Very interesting and original paper on the military capabilities of Israel against Sunni and Shiite hegemonies.
As a practitioner of the mainly symbolic discipline I do, it is a good reality check.

Here’s an excerpt,

The study assesses that a Sunni military threat, either with or without Turkey, could rapidly and unexpectedly emerge. The current combined military capability of the Sunni states is relatively limited compared to that of Israel, but over the long term, Israel would likely prove unable to maintain the decisive technological superiority it now possesses versus the current Sunni militaries. In such a scenario, Israel’s current exaggerated emphasis on combat with non-state light infantry, located within urban areas, under counter-insurgency rules of engagement would combine to compromise its long-term ability to cope with a Sunni conventional combined arms threat that could arise in the future.

link (PDF)

1. Violence in New York is up….In the last 28 days (through July 12), compared to last year, shootings have more than tripled (318 vs. 97). (link)
2. How to Tell GPT-3 from a human? “The lesson here is that if you’re a judge in a Turing test, make sure you ask some nonsense questions, and see if the interviewee responds the way a human would.” (link) [not so fast, gwern shows how to circumvent this nonsense (link), also “Tempering Expectations…(link)”
3. TV and radio could command our attention the way the speaker in a classroom would, through people paying attention to what others were attending to. But we use 21st-century media in isolation. (link)
4. The human sperm flagellum rotates the cell to beat equally on all sides in 3D, not an eel-like, side to side motion. (link)
5. Warlords of the air, Sergey Brin’s Revolutionary $19 Airship. (link)

1. Creating a comprehensive (physical-internal) fitness training for the environment of a prison / small room / refugee camp.
2. Music (together with Ran Lev Ari, Yaniv Meisel, Yoni Ben Dor):
   1. Sympathetic music for fighting and practicing katas
   2. Parasympathetic music for Detant Niradin
      (After several years of focusing on the rhythm we are working on in parallel on melody, harmonies and human voice)
3. Writing a video course:
   1. Long stick
   2. Short stick
   3. Short Chain
   4. Traditional sword in the 21st century
4. Writing a full online course, for beginners Ninjutsu.
5. Completing Detant Niradin 49 video lessons for a total of 100 video lessons.
6. Ongoing Detant Niradin development (work in progress with Nir Adin)
   1. Creating an independent training core suitable for seniors using three new kata.
   2. Integration of mudra to the independent training kernel.
   3. Creating a method for personal mind-body recipes.
7. Integrating the music project for morning training
8. Continue collecting current and relevant links in the blog.
9. Editing several hundred techniques we filmed in Athens and have not yet been published
10. A dialogue with the instructors at AKBAN
11. Writing an online Detant course for instructors.
12. Continued improvement of the Akban website for knowledge (akban.org) and the Akban website for online training (akban-online.com)
13. Changing the current Detant workshop (with Micael Keren)
14. Designing and manufacturing new Kusari.
    

And of course, training and teaching. Everything is built on this.

1. Lebanon is now one millimeter before total collapse. “Newly impoverished people are taking to Facebook to offer to trade household items for milk. Crime is on the rise. In one widely circulated video, a man wearing a coronavirus mask and wielding a pistol holds up a drugstore and demands that the pharmacist hand over diapers.” (link)
2. Tokyo has rapidly gone from canceling a ballistic missile defense system to considering strike capabilities against foreign adversaries. (link)

1. typical skyscraper will have at least double the carbon footprint of a 10-storey building of the same floor area. (link)
2. At least 16 people, including an army general, have been killed in fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan forces in the worst outbreak of hostilities in years. (link)
   
3. The world is ill-prepared for the global crash in children being born which is set to have a “jaw-dropping” impact on societies, say researchers. (link)
   
4. Good news. Memory T cells induced by previous pathogens can shape the susceptibility to, and clinical severity of, subsequent infections (link)

1. The USMC is smack-dab in the middle of a transformational institutional revolution.  It has decided to redefine itself as anti-China force, and is making some radical changes to its force structure and doctrine for that purpose.  (link)
   
2. So many frustrated traders have showed up at Robinhood’s Silicon Valley headquarters that the stock-trading app installed bulletproof glass. (link) doctrine for that purpose.  (link – NY times)
   
3. Traumatic brain injuries declined 32% from 2012 to 2018, after more than a decade of increasing rates, a new study finds. The decline seems to be largely related to the decreasing number of kids playing tackle football and the increase in the additional contact limitations put on the game (link)
4. Attackers can get information about what’s going on in front of the security camera via its cloud storage, and infer when there is someone home. (link)
5. A touching description of OCD in times of COVID-19 – “What happens when constant hand-washing is actually recommended, when friends are quarantining their groceries for 72 hours, when the most practical people you know have taped-off contamination “hot zones” in their homes next to arsenals of hand sanitizer? The line between the rational and irrational – once clear even as I performed bizarre rituals – risks becoming blurred. (link)

The tenets of police ideology are not codified or written down, but are nonetheless widely shared in departments around the country.

The ideology holds that the world is a profoundly dangerous place: Officers are conditioned to see themselves as constantly in danger and that the only way to guarantee survival is to dominate the citizens they’re supposed to protect. The police believe they’re alone in this fight; police ideology holds that officers are under siege by criminals and are not understood or respected by the broader citizenry. These beliefs, combined with widely held racial stereotypes, push officers toward violent and racist behavior during intense and stressful street interactions.

more at the (link)

1. An extra-virgin olive oil made in China has been selected as the best product out of 430 different types from 17 countries at this year’s Athena International Olive Oil Competition (link)
   
2. A TV commercial for a Dutch-made bicycle has been banned by France’s advertising watchdog for creating a “climate of fear” about cars (link). I can only imagine the quality of life if “climate of fear” was banned from media altogether.
   
3. New viral song is spreading in Canada’s sparrow community and replacing the traditional triplet call (link)
4. Researchers say apocalyptic movies prepare people for Covid-19 and make them more resilient (link)
5. The frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person’s willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors.. (link)
   

1. Off road mega train (link)
2. A huge star, from Kinman dwarf galaxy, has disappeared (link)
3. Researching violence against healthcare, a report. (link)
4. External powers have intervened in the civil wars in Libya and Syria, supplying advanced conventional weapons that have intensified the conflicts. But not all of the weapons have performed as claimed. (link)
5. British law enforcement officials have “broken into” a communication system used by criminals in their biggest ever series of strikes against serious and organised crime. (link)