October 20, 2017 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Can she kick it? Female Israeli soldier unleashes Kung Fu skills in un-orthodox fight" (1-1/2 min.)

The Daily Mail has an article on the incident: "Female Israeli soldier uses martial arts to fight off crowd of ultra-Orthodox demonstrators as they call her a 'wh***'."

• TGIF: Another Weekend Knowledge Dump from Greg Ellifritz at Active Response Training. A article that caught my eye was an article on buffer weights and springs in an AR (the link that Ellifritz has is broken--updated link here), a how to guide on fast magazine reloads for an AR or handgun, and shotgun carry positions (like Ellifritz, I use the African carry because, with the left hand on the front handguard/pump I can bring the weapon out, twisting it, and up to my shoulder as fast or faster than drawing a handgun--and it lends itself to pumping the first round simultaneously if you were carrying without a round chambered).
• "Best Freeze Dried and Dehydrated Food for Backpacking"--Back o' Beyond. The author lists some of the reasons he likes using freeze dried or dehydrated foods when backpacking, and then gives a brief overview of 5 different brands--Good-to-Go, Packit Gourmet, Mountain House, Backpacker's Pantry, and AlpineAire--and his favorite meal for each brand. I hadn't heard of a couple of the brands, so that was good to know.
• Maybe instead of the slippery slope, we should be thinking of a ratcheting effect--gun laws only become more strict over time: "UK Government considering to ban .50 cal and Lever Release action rifles"--The Firearms Blog. No reasonable explanation for the proposal other than some stupid and bored bureaucrat just decided it was time to crank the ratchet another notch or two. 
• "Why Solar Microgrids May Fall Short in Replacing the Caribbean's Devastated Power Systems"--IEEE Spectrum. The photo at the top of the article is worth the click: it shows a solar power farm that has been devastated by the hurricanes: solar panels ripped up and strewn all over. The article mostly discusses the costs and benefits to using a centralized power system (using oil or natural gas) over decentralized systems relying on solar panels and expensive batteries. 
• Tainter's thesis in action: "Volcanic Eruptions Linked to Social Unrest in Ancient Egypt"--Lab. Large volcanic eruptions could impact the climate, and reduce the level of the Nile floods, relied on for food production. The article explains:

         At the heart of that dynamic society was the Nile River....  ... Egyptian farmers depended on the yearly flooding of the Nile in July through September to irrigate their grain fields - inventing systems of channels and dams to store the river's overflow.

        "When the Nile flood was good, the Nile valley was one of the most agriculturally-productive places in the Ancient World," says Francis Ludlow, a climate historian at Trinity College in Dublin and a co-author of the new study. "But the river was famously prone to a high level of variation."

          In some years the Nile didn't rise high enough to flood the land, and that could lead to trouble. Historical records suggest, for example, that a shortage of grain and the unrest that followed were behind Ptolemy III's return to Egypt [in 243 B.C. abandoning a successful military campaignt against he Seleucid Empire]. And Ludlow had reason to think that volcanoes could be behind some of those bad years.

          The reason comes down to a squiggly band of monsoon weather that circles the planet's equator called the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ). Every year around summer in the northern hemisphere, this band moves up from the equator. That, in turn, soaks the headwaters of the Blue Nile River, a major tributary of the Nile. But when volcanoes erupt, they blast out sulfurous gases that, through a chain of events, cool the atmosphere. If that happens in the Northern Hemisphere, it can keep the monsoon rains from moving as far as they usually do.

          "When the monsoon rains don't move far enough north, you don't have as much rain falling over Ethiopia," Ludlow says. "And that's what feeds the summer flood of the Nile in Egypt that was so critical to agriculture."

          ... Manning and their colleagues turned to computer simulations and real-world measurements of the Nile River that date back to 622 CE. The team discovered that poor flood years on the Nile lined up over and over with a recently published timeline of major volcanic eruptions around the world. That evidence suggested that when volcanoes explode, the Nile tended to stay calm.

           The team then dug further to see if that might have an impact on Egyptian society during the Ptolemaic era.... Again, the timelines matched: Volcanic eruptions preceded many major political and economic events that affected Egypt. They included Ptolemy III's exit from Syria and Iraq - just after a major eruption in 247 BCE - and the Theban revolt, a 20-year uprising by Egyptians against Greek rule. The researchers then examined how likely it was that these events occurred so close in time to eruptions, finding it "highly unlikely to have occurred by chance, such is the level of overlap," Ludlow says.

          The volcanic eruptions didn't cause these upheavals on their own, both Ludlow and Manning stress. But they likely added fuel to existing economic, political and ethnic tensions. ...

          The results may also have implications for the modern era. Currently, Ethiopia is in the middle of building a humongous dam called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, or GERD, on the Blue Nile. Tensions are already high between the nation and Egypt over how the water resources of the river will be distributed. A sudden change in climate, such as from a volcanic eruption, could make these "fraught hydropolitics even more fraught," Ludlow says.

          "The 21st century has been lacking in explosive eruptions of the kind that can severely affect monsoon patterns. But that could change at any time," he says. "The potential for this needs to be taken into account in trying to agree on how the valuable waters of the Blue Nile are going to be managed between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt."

• "Missionaries Temporarily Transferred from Madagascar"--LDS Newsroom. As a precaution, the Church has pulled many of its missionaries from Madagascar because of the outbreak of pneumonic plague. 
• The wages of sin socialism: "Driven by unrest and violence, Venezuelans are fleeing their country by the thousands"--Los Angeles Times. From the article:

        Linares arrived in Lima last May after enduring a six-day bus trip from central Venezuela, her 8-month-old son on her lap, to join her husband who came months before. Life in Venezuela had become intolerable, with millions struggling with hyperinflation, food shortages, lack of work and lawlessness.

         “Everything there has turned ugly. There’s hunger and crime. You can’t leave your house after 5 p.m. because you’re going to be robbed or killed,” Linares said, adding that she now earns enough to afford three meals a day, an impossibility for many these days in Venezuela.

• Another blow to the Out-of-Africa theory? "Archaeology fossil teeth discovery in Germany could re-write human history"--Deutsche Welle. The teeth "resemble those belonging to the early hominin skeletons of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and Ardi (Ardipithecus ramidus), famously discovered in Ethiopia." However, they were found in Germany, and are 4 million years older than Lucy.
• Some reminders that we live in the 21st Century: 

• "Stunning AI Breakthrough Takes Us One Step Closer to the Singularity"--Gizmodo. Further discussion of the implications of the Deep Mind AlphaGo Zero phenomenal self-mastery of Go.

• "Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin successfully fires up the most powerful US rocket in decades - and it could take astronauts back to the moon"--Daily Mail. 550,000 lbs of thrust from a single engine. However, several of these engines will be combined into each rocket.

• "The biggest rocket on Earth takes shape: Nasa successfully tests the engine that could take humans to Mars in the 2030s"--Daily Mail. A test of the RS-25 engine. According to information in the article, each of these engines generates 500,000 lbs of thrust.

• "Where’s the Trust?"--American Interest. David Blankenhorn writes about declining trust as the cause of the breakdown of civil discourse, stating: 

The main toxin ruining our politics and coarsening our society is the loss of trust. Not Trump, or evil liberals, or the dishonest media, or right-wing populism, or insufficient fervor for this or that candidate or cause—but rather the widespread and growing belief among Americans that many if not most of their fellow citizens lack basic honesty, integrity, and reliability. Our loss of trust in one another is arguably our biggest social problem, mainly because it helps to drive so many others, from family disintegration to political polarization to post-fact public debate.

He continues:

         Today, three main types of mistrust course through our society.  One is partisan mistrust: Americans increasingly believe that those with whom they disagree politically are not only misguided but are also bad people, members of an essentially alien out-group.

          A second is class mistrust: The approximately 30 percent of Americans with four-year college degrees are mostly thriving; the other 70 percent are falling further and further behind on nearly every measure. Upscale Americans are increasingly isolated from and ignorant about the rest of the country, and large numbers of middle and working class Americans resent and mistrust the nation’s elite class.

          And a third is governing mistrust: Huge numbers of Americans no longer believe that their elected leaders, including those from their own party, are honest or can be trusted even to try to do the right thing.

He also adds:

Increasingly, Americans don’t trust anyone outside of their in-group to tell them what the facts are. As a result, what we believe are the facts is increasingly a reflection of the politico-cultural tribe to which we belong.  Our problem is not that Americans have become disdainful of facts. Nor is it that my side respects the facts and your side doesn’t (as tempting as that is to believe). It’s rather that, in a declining-trust society such as ours, both the facts themselves and our ways of thinking about the facts begin to function less as public goods—things that promote shared thriving—and more as private assets which we use to define and defend our group and to attack the group’s enemies.

       Where his article gets interesting is where he discusses whether the lack of trust is a cause of our problems or result of problems. For instance, he notes the decline in trust in politicians after Watergate, or the loss of trust in institutions (churches, marriage, etc.) after these institutions stopped meeting people's needs. And "Americans stopped trusting people with whom they disagree politically when those people started embracing crazy, dangerous ideas." However, Blankenhorn ultimately rejects this conclusion--at least as a full explanation--because, in his view, the distrust has taken on a life of its own. Moreover, Blankenhorn believes that the lack of trust will prevent meaningful political and social reforms. Thus, his solution is to start small--to start talking to people of different viewpoints.

           One of the basic flaws I see with Blankenhorn's analysis is that he ignores the elephant in the room: trust, altruism and sense of community decline as societies become more diverse (see here and here for lists of numerous scientific papers on this topic). The time period over which Blankenhorn identifies increasing lack of trust (beginning with Vietnam and the Watergate era) also corresponds to the period of time when immigration laws were changed to allow the large influx of non-white Europeans into the United States and as the federal government forced integration (i.e., racial diversity) onto the country. It was mirrored in greater racial unrest and increasing crime. At the same time, our political and industrial leaders began pushing for globalism, hollowing out America's industrial capacity by shifting jobs and manufacturing technology and know how to third-world countries. Any efforts to rebuild societal trust are doomed to failure if a (perhaps, the) fundamental reason for societal distrust is ignored. 

          Former-President George W. Bush stated the other day: "Bigotry in any form is blasphemy against the American creed and it means the very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation." But the very creed that Bush supports is one that maintains that people, whether individually or as societal groups, are fungible. It's no wonder there is no trust.

• Related: "The Purge: Scott Yenor and the Witch Hunt at Boise State"--The Weekly Standard. Boise State University is the local state university. A tenured professor, Scott Yenor, apparently had the temerity to pen an article noting that "radical feminism’s central argument decrying gender boundaries between the sexes as entirely socially constructed has led directly to transgenderism’s attacks on gender itself as a social construct," and, subsequently, another article that, building on the first, argued that transgender activists were attempting to undermine parental rights. For this, the thought police have come down on him, incluidng Francisco Salinas, the University's “Director of Student Diversity and Inclusion,” whatever that means. Apparently, though, "Diversity and Inclusion" does not allow for differences of opinion. I think this is a situation where the Legislature ought to look into BSU's funding levels, and whether there really need a Director of Student Diversity and Inclusion. I certainly don't want to be paying taxes to support the thoughtless mewling of such a dolt.

• Time for the Orionid meteor shower: "Where, when, and how to watch this week's meteor shower created by Halley's Comet"--Business Insider. According to the article, "[t]he most meteors will fall between Oct. 20-22. Expect to see between 10-30 meteors an hour. The best time to spot them is around 1:30 am each night."