Checks on the president’s ability to fire nuclear weapons

According to the US constitution, the president is the commander in chief of the military forces and thus has the power to order them to do anything without anybody being able to challenge that decision. That power extends to the use of nuclear weapons. A new book by two Washington Post reporters says that the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley, the head of the US military, was so concerned that Trump had become unhinged by his election loss and the events of January 6th that he feared he might ‘go rogue’ and do something dangerously irrational such as start a war, perhaps with nuclear weapons. Milley reportedly convened a meeting of the officers who would be involved in the process to tell them that they had to promise to make sure that any order to start a war or use nuclear weapons also involved him. Milley also called his Chinese counterpart to reassure him.
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Calling a woman a ‘young lady’ is an obvious put down

Democratic senator Joe Manchin has been using the influence he has achieved as a result of a 50-50 tie in the US senate to advance the agenda of his corporate backers by thwarting efforts to pass the infrastructure bill in its present form and demanding huge cuts. When Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez pointed out his ties to lobbyists, he responded by referring to her as ‘young lady’ and she immediately called him out on it.
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Dan Ariely’s work called into question

In my teaching work and on this blog, I have often referred favorably to the work of behavioral economist Dan Ariely who devised ingenious experiments to tease out human behaviors and motivations. (See here for the posts where I have discussed his work.) I have recommended his book Predictably Irrational which, as the title succinctly suggests, argued that while people are often irrational, their irrationality is not random. He has also given very popular TED talks.

A lot of his research dealt with the issue of honesty: what corners people are willing to cut, by how much, and how they view themselves. So I was disappointed to read that he may the latest example of an academic who has been sloppy or worse in the way that he has conducted his research, throwing his work into doubt.
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What kind of marketing strategy is this?

I noticed that used copies of my latest book The Great Paradox of Science are available on eBay at about $10 higher than the list price set by the publisher and about $15 higher that the discounted price set by major retailers.

Since my book is readily available, why would anyone try to sell a used copy at a higher price than a new one?

I have never used eBay. Is there some weird marketing strategy that people use on that platform that I am unaware of?

The Costa Rican health care system

In the August 30, 2021 issue of the New Yorker, Atul Gawande takes a close look at the health care system in Costa Rica that, within a few decades, improved so rapidly that now its people have a higher life expectancy than the US and at a much lower cost. The numbers alone tell the story.

In 1950, around ten per cent of children died before their first birthday, most often from diarrheal illnesses, respiratory infections, and birth complications. Many youths and young adults died as well. The country’s average life expectancy was fifty-five years, thirteen years shorter than that in the United States at the time.

Life expectancy tends to track national income closely. Costa Rica has emerged as an exception… Across all age cohorts, the country’s increase in health has far outpaced its increase in wealth. Although Costa Rica’s per-capita income is a sixth that of the United States—and its per-capita health-care costs are a fraction of ours—life expectancy there is approaching eighty-one years. In the United States, life expectancy peaked at just under seventy-nine years, in 2014, and has declined since.

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Civil resistance versus revolution

Sometimes people who get frustrated by deep injustices in democratic societies seem to give up on their governments doing the right thing and start to consider the possibility of violent revolution as the only way to get any meaningful change. Andrew Marantz writes about an empirical study by Erica Chenoweth, the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, to try and address empirically the question of which kind of effort, mass civil rights struggle or revolution, is more likely to produce the results sought.
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Deprivation can lead to common knowledge

In an earlier post, I mentioned how nowadays people have so many sources of news and entertainment that it is hard to find a common base of knowledge and experiences with other people. It is surprising when one encounters someone who has seen a film or read a book that you have too. Nowadays, it seems like the best we can do is to recommend to each other what each of us has been exposed to that the other hasn’t.

It struck me that when I was growing up in Sri Lanka, people did have a lot of cultural experiences in common but that was because we had an extremely limited menu to pick from. When it came to western music, for example, we had just one radio channel that broadcast in English for just about eight hours per day and of those only about three were devoted to popular music. So all of us had the same exposure to whatever records the announcers chose to play for us. Very few people could afford to buy their own records. While we knew the same singers and songs, there were a huge number singers and groups that we had never heard of, especially non-mainstream ones.

It was the same with films. There were just about five theaters that showed English films and that was in the capital city Colombo. In the smaller town that I spent my middle and high school years in, there were just two theaters. Hence pretty much everyone would see the same films and we could talk about them. These theaters had contracts with the film distributors that required them to show not just good films but also the bad ones and because we were starved for films, we would see a wide variety of them. Many of them were really good, some were arty films that were above my adolescent mind (such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), while others were real stinkers (such as Valley of the the Dolls) that we laughed all the way through because they were so bad.

Nowadays I find it difficult trying to pick a film that I might like to watch as I scroll through the menus of streaming services with their seemingly infinite offerings. It gets even more difficult if there are a group of you trying to agree on something.

I am definitely not arguing that having highly restricted choices is a good thing. I enjoy the fact that I can now see films and hear music that were not available to me growing up. But it did have the benefit that one could always find common topics to talk to others about.