The Local: Is Italy’s League a ‘far-right’ party?

The League was founded 27 years ago on the pipe dream of separating northern Italy from “Roma ladrona” (“thieving Rome”) and southern Italians, whom it characterized as layabouts and criminals. But under Matteo Salvini, the League’s leader of just over four years, the party has dropped references to secession from its programme, aiming instead at national power. Its anger has been redirected at Brussels and most especially, immigrants. [...]

“If today many people confuse it with the far right, it’s essentially because it fiercely opposes immigration and demands national sovereignty as regards the European Union and its policies. But it’s a question of specific convergences, not a deep affinity.” [...]

In its former life, the Northern League converged with the centre and the left, counting former communists, socialists, anti-fascists, federalists, libertarians and others among its ranks. Throughout its first decade it talked about teaming up with centrist and leftist movements, and in some cases did so; one left-wing prime minister described the League as a “rib” of Italy’s left. [...]

“Its programme has aspects that put it mainly near the right (for example, defending small and medium businesses, criticizing the tax system) and others that place it less far from the left (policies that favour working people and those at the lower end of society – provided they’re Italian by birth),” says Tarchi.

read the article

Independent: Why Acid Corbynism is the new counterculture we need

Part of what Acid Corbynism is about is finding ways of exploring what it would mean in cultural and political terms to really act like you’re conscious of that. On a philosophical level, I’m part of a tradition which is very sceptical of the whole liberal, European view of the self. If you accept that the bourgeois, individual subject is a myth, the European tradition is to be a revolutionary and the Buddhist tradition says you should give up all your possessions and live in a monastery. They’re quite different but there’s a whole terrain in between to explore. I don’t think we would so hubristic as to think we could be that point of conversion but we would want to create a space where people explore those kinds of ideas.

Before Blair, especially in the Nye Bevan/Tony Benn tradition there was always a sense that our enemy wasn’t just the Tories, but a whole culture and whole cultural hierarchy, and anything that was opposed to that we should be sympathetic to. In the 1960s and 1970s, for the first time you have a generation not growing up worrying about how to feed their children. The consequence of that are people start to ask, why given they no longer have to experience scarcity, why they have to continue to experience any degree of exploitation. [...]

Every political project will implicitly have an ideal human in mind. Thatcher wanted to create entrepreneurial, hard working individuals. Without imposing a template, we would want to develop humans who would find it easy to collaborate with others in a creative way in as many contexts as possible, without paranoia and fear. Someone who’s comfortable with their own complexity and the complexity of the society they live in.

read the article 

Quartz: You probably won’t remember this, but the “forgetting curve” theory explains why learning is hard

Ebbinghaus made a second discovery: The downward slope of the forgetting curve can be softened by repeating the learned information at particular intervals. This principle is the foundation of the learning method known as “spaced repetition,” where material is learned then reviewed after increasingly large time gaps. [...]

Overcoming the forgetting curve is about more than raw repetitions. There has to be space between the reviews. It doesn’t work to just study a new fact 15 times in 1 hour and overcome the curve. If the fact is already at the front of the mind, no work is being done in recalling it again. But if information is repeated at intervals, the brain has to reconstruct that memory, strengthening it like a muscle. [...]

The forgetting curve shows how brains are different. They can learn anything, which means they need to filter out the important from the trivial. Luckily, understanding how the curve works makes it easier to learn things that may not be necessary for survival, but are deeply rewarding. Like a new language, a musical instrument, or the name of Chewbacca’s father (it’s Attichitcuk).

read the article

Deutsche Welle: Stealthy sleuths: Lithuania calls for 'cyber Schengen' zone

As NATO and the European Union team up to cut red tape for troops to move more quickly through Europe to counter a potential crisis, Lithuania is leading an effort to do the same for cyber defenders. Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite has called on fellow EU leaders to support the creation of a "cyber Schengen," modeled on the area of free movement of people within the European Union, to better battle online crime and aggression which operate border-free. [...]

Besides being deployed to protect civilian infrastructure under attack, including EU institutions themselves, "it's easier to talk about joint efforts in cyberspace in Europe than in NATO," Kerza told DW.

He said that in his meetings with counterparts on both the military and civilian sides, he constantly hears discussion about trust. "When you talk about NATO, normally you talk about secrets and when it comes to secrets, countries do not want to open doors very widely. When we're talking about cyber in the EU...about 80 percent of incidents are open, not classified." [...]

But the incident itself was serious. The false information was also sent as an "alert" by email from the genuine "tv3.lt" email address. "The messages were sent to high-level politicians including the president and prime minister, representatives of the parliament, and journalists," Karoblis explained. Clicking on it unleashed a virus in users' computers. "The aim was to extract information and actually take over the IT systems," he said.

read the article

statista: The German Military Is Woefully Unprepared For Action

Germany has attempted to modernize its military in recent years, introducing new types of equipment such as the NH-90 helicopter and the A400M transport aircraft. Despite the new and more modern hardware, a report has revealed that less than half of German military assets are operational. The "Report on the Operational Readiness of the Bundeswehr's Primary Weapons Systems 2017" revealed that only 39 out of 128 Eurofighter jets are ready for action, while 26 out of the 93-strong fleet of Tornado fighter-bombers are operational.

New and state of the art equipment such as the A400M, NH-90 and Tiger attack helicopter all suffer from appalling rates of availability. Only three A400Ms are ready for action out of a total of 15 while 13 NH-90s are up and running out of 58 altogether. If the Bundeswehr had to fight a conflict against a modern adversary using armour tomorrow, it could only muster 12 Tigers out of 62 in total, along with 105 Leopard 2 tanks out of 224 in the army. The situation at sea isn't much better with less than half the frigate fleet available for operations along with absolutely no submarines.

see the graph