The return of "the greatest (MAGA) hits"

What a joke.  

Talk about your fake Christians

He's also so charitable to the [perfectly normal looking] happy Texan Democrats?:

 

People in comments just don't get it (with good reason - I don't understand his point either!):

 

I can well image the screams of Stephen Miller while he watched this...

And, indeed:

Trump proving that he has zero principles and in only interested in power.  Thus, anti- immigrant bigotry and fearmongering got him a long way, but when it stopped working, he wants to be Mr Reasonable and throw all of the ICE defenders under the bus.  

It's ridiculous. And kind of hilarious, if it weren't for people's lives being ruined, or ended. 

 

UPDATE:   Oh, I just learnt this morning that the interview was made just before he appointed Miller as the new Chief of Staff.

 

I also saw a clip on Youtube of Trump in 2018 saying to a group including the late Senator Feinstein that he could perhaps do a deal about amnesty for some immigrants.  Nothing ever happened, of course.

 

The thing is, this is just empty words, again.  Like his great health care deal.   

The return of the blue-faced honeyeaters

I was thinking recently that I haven't seen these pretty birds for quite a while, but this morning they made a springtime return, and the lighting made the camera catch the blue nicely.

The split in the American Right worth watching...

This is interesting, and who know where it will end up.

 JD Vance is that apparent head of "it's the Iran War, stupid" camp (as an explanation for the Republican wipeout at the midterms) within Trump's circle, and is apparently urging a rapid negotiated end to the conflict.     Surprisingly, he has the support of Don Jnr!  (God knows why he has decided to get involved.)

But as Mark Steyn notes (hey, he's still writing?  No one pays much attention to him anymore, do they?), there is a camp of Trump loving commentators who are urging him to finish the conflict militarily - in other words, engage in a massive attack to remove the regime.   To his (ever-so-slight) credit, Steyn thinks that's crazy advice.

Is Miller influential on Trump's war decisions?   Because it's hard to imagine him being a moderating influence in that regard.  I half expect he would be suggesting nuclear strikes.   

So, it all continues to be a worry.  Hopefully, a Democrat controlled congress may well be prepared to impeach a US President who goes "full war" without its approval? 

 

Reactions to Stephen Miller getting a Trump promotion

In the Washington Post:

  

But Australian conservative weirdo Gray Connolly thinks he can read the American room better:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally, yes, with Miller, it's impossible not to see the Nazi comparisons:

Update:  Jonathan Chait in the Atlantic:

 

He is fanatically post-liberal. Miller has repeatedly described the opposition as illegitimate. “The Democrat Party is not a political party,” he said last year. “It is a domestic extremist organization.” He has obsessively, and effectively, employed executive actions to circumvent Congress as a lawmaking body. Trump had little use for the legislature even when his allies controlled it. If Miller remains true to form, he will extend his reliance on executive action, and commit the administration to total defiance of any oversight. 

Does he mention that it starts at the top?

Erick Erickson writes in the New York Times:

I’m a Republican. We Have Let Too Many Weirdos Into Our Party.

Well, hear hear.  

Interestingly, as I don't really know much about Erickson's views, he seems not to be a fan of Vance:

During the 2016 campaign, Ross Douthat warned, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” A decade later, we have met it. It has borrowed the grievance politics, the identity obsessions and the contempt for dissent of the woke left, and it has dressed all of that in a rather Christless Christian nationalism. It intends to be the future of the Republican Party.

Consider how some of its leading lights spent the month before the election. For four consecutive Mondays, Peter Thiel, a billionaire, lectured on the Antichrist at a Masonic lodge in Nashville. The sessions drew William Wolfe, Andrew Isker and Joshua Haymes, prominent Christian nationalists. Mr. Wolfe’s Center for Baptist Leadership rallies online mobs against Southern Baptist pastors who resist his project and offer a gentle word about the culture.

Some of the funding behind this movement comes from Charles Haywood, who made his fortune selling a shampoo company. Mr. Haywood has written that his preferred government “will not be democratic,” that women “will not be permitted to choose career over family” and that men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family” without “significant penalties.” He has written glowingly of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. His foundation has reportedly given the Claremont Institute nearly $400,000 since 2022, and it has funded American Reformer, a publication devoted to recapturing Christian institutions, and American Moment, a government staffing pipeline founded with JD Vance’s support.....

Here's the main bit:

 This group is invested in the future of Vice President JD Vance as the agent of the change they want. At a National Conservatism conference in Jerusalem, which happened to be held on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre, Mr. Wolfe said that “JD Vance is our guy.” According to Rod Dreher, he also suggested that conservative American Jews should know their place. Mr. Vance, for his part, has cultivated the weirdo right rather than confront it. He appears to be going along for the ride. Even after Tucker Carlson turned on President Trump and kept mainstreaming antisemitic conspiracy theories, Mr. Vance has not put any real distance between himself and the weirdo right.

  UPDATE:  good point!

Thank heavens for the non White vote...

From the New York Times today:

 One would think that, despite the obvious significance of the Iran War, with the massive move in the Hispanic and Asian vote (and the vote in Texas), Republicans should not be underestimating the importance of the terrible implementation of their anti-immigration policies in the form of ICE, and more generally with the routine demonisation of all (non white) immigration...

Time for some considered analysis from Australia's mini-MAGA-me online people

Billionaire blows nearly half a billion dollars and tries to joke about it

 Note the number of comments.  I can tell you, it is hard to find any that are supportive.

Quite a few are along the lines "what a waste:  think of the good you could have done in the world by spending it on something worthwhile".    Which is a very good point, and all the more reason to dislike him.... 

A simple idea that works

Seems that a simple idea that helps in working out whether mothers really do need urgent treatment to stop postpartum bleeding is making a real difference, especially in poorer countries.   Have a read about it from the New York Times.

 It's very cool when you read about cheap, effective medical interventions.   

Things we like to see...

Korean does AC/DC

The YouTube algorithm, seeing how much Asian sourced pop I have been investigating lately, suggested this Korean guy who seems pretty popular, but I hadn't heard of him before.  This recent song immediately made me think that it's a copy, even vocally, of early AC/DC with Bon Scott.   I find this amusingly incongruous, but the video is actually pretty fun to watch: 

 

I have scrolled through some of the comments following the video, and although most are in Korean, I thought I might spot "AC/DC" in one of them. No luck, so far, though...

Monday musings about Sabine Hossenfelder

I think it's well worthwhile following Sabine Hossenfelder for her (nearly always cynical or dismissive) takes on recent physics papers which I might otherwise not have heard about, as well as a story this morning I had missed about how a couple of historians have weighed in on the question of physicist Schrodinger's alleged paedophilia.   (They say that a careful examination of his difficult to read diaries do not support the worst case scenario that an Irish journalist had promulgated 9 years ago, and which had led to some renaming of facilities at an Irish university.  I had posted about his unconventional love life myself back in 2017, but had not realised - or recalled?- that the allegation of paedophilia had blown up enough for actual consequences today.)

There's no doubt, however, that one should not think she is always 100% reliable on her takes.  To give some examples:

* she seemed to move quite quickly from cautious optimism on fusion being able to be achieved by one of the new start ups pursuing different paths, to now doubting most of them.  (I think she should have strongly doubted all from the very start!);

* she has spoken openly about poor professional treatment when within mainstream physics, and having had periods of poor mental health.   Her insistence on the fundamentals of physics becoming "lost" and  following fruitless paths for the last few decades I think needs to be seen in that light, although I do tend to think she is probably correct about string theory, as she is not the only person pointing out the unprovability of that idea.   I also think she is probably right about warning about physicists (and engineers) overselling what a new, super expensive, particle collider could achieve, and suggesting that governments should spend the incredible amount of money that project would entail in different science related ways.

* her preferred approach of superdeterminism as a way of dealing with quantum mysteries seems to be going nowhere, and seems as wildly improbable as Everett's Many Worlds does.  

* her takes on free will align with superdeterminism, but she also seems superdetermined (ha) to not follow the moral or practical consequences of telling people they have no free will.  (This topic keeps bothering me, and I should write a specific post about it one day to try to clear my head.)

* she is friends with, and defends, Eric Weinstein, who I think really is a crank, sharing with him a fondness for telling others how foolish they are.  Have a look at this "walking both sides" example to crankdom from him:

This is how the game is played. People don’t get that the entire REASON 9/11 conspiracies exist is that we can’t admit that some things are not well understood. I don’t believe in a 9/11 conspiracy theory. I do believe we have a building collapse for which we lack a good theory.     

 Anyway, it's clear from comments on her Youtube videos that she has become the darling of parts of the Right, and is getting some vehement denunciation from science types heavily aligned to the Left,  due to her occasional forays into things like the trans issue (on which I thought her take was pretty sensible), her back and forth on climate change, and her overall condemnation of the state of physics being read in such a way that she is accused of being supportive of Right wing anti-science attitudes.   

I am writing this post because of her recent video about extreme weather event attribution to climate change, as I thought the argument and the message was pretty muddled, and gave far too much comfort to the climate change denier audience, as was evidenced by the flood of Youtube comments from them.   

It has longed seemed to me that, while believing climate change is definitely real, she is (as her friendship with Weinstein would indicate) so free market aligned that she is ideologically against fossil fuel corporations being pursued in court for contributing to climate change, or for supporting climate change denialism (or lukewarmism, which is the default of the "professional" climate change skeptic).  This seems to unduly colour her take on extreme weather attribution studies.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find much online commenting on the video from the climate change mainstream.   I think she might now be being perceived by too many in the mainstream of science as being too, um, professionally cranky?, to bother pushing back against?   Which I think is a pity.

I think her views are worth hearing, and worth engaging with, even when she's wrong or too biased... 

 Update:   One fairly recent video should have been paid more attention to by the Right wingers/climate lukewarmers who like to promote small modular nuclear reactors is here, in which she succinctly set out the arguments as to why this proposed power source for towns or cities doesn't turn out to be economical or practical, despite small reactors being around to power ships for a long time.   Funnily enough, it was only within days of my watching that and thinking it made sense that I saw Murdoch professional right wing  gadfly James Morrow mocking on Twitter some comment expressing scepticism of small nuclear.  

As noticed on X

Yes, X is a degrading hot mess of a site, but posts like this is why I still look at it: