With a new cold war between the USA and China looming on the horizon the balance of power in Asia is being drawn up, with Beijing and Washington vying for influence in the region. Of all the nations of importance though none will be as crucial as Indonesia. Set to be the 4th largest economy by the year 2050 Indonesia is quickly becoming a regional leader, one that could dictate the direction for ASEAN and SE Asia for decades to come. So we sat down with our expert panel to talk about the future of this soon to be giant. On the panel this week Kyle Springer (US Asia Centre) Natalie Sambhi (Verve Research) Gordon Flake (US Asia Centre) For more info visit - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod or Michael on @MikeHilliardAus
29 November 2020
BBC4 In Our Time: Albrecht Dürer
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) who achieved fame throughout Europe for the power of his images. These range from his woodcut of a rhinoceros, to his watercolour of a young hare, to his drawing of praying hands and his stunning self-portraits such as that above (albeit here in a later monochrome reproduction) with his distinctive A D monogram. He was expected to follow his father and become a goldsmith, but found his own way to be a great artist, taking public commissions that built his reputation but did not pay, while creating a market for his prints, and he captured the timeless and the new in a world of great change.
Nautilus Magazine: We Never Know Exactly Where We’re Going in Outer Space
In the early 1960s, during the space race, neither American nor Soviet scientists really knew where planets like Mars or Venus were—especially at the accuracy and precision essential for spacecraft navigation. That may sound faintly ludicrous. They of course knew roughly where a target like Venus would be when a spacecraft got there. But “roughly” in this context might be an offset of 10,000 or 100,000 kilometers. Planetary positions, their ephemerides, rely on the calibration of their orbits to extremely high precision over time. But the only way to do that properly is to make direct measurements, just as the mariners of old would need to sail right by an island or shoreline in order to nail down its latitude and longitude. [...]
It remains to be seen whether tiny spacecraft can carry the requisite computational toolkit or sensory and steering capacity to do this. The bright stars themselves might be the best markers to exploit, together with our own sun forming a navigational beacon. Tiny pulses from miniature laser diodes could provide thrust to maneuver with, and perhaps the key is to send hundreds, even thousands, of nanocraft, each with modest AI and an ability to learn from each other and to reach their goals in space and time through massive redundancy and the sacrifice of many. But when you’re trying to catch a flying bullet—whether star or planet—with another flying bullet, things can go wrong. [...]
In sending machines to other worlds, even to other stars, we have no choice but to fully admit our inaccuracies and imprecisions, to be entirely, brutally honest about our limited grasp of what’s out there. Even the laws of nature are deductions based on wholly imperfect measurements, whether of planetary orbits and gravity, or of the properties of logic and symbolic manipulation in algebra—the latter being “measured” through human minds and the machines those minds produce. The amazing thing is how well these laws let us model and predict aspects of the physical world, a capacity that has reassured and helped us for thousands of years. We have managed to turn the problem around, and can now predict the kinds of chaos that should occur across nature, from unsettled weather conditions and unstable stock markets to, of course, planets.
Vox: Weed was the real winner of the 2020 election
On November 3, four American states voted to legalize marijuana: Arizona, New Jersey, Montana and South Dakota. Combined with the other states that have done so in recent years, one in three Americans now live in a state where access to marijuana has been legalized. It shows that Americans are souring on the harsh drug policies that have put millions of people in prison.
But America’s national drug policy is a different story. Under federal law, marijuana is still classified as a “schedule 1” drug, meaning it’s considered to have little medical value and a high risk of abuse, along with drugs like LSD, heroin, ecstasy and psilocybin mushrooms. In states where marijuana has been legalized, that conflict with federal law creates numerous problems for legal marijuana sellers and users. And few national politicians talk about legalizing marijuana throughout the country. But advocates are hoping that by introducing new state laws one by one, Americans who are ready to move on from the country’s decades-long war on drugs will eventually force the federal government’s hand.
TLDR News: Did Polls Incorrectly Predict the 2020 Election Results? 2020 Poll Review
In the run up to the election a lot of people, including us, spent a lot of time looking at the polls. So when election night rolled around and we didn't see a huge blue wave, some started to doubt the polls they'd been studying. So in this video we discuss if the polls really did get it wrong and if they did, does that matter?
Social Europe: The rise of right-wing nationalism: from Poland to Polanyi
Applebaum is appalled by the ‘extreme left’ which does not wholeheartedly trust such well-known forces for good as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Every movement or actor critical of the status quo contributes to ‘polarisation’ and is an enemy of democracy; to not believe in American ideals is to be a ‘cynic’. In Applebaum’s idealised narrative of the US there are no illegal wars, poverty or corruption or flaws in its increasingly distorted capitalism. [...]
Applebaum’s only material explanation for the weakening of democracy is ‘social media’, where propaganda spreads and people are radicalised. True, such mechanisms are powerful and often underestimated. But the logic of Twitter and Facebook confirms Applebaum’s own way of seeing the world: the moral and emotional stories of our time are reinforced and these platforms become the perfect scapegoat to avoid thinking about other, underlying factors. [...]
Democracy is not just the right to vote. What matters in the long run is justice, and justice can only be achieved through changes in the material conditions of people’s lives. The real dividing line in politics cannot be between ‘evil’ and ‘good’, moral and immoral. What is needed to save democracy is to create new counterweights to today’s capitalism—which undermines it.
Social Europe: Tax havens: patience is running out
That’s no surprise. The OECD had certainly sought to legitimise its claim to speak for all by creating an ‘inclusive framework’ involving developing countries. However, of the 137 nations sitting around the negotiating table, only the G7—those home to the major multinationals and their lobbying teams—had a voice. As a result, the solutions advocated by the OECD would hardly limit financial flows to tax havens and the scarce resources recovered would mainly benefit rich countries. [...]
Estimating the loss of resources caused by corporate and individual tax abuse country by country, and the consequences for healthcare spending, this research is chilling. Globally, these diversions correspond to 9.2 per cent of health budgets, equivalent to the salaries of 34 million nurses. The impact is even more devastating in developing countries, where the shortfall represents 52.4 per cent of health spending. [...]
Of course, there is strong opposition within the EU itself, for one simple reason: if we readily point the finger at the small islands of the Caribbean, it is to make people forget that Europe has its own tax havens. The departing UK, together with its network of Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies—often referred to as its ‘spider’s web’—is responsible for 29 per cent of the $245 billion the world loses to corporate tax abuse every year, according to The State of Tax Justice. And we have further examples inside the EU. Every year, for example, the Netherlands steals the equivalent of $10 billion from its EU neighbours. And it is not alone: Luxembourg, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta do the same.