This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Bad Opinions — xkcd:
  
• What a widely attacked experiment got right on the harmful effects of prisons — a frustratingly short read by Ashley Rubin in the Conversation: In news articles, the Stanford experiment has been “debunked” and “exposed as a fraud.” Its findings have been declared “very wrong” and “fake.” It has been further criticized for experimenter interference, faked behaviour from participants and for research design problems, among other things. These serious critiques have generated much discussion in academic circles and in news articles about what, if anything, we can learn from the experiment. And yet, as someone who studies prisons, I’m struck by how much the Stanford Prison Experiment got right. A wealth of other research suggests prisons have serious detrimental effects on prisoners and prison workers alike.
• Calculating art — an excerpt from the latest book by Hannah Fry of the splendidly light and fluffy podcast the Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry: In October 1997, an audience arrived at the University of Oregon to hear the pianist Winifred Kerner play three short pieces. One was a lesser-known keyboard composition by the master of the Baroque, Johann Sebastian Bach. A second was composed in the style of Bach by Steve Larson, a professor of music at the university. And a third was composed by an algorithm, deliberately designed to imitate the style of Bach. After hearing the three performances, the audience was asked to guess which was which. To Larson’s dismay, the majority voted that his was the piece that had been composed by the computer. And to collective gasps of delighted horror, the audience learned that the music they’d voted as genuine Bach was nothing more than the work of a machine.
• Water-Ski Signals — Phil Are Go!:
  
• Stop telling people who need social care they aren’t eligible – be honest, there isn’t enough money — Peter Beresford in the Conversation: When giving evidence to the Public Accounts Committee about [social care funding] earlier in the year, the permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care, Chris Wormald, told MPs that there was enough money in the social care system to meet all of its statutory obligations. Many of the MPs struggled to reconcile this with the savagery of the cuts since 2010 and the realities facing a service said by its leaders to be in crisis and at a “tipping point”. The truth is that Wormald probably didn’t have the first idea how much resource the service requires. That is because the system operates as a perfect circle – a need is only a need if there is resource to meet it. In this way, there can never be unmet need and “statutory obligations” are always met. It makes no difference how large or small the budget or how much it contracts. It’s a very convenient device for political leaders confronted by a service with high fiscal risk but low public value. [Misleading headline. For a currency-issuing government there is always enough money, but the core argument — that the definition of need for services varies according to the willingness of the government to spend on these services, and that this is duplicitous and inhumane — is entirely sound.]
• Off the Mark — by Mark Parisi:
  
• Death of American on remote Indian island is an indictment of fundie "bubble boy" mentality — Darrell Lucus at Daily Kos: Never mind that the Sentinelese have made it clear on several previous occasions that they want to be left alone. According to Survival International, a human rights organization that advocates for indigenous people, this is largely because of a harrowing incident that happened during the British colonial era. A colonial administrator took some Sentinelese adults and children to Port Blair, the largest settlement in the Andaman Islands, for reasons of “science.” However, the adults quickly died; then as now, their isolation made them vulnerable to illnesses to which they had no immunity. The children were brought back with gifts, though Survival International has good reason to believe they also passed on diseases they picked up on Port Blair. […] Is it possible that Chau didn't know to find out why the Sentinelese didn't want to be contacted by anyone, let alone Christian missionaries? His diaries, provided by his family to The Washington Post, certainly suggest this. In one entry, he wondered, “Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?”
• Toward Community-Oriented, Public & Transparent Copyleft Policy Planning — by Bradley M. Kuhn: Sadly, the age of license proliferation has returned. It's harder to stop this time, because this isn't merely about corporate vanity licenses. Companies now have complex FLOSS policy agendas, and those agendas are not to guarantee software freedom for all. While it is annoying that our community must again confront an old threat, we are fortunate the problem is not hidden: companies proposing their own licenses are now straightforward about their new FLOSS licenses' purposes: to maximize profits. Open-in-name-only licenses are now common, but seem like FLOSS licenses only to the most casual of readers. We've succeeded in convincing everyone to “check the OSI license list before you buy”. We can therefore easily dismiss licenses like Common Clause merely by stating they are non-free/non-open-source and urging the community to avoid them. But, the next stage of tactics have begun, and they are harder to combat. What happens when for-profit companies promulgate their own hyper-aggressive (quasi-)copyleft licenses that seek to pursue the key policy goal of “selling proprietary licenses” over “defending software freedom”?
• Hidden Treasures — Bizarro by Dan Pirarro:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Outrage over schoolgirl refusing to stand for anthem shows rise of aggressive nationalism — Gwenda Tavan: History is also often the victim of nationalist mobilisations. By this I mean the tendency of “patriots” to select those aspects of the national story that “fit” the narrative of a timeless, unified, undifferentiated, organic community to which they are “loyal”. In the process, they edit out the bits that show how contested and contingent our national story really is. The national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, is a case in point. Claims that not singing the anthem “disrespects our country and our veterans” assume the song holds deep historical, moral and sacred meaning. The truth is more prosaic. Advance Australia Fair became our national anthem in 1974, following a competition launched by the Whitlam Labor Government and a public opinion poll by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to identify the relative popularity of three “unofficial” Australian songs: Advance Australia Fair, Waltzing Matilda and Song of Australia. Advance Australia Fair was the clear front-runner, but it is worth remembering that only just over half of respondents (51.4%) nominated it. In other words, nearly 50% of the population did not. So much for collective unity.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  
• Precarious private balance sheets driven by fiscal austerity is the problem — Bill Mitchell: We have learned very little. Commentators still construct the crisis as a sovereign debt problem and demand that governments reduce fiscal deficits to give them ‘space’ to defend the economy in the next crisis. They are also noting that the balance sheets of the non-government sector components – households and firms – are looking rather precarious. They also tie that in with flat wages growth and a run down in household saving. But the link between the fiscal data and the non-government borrowing data is never made. So we are moving headlong into the next crisis with very little understanding of the relationship between government and non-government. And we are increasingly relying on private sector debt buildup to fund growth as governments retreat. Everything about that is wrong.
• Honourable Theft — George Monbiot: Never underestimate the power of one determined person. What Carole Cadwalladr has done to Facebook and Big Data and Edward Snowden has done to the state security complex, the young Kazakhstani scientist Alexandra Elbakyan has done to the multi-billion dollar industry that traps knowledge behind paywalls. Her pirate webscraper service, Sci-hub, has done more than any government to tackle one of the biggest rip-offs of the modern era: the capture of research that should belong to us all. […] After my cancer diagnosis earlier this year, I was offered a choice of treatments. I wanted to make an informed decision. This meant reading scientific papers. Had I not used the stolen material provided by Sci-hub, it would have cost me thousands. Because, like most people, I didn’t have this money, I would have given up before I was properly informed. I have never met Alexandra Elbakyan, and I can only speculate about alternative outcomes, had the research I read not swayed my decision. But it is possible that she has saved my life.
• If Other Nations Mourned Like the U.S. — Ted Rall:
  
• Mainstream Economics Has Become a Celebration of the Wealthy Rentier Class — Michael Hudson in Evonomics: The reality is that you don’t have to be smart to make a lot of money. All you need is greed. And that can’t be taught in business schools. In fact, when I went to work as a balance-of-payments analyst at Chase Manhattan in 1964, I was told that the best currency traders came from the Brooklyn or Hong Kong slums. Their entire life was devoted to making money, to rise into the class of the proverbial Babbitts of our time: nouveau riches lacking in real culture or intellectual curiosity. Of course, for bankers who do venture to “stretch the envelope” (the fraudster’s euphemism for breaking the law, as Citigroup did in 1999 when it merged with Travelers’ Insurance prior to the Clinton administration rejecting Glass-Steagall), you do need smart lawyers. But even here, Donald Trump explained the key that he learned from mob lawyer Roy Cohn: what matters is not so much the law, as what judge you have. And the U.S. courts have been privatized by electing judges whose campaign contributors back deregulators and non-prosecutors. So the wealthy escape from being subject to the law.
• The Lehman 10th Anniversary spin as a Teachable Moment — Michael Hudson: What has been put in place is not a restoration of traditional status quo, but a reversal of over a century of central bank policy. Failed banks have not been taken into the public domain. They have been enriched far beyond their former levels. The perpetrators of the collapse have been rewarded, not penalized for lending more than could possibly be paid by NINJA borrowers and speculators whose mortgage applications were doctored by systemic fraud at Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Bank of America, Citigroup and their cohorts. The $4.3 trillion that could have been used to save debtors was given to the banks and Wall Street firms whose recklessness and outright fraud caused the crisis. The Federal Reserve “cash for trash” swaps with insolvent banks did not restore normalcy or the status quo ante. What occurred was a financial revolution by stealth, reversing the traditional responsibility of creditors to make prudent loans.
• Joan Robinson, philosopher — Alexander Douglas: The first significant contribution that Robinson made to the philosophy of economics kicked off the famous ‘Cambridge Capital Controversy’. Robinson noted that economists often build models in which rational decisions are made about how much ‘capital’ to employ. ‘Capital’ is often represented by a single variable, k. Robinson found it conceptually impossible to specify a unit of magnitude here: how many broomsticks, she asked, equals one blast furnace? ‘“Capital”’, she wrote with the standard logician’s nod to Lewis Carroll, ‘is not what capital is called, it is what the name is called’.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  
• Everything he does, he does it for us. Why Bryan Adams is on to something important about copyright — Rebecca Giblin in the Conversation: Authors, artists and composers often have little bargaining power, and are often pressured to sign away their rights to their publisher for life. Adams appeared before a Canadian House of Commons committee to argue they should be entitled to reclaim ownership of their creations 25 years after they sign them away. […] The copyright term needed to provide an incentive to create something is pretty short. The Productivity Commission has estimated the average commercial life of a piece of music, for example is two to five years. Most pieces of visual art yield commercial income for just two years, with distribution highly skewed toward the small number with a longer life. The average commercial life of a film is three to six years. For books, it is typically 1.4 to five years; 90% of books are out of print after two years. It is well accepted by economists that a term of about 25 years is the maximum needed to incentivise the creation of works.
• Trump rally — Keith Knight in Daily Kos:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• New Labour’s Irrational Adoration of Thatcher — Craig Murray: When Michael Crick embarrassed Theresa May by quizzing her on her non-existent opposition to apartheid as she visited Mandela’s old cell, the response of New Labour was to defend May by claiming the Tories had opposed apartheid all along. Progress and Labour Friends of Israel rushed immediately to the defence of the person they truly adore, who sits higher still in their Pantheon than Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. They rushed to defend the memory of Margaret Thatcher.
• 'I leave the car at home': how free buses are revolutionising one French city — Kim Willsher in Dunkirk for the Guardian: “Before, when they paid, it was a service and they were customers. They may have been only contributing 10% of the cost of running the service but they thought it was theirs. Now it’s a public service they look at it differently. They say ‘bonjour’ to the driver, they talk to each other. We are changing perceptions and transforming the city with more vivre ensemble. We are reinventing the public space. Before the bus was for those who had no choice: the young, the old, the poor who don’t have cars. Now it’s for everyone.”
• Battery drain — The Oatmeal:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Perry Bible Fellowship — by Nicholas Gurewitch:
  
• There’s a psychological link between conspiracy theories and creationism — Stephan Lewandowsky in the Conversation: The Fribourg researchers conducted three studies with more than 2,000 participants overall. Echoing previous studies, the findings showed that teleological thinking was associated with the rejection of evolution and the acceptance of its pseudo-scientific alternative, creationism. But the researchers also showed a strong association between creationism and conspiracism. People who believed in creationism also tended to believe in conspiracy theories, regardless of their religious or political beliefs. Conspiracism was also associated with teleological thinking. This confirms that seeking purpose in random events, such as the death of Princess Diana in a drink-driving accident, or natural phenomena such as rain clouds or the necks of giraffes, reflects a common underlying way of thinking.
• The economy of permanent war — Claire Connelly in Medium: What the world thinks of as debt creation is actually the creation of credit for the financial sector. Dr Kadri says the west can make far more money from destruction than from trade. […] “You cannot expand the economy without war. War is, in fact, a necessity; it absorbs the surplus. By issuing bonds the state absorbs the excess surplus existent in the western hemisphere. That is the principal condition for global economic imbalance.” Issuing bonds has the effect of creating a military economy in a way that doesn’t interfere or compete with the private sector and acts as conveyer belt for its resources.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller: