Links - 1st November 2019 (1)

Singh’s NDP trails all major parties for candidates — he seeks more women, minorities - "Singh said he’s not worried, despite having difficulty attracting the kinds of candidates he wants, particularly women.“It’s a lot harder to recruit many women, who are so qualified and so capable but don’t see themselves as leaders and they won’t say yes on the first try,” he said.“It takes multiple attempts to encourage women to come forward"
So much for no means no

How to Stop the Corporate Virtue-Signaling Before It’s Too Late - "There are enough forces fueling the political polarization in the west—from Black Lives Matter to Fox News to Vladimir Putin. The last thing we need right now is for corporations to be adding fuel to the fire by taking sides in the culture wars.The dangers of this kind of corporate politicization became apparent in Australia last year after the government announced a plebiscite on the question of gay marriage. While a healthy debate took place in the political realm, many of the country’s biggest corporations, including Qantas, began to actively campaign for the “yes” side. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, who is openly gay, was one of the most outspoken. He ended up getting a pie in his face. Peter Dutton, whose Liberal National Party was opposed to same-sex marriage, argued that corporations should “stick to their knitting.” Dutton said that Qantas executives were welcome to campaign on their own dimes but he urged them not to “use an iconic brand and the might of a multi-billion dollar business on issues best left to the judgment of issues and elected decision-makers.” Sydney’s Catholic Archbishop, Anthony Fisher, was also concerned, warning that corporations getting political on social issues was threatening to democracy. “In our polity, corporations enjoy various privileges such as legal personality and perpetuity, limitation of liability, corporate tax rates, protections of intellectual property and bankruptcy law et cetera, on the understanding that they will use those advantages for their well-understood commercial purposes, and not so as to become a Fifth Estate governing our democracy”... Jeremy Sammut, a researcher at Australia’s Centre for Independent Studies, documented the corporate intrusion into politics in his recent paper, “Curbing Corporate Social Responsibility: Preserving pluralism – and preventing politicisation – in Australian business.”Sammut points out that the corporate virtue-signaling almost exclusively tends to favor the political tastes of the “elites” over the “ordinary” people, and that’s what makes it so dangerous... As Harvard professor Amy Chua points out in her recent book Political Tribes, “when groups feel threatened, they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.” It’s easy to feel threatened when even corporations are piling on with the politicians. For another example of this, check out the videos of Americans burning their sneakers after Nike lionized NFL player Colin Kaepernick for refusing to stand for the national anthem before games. The Kaepernick controversy has been a gift to Donald Trump, who uses it to rile up voters."

Schrödinger’s (Wo)Manhood - "Much like Schrödinger’s unfortunate cat, which is simultaneously dead and alive, manhood and womanhood in our era are held to be simultaneously entirely in the brain and everywhere except the brain. In matters concerning gender equity in STEM, one must profess that the differences between men and women manifest solely in the pelvic and chest anatomy, not the brain. Consequently, if women constitute less than 50 percent of the people studying or working in a field, the only acceptable explanation is sexism, not a difference in the typical preferences of the two sexes.On the other hand, transgender activists maintain that the distinction between being a man or a woman is entirely in the mind, and a person’s reproductive anatomy is not what defines them as male or female. Whatever a person states about his or her gender identity reflects their authentic inner nature, and may not be challenged. Scholars who raise questions about transgender identity face not only criticism and counterarguments (fair game for anyone making a claim), but also demands that their published work be removed from the written record rather than rebutted in open debate... (Interestingly, transgender men make remarkably few demands concerning their status as men. One reason is surely that modern Western society has fewer spaces that are explicitly male-only, and those that remain mostly face pressure to admit women rather than expand their concept of manhood. Facing a dearth of explicitly men-only spaces to which they can demand access, some transgender men have actually demanded access to women-only spaces.)"

Labor fight roils Bernie Sanders campaign, as workers demand the $15 hourly pay the candidate has proposed for employees nationwide - "Campaign field hires have demanded an annual salary they say would be equivalent to a $15-an-hour wage, which Sanders for years has said should be the federal minimum. The organizers and other employees supporting them have invoked the senator’s words and principles in making their case to campaign manager Faiz Shakir"
Whoops!

Bernie Sanders Campaign Responds to $15 Minimum Wage Controversy with Better Hours for Staff - "Amid a pay war within his own 2020 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders will limit the amount of time his organizers can work to guarantee that no one is making less than $15 per hour"

Bernie Sanders, Defender of Bread Lines as Sign of Prosperity, Attacks Amazon’s Corporate Lingo as ‘Orwellian’ - "Take Sanders' defenses of the authoritarian Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, which he visited and enthusiastically supported while mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980s. When asked about his support for the Sandinistas in light of the food shortages in the country that resulted in people standing in bread lines, Sanders retorted:
    It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don't line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.
Then there is Sanders' support for the Castro regime in Cuba, which, according to his telling, had "deficiencies" but also instilled in the population a genuine love of the government."

How wings really work - "It’s one of the most tenacious myths in physics and it frustrates aerodynamicists the world over. Now, University of Cambridge’s Professor Holger Babinsky has created a 1-minute video that he hopes will finally lay to rest a commonly used yet misleading explanation of how wings lift.“A wing lifts when the air pressure above it is lowered. It’s often said that this happens because the airflow moving over the top, curved surface has a longer distance to travel and needs to go faster to have the same transit time as the air travelling along the lower, flat surface. But this is wrong,” he explained. “I don’t know when the explanation first surfaced but it’s been around for decades. You find it taught in textbooks, explained on television and even described in aircraft manuals for pilots. In the worst case, it can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of some of the most important principles of aerodynamics.”To show that this common explanation is wrong, Babinsky filmed pulses of smoke flowing around an aerofoil... “What actually causes lift is introducing a shape into the airflow, which curves the streamlines and introduces pressure changes – lower pressure on the upper surface and higher pressure on the lower surface,” clarified Babinsky, from the Department of Engineering. “This is why a flat surface like a sail is able to cause lift – here the distance on each side is the same but it is slightly curved when it is rigged and so it acts as an aerofoil. In other words, it’s the curvature that creates lift, not the distance.”"

Targeting Barcelona was sadly predictable – Spain holds both historic and modern importance to jihadists - "What happened in Barcelona, however, was not a freak incident. The writing has been on the wall for years. No, not because of foreign policy often cited as a legitimate grievance of why we see “backlash” on our streets, despite Isil writing in its magazine Dabiq in 2016 that “even if you were to stop bombing us … we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.”On the contrary, Spain has kept a low profile and avoided foreign policy adventures since the departure of former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar in 2004, a close ally of the United States in “the war on terror” post-9/11. Under his leadership, Spain took part in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a decision for which Aznar paid a heavy price. Following the Madrid attacks, he lost in an election he expected to win to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who immediately ordered the withdrawal of Spanish troops. Spain has erred on the side of caution ever since and as countries around the world stepped-up their roles in a US-led coalition against Isil in Iraq, the country remained a reluctant partner. But just because Spain had little appetite to confront Isil, the group still showed interest in Spain.The country has been identified as a key target on extremist websites for historical reasons, given that Muslims ruled in Spain for close to eight centuries until 1492, a fact that informs Isil’s central narrative in the fight against the “crusaders”. In January 2016, the terrorist organization issued a chilling video threatening to launch attacks in Spain and to reconquer the territory of the Iberian Peninsula that previously was part of the Islamic caliphate. “We will recover our land from the invaders”, Isil vowed in the video message... [The Jihadist] interest is not so much informed by our actions but rather eminently shaped by a skewed historical narrative and fascist ideology."
If you take a very generous view of "Western foreign policy", you can claim the Reconquista as part of it. Or maybe you can pretend that the Reconquista was Western Imperialism and Muslims are just punching up and fighting Colonialism

An angry minority made foxhunting a political issue - yet today, support remains undimmed - "Hunting is not a ‘controversial’ activity among those who live and work in the countryside. Some like it, some don’t, but the idea that this traditional and slightly odd activity should have become a national political issue is fairly ludicrous wherever you are viewing it from. The fact that somewhere in the 20th Century the eradication of hunts and the 40,000-odd people who follow them became, in the words of a leading Labour politician “totemic to the Labour party”, is utterly bizarre.The 'totemic’ ban was passed in 2004, but it has little to do with animals or their welfare. The chairman of the government inquiry into hunting with hounds in 2000 stated very clearly that hunting was not cruel, and it remains perfectly legal to shoot a fox, trap a fox or snare a fox. In fact, research has shown a big drop in the UK’s fox population since the ban on hunting came into force. The one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that the fox is no better off as a result of the ban. There can be no logical justification for such a ridiculous law, so what was the real motivation for the ban? If that was not already obvious, the admission of one MP as soon as the law was passed that it was “class war”, and the subsequent continuing campaigns against hunts that are no longer hunting foxes can leave only one conclusion. The anti-hunting movement is not really about the welfare of animals, it is about a hatred of people, and so it continues its obsessive pursuit of hunts. Meanwhile, in the countryside, support for hunting remains undimmed. More women and young people continue to take up hunting as it remains open and accessible to everyone. Hunting prevails in some of the most marginal of rural communities. In many remote rural areas, hunts play an important social role in times of challenge and change.The real shame is that this issue continues to soak up so much energy that could be used for something positive, not least given the huge challenges facing the countryside in the coming years. Our ever-growing population puts more pressure on green spaces as the demand for housing and infrastructure grows, and when the absolute priority should be to ensure that Brexit works for the countryside it remains bizarre that issues like hunting remain so high on the agendas of some politicians... hunting and badger culling were among the least influential issues when it came to how people voted in the 2017 General Election, as they were in 2015 and 2010. But the tide of e-petitions, automatically generated emails and social media posts on hunting reinforce that there is a small proportion of the population which is fixated with animal rights issues, for reasons that have little to do with animals... There has been no benefit to the huntsman or the fox, but worse than that, hundreds of hours of police time and thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money continue to be wasted"

What do drones and GPS owe to a 1744 shipwreck? - "In rural China, delivery drones are starting to look like a leapfrog technology: one that catches on most quickly where there is not a competing established infrastructure - in this case, of big-box retail stores and roads for van deliveries.Zhangwei, for example, is a village in Jiangsu province where few people own cars, and only half have fridges, but everyone has a phone - and they use those mobiles to place orders at online retailer JD.com for everything from disposable nappies to fresh crabs. As Jiayang Fan describes in the New Yorker, about four times a day, warehouse workers dispatch the village's orders on a drone that carries up to 30lb at 45 miles per hour. Everyone is happy - except for Big Auntie, the woman who runs the village shop."

How important will blockchain be to the world's economy? - "the computers solving Bitcoin's cryptographic puzzles consume, by one estimate, about as much electricity as Ireland... In removing the need for intermediaries, blockchains may sometimes remind us why their services can be worth paying for.Intermediaries can fix mistakes. Your bank can send a replacement internet banking login. Lose the passcode to your Bitcoin wallet, and you can kiss your currency goodbye.They can also resolve disputes. How best to do that with blockchain "smart contracts" is most kindly described as an evolving conversation.And trust in an intermediary has to be replaced by trust in other things - that software is reliable, and that incentive structures will not break down in unexpected circumstances.But assessing software is hard. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a pioneering investment fund on the Ethereum blockchain, raised $150m before someone hacked it, and stole $50m."