heraclius

One respect in which it seems prima facie that the story is farfetched nonsense but isn’t is provenance. Lianhe Zaobao is owned by the Singaporean government and is reasonably reputable, and the translation is accurate. It is however a report mostly based on a previous report that Jin Canrong, Deputy Dean of IR at Renmin University, claimed that such microwave weapons were used, so evidentially this is not enormously helpful.

There are obviously questions about why they would use such weapons and escalate matters, whether such a weapon could even be constructed to be used at such a distance, etc.

> Large geographic size…Similar to #1, this makes it hard for aggrieved, disenfranchised groups to collectively rise up, as everyone is literally all spread out.

This is not at all obvious: sometimes different groups are disproportionately present in one particular area.

> China has no imperial ambitions. The annexation of Tibet was 70 years ago. The last incident of expansion could technically be in in 1997 when Hong Kong was transferred to China from Britain

Pedantically, don’t forget Macau. Taiwan remains. And Sino-Indian conflict is still on the rise. Generally, the expansion of China’s overseas presence prima facie looks imperial. It may not be, but some reason should be given as to why!

> America’s large bureaucracy and its constitutional republic composed to hundreds of Congressmen and Senators creates a lot of redundancy and limits the damage any one individual can do

One might have thought that, but on the other hand the US president has rather a lot of power (see e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/preside... of course, the bureaucracy may not follow the president, but I think that needs to be shown.

> so many obvious methodological problems and dubious assumptions, such as that history must cycle or that empires must fall

This is the most promising, I suspect, line of response—alas, it isn’t really explored much.

How does this deal with birds, clouds, fog, planes, drones, hills, dust, smog, etc.?

> In the example above, Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil would be bridge languages for Indo-Aryan languages.

Tamil isn’t an Indo-Aryan language. It would be rather surprising if it were a good bridge for any two Indo-Aryan langauges.

I should be rather surprised if the FCC were the relevant body in Wales.

That’s too late for university admissions this cycle, and next year’s Oxbridge admissions cycle will be a nightmare given the large number of reapplicants. It’d have been necessary to use the time saved in not having to mark exams to run the algorithm early.

I don’t see why this is would actually be a bad idea—it just sounds like the offer wouldn't be taken up much. Most systems that allow people to express some preference to be kinder to someone else probably won’t end up causing harm—the worst case is that they just don’t cause anything.

In practice it seems that affirmative action primarily takes from Asians and unconnected whites to give to blacks. I have no objection to the latter—indeed, I can see some justification in taking from educated middle class Asians like me—but the obvious people from whom to take places are those who get in on connexions (most of whom are white). If this creates a shortfall, the obvious solution is to dismantle a bureaucracy that was clearly unneeded, say, 40 years ago. Unfortunately there is no political incentive to do this—the Republicans will almost certainly attempt to restore a situation by which blacks end up in the grand scheme of things disadvantaged, with no correction at university admissions, whilst the progressive narrative is controlled by mostly white liberal bourgeois class interests, and therefore will continue to find some other group to make the sacrifices it deems (not incorrectly in this case!) necessary, and happens to create not inconsiderable employment for them, inter alia—indeed, one might go so far as to say is necessary for their broader control of the capitalist system by holding onto cultural power within education.

According to Wikipedia, the IPT upheld ten of 1468 complaints from 2000 to 2012. High standards of conduct, judicial probity and intellectual excellence do not inevitably lead to justice—we know this from, e.g., Singapore—and, whilst we cannot determine much sans access to classified data and rulings, this seems to be one of those cases. The problem with the IPT is probably not this sort of exploit, but rather its overall structure and the statutory framework within which it operates.

Initially I suspected that the most likely reason was that the _Deutsche Physik_ babble (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik) somehow had got out of hand, but evidently that wasn’t it.

The answer from the Education Secretary in the LegCo, in full: https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202007/08/P2020070800306...

The obvious flaw in the answer given is that he goes from ‘such right [para 1, art. 13 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child] is not absolute’ given para 2’s provisions to a seemingly disproportionate restriction of all political activity (‘no one…should…hold any activities to express their political stance’).

Notably, para 2 of art. 13 requires that ‘the exercise of this right…shall only be [restricted where it is necessary]…(a) for respect of the rights and reputations of others; or (b) for the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health and morals.’ This does not to me seem to encompass a blanket ban, e.g., of advocacy of universal suffrage (the stated aim of the Basic Law), or an alteration of the tax rate, or public subsidy for the beautification of local streetscapes by artists, or a change in the timing of a traffic light.

The fourth year of an undergrad also gives an “undergraduate master’s”.

The PM was Senior Wrangler, so at least as much of a mathmo as a computer scientist. Moreover he is odd in two ways: first, he is the product of the scholar-army-politician pipeline in Singapore, which is quite unparalleled; second, he is the son of Lee Kuan Yew.

> weapon of absolute last resort

At least when Israel was developing its nuclear bomb, its neighbours were not particularly minded to compromise. Contrast, for example, the Freedom Charter (a fifties document!), which was so studiously nonracial that the PAC had to split off:

> South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white…that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief

At this point the possible threat was clearly domestic blacks, not nearby colonies, and compromise with them was clearly quite possible. CODESA didn't happen earlier because the Broederbond took so long to change its mind—had it, it could have happened decades earlier.

The SA army was also in conventional terms quite sufficient to prevent any foreign invasion. Even Rhodesia with P.K. van der Byl and the other ludicrous types who congregated in Salisbury hotels could manage for over a decade. Armscor on the other hand was world-leading, and none of SA’s neighbours had anything like that.

> soviet supplied cuban troops on our border

They were on the Namibian border, which was from 1966 was no longer really South Africa’s. In any case SA militarily held its own—it inflicted far more casualties than it suffered and maintained control of Namibia. It seems to make much more sense to interpret withdrawal as a political decision to cease the indefensible occupation of Namibia, instead of evidence that a nuclear bomb was strategically necessary.

The court would not discharge its duty to follow the law if it were to decline to correct earlier precedent on the basis that the legislature could at some point alter the law once again. In this case, the question is whether qualified immunity is a correct interpretation of the code or not. Whether or not Amash proposes to alter the law in such a way as to clearly change the law to preclude qualified immunity, the court should consider the cases before it on the basis of the law as it is (or will be, if Amash decided to remove qualified immunity with retrospective effect.)

In this case, in the video, Jimenez asks the police whether they'd like him to move somewhere else, they don't respond, and then they arrest him, so it is quite hard to justify the claim that they were resisting arrest even on that definition.

Hong Kong’s economy is built on its (arguably at least economically) exploitative relationship with China. More improbable even than the successful implementation of a relocation plan (to N. Ireland, Tsushima Island, or whatever) is that China would allow this new Hong Kong to have any economic relationship with the Mainland. It has factored in the economic cost already, and has decided that the tradeoff of having a free and democratic Chinese city is too much. As Chip Tsao said on television recently,⁰ the Zhongnanhai is using ‘bottom line thinking’—they have decided they can do without a window on the West, and so will neither act to save the other one nor allow the creation of a new one.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtom_T9-g08

Ah yes, quite right. I thought the colours suggested that I was in fact already on the fixed broadband list.

I looked at [4]—unless I’m being silly, the table seems to have the US far behind (from your list) S. Korea, Belgium, Austria, and several other European states.

> I just want them to understand that they aren’t very much more protective than if they weren’t wearing them. And they’re really not doing a whole lot of good for the people around them. So, we should continue to do social distancing as much as we possibly can.

The headline is rather misleading then. Given most lockdowns don’t encompass starving oneself to death by not leaving the home at all and no epidemiologist has hitherto recommended this, masks still would improve the situation; their use would not be mutually exclusive with any particular level of social distancing.

Bravo!

Thank you very much; in retrospect this should have been obvious.

The original 2019nCovMemory repository appears to have been deleted.⁰ There is another repository of that name on Github, but it was last updated 13 February.¹

If anyone happens to have a more recent local copy, I urge you to upload it to Github again, and send it to as many people as possible. If you would be unwilling to upload it yourself, I am sure that there are many others who would be happy to help.

0. https://2019ncovmemory.github.io/nCovMemory/; https://github.com/2019ncovmemory/nCovMemory

1. https://github.com/2019ncovmemory/nCovMemory

EDIT: Some results appear here: https://github.com/search?q=nCovMemory; you can help to keep this information online by locally cloning it and/or forking the repositories.

The nonempty repos are—

https://github.com/dta0502/nCovMemory

https://github.com/memoryhonest/nCovMemory-en

https://github.com/Project-Gutenberg/nCovMemory-Web

The target is to ensure that each case infects no more than one additional person (‘R<1’).

Each infected person will come into contact with some other people. Testing allows three things—

- first, we can tell this person to stay at home and so stop them from infecting more people;

- second, we can tell the people they have seen to stay at home with good contact-tracing, so that even if they get it they don’t spread it further; and

- third, with enough tests and contact tracing, those who were exposed but not infected don’t have to stay at home.

We are winning so long as R<1, even if there is some chance the infection spreads; we do not need R=0.

The other way of reducing R requiring much less testing and contact tracing is a lockdown. This has obvious downsides. The point of a programme of testing and conyact tracing is that we can turn the cost of avoiding disaster from a lockdown to sticking some things up people’s noses.

edit: typo in first para

I believe that they stay in quarantine wards where everyone is known to be infected, since attempts are still made to treat them.

From Caixin:

> He found that two-thirds of the medical staff in the ICU were already infected. Doctors there were running "naked" as they knew they were set to be infected given the shortage of protective gear. They still worked there nonetheless.

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/reporters-notebo...

1. It is trivially the case that many have overthrown such systems sans guns. See, for example, the DDR, Poland, Hungary etc.

2. The HK protest movement is not about “communism”. The left in Hong Kong, apart from a very small section represented by newspapers such as Ta Kung Pao, is against the CCP and government. That is because the people you refer to as communist here don’t care very much for class struggle or Marxism. They care about power, and so they have sided with the oligarchs instead of the professional and working classes. That’s why they kept laissez-faire capitalism but not the limited progress towards democracy under the British that took place in the 1990s. For this reason there are large numbers of tycoons in the HK political establishment.

3. It is unhelpful to try to shoehorn one’s bugbears into everything without reference to the specificities of the particular situation into which one is trying to shoehorn something.

As Hyphen Press explain, hardbacks used invariably to be bound properly, but now they are often simply paperbacks between boards.¹ Signalling alone as above is the correct explanation. Cloth books can have practical advantages, such as the possibility of rebinding, but modern hardbacks mostly lack them.

1. https://hyphenpress.co.uk/journal/article/bookbinding_survey

The PM’s response that he also believes in the rule of law is utterly facetious. The whole point of the campaign is to demand that media organisations should be free to report on more matters of concern to the public. The most logical way to achieve that end would be the entirely usual procedure of changing the law, which is how every other legislative programme is achieved. The rule of law could not thus be undermined, for the legal situation afterwards would expressly allow what the media seek to do.

It’s trifling for Europe as a whole, as shown by the fact that Turkey managed to process them alone. For Turkey or course it is not trifling.