"natural theology > notes > 2017

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Foglesong, David S., The American Mission and the 'Evil Empire': The Crusade for a 'Free Russia' since 1881, Cambridge University Press 2007 "This timely and trenchant book looks at the cultural and political roots of American attitudes toward Russia from the late nineteenth century through the present day and makes a strong case that these attitudes have helped keep U.S.-Russian relations moving through an unhappy cycle." -Foreign Affairs
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Kolmogorov, A N, and Nathan Morrison (Translator) (With an added bibliography by A T Bharucha-Reid), Foundations of the Theory of Probability, Chelsea 1956 Preface: 'The purpose of this monograph is to give an axiomatic foundation for the theory of probability. . . . This task would have been a rather hopeless one before the introduction of Lebesgue's theories of measure and integration. However, after Lebesgue's publication of his investigations, the analogies between measure of a set and mathematical expectation of a random variable became apparent. These analogies allowed of further extensions; thus, for example, various properties of independent random variables were seen to be in complete analogy with the corresponding properties of orthogonal functions ... '
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McMaster, Herbert Raymond, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, Harper Perennial 1998 'Dereliction Of Duty is a stunning new analysis of how and why the United States became involved in an all-out and disastrous war in Southeast Asia. Fully and convincingly researched, based on recently released transcripts and personal accounts of crucial meetings, confrontations and decisions, it is the only book that fully re-creates what happened and why. It also pinpoints the policies and decisions that got the United States into the morass and reveals who made these decisions and the motives behind them, disproving the published theories of other historians and excuses of the participants.'
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Weeks, Jeffrey R, The Shape of Space, CRC 2001 Amazon Editorial Reviews Book Description 'Maintaining the standard of excellence set by the previous edition, this textbook covers the basic geometry of two- and three-dimensional spaces Written by a master expositor, leading researcher in the field, and MacArthur Fellow, it includes experiments to determine the true shape of the universe and contains illustrated examples and engaging exercises that teach mind-expanding ideas in an intuitive and informal way. Bridging the gap from geometry to the latest work in observational cosmology, the book illustrates the connection between geometry and the behavior of the physical universe and explains how radiation remaining from the big bang may reveal the actual shape of the universe.'
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Anne Applebaum, The critical questions on Russia, 'After the demise of the Soviet Union, these games stopped. The KGB was in disarray; more important, a large part of the Russian establishment then wanted to join the West, not undermine it. But now we live in a different era. Russia is run not by “reformers” but by very rich men who believe that Western institutions, and Western democratic ideals, threaten their power and their stolen money. They have returned to their old tactics — but with some new twists. back

Anne Case and Sir Agnus Deaton, Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century, 'Case and Deaton find that while midlife mortality rates continue to fall among all education classes in most of the rich world, middle-aged non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. with a high school diploma or less have experienced increasing midlife mortality since the late 1990s. This is due to both rises in the number of “deaths of despair”—death by drugs, alcohol and suicide—and to a slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age.' back

Ashley Parker and Phlip Rucker, Trump taps Kushner to lead a SWAT team to fix government with business ideas, '“We should have excellence in government,” Kushner said Sunday in an interview in his West Wing office. “The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.” ' back

Brian Robins, The real reason our power companies block battery systems, '"What people don't understand about renewables is the need for diversity of sources. You can't just have wind," he says. You also need solar for when the wind doesn't blow and batteries to help smooth the energy flows to meet demand." So removing the half-hour average settlement rule and allowing payment in five-minute blocks would tilt the playing field towards batteries, which store output from wind and solar systems, and save energy users money.' back

Commonweal: Editors, Failure, Bigly, 'It can’t be repeated often enough that the United States spends vastly more on health care (which now accounts for nearly one-fifth of the economy) than any other industrialized nation, yet gets medical outcomes that are much worse. The system is profoundly dysfunctional. A significant portion of the high cost of medical care and insurance for those who can afford it pays for the treatment of the uninsured in hospital emergency rooms across the country. Extending coverage to the uninsured, which Obamacare has done for more than 20 million Americans, is the first step toward rationalizing the system, controlling costs, and improving health outcomes. That is something government should and can do, and as the practice of other Western nations suggests, it is something that only government can do.' back

Costica Bradatan, Our Delight in Destruction, 'It’s as though we have become more Cartesian than Descartes; we refuse to have anything to do with that which is not exceedingly clear and distinct; if something defies the usual explanations and seems mysterious, then it “smacks of religion.” If a problem unsettles us, but it’s not solvable in strictly linguistic, logical or empirical terms, we deem it a “false problem” and move on. Today, it is considered unrigorous and unprofitable to talk of matters of the human heart — that obscure little thing that, more than logic or arguments, make people act and live and die.' back

Costica Bradatan, Our Delight in Destruction, 'IThe main reason we don’t engage with the abyss, however, is not necessarily mental laziness. Most of the time, it is sheer fear. For, as Nietzsche warned, if you look intently into an abyss, the abyss will start looking back. Dostoevsky — socialist, political prisoner, addicted gambler, epileptic, reactionary thinker and visionary artist — did plenty abyss-gazing and his testimony is overwhelming. It is clear “to the point of obviousness,” he confesses in “A Writer’s Diary,” that “evil lies deeper in human beings than our socialist-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it has always been; that abnormality and sin arise from that soul itself; and, finally, that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges.”' back

Dan Schnur, Trump, the Centrist President, 'The only way for Mr. Trump to have maneuvered to the outside of the members of the Freedom Caucus was to call their bluff, put his health care bill up for a vote and dare them to say no to a repeal of Obamacare. But Mr. Trump blinked, and now the 30-plus most conservative Republicans in the House know that they can stand up to him without fear of retribution.' back

Elizabeth Grant and Kristin Harman, Dark tourism, Aboriginal imprisonment and the 'prison tree' that wasn't, 'The Derby boab tree has become a major attraction - visited by local and international tourists - protected under WA’s Register of Heritage Places. The statement of the site’s significance says, in part, that the tree “represents the harsh treatment prisoners often received in the north of Australia in the late 19th and early 20th century”. But our research has found that the Derby boab was never used as an Aboriginal prison, a holding area or as a staging point. There is no evidence that anyone was imprisoned in the tree.' back

Emmy Noether, Invariant Variation Probems (English Translation), M. A. Tavel’s English translation of “Invariante Variation sprobleme,” Nachr. d. K ̈onig. Gesellsch. d. Wiss. zu G ̈ottingen, Math-phys. Klasse , 235–257 (1918), which originally appeared in Transport Theory and Statistical Physics,1 (3), 183–207 (1971). 'The problems in variation here concerned are such as to admit a continuous group (in Lie’s sense); the conclusions that emerge from the corresponding differential equations find their most general expression in the theorems formulated in Section 1 a nd proved in following sections. Concerning these differential equations that arise from pro blems of variation, far more precise statements can be made than about arbitrary differential equ ations admitting of a group, which are the subject of Lie’s researches. What is to follow, there fore, represents a combination of the methods of the formal calculus of variations with those o f Lie’s group theory.' back

Eugene Robinson, Republicans are so hopeless, Trump may have to work with Democrats, 'Will anyone be left standing when the Republican circular firing squad runs out of ammunition? Or will everybody just reload and keep blasting away, leaving Democrats to clean up the bloody mess? The political moment we’re living through is truly remarkable, but not in a good way. Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress, so we’re basically in their hands. But they have nothing approaching consensus on what they should be doing — and they have failed to show basic competence at doing much of anything.' back

Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin, 'We Must Fight Them': Trump Goes After Conservatives of Freedom Caucus, 'All week, the White House lurched between battering conservatives and trying to win them over. On Wednesday — about 18 hours before Mr. Trump’s Twitter blast — senior officials invited two dozen leaders from conservative groups for a closed-door session to plot a path ahead.' back

Hadley Freeman, What do many lone attackers have in common? Domestic violence, 'And yet, Trump’s approach to terrorism is – like the right wing in this country – focused on the idea that Muslims specifically are dangerous. In fact, as David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center of Terrorism and Security, recently said: “Attacks by Muslims accounted for only one third of one percent of all murders in America last year.” Meanwhile, Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control advocacy group, analysed all the FBI data on mass shootings in the US from 2009 to 2015, and found that 16% of the attackers had previously been charged with domestic violence. And yet instead of calling out deep-rooted patterns of misogyny that might hit close to home, the right insists on looking only outwards and demonising an already demonised religion. Funny, that.' back

Ian Johnson, What a Buddhist Monk Taught Xi Jinping, 'I’ve found that Mr. Xi’s embrace of faith is incredibly popular among most Chinese. While Christians may cringe at his views, many more others see his support for traditional faiths as positive — a re-creation of the imperial Chinese state’s support for certain faiths and belief systems. Far from being an anomaly in Mr. Xi’s rise, his stint in Zhengding is most likely something else: a template for the mixing of faith and politics — a reimagining of the political-religious state that once ruled China.' back

Joseph Paul Forgas, Why are some people more gullible than others?, 'Homo sapiens is probably an intrinsically gullible species. We owe our evolutionary success to culture, our unique ability to receive, trust and act on stories we get from others, and so accumulate a shared view about the world. In a way, trusting others is second nature. But not everything we hear from others is useful or even true. There are countless ways people have been misled, fooled and hoaxed, sometimes for fun, but more often, for profit or for political gain.' back

Julian Brave NoiseCat, The western idea of private property is flawed. Indigenous people have it right, 'We live in a world dominated by the principle of private property. Once indigenous people were dispossessed of their lands, the land was surveyed, subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. From high above, continents now appear as an endless property patchwork of green and yellow farms, beige suburban homes and metallic gray city blocks stretching from sea to shining sea.' back

Mary-Anne Kate and Graham Jamieson, A soldier and a sex worker walk into a therapist's office. Who's more likely to have PTSD, 'Sex workers, women fleeing domestic violence, survivors of childhood abuse and Indigenous Australians are far more likely to have experienced this complex trauma. In these groups, between 40% and 55% are affected by PTSD.' back

Massoud Hayoun, Arab Americans lead the charge for US civil liberties, 'Before Linda Sarsour was an organiser of the Women's March, which the day after Donald Trump's inauguration mounted the largest protest in US history, she was an Arab and Muslim American community organiser in New York City, building bonds with New Yorkers of many other ethnicities and faiths. Sarsour is a prominent example of the many Arab American community leaders across the country joining forces with others across faith and colour lines to form a united front against what many consider to be the aggressive and bigoted policies of the Trump administration.' back

Megan Neil, Child abuse a taboo topic in many cultures, 'Social worker and consultant Jatinder Kaur says there is a lack of education about understanding child sex abuse in multicultural communities in Australia, amid a notion that it has not been an issue for them. "Sexual abuse is such a taboo topic with most of the multicultural communities," Ms Kaur told the child abuse royal commission. "It's such a taboo topic that most of the multicultural communities really struggle in talking about sexual abuse, grooming - you wouldn't be able to get them into the room to have a conversation." Ms Kaur said many parents from culturally and linguistically diverse communities are not aware of Australia's child protection systems and community leaders also lack training in understanding child sexual abuse.' back

Nicholas Kristof, President Trump vs. Big Bird, 'What tamed us was, in part, books. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” famously contributed to the abolitionist movement, and “Black Beauty” helped change the way we treat animals. Steven Pinker of Harvard argues that a surge of literacy and an explosion of reading — novels in particular — “contributed to the humanitarian revolution,” by helping people see other viewpoints. There is also modern experimental evidence that reading literary fiction promotes empathy.' back

Nick Harmsen, Lyon Group announced $1b battery and solar farm for South Australia's Riverland, 'Lyon partner David Green said the project was 100 per cent equity financed and construction would begin within months, employing 270 workers. "Riverland Solar Storage's 330-megawatt solar generation and 100-megawatt battery storage system will be Australia's biggest solar farm with 3.4 million solar panels and will also include 1.1 million batteries," he said.' back

Nick Haslam, Distress, status wars and immoral behaviour: the psychological impacts of inequality, 'It is also well known that rising economic inequality is associated with a range of economic and social ills. More unequal societies tend to have worse health, more obesity, more violent crime, more political instability, and more institutional corruption. . . . An important new review article makes a strong case for the explanatory role of two phenomena in particular. Nicholas Buttrick and Shigehiro Oishi argue economic inequality breeds mistrust and status competition. These have downstream effects on health and well-being in more unequal societies. back

Nicole Chettle, Sexual abuse royal commission: Adults who molest children 'often popular members of community', 'Experts told the final public hearing of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Sydney today that inaccurate stereotypes were hindering child protection. Professor Anne-Marie McAlinden, from the University of Belfast, appeared via video link and said child molesters were often respected and well-liked individuals. "That's one of the things that abusers will often strive to do," she said.' back

Patrick Cockburn, Iraqi government 'made a mistake' by attacking Mosul before capturing Isis sanctuaries, 'Endgames: inside Iraq In his second dispatch, Patrick Cockburn speaks with the Governor of Kirkuk, who says Isis will survive fall of Iraqi city because it can still find support among displaced Sunni Arabs.' back

Robert J.Samuelson, The national slush fund, 'The crucial break occurred in the early 1960s when President John F. Kennedy accepted the advice of his economists that tax cuts would spur economic growth, although the budget was already in deficit. The assumption was that continuous strong economic growth would generate the higher tax revenues to pay for new programs. We went from limited to open-ended government.' back

Saul Eastlake, The APTA bandaid for the housing market is wearing off, 'The Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA) and the Reserve Bank (RBA) are locked into a strange game of tweaking with economic levers to try and reduce the risk of a rapidly growing property market. But past cycles of rate rises and rules to try and curb lending to investors show the effectiveness of these measures is running out. It also underscores the problems arising from a government unwilling to tackle the problem at source – the perverse incentives in the tax system.' back

Stephen Boykewich, Angels and Demons in the Cold War and Today, 'In his book “The American Mission and the ‘Evil Empire,’ ” the historian David Foglesong details how American opinion leaders have cast Russia in the role of America’s “dark double” for more than a century. Mr. Foglesong’s book is as indespensible today as ever, helping Americans to understand how we have treated Russia as either a benighted land yearning to become a second America, or a moral monster whose faults ease Americans’ own guilty conscience.' back

The Society or Judgement and Decision Making, The Society or Judgement and Decision Making, 'The Society for Judgment and Decision Making is an interdisciplinary academic organization dedicated to the study of normative, descriptive, and prescriptive theories of judgments and decisions. Its members include psychologists, economists, organizational researchers, decision analysts, and other decision researchers. The Society's primary event is its Annual Meeting, at which Society members present their research. It also publishes the journal Judgment and Decision Making.' back

Timothy Garton Ash, Like Trump, the Chinese leader is pushing a political system to its limits, 'Given the dangerously erratic character of the US president, and the array of possible flashpoints – North Korea’s nuclear programme, Taiwan, and the South China and East China Seas – between the US and its allies on one hand and the rising Asian superpower on the other, the conclusion is clear. The internal dynamics of China’s unprecedented political experiment are not only of interest to anyone who cares about China – they may yet be a matter of war or peace.' back

Vietnam War - Wikipedia, Vietnam War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Vietnam War (Vietnamese: Chiến tranh Việt Nam, although in Vietnam this period of American involvement is known as the American War, Vietnamese: Chiến tranh Mỹ), also known as the Second Indochina War, was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955[ to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975.' back

vol VII: Notes

2017

Notes

Sunday 26 March 2017

Monday 27 March 2017

Tuesday 28 March 2017

Wednesday 29 March 2017

Thursday 30 March

Friday 31 March 2017

Saturday 1 April 2017

Further reading

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