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The president of Pakistan tells Seymour Hersh why his army won’t do anything silly with nuclear weapons:

Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They’re British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security?

Not

entirely

convincing, given that every military coup in Pakistan’s history has been led by a British-trained general. Worse still if you start to wonder precisely which tips they might have picked up:

…until they were retired in 1998, the RAF’s nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key. There was no other security on the bomb itself.

Meanwhile Bruce Sterling has started his annual state of the world interview, an open Q&A which he concocts a grotesque (but plausible) interpretation of the zeitgeist. Always brilliant, it’s especially entertaining this year because his contrarian instincts compel him to be optimistic while everybody else is full of gloom. So far, he’s completely failing.

Bruce Sterling’s State of the World is back for another year. I swear, this is the only piece of punditry that ever seems close to grokking what’s going on:

Sy Hersh’s Nov 09 article on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is not all that revelatory. But, given the last post here, it’s hardly reassuring to read of the Pakistani president defending nuclear security in these terms:

“Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They’re British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security?”

“

until less than ten years ago, the locks on RAF nuclear bombs were opened with a bicycle lock key. ” [BBC

]

Admittedly, this looks like a case of auntie spinning their info as far as it’ll go. e.g. no bicycle lock itself, necessarily, just the same kind of key.

More optimism from Hari, this time idolizing JJ & co:

It works. Look at Britain. Three years ago, eight new coal power stations were being planned, and the third runway at Heathrow was all but inevitable. A few thousand heroic young people took direct action against them. Now all the new coal power stations have been cancelled, and the third runway is dead in the water. Here in the fifth largest economy in the world, they have stopped coal and airport expansion. Politicians felt the heat. That was done by a few thousand people. Imagine what tens or hundreds of thousands could do.

I’m piously encouraged by Johann Hari’s list of objects of emulation from 2009

Self-criticism:

A lot went wrong and my own sorry generation are largely culpable. Smug, lazy and intellectually self-satisfied; historically uneducated and therefore fixated on superficial understandings and re-stagings of the past; unwilling to risk seriousness, or rather, mistaking creative conservatism and po-faced self-absorption for seriousness; lacking sex, glamour, rage, resentment, a death drive, or anything vaguely fucking resembling a reason to make a mark upon the world – you, my peers, are possibly the most boring lot of Westerners since those born ‘tween the World Wars grew themselves up on Patty Boone and Georgia Gibbs.

Couldn’t agree more.

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Paul Erdos, Tom Waits, and women in Philosophy:

But he wasn’t just moving from one university or research center to the next in a restless quest for mathematical talent. He was on the move so much because he was holy hell as a house guest. —He “forsook all creature comforts—including a home—to pursue his lifelong study of numbers,” the blurbs will tell you. Bullshit. He forsook the bother and worry of creature comforts. Other people cooked his food. Other people washed his clothing. Other people kept him from wandering into traffic. Other people woke him in time for his “preaching” appointments. Other people filled out his paperwork.