The right wing billionaire using big data

In Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media Carole Cadwalladr details some of the activities of companies associated with Robert Mercer in influencing public opinion and disrupting mainstream media.

Michael Mosley's six tips to improve our diet

In Why your diet isn’t working: Michael Mosley’s six things to change right now Bonnie Bayley talks to Michael Mosley about what we're doing wrong in our diets. His six things are:

• You think diet soft drinks are healthy -- they aren't
• You’re terrified of your natural hunger signals --we don''t have to eat as soon as we feel hungry
• You eat low-fat dairy -- full fat lowers your risk of type 2 diabetes
• You’re partial to bread and pasta -- commercial breads are full of sugar and salt, stick to dark rye bread. As for pasta, reheat it to make it healthier
• You rely on willpower to make healthy choices -- It's much easier to not have any unhealthy choices available so don't keep them in the house
• You mainline the smoothies -- you lose the benefits of the fibre which slows sugare absorption. You're better off eating whole fruit and vegetables.

H. R. McMaster on lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan

In The Pipe Dream of Easy War H. R. McMaster looks at lessons to be learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. I especially liked this:

We must not equate military capabilities with strategy.

Michael Mosley post the 5:2 diet

Sarah Berry writes about What Michael Mosley has learnt since the 5:2 diet. Mosley seems to recommend eating mostly vegetables, and NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis), which is just a fancy way of telling us to be more active during the day.

He builds in more NEAT by always walking "if it's less than a mile", always taking the stairs "if it's less than seven flights", and walking up escalators.

"You can easily burn 300-400 calories by just doing that," Mosley says, "[it's the] equivalent of running a few miles and is more achievable for many people."

He also does a set of resistance exercises each morning, including press-ups and squats.

Mosley is in favour of fermented foods, but advises that most of the commercial ones offer no benefits:

"There's a lot of rubbish out there at the moment, and all sorts of probiotic drinks being sold," the father-of-four says. "We did an experiment in the series where we compared the yoghurt drinks that claim to promote good bacteria and compared that to having kefir (a fermented milk drink). The yoghurt made no difference whatsoever ... we couldn't detect any difference ... but the kefir did make quite a big difference."

He adds: "There's such a big difference between the ones you buy, like sauerkraut - out of a jar and the homemade stuff. We tested sauerkraut - it didn't taste great - and the supermarket version had nothing living in it at all. Whereas the homemade version was absolutely rife with bacteria. I've been making some at home myself and ... particularly kefir is really easy to make."

He also recommends a Mediterranean diet:

"One of the main things is switching to a Mediterranean-style diet," Mosley says. "We realised that low-fat diets are not very effective.

"And understanding what a Med-style diet really is - it's not pasta and it's not pizza. It's the oily fish, nuts, olive oil and stuff like that. The evidence is pretty strong now to say that way of eating is one of the healthiest there is.

"When I wrote the Fast Diet, I wasn't all that interested in the things you ate on the fast days, and I've become much more interested in a more Mediterranean-style diet and looking more carefully at looking how much of the sugary, carby stuff you eat.

"Changing what you eat is one of the most important things you can do to lose weight and improve health."

Australia's role in the Iraq War

David Wroe explores Australia's role in the Iraq War in The Secret Iraq Dossier. It seem Australia was basically there to strengthen the alliance, at minimal risk to our forces.

Have renewables kept SA power bills down?

Sophie Vorrath reports that SA power bills rose less in past decade than coal states. This was based on an ANU report commissioned by News Limited.

	2006	2016	Increase
NSW	$918	$1,922	109%
VIC	$ 841	$1,837	118%
QLD	$890	$2,102	136%
SA	$1,110	$2,080	87%
WA	$855	$1,582	85%
TAS	$1,317	$2,181	66%
ACT/NT	$1,061	$1,785	68%

4chan and Trump

Dale Beran writes about 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump.

Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him.

Police pursuits

In In pursuit of the truth on police pursuits John Silvester has some interesting stats on the outcome of police pursuits.

Nothing lasts forever, communities change

Matthew Yglesias writes that Preserving community character is impossible, whether that's small rural communities or urban neighbourhoods.

Attitudes to immigration and diversity in America

In Immigrant Shock: Can California Predict the Nation’s Future? Emily Badger writes about parallels between the political backlash against growing diversity in California between 1980 and 2000, and in other communities at the moment. The backlash is most notable in smaller communities where changes are more noticeable.

Sociological studies suggest that increasing contact between groups can yield familiarity and tolerance. But it can also unnerve, especially in communities where that rapid change is most visible — and when politicians stand to gain by exploiting it. California lashed out at diversity before embracing it.

However, this only becomes a political issue if a politician attempts to exploit the change, as Pete Wilson did in California in 1994, and as Donald Trump is doing now.

California’s example suggests that the very demographic trend Democrats believe will benefit them in the long run could aid Republicans in the near term. At least, that remains true so long as Republican candidates like Mr. Trump or Mr. Wilson position themselves in opposition to immigration or policies perceived as aiding minorities.

Mr. Trump fared particularly well in the parts of the country where demographic change is accelerating. Scholars say that it’s the change in diversity that helps explain how a community responds. So an influx of Hispanics into Chicago may not be noticeable, but a few new immigrant families into small-town Pennsylvania is.

...

A Wall Street Journal analysis found during the primaries that the most rapidly diversifying counties in a cluster of Midwestern states were more likely to vote for Mr. Trump.

In the general election, voters were more likely to shift to Mr. Trump in the counties with the strongest growth in the Hispanic and nonwhite populations since 2000, according to research from a coming book by Ryan Enos, a Harvard political scientist. It appears in survey data, Mr. Enos argues, that this shift in 2016 was driven by whites who had previously voted Democratic — and who don’t appear to have responded in the same way to rising diversity before Mr. Trump’s campaign.

...

“When I talk to people about their concerns about immigration, they often talk about language,” said Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.“They talk about being uncomfortable having to ‘press 1 for English,’ or seeing Spanish-language signs. They talk about the feeling of dispossession that comes from having lived for a long time in a community and seeing it change.”

One noticable point from the article, this is much more of an issue where there's segregation.

There is no neat tipping point, no level of diversity beyond which the backlash inevitably gives way to greater tolerance. The volume of political bluster matters. So does the level of segregation, because diversity doesn’t necessarily mean communities are integrating. So does the kind of contact that occurs when different groups bump up against one another.

Research from the 1950s found that integrated military units reduced prejudice and stereotyping. And studies since then have shown that soldiers have more interracial friendships than typical civilians (as veterans, they’re also more likely to buy homes in more integrated areas). But soldiers engage in a rare kind of contact: They live together, eat together and work together on common goals.

That’s a different kind of contact than occurs when we pass strangers in the supermarket aisle, or encounter Spanish-language signs. And even in the most demographically diverse cities, there is often little integration of schools, neighborhoods and workplaces.

...

In Mr. Enos’s earlier work, he found that white voters in the most segregated counties nationally were five to six percentage points less likely to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 than white voters in the least segregated places, with a similar effect within states. That suggests that the nature of contact matters not just for disarming prejudice but for shaping politics. And often, when new groups come into a community, they immediately segregate.

It's interesting that attitudes soften over time:

In another study, Mr. Enos found that the mere presence of a few Spanish speakers on a train platform was enough to raise anti-immigrant sentiment among commuters in the white, liberal Boston suburbs. But as the same Spanish speakers kept appearing over two weeks, those attitudes softened. The commuters began to smile at one another.

To reiterate, this only becomes an issue when you have a politician trying to exploit it. I think this also helps explain the Brexit vote.

Bannon's treatment of his former wife and children

The Oppo Report has published details from Bannon's divorse to his second wife in The Bannon Files: Divorce Records Reveal Marital Discord and Questionable Parenting.

He comes across as a real arsehole.

SF & Fantasy books being recommened by their publishers

96 Books Sci-Fi & Fantasy Editors Can’t Wait for You to Read in 2017.

Steve Bannon appointed to the National Security Council

David Ferguson writes that Trump boots top officials — but includes Steve Bannon — in reshuffled National Security Council.

The Post reported that Bannon has been given a regular seat on the National Security Council’s principals committee, which will include the nation’s highest ranking security officials, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State.

Unlike previous presidential administrations, Trump’s Saturday memo specified that the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs will only attend principals committee meetings that pertain to their specific “responsibilities and expertise.”

...

The former Goldman Sachs executive presided over the expansion of Breitbart.com from a fringe right-wing web community to a sprawling hub of the so-called “alt-right,” a collection of white nationalists, racists, anti-feminists and neo-Nazis.

On the council, Bannon will be privy to some of the country’s most highly classified military and intelligence secrets. Typically membership on the council is reserved to the president and key administrators and is, as columnist and author Dan Froomkin said Saturday night “off limits to political hacks.”

Does Bannon want to destroy the US Government?

Ronald Radosh writes that Steve Bannon, Trump's Top Guy, Told Me He Was 'A Leninist' Who Wants To ‘Destroy the State’.

Hill’s Criteria applied to climate change

In What climate skeptics taught me about global warming Seth Miller writes that:

Long before research exposed evidence that humans cause global warming, science made another sensational claim — that smoking caused lung cancer.

That case has been proven beyond doubt. But there is a science story from this era that is mostly forgotten: The battle against cigarettes taught science how to prove.

Before linking cigarettes to lung cancer, science had no established method to prove that one thing caused another. The fields of epidemiology and statistics were new, and while they had some prior successes, the questions were so evident — think about mercury causing madness — that proof did not require the level of meticulousness that modern science expects. The need to establish a link between cigarettes and lung cancers — and the backlash that ensued — changed this. Epidemiology and cigarettes grew up together.

...

And I unearthed a notion that is rarely mentioned in the global warming debate: Science actually has a method for establishing that one thing causes another. Scientists don’t have to vote on the issue — the 97% consensus of climate scientists who believe that humans cause warming is telling, but only one part of a broader process. And for those who want to honestly weigh their skepticism in context of the evidence, there is a way.

...

The battle against smoking was the first bare-knuckles public policy debate driven by science. So over years of defending his work, Hill had to think deeply about what constitutes ‘proof’, and how to overcome the intelligent rebuttals of the world’s Ronald Fishers.

In 1965, he formally proposed a solution.

Hill recognized that there are more ways to support causation that finding that two variables track. In fact, Hill identified nine separate strands of ‘proof’, each of which makes an independent case for or against causation. The list of nine aspects — and I’ll go into details below — are now called Hill’s Criteria.

You don’t need strong support from all of the strands to prove a result. But when independent strands tell the same story, with no contradictions, the case is strong. Perhaps as importantly, by using fixed criteria, we can categorize not just data we have, but identify what data are missing as well. And with all of the possible evidence in mind, we can effectively draw a conclusion using classic, human judgment.

...

And while Hill’s Criteria are not commonly used outside epidemiology, they should be. The criteria take an impossibly large and complex pile of data and break them up into chunks. They make the evidence understandable. And they make the case for causality transparent — each piece of evidence is categorized, and weighed in the context of the whole. If evidence is challenged, it becomes clear just how devastating or inconsequential that challenge is. We lose any presumption that somehow a single set of data could prove the entirety of scientific understanding to be in error.

What happens when we apply Hill’s criteria to the question:
Are humans, by adding CO2 to the air, causing the planet to warm?

Miller then goes on to test this question against Hill's Criteria.

This is worth a read.

German genocide in Southwest Africa and the Holocaust

In Germany’s extermination program for black Africans, a template for the Holocaust Edwin Black documents how many of the techniques the NAZIs used against Jews were first deployed by Germany against the native people of Southwest Africa.

'Subhumans,' 'cattle car transports,' even the 'Final Solution' - all these and other Nazi concepts have their sinister antecedents in Africa in the early 1900s. And the list of the prominent Germans there who went on to shape Nazism is long and execrable.

...

Decades before the Nazis turned to the Jews, German colonialists in Southwest Africa – now Namibia – dehumanized, built death camps for, and slaughtered tens of thousands of tribespeople in a systematic genocide. Here, Edwin Black reveals the full horrors of an eerie and odious precursor of the Shoah, and its legacy in the US

Black also describes eugenics and forced sterialisations in the US prior to World War II. It seems that proponents of eugenics in Germany and the US were influenced by each other.

Black also mentions the an unintended consequence of the eugenics and discrimination programs in Germany and the US. Many highly skilled German Jews migrated from Germany to the US because of NAZI victimisation. However, at the time there was considerable anti-semetic feelings in the USA. Jews as well as blacks were often discriminated against. So many German Jewish academics ended up as teachers at black colleges.

The influx of German-Jewish academics offered an unexpected stimulus to many African Americans’ educational experiences during the formative years of the pre-Civil Rights era. Refugee professors helped set the stage for the intellectual movement to come.

Among the students who credit the inspiration of German-Jewish professors is Joyce Ladner, who went on to organize civil rights protests with Medgar Evers and who would later rise to the leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] and the Congress on Racial Equality [CORE].

Ladner’s mentor was Ernst Borinski, a Jewish sociologist who arrived from Germany in 1938 and eventually taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. His sociology student Ladner excelled and ultimately became a board member of the American Sociological Association as well as interim president of Howard University. In 1996, Washingtonian Magazine named her “Washingtonian of the Year.”

As for Borinski, he is remembered for fighting Jim Crow all his years in Mississippi. When he died, he was buried on the Tougaloo Campus.

His tombstone reads simply: “Ernst Borinski, Inspiring Teacher.” Ladner remembered Borinski’s devotion to overturning segregation, recalling his “affinity with blacks because they experienced a similar persecution.” The Mississippi chapter of the ACLU still grants the “Ernst Borinski Civil Libertarian of the Year Award.”

Another African American student is Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who went from being mentored by a German-Jewish professor to a distinguished career in medicine. In 1993, she became Surgeon General of the United States. Later, Elders reflected on the indispensable years as student of a German-Jewish émigré. “I can read almost any German scientific literature,” Elders told the Wall Street Journal. “The German-Jewish professors had a tremendous impact on young blacks in the South,” summed up African American attorney Jim McWilliams, who attended Talladega College. “They exposed us to new music, art, and academic programs.”

The Okinawan diet

The Okinawa Diet Plan’s Food List and Menu Recipes Are Wrong lists the thinks Okinawans traditionally ate. It appears to have been mostly vegan, with little meat or dairy. Sweet potatoes feature heavily as did rice, grains and soy.

Did Putin use the left and the right against Clinton?

In How Putin Played the Far Left Casey Michel argues that Russia assisted both the far left and alt-right in order to undermine support for Hillary Clinton.

Free trade brings benefits, the TPP maybe not

In Turnbull and the TPP: desperately pressing ahead despite negligible benefits Greg Jericho finds there would likely be little economic benefit to Australia in the TPP. He has some interesting graphs on inflation and the price of motor vehicles  and textiles and footwear in Australia as protection has been removed.

Nate Silver on what reporters got wrong about the US 2016 presidential election.

In The Real Story Of 2016 Nate Silver details "What reporters — and lots of data geeks, too — missed about the election, and what they’re still getting wrong."