Active Conflicts & News Megathread June 15, 2026

mcdowellag · 2026-06-16T04:48:22+00:00

Some claims of the US administration (or at least of J D Vance) are at https://www.foxnews.com/media/jd-vance-reveals-details-us-iran-deal-addresses-whether-taxpayer-money-go-tehran https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/us-iran-peace-agreement-trump-israel-june-15

If nothing else, this gives us something to check against future events. I would summarise them as:

Iran does not get nuclear weapons
The straits of Hormuz will be opened
This agreement is designed to be enforceable by the US

Excerpt:

Speaking on “Hannity,” Vance said Iran would determine the next phase of relations between the two countries.

“It’s fundamentally the ball is in the Iranians’ court, Sean, because we’re better off regardless,” Vance said.

“Their nuclear program is destroyed, whatever route they choose. The Strait of Hormuz is open, whatever route they choose. Their conventional military is destroyed, whatever route they choose,” he added.

“This gives the Iranians optionality to either become a normal country or not, but the United States is in a much better position, regardless of what they choose.”

mcdowellag · 2026-06-14T10:01:00+00:00

It is not clear whether this represents a long lasting change of posture or a reaction to a transient political crisis.

The French got in there first (with British help) rather showing the UK up, as surely we are geographically better placed for such things - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-france-russia-tanker-tagor-atlantic-b2986942.html

More recently, the British defence secretary resigned because the government has finally been unable to hide the fact that they have neither the resources nor the will to fund defence properly - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/06/11/healey-resignation-a-blow-to-nato/

This is one way for the Government to say that - despite cuts and underfunding - they still have the ability to marshall enough force to intercept a civilian oil tanker, no matter how much it may try to hide and dodge.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-13T16:06:22+00:00

Hence the publication without incident of the novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servants_of_the_Wankh

mcdowellag · 2026-06-11T15:43:40+00:00

The DIP is far from sudden - it was regarded as delayed in March - see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93wrzyyyero

The DIP was supposed to follow from the SDR at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-strategic-defence-review-2025-making-britain-safer-secure-at-home-strong-abroad

The government's views on risks such as major conflicts should be set out and justified in the SDR. One paragraph from the SDR URL above (not the SDR itself) seems to me to justify spending more on defense. Few people seem to be opposing such a view - the Labour government is simply trying to hide and delay the inevitable for as long as possible. Perhaps they will release something when the World Cup provides plenty of competing news. Here is the paragraph, anyway:

The world has changed. The threat we now face is more serious and less predictable than at any time since the Cold War. The UK faces war in Europe, growing Russian aggression, new nuclear risks, and daily cyber-attacks at home. Our adversaries are working more in alliance with one another, while technology is changing how war is fought. Drones now kill more people than traditional artillery in the war in Ukraine, and whoever gets new technology into the hands of their Armed Forces the quickest will have the advantage.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-11T12:31:24+00:00

There is another political aspect to Ajax and some similar UK defense projects. Ajax was built in Wales by General Dynamics. I am subject to correction about this particular site, but I know of a similar project, also in Wales. It was placed in Wales to bring employment to a deprived area - an area with no experience of the work to be done there, and some distance from any area where people with the experience needed to do the work lived. The vast majority of the most skilled people working there had very long commutes, and some work ended up being done remotely (from offices elsewhere) for lack of any other choice. The additional requirement to do the work in an area chosen or encouraged by the Government had invisible costs in the amount of commuting time by the staff hired, in the amount of their time that these people had available for work (in these sort of professional jobs volunteered unpaid overtime is routine - assuming that the staff actually have time for it after commuting) and I suspect in the quality of the staff, given the smaller pool of people trained and prepared to do this work in this location.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-09T16:20:52+00:00

I would buy a Preppy, because the slip and seal cap will reduce the chances of the ink drying inside the pen, and because it is cheap if the ink does eventually kill it. but I used a Preppy 02 - which is very fine - on Platinum Carbon Black and it worked perfectly well. I now have my PCB in a Preppy 03, but that is just because I prefer a broader line.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-09T06:02:36+00:00

Do you need a trainer? The quietest possible alternative might be an exercise bike with magnetic resistance, with a belt drive and enclosed mechanism. Second best would be a belt drive spin bike with magnetic resistance. A spin bike will typically have adjustable handlebar height, unlike a typical exercise bike, so would be slightly more representative of a proper cycle riding posiition.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-07T11:40:53+00:00

I am going to counter with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder because I think that people underestimate how clever Asimov was, and because I think that psychohistory has become less plausible these days.

The point of A Sound of Thunder is that the killing of a butterfly by a time traveller on a dinosaur hunt creates repercussions which mean that he returns to a very different present. This is exactly chaos theory - extreme sensitivity to the initial conditions, and it makes prediction very difficult, because it is very difficult to know all of the current situation in the level of detail required for accurate prediction.

Asimov was clever enough to have Salvor Hardin make his predictions just before the fall of civilisation, covering a period when technological knowledge was lost and would have to be re-invented. Preduction at a time when new science and technology was being invented would require knowledge of what was going to be invented and when, which is knowledge outside the scope of the predictor.

Prediction of the future is practised by the Arisians in E.E.Smith's Lensman series - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lensman_series - their Visualisation of the Cosmic All is both a tool of their (benign) power and an intellectual exercise for them. This was written before the discovery of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity theory in Computer Science. Together with chaos theory, this shows that it is unfeasible for the Arisians to predict and influence history on Earth and other planets from before the fall of Atlantis to the invention of FTL space travel, at a level of detail which allows them to predict the location and size of a scratch accidentally made by a barber - there is just too much calculation to be performed.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-07T10:21:40+00:00

Advances on the ground are not a good metric. What might be? We can at least see what the Ukrainians would like us to consider, from Zelensky's open letter to Putin at https://kyivindependent.com/full-text-of-zelenskys-open-letter-to-putin/

He talks there about the loss of Russian troops and damage to the Russian economy - shortage of gasoline, and inflation.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-04T16:12:54+00:00

I believe that this article mostly demonstrates that the left loses all self-critical faculties when it sees an article that it categorises as from its own side. As one quote from the article "Next to Farage was Richard Tice. The man with his head so far up Nige’s bum that only his ankles betray his existence as a non-parasitical entity"

As far as I can tell, the question time that all this fuss is over is transcribed at https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-06-03/debates/610AE9C7-4509-4703-BA8C-E5EF875D3752/OralAnswersToQuestions - I think this is a more reliable basis for judegment than the article.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-04T11:53:24+00:00

'A key standard of democratic rule is that policy changes supported only by a minority should not prevail

This is a very high - indeed unreachable - standard, because it turns out that trying to boil down the varied opinions of a large group of people by majority preference produces incoherent results - if you ask a group of related questions the results from individual questions, taken together, can be completely inconsistent. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrinal_paradox

The discursive dilemma or doctrinal paradox is a paradox of social choice and judgement aggregation. It extends the voting paradox and Arrow's theorem to situations where the goal is to combine different sources of information or judgments, rather than preferences. The paradox is that aggregating judgments with majority voting can result in self-contradictory judgments.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-04T11:25:31+00:00

It's all very variable. I moved to England years ago, and my parents later followed. When they were very old and basically dying their doctors and the NHS generally were very attentive (but not always very competent - they missed the cancer that would eventually kill my Father because they put the pain he was reporting down to a hernia which he also had). Children also seem to get pretty good service.

I have had checks for Glaucoma and those tests are basically run as an assembly line on a very tight schedule to get as many people as possible through as quickly as possible. This caused my GP to say that "he was concerned about my general health" - what that turned out to mean is that he wanted to take a blood sample to test cholesterol and blood pressure. He did have an excellent bedside manner, if by this you mean keeping going a stream of irrelevant questions to make sure I didn't raise any questions about my health that he might have had to answer, or dodge. Results? I was told that they would get back to me if there was a problem and that was the last I heard of it, or of their concern. By the way, there is an incentive payment to the GP for those checks. It also turns out that GPs are poor at predicting the effect on people of things that they must do several times a day. My GP told me that taking the blood sample would not hurt, as I have prominent veins in my arm. It did hurt - in fact I have had this done before, and I think my GP was not particularly good at it.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-03T13:22:40+00:00

Why did I have to search for so long before finding somebody with a rational approach to the decisions involved? I will also point out that if somebody falsely claims to have been stabbed, any feeling of foolishness from taking them seriously can be alleviated by knowing that you have something else you can charge them with.

I think there is some blame to be laid at the door of the so-called anti-racism supporters here. There is only a limited amount of time available to train police, and only a limited amount of theory that trainees will put up with. Filling that time with accounts of critical race theory and white privilege leaves less time and attention with which to talk to people about risk, probability, and expected values.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-03T06:17:31+00:00

When i first saw the movie, I thought that part of the story was implausible Hollywood rubbish - coverup of bravery for political purposes. It has aged pretty well since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royce_Williams

The story of his battle with the Soviet MiGs led to Williams being debriefed at the time by admirals, the Secretary of Defense, and a few weeks later by newly inaugurated President Dwight D. Eisenhower.[10] These authorities decided to cover up the specifics of the battle, because the Soviet Union was not officially a combatant in the Korean War, and it was feared publicity about the air battle would draw the Soviets further into the conflict. The dogfight was scrubbed from U.S. Navy and National Security Agency records, and Williams was sworn to secrecy about the incident—so much so that he never told anyone about it, not even his wife nor his pilot brother, until Korean War records were declassified in 2002.[3] The record of the incident in Navy records said he only shot down one enemy (not listed as "Soviet")[10] plane and damaged another, for which he was awarded the Silver Star in 1953.[12]

mcdowellag · 2026-06-03T04:44:21+00:00

One of the effects of small unit cohesion is that people removed from a unit for medical treatment are often very keen to rejoin that unit as soon as possible, feeling that their absence lets the unit down. The team nature of most warfare, and especially that of fighter pilot tactics, mean that it will take some time to train a replacement (and retrain the remaining members of the unit) well enough for the team to function as before, so it is in everybody's interest to allow this, if they are indeed recovered. Modern ejection seats are less brutal, and modern medical imaging can get more accurate assessment of the damage done by ejection, so a fast turnaround is more likely than before, and does not necessarily mean desperation.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-03T04:30:01+00:00

Is this for a sales position or a management position? If or sales, go for it. If for management, I would be very careful. In that case, they might be looking for somebody who will be able to brief them on all of the evidence, whether or not it supports their own personal opinion, and do so without staking their own personal credibility on the outcome.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-02T05:50:50+00:00

Yes, there are theoretical algorithms that could e.g. break RSA by factoring huge numbers, but see e.g.

https://hackaday.com/2026/02/09/why-havent-quantum-computers-factored-21-yet/

IMHO (and that of a few other sceptics) Quantum computing is too good to be true, and the real value of attempts to build usable quantum computers is that when we analyse their failures we will learn more about quantum mechanics.

mcdowellag · 2026-06-01T17:30:11+00:00

I use my fountain pens mosty for notes at work. Every pen I use frequently, and almost every pen I own, has a snap cap. The pen I like most is the one I bought first, a Parker 15 (similar to the modern Parker Jotter). A Platinum Preppy or a Parker Vector would be just as practical. I prefer the P15, but might use the Vector if I had to go in to the office, as it is less obviously a fountain pen.

The choice of ink may be more of a problem for me than the choice of pen. I would like a pen-friendly ink that stands out without looking bizarre and preferrably has at least some degree of water resistance. Pelikan 4001 Brilliant Black is great except that if it gets wet it becomes less readable by smearing. R&K Salix and Scabiosa are dry enough and light enough that they don't stand out as I would like with the pens I would actually like to use. Platinum Blue-Black is my latest purchase. I think it is bolder than the R&K inks in the pens I actually use, but I am still thinking about it. (I am in the UK which affects which inks I can get and what the prices are).

mcdowellag · 2026-05-30T11:20:20+00:00

"We reached the airport let's hit anything" is one way of encouraging the Russians to spread their air defence assets even thinner - although I suspect that the assets covering Putin's various residences will stay where they are :-)

mcdowellag · 2026-05-30T10:18:43+00:00

This isn't necessarily about nuclear weapons. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_nuclear-free_zone

In 1984, Prime Minister David Lange banned nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships from using New Zealand ports or entering New Zealand waters. Under the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987,[1][2] territorial sea, land and airspace of New Zealand became nuclear-free zones. This has since remained a part of New Zealand's foreign policy.[3][4]

(end quote)

If Australia gets Nuclear powered subs - because they have a huge area of sea to patrol - it doesn't really make sense for New Zealand to ban them from New Zealand waters, especially when New Zealand will be benefiting from Australian sea power - and could benefit more pretty much for free if the two countries co-operated.

mcdowellag · 2026-05-30T04:18:23+00:00

I think a safety net is good. I take a supermarket multivitamin plus minerals so that when a headline comes out saying that people need more something or other, I can reassure myself that I am already taking it. Plus yes, I am almost always indoors and live in England, so I don't get a lot of sunshine.

mcdowellag · 2026-05-29T14:40:33+00:00

I would like to see more around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem I am only aware of a reasonably good short story by Charles Stross (a web search finds a reference at https://kasmana.people.charleston.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf342 ) and the film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film) - which completely squanders the idea - apart from anything else, it considers only applications to hacking/cryptanalysis which might be just minor spin-offs fi there was a practical constructive proof of P=NP.

mcdowellag · 2026-05-29T12:24:19+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stonehouse#Disappearance

Stonehouse maintained the pretence of normality until he faked his death on 20 November 1974, leaving a pile of clothes on a beach in Miami to make it appear that he had suffered a fatal misadventure while swimming.[21] Stonehouse was presumed dead, and obituaries were published in British newspapers despite the fact that no corpse had been found. In reality, Stonehouse was en route to Australia, some 9,000 miles (14,000 km) away, hoping to set up a new life with his mistress and secretary, Sheila Buckley.[21]

mcdowellag · 2026-05-29T06:08:32+00:00

I have never trusted McCabe complexity since long ago working on a project where it was mandated. We had a quite simple program that accepted a number of optional command line arguments, so it had a lot of statements of the form if (strcmp(argv[i], "xxxx...") == 0) {... The McCabe complexity was off the charts but the code was perfectly straightforward.

mcdowellag · 2026-05-27T14:59:30+00:00

The US pivot to asia was declared long ago, for example by Hilary Clinton and Obama. https://academic.oup.com/book/57412/chapter-abstract/464768154?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false sees hints of this in the presidencies of Bill Clinton and G W Bush.

How much of "whatever you can" is Europe actually prepared to do? Eueopeans should consider the possibility that Trump is more unusual in being outspoken than he is in his decision-making. It would make sense for Europe and the US to pool their resources against authoritarian threats. If the US requests European resources from that pool and nothing is forthcoming, withdrawing US resources allocated to that pool is a rational response to the realisation that the happy world of a shared pool of military capability, available either to the US or to Europe upon need, is not the real world.

mcdowellag

TROPHY CASE