that are small and countries that do not know that they are small. Aside from the English, no Europeans in the audience were upset at this plain-speaking. Not even the French. [...]

May has resolutely ruled out another referendum, but this is more than just her failure. After all, even if somehow Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party manages to unseat her, Labour’s approach to Europe is as predicated on fantasies as May’s. Corbyn is on record as saying he wants a customs union with the European Union that allows Britain to negotiate its own trade deals; this is, quite simply, impossible. It reflects a notion of British indispensability that nobody outside England shares.

The British can blame no one but themselves. While they’ve never been enthusiastic Europeans, their decision to be the first country to withdraw from the EU is revealing of a basic inability to grasp their vastly diminished place in the world. That they are a member of the United Nations Security Council means little; that reflects merely the power that the British Empire had in 1945, not the U.K.’s power today. Nor is being a nuclear-weapons state much of a big deal any more: Such basket cases as North Korea have the bomb. Most of Britain’s foreign policy influence grows out of its loyalty to the U.S., and Britons’ disproportionate cultural influence derives from the fact that they happen to speak the same language as the world’s sole cultural superpower.  [...]

I write this column from Vienna, an imperial capital grander even than London and one that has also been long without an empire to rule. Austria’s capital, unlike Britain’s, has come to terms with its new status. A profoundly liveable city, it prospers as Western Europe’s bridgehead in the east, and it has an easy pride in its history of intellectual innovation and artistic excellence.

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The Conversation: Bees and butterflies are under threat from urbanisation – here’s how city-dwellers can help

It’s alarming, then, that pollinators are under threat from factors including more intense farming, climate change, disease and changing land use, such as urbanisation. Yet recent studies have suggested that urban areas could actually be beneficial, at least for some pollinators, as higher numbers of bee species have been recorded in UK towns and cities, compared with neighbouring farmland.  [...]

We also recorded high numbers of pollinating insects in gardens. Residential gardens made up between a quarter and a third of the total area of the four cities we sampled, so they’re really a crucial habitat for bees and other pollinators in cities. That’s why urban planners and developers need to create new housing developments with gardens. [...]

Rather than paving, decking and neatly mown lawns, gardeners need to be planting flowers, shrubs and bushes that are good for pollinators. Choose plants that have plenty of pollen and nectar that is accessible to pollinators, and aim to have flowers throughout the year to provide a constant supply of food. Our research suggests that borage and lavender are particularly attractive for pollinators.[...]

Parks, road verges and other green spaces make up around a third of cities, however our study found that they contain far fewer pollinators than gardens. Our results suggest that increasing the numbers of flowers in these areas, potentially by mowing less often, could have a real benefit for pollinators (and save money). There are already several initiatives underway to encourage local authorities to mow less often.

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statista: The EU countries with the most (and least) GPs

t's not uncommon in some countries to see a queue extending down the street when a new medical practice opens its doors to the public for the first time. Likewise, many know the frustration and bafflement that arises when calling for an appointment with their doctor at the start of the day, only to be told there are already none left. As new data from Eurostat shows though, the chances of encountering these problems are likely to vary greatly from country to country. When it comes to general practitioners (GPs) per 100,000 population, Portugal is way out in front in the EU with 253. The UK is low down on the list with only 76 and Greece is rock bottom with a mere 42.

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Metro News: Past of top Brexiteers comes back to haunt them on massive billboards

Giant posters have emerged showing previous quotes and promises of prominent Brexit politicians. 

Pro-Remain group Led By Donkeys put up the billboards around Dover to remind people of what our MPs said.

The group said: ‘If they want us to trust their judgment as we enter the choppy waters of Brexit it’s right that we remind ourselves of their record.’ 

The new posters include quotes from arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, Prime Minister Theresa May, former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox.  

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