which I haven't read in full (paywall), but the point appeals to me:
My father-in-law, with whom I was very
close, spent most of his life on the same working-class street in
Barcelona’s El Clot neighborhood. Born in 1929, he saw Spain’s bloody
civil war taking place literally in front of his house. His family
experienced a lot of suffering. Some died; others spent years in jail or
were forced into exile. He himself spent a year in a refugee camp, an
experience that affected him for the rest of his life. Every time he
wanted to make a point about society or culture, he always started with:
“Well, during the civil war …”
One evening, a few months before he died, he read in his local paper an article of mine about unhappiness. “You have a lot of complicated theories,” he told me, “but the real reason people are unhappy is very simple.” I asked him to elaborate. “They don’t enjoy their dinner,” he responded. I asked him what he meant. “Well, during the civil war, we were always hungry,” he said. “But one day a year—Christmas—we got to eat whatever we wanted, and we were so happy. Today, people snack all day long, are never hungry, don’t enjoy their dinners, and aren’t happy—even on Christmas.”
Would I be happy with an Atlantic subscription? Possibly. Digital is $90 (US) a year. Maybe I ask the family to each pay a third.
Meanwhile, I still, lazily, haven't decided if I should drop the NYT or WAPO. I feel I only need one.
* Clive Robertson, the cranky persona-ed news reader and broadcaster, died last week. I hadn't thought about him for years, but his death reminded me how much I used to enjoy his late night news show. His droll, dry wit was very amusing, and I miss that we have nothing similar today.
* Australian author John Marsden has also just died (at only 74 - as I age, I long to read only about deaths that are at older ages than that!). I only read his famous first book in the "Tomorrow - When the War Began" and thought it was OK, but I knew he had been very influential in the youth fiction market, and in youth education generally. I didn't recall this:
John’s youth was harrowing in different ways, and he never hid the fact
that he was a bit bruised by life. He became suicidal as a university
student and was institutionalised; he once wrote that the world of the
psychiatric hospital was in some ways “more real than the one outside.
In here the masks are off, people don’t pretend so much. [They] don’t
have the energy or strength.” Perhaps that’s why he was able to inhabit
his characters so fully. It is extraordinary for a man of his generation
to write teenage girls so convincingly and with such empathy.
Update: yes, as Tim points out below, now Michael Leunig has died, aged 79. (Again, fellas, for my long term planning, I only want to see people start to leave this mortal coil from about 85!) I guess like most people I didn't mind Leunig at his peak, but his brand of idiosyncratic eccentric takes did start to wear thin in the long term.
If anything, I reckon it was way, way too gentle on Musk, even though she doesn't think his plans will happen any time soon.
She spends too much time on the long term difficulties of permanently colonising Mars (the issue of it not being to retain an atmosphere due to solar wind is covered, for example) without talking enough about the short term wild implausibility of Musk's fantasy - the huge number of rocket builds and launches needed, the totally tricky orbital re-fueling that has not been tried and is (I reckon) always going to be a high risk manoeuvre - probably with the potential to create a huge mess of orbital debris - and the routinely overlooked matter of how difficult it will be to build a biologically self supporting colony on Mars.
I think this latter issue is just common sense - look at the problems the Biosphere experiment went through, and that was on a planet where all the organic material needed could just be driven in on the back of a truck.*
At least I saw some support in the video comments for my view that if you want a "lifeboat" for planet Earth, why not build it on the Moon? (The only plausible reason against it that I can think of is that no one knows what effect low gravity pregnancy will have on the babies - but then, the same might turn out to be an issue in Mars gravity too. Wouldn't it be ironic if it turns out it's really, really difficult to carry a baby to term in low gravity, for some reason we have no idea about at the moment. That would ruin Musk's "longtermism" pretty rapidly.)
I remain very confident that Musk will face a downfall sooner or later, and people will wonder why more experts didn't speak out about his wild overconfidence earlier...
* Have a look at the website for a long on-going research project of the European Space Agency to develop a closed system for life support, including food, called Melissa. As far as I tell, they might be up to trying it out on a small rat colony. And I liked this part from their FAQ page:
Why after 30 years the project is not finish yet ?
The proper answer to this one is probably:
Why man has no try to duplicate the
Earth functions earlier ? In other words, although humans are fully
depending of the Earth ecosystem functions (e.g. oxygen, water, food,
...), we have today no back-up. Anyone who looks a bit more carefully to
the challenges of artificial ecology will rapidly perceive the enormous
difficulties. We have seen over the years many similar projects :
CELSS, CEEF, CERES, BIOSPHERE 2… almost all of them had to stop due to
incorrect evaluation of the challenges, and necessary amplitude and
duration of the efforts.
Yeah, I've slowed down a bit in my reading of the abridged version of Journey to the West, and I note as follows:
a.it takes to about the half way point of the book before the journey actually begins;
b.I am now 55% percent in, and we still haven't met the 4th travel companion (Sandy in the TV series);
c.I was rather surprised that in Chapter 17, the Heart Sutra suddenly appears in full. I had just watched one of the Doug's Dharma videos on Youtube in which he spoke about it.
Stancil, who it seems annoys a lot of people for reasons unclear to me, has (along with David Roberts) been one of the most consistent messengers about how that the Left needs to start paying much more attention to the inherent damage the information environment (including its speed and ease of manipulation) has caused.
So, we're getting a fair bit of handwringing over much of the public reaction to that US health fund executive being murdered:
While I agree that it's not good to celebrate vigilante actions, I'm also on the side of those on the Left who think that the Right complaining about bad taste is too often used to sustain a bad status quo.
And it has made me finally post a thought I've had about Trump for years.
I predict - if ever he is successfully assassinated, I reckon the reaction of about 60% of Americans (and 90 of the rest of the globe) will be exactly like the end of the Seinfeld episode in which George (accidentally) kills his fiancée Susan: a couple of awkward exchanges and half sincere mutterings of "that's so bad", and within 60 seconds, "so, wanna get some coffee?"
As a growing body of research reveals,
Black people in the United States suffer the hallucinations and
delusions of psychosis — the voices that seem to emanate from outside a
person’s head, the visions, the paranoias, the breaks with common
reality — at a rate roughly twice that of white people. In Europe,
racial disparities regarding psychosis are yet wider. Even after
researchers control for socioeconomic factors and address issues of
diagnosis, the alarming racial gaps remain.
Studies
suggesting a link between minority or outsider status and psychosis run
back about a century. A 1932 study looked at hospital admissions for
psychosis in Minnesota. It found that Norwegian immigrants were admitted
at twice the rate of native Minnesotans or Norwegians in their home
country. By the 1970s, researchers were turning specifically to racial
divides in psychiatric disorders, and by the 2000s, the relationship
between race and psychosis (which appears to outstrip any correlation
between race and more common conditions like depression) was becoming
well studied in both the United States and Europe. Yet despite the
mounting data, in the United States, until recently, the issue was
relegated to the edges of mainstream psychiatry — or perhaps beyond the
edges.
The whole thing is pretty odd, as explained in this part (with my bold):
In the United States, Black-white ratios
are at least 1.9 to one; some studies show that disparities for nonwhite
Hispanics are narrower but still notable. In Europe overall,
Black-white differentials hover in the vicinity of four to one. In
England, the gap for Black Caribbean and Black African immigrants runs
between four to one and more than six to one. In the Netherlands, for
Moroccan, Surinamese and Antillean immigrants, the ratio is around three
to one.
Among the immigrant groups,
one plausible factor is the dislocation and stress that can come with
the immigrant journey itself. But while such trauma may seem an obvious
trigger, given that many immigrants arrive in their new nations after
dangerous journeys and unable to speak the language that surrounds them,
researchers have found repeatedly that second-generation immigrants to
the United States and Europe develop psychosis at rates at least as high
as their parents. Something is happening in the new country.
Compared to some people, I suppose I have pretty small exposure to social media, given that Twitter (and now Bluesky) was my only real social media app (if you don't count blogs with active threads - now a rarity - or YouTube). And one of the problems of Bluesky now being pretty good is that I am finding it too easy to just keep...on...scrolling...scrolling (and often avoiding reading the in depth articles sometimes linked.)
Earl Miller, an MIT neuroscientist and world expert on divided attention, warned in 2022 that we are now living in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”. Dr Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California and author of Attention Span, has found evidence of how drastically our ability to focus is waning. In 2004, her team of researchers found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes. In 2012, it was 75 seconds. Six years ago, it was down to 47 seconds. This “is something that I think we should be very concerned about as a society”, she told a podcast in 2023.
But we’re not entirely to blame if technology is making us less intelligent. After all, it was designed to captivate us totally. Silicon Valley’s dirtiest design feature – which is everywhere once you spot it – is the infinite scroll, likened to the “bottomless soup bowl” experiment, in which participants will keep mindlessly eating from a soup bowl if it keeps refilling. An online feed that constantly “refills” manipulates the brain’s dopaminergic reward system in a similar way. These powerful dopamine-driven loops of endless “seeking” can become addictive.
What will happen if we don’t get a handle on our declining cognitive health? The former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris told US Congress in 2019 that billions of people – “a psychological footprint about the size of Christianity” – now receive their information from platforms whose business model “links their profit to how much attention they capture, creating a ‘race to the bottom of the brain stem’ to extract attention by hacking lower into our lizard brains – into dopamine, fear, outrage – to win”.
His warnings are about as stark as they come. “Persuasive technology is a massively underestimated and powerful force shaping the world,” he said. “It has taken control of the pen of human history, and will drive us to catastrophe if we don’t take it back.”
The worst thing about it (internet brain rot) is likely the loss of book reading amongst everyone, especially the young.
I have been meaning to say for some time, but as I get older, I am surprised that I am still drawing connections between my life experience and some incidents in novels that have stuck in my head from what I might have read 30 or 40 (or more!) years ago. What I mean is - I have just recognised the truth or insight in the writing that long after reading it. It's quite surprising, and I just can't see people who have grown up in social media (with ruined attention spans for reading novels) being able to have the same experience, and it does feel like a real loss, but they won't realise it....
In 2023, the global mean temperature soared to almost 1.5K above the
pre-industrial level, surpassing the previous record by about 0.17K.
Previous best-guess estimates of known drivers including anthropogenic
warming and the El Niño onset fall short by about 0.2K in explaining the
temperature rise. Utilizing satellite and reanalysis data, we identify a
record-low planetary albedo as the primary factor bridging this gap.
The decline is apparently caused largely by a reduced low-cloud cover in
the northern mid-latitudes and tropics, in continuation of a
multi-annual trend. Further exploring the low-cloud trend and
understanding how much of it is due to internal variability, reduced
aerosol concentrations, or a possibly emerging low-cloud feedback will
be crucial for assessing the current and expected future warming.
Of course, how to work out the net effect of clouds has been one of the main bugbears of climate modelling. The skeptic hope was that higher temperatures would mean more cloud and more albedo to keep the earth from getting too hot. (I thought that was how the late Richard Lindzen's iris effect idea worked, but now that I double check, it was more that cirrus clouds would reduce and allow more IR to escape - so I'm not sure if an increase of lower, brighter clouds was actually part of that theory or not.)
Anyhow - it remains a major worry that it is unclear whether the modelling has got the cloud effects underestimated, so that global temperature increases could be more rapid than expected.
Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate has a brief commentary on the paper here. There is quite a bit of talk in the comments following about whether to credit reduced sulphur emissions from shipping as causing the albedo decrease, too.
The story over the last week or so about people claiming there is a lot of unusual large drone activity in the night skies of New Jersey is pretty intriguing.
I get the feeling that there is something to it - some of the descriptions of a line of drones one after the other seem unusual. But - if it is a company trying out some new tech, it's hard to imagine why they (or the authorities wouldn't be open to it. That's why it's intriguing.
I have mentioned once before though - it does seem at times that the airspace over parts of the US is not as well monitored as one might assume. Maybe too many things going on to keep track of all of it?
I see that the Bluesky user counter shows a considerable slowdown in the rate of sign ups since it hit 24 million. It will take quite a while at this rate to hit 25 million.
That's a pity, because it really has already become a good Twitter replacement. The only thing I kind of miss is a "trending" list - but half the time those was false alarms anyway. "Why is this person suddenly trending - has he/she died?"
I would also like to see more local accounts so that I could search for comments on breaking local news.
Speaking of comedians, Ronny Chieng has been on a roll hosting the Daily Show this week. This day's clip was particularly good I think - every joke seemed to hit:
The Junkyard, managers of Australian comedians like Aaron Chen and Sam Campbell, goes into administration
Let it be known that, of the younger Australian comedy set, I've always enjoyed Aaron Chen's comedy persona. That Sam Campbell - well I first saw him recently on an episode of Would I Lie to You (english version) and it was a few years old, but he seemed amusing in a similar eccentric persona to Chen. But then I think I watched some other clip of him on Youtube and didn't like it, so I dunno.
Anyway, back to the point: about the only fictional portrayal of a talent agent I can remember is from that Matt Berry series - Toast of London. And it fitted in with what is probably a widely shared assumption that actor's agents sit around doing nothing much all day other than reading the occasional casting call news and ringing up people on their list and saying "why don't you try this, I think it suits you". It seems like such a flaky way to make a living - even if, in the case of top Hollywood agencies, it's a very lucrative one.
But is it really like that? Does no one do a realistic portrayal of this line of work because it's hard to make "networking" interesting?
Update: Maybe there was an agent or two featured to a little extent in Bill Hader's dramedy Barry. But I think that shows attack was more against the incredible flakiness of cable television executives. In fact, I found it kind of amazing that the executives at (I think) HBO let such a damning portrayal of their job be part of the story! I presume they thought - it's not our network's execs he's attacking - it's the one down the road.
Gee, this has become a pretty familiar story - a small start up company manufacturing a clean, green energy product that just doesn't stack up in quality and reliability, then goes broke and tarnishes the reputation of clean energy overall:
A similar story happened in 2009 with some Stirling engine solar power plant that might have looked cool, but never worked well. (I see now that even the webpages for the long defunct American Stirling engine solar power company Infinia are gone! I always liked the look of their dishes. There's a photo on one of my posts from 2008.)
Not to mention failure to develop geothermal power in Australia: see this story, and this one.
[Oh, and I nearly forgot - the failure of various wave energy schemes. Frankly, this idea has always seemed to me to be extremely dubious - my gut feeling was always that there is too little movement in any single device riding waves to generate significant enough power to be worth the expense and maintenance.]
The common theme seems to be that they are not crank schemes per se (in that they are systems obviously capable of making energy) - but they need a lot of finesse to make them reliable and economical. Small companies grab the idea but don't have the resources to make it work like it should - and unfortunately, can start to sell the systems before they are proven.
Seems to me that what it all lacks is big companies with the resources to build and test properly the systems before selling them.
Following last weekend's flash flooding around parts of Brisbane, the ABC has this article up:
More wild weather forecast for Queensland raises questions about how Brisbane drains handle intense rainfall
with one guy saying:
"With the bureau forecasting more frequent events, the storm drains across the city simply aren't designed to take in flows of run-off and intense rain," Mr Winders said.
Rather than being flood-resilient, Mr Winders suggests residents need to become "storm-resilient".
"The local council can't do anything about the network, the drains are already in place and there's too much existing development," he said.
"All these things impede the ability of the council to provide any relief from local flooding."
And I suspect he's right.
One thing that isn't mentioned in the article, and that I'm pretty sure would be true, is that Brisbane's drainage system does seems to often handle much higher total rainfall events without flooding, compared to cities such as Melbourne, and probably Sydney too?
I mean, over the years, I have seen many news reports of flash flooding from storms in other cities, and the rainfall totals that caused it often seem to be well under the rainfall we hear about in Brisbane storms or rain events.
So I have always suspected that our drainage system has been engineered to expect higher surges than those of drier cities. (Melbourne in particular seems to get most of its rain in far less intense events than Brisbane - it's just spread out over drizzly days rather than in 10 or 15 minute bursts like here!)
* A month or so ago, I posted about whether or not I should go see a performance of Beethoven's 9th (for the first time.) I was encouraged to do so, but delayed buying tickets. I checked about 9 days ago if seats were available, and some were, but I still didn't book. Then, on Sunday, I thought I should check again - then thought "whoops - it's December!". I had become so busy with one work matter that I had completely forgotten the concerts were on last Thursday, Friday and Saturday. :(
When the seated choir (Brisbane Chamber
Choir Collective) rose to their feet, we were in for a surprise.
Unexpectedly, around the concert hall – in the stalls and side balconies
– other choir members also stood with opened books. Undercover,
plain-clothes, choral operatives had been inserted into the midst of the
unsuspecting audience.
As the instrumental and vocal volume
swells, Clerici is conducting a 360-degree enterprise. The sound is
heavenly, harmonious. Beethoven has played his trump card. The pitch
rises as the beautiful voice of the soprano soloist soars above the
music and the choir.
The performance earns the orchestra and
conductor a standing ovation. Orchestral sections are individually
applauded. Clerici shakes hands warmly with the concertmaster, Natsuko
Yoshimoto. As the soloists exit, Umberto bows graciously to the two
women before giving the baritone a hearty high-five. A tremendous
performance by our state orchestra and a triumphant conclusion to the
2024 season.
Ugh...
* There was flash flooding yet again in Brisbane last Sunday, yet oddly enough, in my corner of the city, it got dark and a bit thundery, but virtually no rain at all. Only 15 km down the road, people went to a well know pub car park, only to get their cars inundated:
This spring and early summer in Brisbane, and the south east generally, has been so wet that it is making me worried that Brisbane is in for yet another flood this summer. I checked the SEQ Water dam levels, and virtually all are full or overflowing, except for Somerset and Wivenhoe (the ones that protect the Brisbane River from flooding) and they are at 80%. (The last time I checked, about 3 or 4 weeks ago, they were 80% then, too. I'm guessing water is being released enough to keep it there.)
But, gee, I don't know. Seems to me it wouldn't take too much more torrential rain in the right spot to cause another major flood.
* So, Biden pardoned his son. I can't get too excited about it, especially with the absolute nutjobs who Trump wants to appoint who seemingly want to spend another 4 years of wasted effort on trying to pin corruption on him. Jon Stewart isn't happy - but his takes are only right about 75% of the time, it seems...
I saw a video on the "Megabuild" channel on the weekend about how Singapore is massively expanding its port facilities, from the seabed up. It's - kind of amazing:
But - if you don't have time to watch that, you can view instead a good multimedia graphics explanation that appeared a couple of years ago at the Straits Times website here.
It also explains something I was curious about - wouldn't the steel reinforcement that is throughout the giant concrete caisson corrode quickly when its in seawater? Would the whole box be a crumbling mess in 20 years?
Apparently, it's solved by spraying a sealant on the sea exposed parts. Huh.
I have now seen 3 Youtube reviews of the movie version of Wicked, all by male reviewers who are not the most "bro" reviewers around, but still feel like their tastes skew towards the Rightwing-ish views on "woke" as a cultural issue. And they all enjoyed the movie quite a lot - saying they went in with no or low expectations, and two I think said they had never seen the stage play (nor have I), so they were surprised about how good they found it.
I think this is particularly surprising given that (as the Critical Drinker said in a video about the lead actress going a bit nuts about changes to the movie poster), the musical could be said to have started something of a "woke-ish" cycle of movies about a misunderstood villain (often female) who we would have some sympathy for if only we understood the backstory and her perspective.
In the medieval past, people would routinely employ "cunning folk" or "service magicians" to help them. They were much more effective, rational, and ethical than many spiritual practices today.
This part, about love magic, I found pretty amusing:
Before there was Tinder, there was seduction magic. It was deemed so powerful that a thirteenth century Christian theologian named William de Montibus felt it necessary to warn his fellow believers about the perils of consuming food prepared with a love spell, infused with the essence of a courting woman in, well, rather unique ways.
The first worry was that one might consume a loaf of bread kneaded not by hand, but by buttocks. Bread, a staple of a medieval diet also used in religious rites, could be a vector for an irresistibly magical feminine essence embedded in the dough, particularly if the cunning woman had sat on it and wriggled around in her natural state to prepare the loaf.
With mainstream religion in the west in long-term decline, something else is emerging. Not quite religion, not quite self-help – but a tantalising mix of the two. Where self-improvement sections of bookshops once contained straightforward advice on dating, dieting or getting rich quick, now they ask you to buy into a whole canon of spiritual beliefs. Call it mystical self-help.
You see it, for example, in the astonishing popularity of astrology
among young people. For my generation, for whom reading your horoscope
is an embarrassing secret, this can be jarring. At a recent party, I was
surprised to stumble into an earnest astrology conversation between
people in their late 20s, bonding over the fact that two of them were
Capricorns, and analysing their moon signs in great detail.
Really, of course, it was a jumping off point to open up about their lives, relate to each other, and explore how they tended to deal with problems. No wonder generation Z seems to find it therapeutic. The global market for astrology was valued at $12.8bn in 2021 and was projected to nearly double in the following decade.
Then there is tarot, which is also on the rise, driven mostly by TikTok. More young people are turning to spiritual readings “as an alternative to therapy”. Meditation techniques used to be advocated as a method for calming down; now they are sold, via semi-Buddhist beliefs, as a route to complete personal transformation. See, for example, the huge success of The Power of Now, a book that asks the reader to believe in a system of universal energy flow. Wellness has meanwhile fused with a set of anti-science beliefs, including the idea – dangerously championed by Elle Macpherson – that you can think yourself better, via your “inner sense” of what will cure you.
This sits alongside a cabal of celebrities on the right – Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Andrew Tate, Peterson – who are tapping into the self-improvement market among young men and advocating religion as a route to the answer. The market is growing: the largest segment of buyers of self-help books is now men aged 25 to 34. They are sold a rebranded and cherry-picked system of faith, drawn from various religions and packaged to fit their needs.
The bit about astrology is interesting. I thought it was long dead and buried; or at least, now a very fringe interest with much less popular following than in what seems to have been its heyday from the 1960's to the 1980's. But then again, I was surprised recently to see the most generic type of astrological weekly forecast pap being put up near the end of one of the commercial TV news services on (I think) a Sunday.
And, of course, as I don't use TikTok, I have no idea what things are gaining popularity there with the youth.
Anyway, Gill ends with a bit of overreach, I think:
Mystic self-help may largely be harmless but we should ask what its popularity says about us and where we are going. After all, we owe nearly all modern progress to the fight against religion, allowing rational deductions to hold sway over tribally mediated beliefs. Are we now seeing the dawn of a post-information age?
Still, it's a topic that always interests me - how people find meaning and how much religion or other metaphysical beliefs really have to do with it.
Surely I am not alone in thinking this: never has my opinion of billionaires been lower, in light of recent events.
The prime example, although there are so many to chose from, is (of course) Elon Musk. A peculiar man seeking to exercise immense power by proxy, having succeeded in helping get said proxy elected via his social media empire, dwindling though it may now be.
Yet if questioned, he would claim it is all in the interest of "making humanity multiplanetary", his perceived vital long term goal.
What is irking me at the moment, with the "gee whiz" factor of the recent Starship test flights (the most recent one featuring a gormless Trump in tow), is that the future technical challenges to doing anything especially useful with this rocket system seem so far below the public radar.
I mean, relying on both a booster and the enormous manned vehicle to land safely via retrorocket and guidance that are to work perfectly each time? The deadstick landing of the space shuttle had a worrying enough component of "everything has to go right", but at least if they got close to the ground but not near a runway, there was some chance of exit of the horizontally moving machine. Seems to me that there are going to no similar systems possible on Starship, because if there is going to be a major problem, it is more likely to be at the very last minute, with the rocket having no opportunity to align itself to allow a slower descent or an attitude to allow easy crew escape.
Sure, the landing system looks cool, and it's not great disaster if it doesn't work each time with the booster - although there is a very good chance of huge and expensive destruction of the landing pad and facilities. But the manned rocket? I reckon it will only take a couple of fatal accidents and people will leap from "that's so cool" to "you know, this is just inherently dangerous and can you really ever use such a system reliably enough for humans?"
And how many people are really following the development story close enough to realise that it's going to be an enormous problem getting the thing to the Moon, or Mars, because of the need for in-orbit refuelling?
Have a read of this lengthy article from earlier this year, pointing out that it seems already the system is heavier than expected, and noting the huge difference it makes to the whole re-fuelling idea:
“Currently, Flight 3 would be around 40-50 tons to orbit.”
To understand the significance of this statement, one only needs to review prior statements about Starship’s performance. Ever since Musk’s 2017 presentation, Starship’s estimated payload capacity has ranged between 100 and 150 tons to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). SpaceX’s official Starship Payload Users Guide clearly states that “At the baseline reusable design, Starship can deliver over 100 metric tons to LEO” [3]. For the past six years, Starship’s diameter, height, and propellant mixture have remained constant. The most straightforward interpretation of Musk’s comment is that the rocket is suffering from a 50% underperformance.....
The success or failure of the Human Landing System program will be decided by Starship’s payload capacity. Due to its high dry (unfueled) mass, Starship HLS cannot reach the Moon without first refueling in LEO. To complete the Artemis 3 mission, SpaceX must therefore implement orbital refueling on an unprecedented scale. Even on Earth, loading cryogenic propellants into a launch vehicle is no easy feat; if anything, this will be more difficult in space. Prior to every Artemis mission, a flotilla of reusable Starship tankers will transfer liquid oxygen and liquid methane to an orbiting propellant depot. The lunar lander will then launch, receive a full load of fuel and oxidizer from the depot, and continue onwards to the Moon.
The number of tanker flights which will be required to complete Artemis 3 is hotly debated. Estimates range from four [5] to nineteen [6] launches of propellant per lunar landing. Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin recently noted that the probability of mission success is directly correlated with the number of launches in each refueling campaign [7]. For instance, it is reasonable to assume that each individual Starship launch, plus the subsequent propellant transfer operation, will have a 98% probability of success once the procedure is refined. If five tanker flights are required, the mission as a whole will succeed in 90% of scenarios. In contrast, if twenty launches are needed, that probability drops to just 67%.
The precise number of tanker flights depends on several variables,
including the Starship launch rate and the rate at which cryogenic
propellant boils off to space while the depot is in orbit. However, no
parameter is more important than the vehicle’s payload capacity. If
Starship’s payload mass grows, the number of tanker flights required to
complete an Artemis mission will decrease. Conversely, a reduction in
payload capacity will increase the number of propellant launches.
The current iteration of Starship can store 1,200 tons of liquid
methane and liquid oxygen in its propellant tanks. Recent renderings
suggest that the lunar lander will be slightly taller,
with a propellant load of approximately 1,500 tons. If each tanker can
deliver 100 tons of fuel to orbit as advertised, then it will take 15
flights to complete an Artemis mission. This number is large, but given
SpaceX’s demonstrated ability to scale up to a high cadence of
missions, it is not insurmountable in medium- to long-term timeframes.
However, if SpaceX is only able to launch 50 tons of propellant to orbit
inside each Starship tanker, then it will need to launch the world’s
largest rocket a staggering 30 times to refuel a single lunar
lander. Two additional launches will be required to place the Starship
HLS and the propellant depot into orbit. To make matters worse, this
hypothetical manifest does not take boiloff into account. Even if NASA
and SpaceX achieve their stated goal of a 6-day turnaround between
Starship launches, it will take over half a year to stage all of the
propellant in orbit. Several additional flights might be required to
replace the oxygen and methane which are lost during this time period.
I know there has been some publicity about the extraordinary complicated system NASA has been planning all these years for a return to the Moon, but it seems to me not enough.
And it's all because making a large rocket land vertically looks cool.
Another irony about Musk - I mean, beyond the one where he thinks everyone should have lots of kids, yet seems like the most absent father possible to his own - is the recent discussion on Sabine Hossenfelder's channel about concerns that we are getting much closer to a making low earth orbit unuseable due to a Kessler syndrome disaster.
Given that Muck Musk is already cluttering up the orbits with Starlink (another example of something with a "cool" factor but on deeper consideration, we might be better off not using), the ultimate irony would be an exploding Starship in orbit, combined with his hundreds of his other satellites, making low Earth orbit pretty much impossible to safely traverse to get to Mars.
Here's the video:
I think there is a better than even chance that Musk will go down in history as leading humanity to disaster and/or expensive dead ends, rather than being the saviour he thinks he will be.
You can see I'm still looking at Twitter for laughs and giggles - seriously though, if Noah Smith ever abandons it for Bluesky, I'll probably only be back there once a week or so.
But have a look at this for an absurd claim:
Such shameless stupid gaslighting. He would be insta-blocked by so many at Bluesky if ever he shows up there.
How old is Rowan Williams now?* Have his eyebrows been allowed to grow ever higher til they reach his hairline?
Well, that's a bitchy way to start talking about him, because despite his strong inclination towards the sort of modern Church of England waffle theology that tries to offend no one and ends up losing relevancy because of it, I have always had a soft spot for him. Let me search this blog to see if this is right - gosh, yes, I have mentioned him in posts a half dozen times over the years, and yeah, I had forgotten I once described him like this:
"...seems to be a philosopher who ended up a Church's world leader by
accident. He's a nice enough sounding man, but one suspects he has
helped more people out of his Church than into it."
I suppose, now that I think about, that there is something pretty common in their approaches - except that if I recall correctly, Williams did try to convince us that he really did believe that God (or something close to God - "ineffable transcendence" or some such, probably! - was real.)
I actually have been feeling the need to talk about the whole "how do we find meaning in the modern world" topic, but work is so busy today. Will come back to it soon....
This very much reflects my views, and it explains why I am not worried about the "but it's bad to have echo chambers" aspect. (See, Tim T, if Krugman agrees with me, how can I be wrong!):
Pre-Elon Musk, Twitter was the place people in my business had to be. I know different people used it for different purposes — nothing against Katy Perry, but not all of her nearly 106 million followers are on social media platforms for the same reasons I am. What I used Twitter for was to learn from and interact with people possessing real expertise, sometimes in areas I know pretty well, sometimes in areas I don’t, like international relations and climate policy.
I won’t go through the litany of ways the platform has changed for the worse under Musk’s leadership, but from my point of view it has become basically unusable, overrun by bots, trolls, cranks and extremists.
But where could you go instead? In the past couple of years, there have been several attempts to promote alternatives to X, but none of them really caught on. To some extent this may have reflected flaws in their designs, but a lot of it was simply lack of critical mass: Not enough of the people you wanted to interact with could be found on the alternative sites.
Then came this year’s presidential election, which seems to have sparked an exodus (“Xodus”?) from Muskland. From my point of view, Bluesky, in particular — a site that functions a lot like pre-Musk Twitter — quite suddenly has reached critical mass, in the sense that most of the people I want to hear from are now posting there. The raw number of users is still far smaller than X’s, but as far as I can tell, Bluesky is now the place to find smart, useful analysis.
And yes, most of the new Bluesky posters I find useful are liberal, but that reflects the modern right’s anti-intellectualism rather than political bias on the part of the site.
I have no idea what this means for X’s financials, and I don’t care. What I see is that you can indeed ruin a network if you try hard enough. And it’s starting to look as if Musk has managed to pull it off.
Seriously, though: can you imagine the MAGA uproar if a liberal billionaire was Harris's shadow everywhere if she had won?
We have never seen anything like this, and it's bound to end badly. The only question is "how badly?"
Update: It did occur to me that this might be a photoshop, and while I have seen many MAGA types claim it is, I have seen others deny it and claim it was on Musk's own feed. If there is an original photo "hair on", I haven't seen it yet...
Brisbane City Council is working with police to crack down on "anti-social behaviour" at the city's homeless camps.
Council City Standards chairwoman Sarah Hutton said the council was receiving increasing numbers of complaints from local residents and businesses near the tent cities.
"Following the Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner's personal call to the Police Commissioner, we've established a joint taskforce to help address escalating violent, aggressive and anti-social behaviour in Brisbane parks," Cr Hutton said.
Roma Street resident David Mech
said he had repeatedly complained to the council about the state of
homeless camps around the inner city.
He said he wanted to see homeless camping criminalised to make the Brisbane cityscape "aesthetically beautiful" again.
The
retired porn star gave a speech at council chambers on Tuesday last
week, where he advocated that Brisbane follow the likes of Florida and
make public camping a crime.
He told ABC Radio Brisbane there should be a designated campsite in Brisbane where homeless sleepers were permitted, but outlawed everywhere else.
"There's an old saying all around the world that beggars can't be choosers, but here in Brisbane they absolutely can," Mr Mech said.
As I've complained before - it's pretty much a modern nonsense to think that a reasonable response to homelessness is to let encampments develop in any public park or space. I know we are far behind America in the extent of the problem, but as the backlash there is finally gathering pace, I see no reason to let our cities even start developing the same issue.
I really don't care at all for director George Miller's movies, but I do usually find Tilda Swinton extremely watchable. Hence I decided to take a chance and watch their 2022 fantasy flop 3000 Years of Longing on Netflix.
I found it extremely dull, with problems that should have been obvious from the screenplay to any studio funding it. I can't think of any other film with such long, long periods of purely narrated flashback story, without the characters on the screen in said scenes actually speaking. And the fantasy versions of the past were just too silly, even for a movie about a genie from a bottle.
Overall, after the first 10 minutes (which do seem to show some promise), once another 20 or 30 minutes passed I found it impossible to avoid thinking "when is this film going to give us a hint as to where it's going." It does, eventually, get to a relationship of sorts between the two characters, but there is no reason at all to feel invested in it; and once established (like the rest of the movie) it has a profound feeling of "going nowhere". It is such a badly written film. Nothing feels real about any of the characters, including Swinton's, or their reactions. (And Miller co-wrote it, so he can bear all the blame.)
Yet it seems George Miller gets some sort of "benefit of the doubt" all the time from reviewers. I can't help but feel it's something to do with the glasses and always seeming to give off the (pretty typical for an Australian director) vibe of "I'm in the artist class, so if your politics are Left you must appreciate me". Here, for example, Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian gave it 3 out of 5, but his description suggests it deserves a "fail" more than a "pass":
It’s a garrulous, yet almost static movie, and weirdly for a film about narrative there is no single overwhelmingly important storyline. Swinton and Elba sit around in the hotel room while all the exotic drama is given to us in flashback-fragments of wonder. There is something very old-fashioned about it, and I think a younger film-maker might have wanted to engage more knowingly with ideas of orientalism, race and gender. Yet for all that it is a little bit underpowered, with not much of a screen-relationship between Elba and Swinton.
Of course, I have to admit that some people seemed to like it, if online reviews are anything to go by. I can't fathom why, but I guess its commercial failure gives me some encouragement that my view is the more widely shared.
It's rare that I have any interest at all in a boxing match, but I'm having a particularly hard time understanding why anyone on the planet would be keen to watch Jake Paul fight Mike Tyson. Yet somehow, this has been promoted as if it's something consequential.
It feels more to me like the modern Roman circus in the days of a declining empire.
Paul is 27, I see. With his heavy set body, tatts and beard, he could easily pass for 40.
I wonder if even Jason Soon is cynical about this?
Here we were thinking the first Trump presidency was full of weirdness; but the American public decided to just see how much weirder it could get, and man, are they being rewarded.
Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency in countless ways, but one of the clearest is in the company he keeps, surrounding himself with fringe figures, conspiracy theorists and sycophants who put fealty to him above all else. This week, a series of cabinet nominations by Mr. Trump showed the potential dangers posed by his reliance on his inner circle in the starkest way possible.
For three of the nation’s highest-ranking and most vital positions, Mr. Trump said he would appoint loyalists with no discernible qualifications for their jobs, people manifestly inappropriate for crucial positions of leadership in law enforcement and national security.
But even away from Trump, this seems pretty weird too, doesn't it?:
Yes - I can confirm that BlueSky is looking pretty good - for whatever reason, I finally seem to have managed to stop the weird overrun of my "Discover" feed by cat photo and amateur anime art accounts. (It took a fair bit of blocking accounts for the first week or two - or maybe they changed something else in the algorithm - I really don't know.)
But it is now feeling somewhat like old Twitter: pretty much a micro-blogging site with a liberal bent, although still without the quick and often witty community input, because the numbers aren't there yet. At least a lot of journalists, commentators and scientists who I like to follow have made the move recently, and I like it. (The thing I miss about old Twitter was that its popularity meant it was actually good for breaking news in your own area - if a big storm was happening, say, you could search "Brisbane storm" and find a lot of contributions to how bad it was in other parts of the city.)
Just five minutes of activity a day was estimated to potentially
reduce blood pressure, while replacing sedentary behaviours with 20-27
minutes of exercise per day, including uphill walking, stair-climbing,
running and cycling, was also estimated to lead to a clinically
meaningful reduction in blood pressure.
Joint senior author Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis, Director of the
ProPASS Consortium from the Charles Perkins Centre said: "High blood
pressure is one of the biggest health issues globally, but unlike some
major causes of cardiovascular mortality there may be relatively
accessible ways to tackle the problem in addition to medication."
"The finding that doing as little as five extra minutes of exercise
per day could be associated with measurably lower blood pressure
readings emphasises how powerful short bouts of higher intensity
movement could be for blood pressure management."
Astronauts on the International Space Station generate their share of
garbage, filling up cargo ships that then deorbit and burn up in the
atmosphere. Now Sierra Space has won a contract to build a trash
compactor for the space station. The device will compact space trash by
75% in volume and allow water and other gases to be extracted for
reclamation. The resulting garbage blocks are easily stored and could
even be used as radiation shielding on long missions.
As I thought the ISS didn't have that much working life left, seems an odd thing to be spending money on right now.
At the risk of being labeled an apologist, I would like to defend
Kant on just one of the many criticisms Wilson levels. In Chapter Nine,
Wilson ascribes to Kant the genuinely abhorrent view that any woman who
sells or rents her body forfeits her own dignity in such a way that
makes it morally permissible for anyone to use her as a mere thing and thus, presumably, to enslave or even to kill her.[3]
As she writes with subtle but biting sarcasm, “[a]ccording to the
Kantian metaphysics of morality and justice, a person turns herself into
a thing by becoming a prostitute” (208). But could this really be what
Kant thought?
The evidence Wilson presents for this interpretation is a single
quotation from student lecture notes that has been mistranslated, taken
out of context, and does not even concern prostitution. As quoted by
Wilson, it reads: “As soon as a person becomes an object of appetite for
another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function. . .a
person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by everyone
(27:386 [sic])” (208). The line is from the Collins lecture notes
(27:384–5) as rendered in the outdated translation by Louis Infield and
concerns not prostitution but rather the moral impropriety of sex in the
absence of the sort of human affection wherein each aims to promote the
happiness of the other. As the student in Kant’s lecture hall recorded
him as saying, now as translated in the Cambridge Edition:
The sexual impulse can admittedly be
combined with human affection, and then it also carries with it the aims
of the latter, but if it is taken in and by itself, it is nothing more
than appetite. But, so considered, there lies in this inclination a
degradation of man; for as soon as anyone becomes an object of another’s
appetite, all motives of moral relationship fall away; as object of
another’s appetite, that person is in fact a thing, whereby the other’s
appetite is sated, and can be misused [gemißbraucht] as such a thing by anybody. (27:384–5)
Taken in its proper context, the plain meaning of the passage is that
when viewed exclusively “as the object of another’s appetite,” a person
is being regarded by them as a mere thing and so as an
instrument that anyone may “misuse” (not “use”). And this Kant claims is
morally contrary to the dignity that a person, including a prostitute, actually
possesses and certainly never loses by such an act. To my knowledge,
Kant never states that sex in the absence of affection transforms a
person into a thing in such a manner that it then becomes morally
permissible for anyone to use them as a tool. Furthermore, when Kant
does seem to raise the issue of prostitution a few pages after the line
quoted by Wilson, his point is that it is morally wrong because through
it a person’s “humanity is in danger of being used by anyone as
a thing” (27:386; emphasis added). Kant may well be incorrect to regard
prostitution as immoral; but he did not hold the abhorrent view Wilson
so casually ascribes to him here and elsewhere in the book (see also,
267).
Conspiracy theory purveyor Infowars and most of its assets are set to go on the auction block Wednesday, with Alex Jones waiting to see if he will be allowed to stay or if he will get kicked off its online platforms.
The private auction is being held as part of Jones’ personal bankruptcy, which resulted from the nearly $1.5 billion in defamation lawsuit judgments a judge and jurors ordered the bombastic internet show and radio host to pay to families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting for repeatedly telling his audience that the Connecticut massacre of 20 children and six adults was a hoax staged by crisis actors.
Jones has said that he believes he could remain at the Infowars studios in Austin, Texas, and continue to use its online platforms if supporters win the bidding. But if opponents buy the assets, he said it could be shut down immediately. He said he has set up a new studio, new websites and new social media accounts in case the latter happens.
On his show Tuesday, Jones alleged that the auction was “rigged” and
that he believed “bad guys” will buy Infowars’ parent company, Free
Speech Systems, and its assets. He did not elaborate but said he would
“just drive down the road” and broadcast at another studio.
One would hope that American bankruptcy laws are a little like ours, in allowing for any earnings he makes to be partially taken to pay for the judgement debt. But maybe not - bankruptcy in the US never seems to keep losers down for long - or at all, in some cases.
* There hasn't been much discussion, it seems, of the fact that Trump may still be sentenced within a couple of weeks over the existing New York conviction - with (in theory) jail time of up to 4 years.
The view seems to be that being elected President means it would be wrong to send him to jail, as an inappropriate interference with his "doing his job". But I haven't seem anyone actually explain how giving him the punishment he deserves could be stopped (I mean, if it is upheld on appeal):
Under the law, Trump faces a range of sentences, including fines, probation and up to four years in prison. But many options are rendered impractical by re-election win.
“Sentencing a sitting president may be one of the most complicated, fraught sentencing decisions you can imagine,” said Anna Cominsky, a professor at the New York Law School.
“It’s hard to imagine what sentence could be imposed that would not impede a president’s ability to do their job or compromise the president’s security."
Few expect Justice Merchan to sentence Trump to a stint behind bars at this point and if he did, Trump's team would almost certainly appeal it.
“He’s a 78-year old man with no criminal history, who has been convicted of a non-violent felony,” said retired New York Supreme Court Justice Diane Kiesel.
“I don’t think a judge would give a person under those sentences an incarceration sentence.”
Trump could leave a sentencing hearing with the legal equivalent of a slap on the wrist. Justice Merchan could ask the former president to pay a relatively small fine in the three- or four-figure range.
He could also give Trump an unconditional discharge; “basically, goodbye”, as Justice Kiesel puts it.
That Kiesel has always thought he shouldn't get prison - but she is only one voice, and I think others have said a prison term would be a real option.
It's not as if the guy has shown any remorse, and he has continually carried on in a way that should have been dealt with as contempt of court.
For these reasons, I don't know why getting elected to President should be a "get out of jail free" card.
I really do think there is not enough thought put into this basic explanation of modern American politics. That Will Stancil guy on Twitter keeps saying it, and I agree. Two articles:
The nature of these platforms has changed too — as more of their users
come to rely on them for news. In 2020, 28 percent of regular Instagram
users got their news there; in 2024, 40 percent did, according to Pew
Research Center. In 2020, 22 percent of TikTok users got news there; in
2024, 52 percent did.
The other big factor that changed was one of the biggest platforms, X, formerly Twitter, having its owner (with 200 million followers) go all-in for one candidate.
These studies reveal an interesting fault line. While most women get their news from TikTok, most young men get their news from YouTube, Twitter and Reddit, Pew found. This confirms that men and women often act on different sources of information. Yet while we spill many words analyzing whether New York Times headlines normalize bad behavior, we know very little about what news and information rises to the top on Reddit and YouTube.
Trump supporters will argue that this re-sorting of media consumption was a positive development, allowing people to get information unfiltered by the (biased) elite media. Indeed, Elon Musk declared that with this election, “Legacy media is dead. Long live citizen journalism!”
But there is much evidence that information on social media is more likely to include misinformation and provide news that reinforces preexisting beliefs than traditional mainstream media. And in 2020, studies showed that people who relied on social media for news were less knowledgeable. We’ll see if that remains true in 2024. At a minimum, we need to better understand the dynamics.
One meta-cause of the change is obvious: the rise of social media. The other is more indirect but still significant: the collapse of local news. We’ve lost one-third of our local newspapers; the number of reporters has dropped 60 percent in two decades. Studies have shown that the contraction of local news has created a vacuum — which has been filled by partisan news sources and social media (both polarizing and more likely to spread misinformation).
I’m certainly not arguing that issues like inflation or immigration were
not important factors, or that if people just had different information
they might have voted differently. But if we want to grasp the meaning
of this election, we can’t ignore one of the biggest forces that shaped
the electorate — or how the collapse of local news has changed the
political equation.
And at New Republic, a broader look at the whole Right wing media networks (which obviously feed a lot of misinformation into the social media world):
It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.
Extracts (with my bold):
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News
(and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the
Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media
(formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon
Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the
news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of
slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to
win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.
I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen
from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an
annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its
shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the
two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t
survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of
having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the
late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took
office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media
grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust
blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web
sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far
more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on
the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out
once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.
And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.
And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.
That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.
But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.
And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him.
The only confounding thing about this fundamental theory for this election, which a lot of Democrat supporting people have been noting on Twitter with puzzlement, is the apparent significant number of people who split their vote. Voted Democrat for Senators or state positions, yet swapped to Trump for President.
That really is hard to fathom. (Some on Twitter arguing it's evidence of fraud in the system - even going as far as to say it was due to some election tallies been sent via Starlink, where Musk had the figures changed!) I don't believe the conspiracies, but there is much further analysis to be done on understanding what was going on in the minds of voters who did that....
I'm surprised that there isn't a clearer online campaign for all non MAGA, Trump supporting persons to abandon Twitter and move to BlueSky, given the election results.
It seems that most of the major climate scientists have made the move, but there are a couple who are arguing that it shouldn't be abandoned and left to be a breeding ground for self supporting illusion.
And Noah Smith, and a couple of other people I like to read, don't seem interested in a move either.
For what it's worth, I think the move should be made - and the app deleted - because a forum that it left to become its own bog of increasingly detached Right wing opinion loses credibility, at least if Truth Social is any guide. And besides, Musk deserves to be punished for his pushing of conspiracy and fact free memes.
But probably like lots of people, I still want to read the output of those holdouts who either can't be bothered, or who think they are fighting the good fight where it needs to be fought (or whatever).
So I am still reading it, for some of the post election analysis (see last post), but I'm feeling guilty about it.
I think I have to reluctantly say that Biden trying to do a "normal" transition of power to Trump (and probably spending most of the time trying to convince him not to abandon Ukraine) is the moral and right thing to do. (Same as when Biden rang him after the assassination attempt.) But at the same time, you know that MAGA nuts will give zero credit to Biden for doing so - and Trump will do something like make one mention of having "a very nice meeting" and the next day call Biden demented and the cause of everything bad in the world, again.
If we wanted the ultimate in drama, though, let's say Biden asks Trump about his (and Elon's) relationship with Putin, gets some less than satisfactory responses, then pulls out a pistol and shoots him dead in the Oval Office. And for the extra "MAGA" spice, then claims it was the dementia at fault.
So, two possible defences arising from MAGA and conservatives directly - acting in the interests of protecting America's security and therefore within the role of the Presidency, and going along with what MAGA kept telling themselves for the last 4 years.
I know it won't happen, but as scenario for some movie, seems almost semi-plausible.
Jon Stewart's early reaction to the Trump (and Republican) election win was pretty good, I think: don't pay too much attention to the pundits' early rush to assess the alleged "lessons" of an election. It takes a while to do any decent analysis, and anyway, a party that can look in a great condition after one election can be severely humbled in the next, making rushed views of how a party is going wrong look very dubious in retrospect.
There were also some silly Lefty twitter accounts claiming that the total vote count indicated 20 million votes were "missing" - ignoring the fact that the vote was far from completed in California and many other states.
....what about Trump’s earlier and related claim — that his and the GOP’s mandate was “unprecedented and powerful?”
Unprecedented: Surely not.
Powerful: That’s more subjective. But it’s evidently not that powerful, historically speaking.
While
Trump’s win was larger than many expected and every swing state swung
in his favor, his level of support is relatively par for the course for a
victor. And Republicans on the whole didn’t do as well as he did.
It’s all worth diving into, given the major questions about whether Trump and the GOP will actually pursue some of the extreme proposals he has pitched
on the campaign trail — and given that his and his party’s mandate,
both perceived and real, will play a role in what lies ahead.
As things stand, Trump probably will sweep the seven swing states,
but he will do so with only marginally more electoral votes (probably
312) than he won in 2016 (304) and President Joe Biden won in 2020
(306).
That 312 total would also outpace both of George W. Bush’s elections,
but it’s fewer than in any election involving Barack Obama, Bill
Clinton, George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. And the 58 percent of
electoral votes Trump probably will win would rank 41st all-time.
The
other key measure here is the popular vote, which has no bearing on who
is actually elected but does say something about their support
nationwide.
Trump is currently taking 50.9 percent of the popular vote and leading Vice President Kamala Harris
by 3.3 points. That will shift as the remaining votes are counted, but
it seems Trump will actually win the popular vote this time, which he
didn’t do when he won the 2016 election.
At the same time, his popular-vote share probably will drop as the
remaining (mostly western and largely Californian) votes are counted.
It’s likely he’ll win a smaller percentage of the popular vote than any
non-Trump president-elect since 2000, when George W. Bush won despite
losing the popular vote. A big question is whether he could wind up shy
of a popular majority.
The rest is worth reading too - he points out that the Senate and (possible) House majorities are not going to be huge.
OK, with that said, I will comment on some of the early MAGA commentary on Twitter: a very large number are referring to the culture wars, with "woke ideology" and trans advocacy in particular. There is no doubt that trans issues played a significant role in the minds of the MAGA crowd (apparently there were a lot of ads about it on their social media, as well as Trump making nonsense statements about kids going to school and arriving home having changed sex - one of his "not literally, but seriously" moments, I guess).
As I have suggested before, I do consider this a Lefty weakness and blind spot. Social media has made it dead easy to show that there are (what would appear to be) many older "transwomen" who act as if it is primarily a sexual fetish for them, and it's pretty hard to build public sympathy if that is the motivation for being trans. Furthermore, the genitally intact male who insists he can compete against women and its fair just doesn't pass "the pub test" as we would say in Australia. It would pay for Democrats to acknowledge limits on the extent of support for "trans rights", because I reckon the tide has turned and will continue to do so while America spends a few years in lawfare from "de-transitioners", which is the ridiculously clumsy way America chooses so often to revise policy approaches.
That said, it's pretty impossible to assess the degree to which this would be a deciding factor for anyone - it's more likely that a element of a suite of sentiments which is impossible to separate.
As to the other sentiments - another post is coming!
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