This is a pretty fascinating analysis by an Asia scholar of China and our failure to engage with it in a realistic way.

The truth is that the Chinese have already chosen their path and no number of speeches on our part will convince them to abandon it. They do not want our rules based order. They have rejected it. They will continue to reject it unless compelled by overwhelming crisis to sleep on sticks and swallow gall and accept the rules we force upon them.

China has made its choice. The real decision that will determine the contours of the 21st century will not be made in Beijing, but in Washington.

Observers of Chinese affairs have come to recognize two uncomfortable truths. The first is that China is a growing power whose might will continue to grow in every dimension we can measure for decades. The second is that the Chinese system of government is a fundamentally illiberal one, and the system of international relations the leaders of this system prefer reflects their illiberalism. These two things are not determined in the stars; either may change, and may change quite suddenly. But Americans will be better served if we plan as if both of these truths will remain true to the end of our lives.

This is not what we have been doing. For the most part Americans were able to accommodate themselves to the first of these realities by pretending that the second was not true. China could become more powerful, we said, because it will not be illiberal for long. After all, on this Earth the arc of history bends towards justice. Those on the ‘wrong side’ of history do not last long. How can the illiberal hope to endure?

Last spring it finally sunk in. Chinese illiberalism not only can endure, it is enduring. The old consensus cracked apart. No new consensus on how to deal with China has yet formed to take its place.

http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/06/china-does-not-want-your-rules-based.html

Good article on why secure online voting is such a maddeningly difficult challenge, and why it’s really not ready for use, no matter what vendors may say.

The paradox of ensuring both verifiability and anonymity in internet voting has frustrated security researchers for decades.

The history of elections in the United States — to say nothing of how elections have proceeded in other, less democratic countries — demonstrates the importance of maintaining the secret ballot. In order to rule out corruption to the greatest extent possible, elections must feature what Stanford University computer science professor David Dill, a Verified Voting board member, calls “non-coercibility, or receipt-freeness,” which is the inability of a person to prove to anyone else how they voted. “I should be able,” Dill said, “to lie to them about the presidential candidate that I voted for, to defeat their bribing me or threatening me to get me to vote a particular way.” If bribery is possible, it will happen. Thus, in this most important of political activities, bribery must be made impossible.

But election administrators lose something when their internet voting platforms disentangle ballot data from the identity of the people casting those ballots. “When you have the requirement for anonymity,” said Daniel Zimmerman, a security researcher at the technology firm Galois, “you have a lot less audit data that you can work with.”

https://theweek.com/articles/634387/why-cant-vote-online

Human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, the world’s leading scientists have warned, as they announced the results of the most thorough planetary health check ever undertaken.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/06/human-society-under-urgent-threat-loss-earth-natural-life-un-report

h

What a marvelous installation piece 💚💚💚

A recent two-day installation in Commerce, California afforded visitors an opportunity to evaluate and deposit their secret wishes. Dandelions, which was organized by the anonymous artist group The Art Department, took place in an administrative building at the Laguna Bell electrical substation from May 11-12, 2019. The cavernous space was transformed into a secret wish processing facility, where visitors submitted their wishes for questioning and analysis before receiving a dandelion to send their wish in a whoosh down a chute of either slam dunks or long shots. Writer Renée Reizman, who had a chance to visit the fleeting facility, explains the guided performance art in depth on Hyperallergic. Explore more of The Art Department’s previous projects on their website and Instagram.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/05/dandelion-wish-facility/

…reports from major news organizations, including NBC and The Times, have focused on the “unknown energy source” theory. Most recently, “60 Minutes” aired a segment on March 17 titled “Targeting Americans.” The correspondent Scott Pelley said the diplomats had “suffered serious brain injuries” and noted that the F.B.I. is “investigating whether these Americans were attacked by a mysterious weapon that leaves no trace.” The attacks, Pelley intoned in his signature rumble, appear to be “a hostile foreign government’s plan to target Americans serving abroad.”

And yet, two and a half years after the first diplomats in Havana said they heard strange sounds and fell ill, and after at least six visits to Cuba by the F.B.I., the study by Penn researchers, another study led by the otolaryngologist at the University of Miami and a continuing investigation by a “health incidents response task force” organized by the State Department, the claims of an attack by an invisible weapon remain not only unproved but also highly contested by prominent physicists and engineers in the United States and abroad.

Dozens of leading neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists, meanwhile, have offered an alternative narrative: that the diplomats’ symptoms are primarily psychogenic — or “functional” — in nature. If true, it would mean that the symptoms were caused not by a secret high-tech weapon but by the same confluence of psychological and neurological processes — entirely subconscious yet remarkably powerful — underlying hypnosis and the placebo effect. They are disorders, in other words, not of the brain’s hardware but of its software; not of objective injuries to the brain’s structure but of chronic alterations to how the brain functions, typically following exposure to an illness, a physical injury or stress. And the fact that the State Department and doctors the government selected to treat the diplomats have dismissed this explanation out of hand does not surprise these experts. After all, they say, functional neurological disorders are among the most misunderstood, debilitating and denigrated ailments known to medicine.

I was rather startled that a neurologist would say the following, which seems rather philosophically confused:

“I wince when I hear the word ‘psychogenic,’ ” Stone told me during one of many Skype conversations. “It creates a false impression about what these disorders are. They’re like depression or migraine. They happen in that gray area where the mind and the brain intersect.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/15/magazine/diplomat-disorder.html

Gaaahhhhhhhh. Note to self: avoid ExxonMobil at all costs.

[Scientist and intern] Knisely projected [in 1979] that unless fossil fuel use was constrained, there would be “noticeable temperature changes” and 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the air by 2010, up from about 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution. The summer intern’s predictions turned out to be very close to the mark.

[…]

The report, which circulated within the company through the early 1980s, reflected Exxon’s growing need to understand when the climate implications of increased CO₂ emissions would begin to spur policy changes.

So Exxon (now ExxonMobil) shelved an ambitious but costly program that sampled carbon dioxide in the oceans—the centerpiece of its climate research in the 1970s—as it created its own computerized climate models. The models aimed to simulate how the planet’s climate system would react to rising CO₂ levels, relying on a combination of mathematics, physics, and atmospheric science.

Through much of the 1980s, Exxon researchers worked alongside university and government scientists to generate objective climate models that yielded papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Their work confirmed the emerging scientific consensus on global warming’s risks.

Yet starting in 1989, Exxon leaders went down a different road. They repeatedly argued that the uncertainty inherent in computer models makes them useless for important policy decisions. Even as the models grew more powerful and reliable, Exxon publicly derided the type of work its own scientists had done. The company continued its involvement with climate research, but its reputation for objectivity began to erode as it campaigned internationally to cast doubt on the science.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18092015/exxon-confirmed-global-warming-consensus-in-1982-with-in-house-climate-models

These remind me a lot of some generative digital 3D modeling work I did as a senior project at UNCA….

Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan work as a husband and wife team primarily in the medium of cardboard. Their soaring installations fill gallery spaces, reaching from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. The duo’s massive sculptural works are comprised of miniature homes that have been piled and stacked, creating dizzying towers of comingled landscapes. For many of their installations the artists work with students and community members to collaboratively build the cardboard structures, inviting participants to reflect on and channel their own migratory experiences. The Aquilizans moved from the Philippines to Australia in 2006, and much of their work centers around the migrant experience, and having a foot in two worlds.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/05/massive-cardboard-installations-by-isabel-and-alfredo-aquizilan/

An all-star lineup of economists, from Alan Greenspan to Paul Volcker, is endorsing a plan to combat climate change by slapping a tax on greenhouse gas emissions and then distributing the revenue to American households.

All living former Federal Reserve chairs, several Nobel Prize winners and previous leaders of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers have signed on to a statement asserting that a robust, gradually rising carbon tax is “the most cost-effective lever to reduce carbon emissions at the scale and speed that is necessary.”

“A carbon tax will send a powerful price signal that harnesses the invisible hand of the marketplace to steer economic actors towards a low-carbon future,” the 45 economists say in the opinion piece, published by the Wall Street Journal late Wednesday.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/from-greenspan-to-yellen-economic-brain-trust-backs-carbon-tax

Like most Southern children, I accepted, almost as a matter of faith, that kudzu grew a mile a minute and that its spread was unstoppable. I had no reason to doubt declarations that kudzu covered millions of acres, or that its rampant growth could consume a large American city each year. I believed, as many still do, that kudzu had eaten much of the South and would soon sink its teeth into the rest of the nation.

I’m not sure when I first began to doubt. Perhaps it was while I watched horses and cows mowing fields of kudzu down to brown stubs. As a botanist and horticulturist, I couldn’t help but wonder why people thought kudzu was a unique threat when so many other vines grow just as fast in the warm, wet climate of the South. I found it odd that kudzu had become a global symbol for the dangers of invasive species, yet somehow rarely posed a serious threat to the rich Southern landscapes I was trying to protect as a conservationist.

Now that scientists at last are attaching real numbers to the threat of kudzu, it’s becoming clear that most of what people think about kudzu is wrong. Its growth is not “sinister,” as Willie Morris, the influential editor of Harper’s Magazine, described in his many stories and memoirs about life in Yazoo City, Mississippi. The more I investigate, the more I recognize that kudzu’s place in the popular imagination reveals as much about the power of American mythmaking, and the distorted way we see the natural world, as it does about the vine’s threat to the countryside.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/true-story-kudzu-vine-ate-south-180956325/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism