Dad is almost certainly your Dad (although results may vary)

Interesting free article up at Science:

How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers? 

Tackling a touchy subject, genetic detective finds only 1% of European children have unexpected paternity 

It notes that earlier, much higher, estimates for Western societies were just guesswork:

In the absence of reliable numbers, scientists speculated. In his 1991 book The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, biologist Jared Diamond claimed the adultery rate among humans was between 5% and 30%. In a widely cited 1997 paper, University of Reading evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel argued EPP was so common in humans that babies evolved to be indistinguishable at birth, concealing their true paternity as a protective mechanism.

Eventually, a consensus emerged, based mostly on back-of-the-envelope calculations from early genetic paternity testing. In an article in The Lancet published the same year as Diamond’s book, researchers reported the idea that 10% of children were the product of a clandestine affair, but complained there were no solid data to either confirm or disprove the figure. Nonetheless, it continued to be repeated by journalists and researchers. Eventually it took on a life of its own. 

But the new type of research seems to confirm that this was an overestimate:

Subsequent studies elsewhere in Europe by Larmuseau and others came up with essentially the same results: In European societies since at least the Middle Ages, the likelihood a child’s recorded father wasn’t the genetic father was vanishingly small—typically 1%, or less.

But, there are those societies still where things are very different:

The obsession with genetic paternity isn’t universal. South American tribes such as the Yanomami believe multiple men can contribute to a child’s paternity by having sex with the same woman. Among the Nyimba of Nepal, women traditionally have multiple husbands—all of whom are expected to act as fathers to all of their spouse’s children. “There are lots of examples that counter this stereotype of wily women versus bamboozled men,” says Brooke Scelza, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

One of the best documented is found among the Himba people of Namibia. When Scelza first visited Himba villages 15 years ago, she was surprised by how openly women discussed children fathered with partners outside of marriage. “It ran against so much of what we as evolutionary biologists think,” she says. “This looked really different from what Maarten Larmuseau and other people were finding in Europe.”

Intrigued, Scelza worked with the community to conduct anonymized paternity testing. The results showed the EPP rate among the Himba was 48%. Fathers were usually aware of which children were theirs biologically, while simultaneously considering themselves the social and legal fathers of all their wives’ children. “It’s not that they’re being duped—these men still really consider themselves the social fathers, even if they’re not the biological fathers,” Scelza says. “It really shows the importance of getting this kind of data from other regions.”

Another busy, busy week

I wish I could get back to posting more often here, but many distractions continue.

I am dropping in to make a couple of not very important comments:

*    I am finding the situation in the US so obviously dangerously dire that I am starting to have a bit of a  problem with satire and comedy based on it.   I still watch clips of the Daily Show, and some of Colbert, but it is starting to make me uncomfortable that the use of comedy underplays the seriousness in an inappropriate way.

I also feel this about Planet America, which is primarily serious commentary and criticism, but the side comedy bits now feel too trite for what was just discussed.  (I did criticise them in the lead up to the election too, for not emphasising how nuts and ridiculous Trump's campaign claims were - pretty much "normalising" that a politician could now say anything regardless of connection to reality and not be called out for it.  Of course, the whole MSM had the same issue.)   

Maybe you could argue that late night comedy, and even ridiculous shows like Laugh In,  survived the turbulent 60's and 70's, so I shouldn't expect comedy TV to stop now.   But I think the show of those decades got through by largely ignoring the national politics and dire situations as the Vietnam War.  That is, of course, not what topical comedy in the US does any more.

*   Even though I think 1984 was a well intentioned but poorly executed book, and would love to find an online connection with someone I consider smart who shares this opinion, I continue to have a vague interest in George Orwell because he was a pretty odd character, and (who knows?) his essays and other books of reportage might convince he could write well, if ever I get around to reading them.

Hence I was interested to read an interview with his adopted son, now 80, who is happy to say plenty of nice things about his late Dad, yet it takes quite a long way into the article to get to the somewhat significant point that Richard (the son) was only 5 years old when his Dad passed away.

I am - really - how seriously am I meant to take his memories of the period on the remote island of Jura where he Dad went to write 1984?    

And on a happier note - I see that Reddit does have threads by people arguing that 1984 is not a good book.  I wonder if I had looked there before?

*  Speaking of books - here's a decent article at The Guardian about the way self publishing has allowed for a ridiculous number of books to be available each year:

The complaint that there are too many books is not a new one. “My son, be warned by them: of making many books there is no end,” reads one line in Ecclesiastes, written at least 2,000 years before the invention of the printing press.

Now the bestselling author Bill Bryson has added his voice to the millennia-old chorus. There are 200,000 books published annually in the UK alone, “more books than you could possibly read,” the writer of Notes from a Small Island told the Times. He is not sure that the growth in self-publishing, in particular, is “a healthy development”. He said he gets sent “a lot of self-published books, and most of the time it is just some anonymous person’s life, and it is of no interest.”

Bryson is not wrong that self-publishing has contributed significantly to book slop mountain. More than 2.6 million books were self-published in 2023 – many of which are uploaded to the dominant platform, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing – and they can’t all be masterpieces.

The article goes on to explain that self publishing has worked for some - but the success rate is extremely small, of course.   Still, I am not immune from the idea that I might have one story in me that could work as a novel - or more likely, film - it's just that I don't have the confidence that I could execute it.

Saudi Arabia stays high on my list of countries best avoided

The New York Times will no doubt be displeasing the Saudi royal family, and via that route, Donald Trump, with this detailed story about the remarkable number of East African workers who keep dying there:

Lured by company recruiters and encouraged by Kenya’s government, the women have reason for optimism. Spend two years in Saudi Arabia as a housekeeper or nanny, the pitch goes, and you can earn enough to build a house, educate your children and save for the future.

While the departure terminal hums with anticipation, the arrivals area is where hope meets grim reality. Hollow-cheeked women return, often ground down by unpaid wages, beatings, starvation and sexual assault. Some are broke. Others are in coffins.

At least 274 Kenyan workers, mostly women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years — an extraordinary figure for a young work force doing jobs that, in most countries, are considered extremely safe. At least 55 Kenyan workers died last year, twice as many as the previous year.

 

That's interesting...

Sometimes, you end up watching new stuff on Youtube and learn things that are good to know, even if they might never affect you.

For example, I've never been particularly drawn to reading Dostoevsky, and The Brothers Karamazov in particular, but now I know (from watching a guy talking about one star online reviews of classic books) that the very common reaction for modern readers of Karamazov is that nothing happens for the first 300 or so pages.    (It's a lot of talking, setting up the different brothers' views and philosophies, apparently.)

I also didn't realise that no one accuses him of writing particularly realistic characters - they are all somewhat over-the-top in a theatrical kind of way.  Again, apparently. 

I also enjoyed a video from Business Insider making the case that I always suspected was true:  that 5G networking was massively oversold and may never be as significant as they claimed.

Meanwhile, what's the latest stupid thing Musk did:

Early on Friday, Elon Musk shared a post written by an X user about the actions of three 20th century dictators — then quickly deleted it after it sparked a backlash.

The post falsely claimed that Joseph Stalin, the communist leader of the Soviet Union until 1953; Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party in Germany; and Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, didn’t cause the deaths of millions of people under their watch. Instead, the post said, their public sector workers did.

Mr. Musk shared the post without any other comment. He removed it soon after users on X criticized the post, saying it was antisemitic and dismissive of genocide. Historians have widely chronicled that millions of people died under Stalin, that millions of Jews were massacred under Hitler during the Holocaust, and that millions of Chinese were displaced or killed during Mao’s cultural revolution.

 Bizarrely, that post that he deleted sounds like an argument for the exact opposite of what Trump wants - an independent public service that won't follow the appalling orders of the leader if they are immoral and/or illegal.

The state of US politics, part 2

The depressing summary

Alan Kohler's summary of the Trumpian project seems very accurate:  

To make America great, Donald Trump is undoing its greatness as global stock markets fall

This part:

There are two immediate questions: first, will the Trump revolution collapse from its own incompetence?

 And second, will an effective opposition/resistance emerge and blunt it?

The incompetence comes from "common sense".

In his speech to Congress last week, Trump described what he is doing as a "common-sense revolution that is now — because of us — sweeping the entire world".

Who can argue against common sense? Sounds fine, right?

Well, yes, except that in practice it means decisions and executive orders are not based on data, inquiries or science, but simply what Trump thinks.

For example, there was no Treasury inquiry and report into the impact of 25 per cent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, with the result — among other things — that General Motors told him they'd be bankrupt in three months, so its parts had to be exempted.

In fact, the whole tariff venture has become a complete mess of U-turns and exemptions, because it was based on common sense and not thought through. It's also the main reason the US economy is in danger of a big slowdown.

And of course the abandonment of efforts to reduce fossil fuels and combat climate change — in favour of "drill, baby, drill" — are not based on science, but simply his "common sense", along with that of other people on the right, that the energy transition is expensive and pointless.

I have been looking at the example of Australian Trump supporters who hang out online at New Catallaxy.  Look, the average age seems to be about 65 to 70, so it's not as if they are any representative cross section of the population, but reading them, as well as online Right wing America sites, makes it absolutely clear that they are so much still in the thrill of having their culture war priorities put into place by Trump that they simply don't care at all about his entirely haphazard way of governing, and his  neverending stream of lies and grifting that, with 100% certainty, would have appalled them if it were being said or done by a Democrat.  

In the media landscape:  not that I subscribe, but from what I can gather, the Wall Street Journal is a traditionally Right wing outlet that is giving substantial pushback due to the economic damage Trump policies will cause.   But it's galling that this also represents the Murdochs in his traditional fashion:  making money by letting one outlet appeal to the "not on board with Trump" element of the Right, while letting its MAGA devoted night time lineup on Fox News continue to compete with North Korean media in how far they can suck up to the cult leader.   Daddy Murdoch, and his Right wing son, are entirely unprincipled and happy to see the world burn as long as it makes money for them in the process.

A couple of recipes

Because my posting rate has been so slow this year, I've overlooked this blog's function of recording useful recipes I've tried.

 First one - lamb shoulder cooked at low temperature for hours is something I had never got around to before, but I recently followed this recipe which featured a side of white bean puree.   (I see the recipe calls it a roast - but there was lots of liquid involved, so surely it was a braise?)   The most pleasant surprise was how nice the white bean puree was - another thing I never got around to making before.

Second one, as a counter to all the meat in the first:  chick pea curry, using dried chickpeas.   Of course I've used canned chickpeas many times, but the online cooks (especially vegan ones) all suggest that cooking your own dried pulses gives a much nicer result, so I bought a kilo of chickpeas and gave it a try.

I soaked them for 8 hours, changing the water a couple of times as someone somewhere recommended.  Then boiled them for about an hour.  The texture was still slightly firmer than canned, but that was fine by me.   And as for using them in a curry - there are dozens of examples on line and it seems you can use virtually any curry base (dried spices, or jar paste - I used leftover Thai red curry paste), fry an onion first, add the paste or dry spices, a can of tomatoes (and maybe some fresh ones like I did), the chickpeas and a can of coconut milk.   It comes out fine.  (I added some spinach at the end, for colour as well as a fresh contribution.)

And I can tell you, two cups of dried chickpeas, which should cost at most about $2, together with these other ingredients (total cost maybe $4- $5 extra?) made enough for 6 very large servings.

Honestly, this experience has led me to believe that government support for the poor must include a push to getting them to learn how to cook dried beans and chickpeas.   Even allowing for the cost of the electricity or gas (which may be the same for cooking a meat curry too) protein derived from this source is incredibly cheap compared to meat.   And it was pretty tasty and filling.

Tide turning

As I now primarily use BlueSky and live happily amongst the Democrat/Lefty/centrist types who moved there from Twitter, it was there that I saw Californian Govenor (and likely runner for presidential candidate) Gavin Newsom being castigated for saying to Right wing young nut Charlie Kirk that he agreed there was a fairness issue with transwomen competing in women's sports.  

The problem is that the progressive Left steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that there does indeed need to be nuance on trans policy.  Their reasoning, if you can call it that, is that because Republicans have way overreacted on this culture war issue, the Left cannot concede an inch, because that would be giving support to an enemy who has to be defeated with zero compromise.

I find this very frustrating. As I have been saying for a while now, the Left is not going to win this on common sense grounds.  The cases where it matters may be relatively rare and infrequent, but no way is the broader public ready to think that a man with a penis declaring himself to be a woman is being fair if he insists he compete against them as a woman.  If you can't admit that, you're just pushing against unrealistic extremism with your own preferred version of unrealistic extremism.

I am pleased to see, however, that there are finally signs of pushback within Democrat supporters against the progressive tactic. 

This is shown in the tweets here, where David Roberts (a pretty sensible man on most issues with a huge blindspot on this one) gets told:

 

This is good.

 

Even poor Noah Smith is suffering for his lack of ideological purity:

 

 

Brain glass

There's been a lot of reporting on this odd story.  Here's part of the New York Time's version:

Five years ago Italian researchers published a study on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. that detailed how one victim of the blast, a male presumed to be in his mid 20s, had been found nearby in the seaside settlement of Herculaneum. He was lying facedown and buried by ash on a wooden bed in the College of the Augustales, a public building dedicated to the worship of Emperor Augustus. Some scholars believe that the man was the center’s caretaker and was asleep at the time of the disaster.

In 2018, one researcher discovered black, glossy shards embedded inside the caretaker’s skull. The paper, published in 2020, speculated that the heat of the explosion was so immense that it had fused the victim’s brain tissue into glass.

This was, according to some reports, a controversial conclusion, but it's in the news because a new study appears to confirm it:

On Thursday, a paper published in Nature verified that the fragments are indeed glassified brain. Using techniques such as electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and differential scanning calorimetry, scientists examined the physical properties of samples taken from the glassy fragments and demonstrated how they were formed and preserved. “The unique finding implies unique processes,” said Guido Giordano, a volcanologist at the Roma Tre University and lead author of the new study.

Maybe it's still a bit controversial:

The 2020 study was met with some skepticism by other scientists, largely because the raw data was not available. Tim Thompson, a forensic anthropologist at Maynooth University in Ireland, was perhaps the most vocal doubter. This time around, the results excited him. “I very much enjoy seeing new scientific methods applied to the archaeological context,” he said.

But Dr. Thompson would like to see more evidence and more of the original data: “The heating and cooling within Herculaneum following the eruption is likely to be complicated, and the results of the investigation certainly support their conclusions. It just depends on whether the material is brain.”

And why am I posting about it?   Because it reminded me of one of the more curious things to be found in the Buddha's Tooth Relic Temple in Singapore -  examples of Sarira, the pearl or jewel like beads claimed to have been recovered from the cremated remains of Buddhist spiritual masters.  I mentioned this in a previous post.

Now, the ones in Singapore are often very pretty, and I'm not saying that the apparent example of one brain apparently turned by the right kind of heat into something resembling black glass is a good explanation. But I am just surprised to learn that any sort of organic stuff can turn into something that looks glassy...

 

Wet and windy

I'm not telling anyone who lives in Brisbane anything new - but this Cyclone Alfred weather event turned out to be very odd.

Late on Friday night, when it was still a small category 1 cyclone crossing Moreton Bay, it got a bit windy and showery for a couple of hours (after the Western sun had been out at about 6 pm when I was walking the dog.)   I thought it might continue being windy all night, but it died down, and it didn't even rain that much.  It was worse on the Gold Coast, but in Brisbane it felt very anti-climatic, as I always suspected it might.

Then Saturday was very grey and showery, not all shops opened and the city was still pretty much shut down.  Unexpectedly for everyone, in the early evening, it became far windier (and I think wetter) than the night before.  It really felt like what a close cyclone should feel like, and the wind was strong for hours.

Followed by today - I'm not sure if it was showering when I woke up, but it was certainly raining by 8am, quite hard, and it has not stopped all day.   Intensity has varied a little bit, but flash flooding is happening everywhere, and with many trees down last night, the city was more or less at a standstill again.  (I mean, shops re-opened, but I am sure no one was travelling further than they really needed to, as it was obvious that certain streets would be flooding, and trees on footpaths might in some cases be in a precarious state.)

So on social media the "it was a fizzer" cynicism has been replaced by other people going "ha ha".

And poor Harvey Bay, on the northern edge of the influence of the system, had a storm that brought a record amount of intense rain in a short number of hours, leading to 400 emergency calls for flash flooding (I just heard that number on the radio.)  My brother, on the Sunshine Coast between Hervey Bay and Brisbane, seems to have been relatively unaffected. 

It's supposed to stop raining sometime overnight, but at the moment, it slows down for a while, then picks up again.    I think we can all agree we've had enough, please move on...

   

Waiting for weather

So, the cyclone that could have arrived a day or more ago is now not arriving until tonight - maybe.

Sure, it's been windy on the coast (especially the Gold Coast, where, as it happens, I was due to spend a night in a high rise apartment tomorrow - it's been cancelled), but in Brisbane it's been a couple of days of "oh, the rain is picking up" and "it's finally getting breezy", only to have it stop a few hours later and feel as calm as anything.

If the cyclone weakens to a couple of hours of rain and a bit of gusty wind, I bet people will start complaining a lot about over-reaction in terms of preparedness....

 

And now, a South East cyclone

It's been many a year since a cyclone wandered as far south as Brisbane.   From dim memory, one very small cyclone might have approached the Sunshine Coast when I was a youngster, but it didn't do much. Well, that's not counting one that came pretty close one Christmas when I was a toddler and the family was in a tent at Maroochydore and had to pack it up and go to - I think - the surf lifesaving club.  I have no memory of that at all.  

They all tend to fizzle out once this far down (except for the rain, which I think comes more from the post-cyclonic depression if it gets stuck in place)

This hasn't stopped a ridiculous amount of panic shopping, even in supermarkets probably 10 km from the coast, like my local ones.   It seems Covid lockdowns have damaged the psyche of Australians forever such that any prospect of disruption to shopping for even a day causes a rush on toilet paper, bread, eggs (already in short supply) and some fresh fruit and vegetables.  (No sign of a tomato - apart from cherry tomatoes - or bananas in the shop yesterday evening.  Plenty of potatoes though.) 

Of course, I could be wrong, I suppose, and there might be damage of an unexpected scale, especially to places right on the coast.  I just can't see much risk of Category 1 or 2 causing much problem with 90% of Brisbane, though.

Let's see.  Here's the current forecast path:

 

 

Did COVID or politics kill movie going?

Again, I find myself in the mood to kind of ignore the rapidly evolving disaster that is the Trump administration, and note (as I usually do each year) that it's Oscar time today.  I will go over my poor mood regarding the state of cinema again, instead.*

It seems to me that the world is having trouble getting over the apparent fatal blow that Covid and/or the polarisation of American politics has caused to interest in attending the cinema.  Or is it that I'm just getting older and getting lazier to going out?  (I don't think it's the latter.)

As I said to my daughter a few months ago, the problem with cinema feels a bit like we're waiting for a new trend that simply isn't turning up.   In the depressing 70's, you had dark social realism as a thing;  by the end of it, though, you had the science fiction/adventure blockbuster era kicking off, which took us through the 80's.  I'm not sure, without checking, what the 90's brought us - off the top of my head, we had the best 'serious Spielberg' era (with Schindlers List and Saving Private Ryan, and then in the 2000's his excellent adult oriented science fiction);  but overall, I think it was a decent decade with a decent mix of themes.

In the 2000's, I was mostly becoming a father and not going out much, but towards the end was enjoying a lot of kids animation.   And then in the 2010's was the peak of the Marvel superhero movies, which I only half followed, but the best were pretty decent.

Now, Marvel and superheros feels well and truly dead, with efforts to revive it spluttering badly.  DC superhero movies never appealed that much.  And there is a well defined backlash to Disney's culture warring efforts (heavy emphasis on female protagonists and diverse sexuality), which I reluctantly agree is kinda deserved. 

One thing I continually feel puzzled about is how Hollywood used to be capable to making mature movies on current US political and cultural issues - yet at the time US politics is most intensely deserving of fictional drama and scrutiny, it seems the political polarisation has killed off interest in doing it.  I suspect it may be because there feels like there is no "middle" to appeal to anymore, and if you make a movie slanted to the Left or Right, the polarisation means social media campaigns can kill off a movie's box office so easily.

It's all a pity.

 

*   I think I wrote a very similar post late last year, but I am feeling sufficient depressed by the state of the world to not bother checking!   

The state of US politics

Some light hearted content (while we wait for the shooting to start)

I've been busy, and sorry about the madness

By way of explanation as to slow posting:

*  Work had been very busy and distracting for quite a few months now, and it's not going to get much better for another month.

*  American politics has gone over an edge which makes it feel there's no point in talking about how bad it is - it's just too obvious and leaving (I think) a lot of people like me feeling kind of speechless at the spectacle.

* I have an idea or two for longer posts I want to write about some "big picture" stuff about the state of the world, but am having trouble finding the time to get some older books I want to reference off my bookcase, where they hide, somewhere...

Anyway, I also apologise for being a bit slow to delete the mad anti-Semitic comments made by Graeme Bird in recent posts.   (Tim, I'm surprised you had to ask who it was!)

Is there some sort of competition underway as to how badly people can act regarding Gaza?

 I mean, seriously:

*   Hamas thinks looking like militaristic terrorists while they hand over emaciated hostages, just after they have just suffered a massive and inevitable defeat, is a good look??     

*   Trump thinks that talking about America "owning" Gaza is not like running up and throwing petrol on the fire??    

*  Netanyahu thinks - what?   That further grinding the strip into concrete dust will force the countries adamant that they aren't going to upend their own regimes by taking in a million or two Gazans to change their minds??   And that expanding into the West Bank helps encourage Jordan into co-operating with the closure of Gaza?   

I mean, seriously, listen to Trump being an idiot:

King Abdullah II of Jordan on Tuesday rebuffed President Trump’s proposal for his country to absorb Palestinians living in Gaza, saying that he remained opposed to a plan Mr. Trump has laid out to clear the territory so the United States can seize control of it.

During a “constructive” meeting with the U.S. president at the White House, King Abdullah said, he “reiterated Jordan’s steadfast position against the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“This is the unified Arab position,” he stated in a post on social media after the meeting. “Rebuilding Gaza without displacing the Palestinians and addressing the dire humanitarian situation should be the priority for all.”

His statement came hours after Mr. Trump insisted the United States had the authority to “take” Gaza, part of an effort to pressure the leader of Jordan and other Arab nations to embrace a forced removal, which has drawn widespread condemnation.

“We will have Gaza,” said Mr. Trump, as he sat next to Mr. Abdullah and the Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan. “It’s a war-torn area. We’re going to take it. We’re going to hold it. We’re going to cherish it.”

Who knew a constitutional crisis would be so easy?

All it takes is for the executive to think it doesn't have to obey the courts, and for a craven Congress to shrug its shoulders. 

I wonder at what point someone in the military feels they have to intervene, because it's kinda starting to look like that is what it would take.

Or does it only need something to get to the Supreme Court and for it to say "executive, no, you can't ignore the courts, if you want constitutional government"?

The trouble with that is, if it is a majority statement, with a few of the corrupt MAGA supporters not joining in, Trump and Vance would likely say its an illegitimate, political, decision.

As for the matter of the ease of constitutional crisis, I guess some Australian readers would say "well, the sacking of Whitlam was easy too."   Which is true.   But compared to the possible problems of how to deal with a rogue President in the US, our system at least democratically resolved it quickly and neatly.

Update:  When even the Wall Street Journal is putting out videos asking if the country is in a constitutional crisis, you know it is getting pretty serious...

 

Only the best (outright racist) people

So, as this Reuters story tells us, of Elon Musk's kiddie team of "DOGE" pretend department of cost cutters and ideology enforcers:

*    one had a X account re-post Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate content;

*   one was sacked for leaking a company's proprietary information;

*   one resigned after outright racist content was posted on his X account.

The last example has had more detail supplied in other media, such as this BBC story:

The account connected to Mr Elez - first reported by the Wall Street Journal - posted a variety of inflammatory comments that were verified by the BBC as authentic.

"Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool," read one post from the pseudonymous account in July.

Another post, in September, said: "You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity."

"Normalize Indian hate," another post that month said.

All of the posts have since been deleted.

JD Vance, with Indian wife, has said people shouldn't be mean to him.  And Elon deals with it by having a X poll of his MAGA app:

On Friday, President Donald Trump, when asked about Mr Elez's resignation from Doge and Vance's support for the employee, said he didn't know about "that particular thing", but agreed with the vice-president on the matter.

Writing on X, Vance said that while he disagreed "with some of Elez's posts... I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life".

Earlier in the day, Musk posted a poll on X inviting users to say whether the staff member should be brought back.

At least 78% voted in favour of his return out of hundreds of thousands who participated, according to results displayed underneath.

What an appalling bunch of people.  

Some useful commentary on Gaza and Trump

From the New York Times:

For decades, the question of whether and how Palestinians might build a state in their homeland has been at the center of Middle East politics — not only for the Palestinians, but for Arabs around the region, many of whom regard the Palestinian cause almost as their own.

Forcing Palestinians out of their remaining territory, Arabs say, would doom Palestinian statehood and destabilize the entire region in the process.

So it was a nightmare for the Palestinians’ closest Arab neighbors, Egypt and Jordan — and a dream for Israel’s far-right-dominated government — when President Trump proposed moving everyone out of the Gaza Strip and onto their soil, an idea he repeated in a White House news conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Tuesday.

Egypt and Jordan have responded with categorical “nos” — even if their reasons aren’t all borne out of pure concern for the Palestinian plight: Cairo dreads what Palestinian refugees in Sinai would mean for Egypt’s security. Militants could launch attacks at Israel from Egyptian soil, inviting Israeli retaliation, or be recruited into the local insurgency in Sinai that Egypt has battled for years. Jordan’s king has to reckon with a population that is more than half Palestinian, so to accept more such refugees could further raise tensions.

That refusal has been backed up by political independents and opposition figures in Egypt, along with mouthpieces for the country’s authoritarian government, underscoring how the Palestinian issue can unify even the bitterest political opponents there.

Khaled el-Balshy, the editor of one of the few remaining Egyptian media outlets that are not pro-government and the head of the national journalists’ union, issued a statement on Wednesday calling Mr. Trump’s proposal “a clear violation of human rights and international laws.”

Moustafa Bakry, a loudly pro-government member of Parliament, suggested, without giving specifics, that Egypt could repel the displacement with force. “Egypt can move forward with other measures, because the Egyptian military can never allow this,” he said in an interview on Wednesday.

But Mr. Trump has shown little regard for the two countries’ concerns, their sovereignty or the idea of Palestinian statehood.

“They say they’re not going to accept,” Mr. Trump said of Egypt and Jordan during an earlier meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in the Oval Office. “I say they will.”....

Egypt has cooperated closely with Israel on security in its restive Sinai Peninsula, which borders both Gaza and Israel. But while Egypt and Jordan are on speaking terms, and sometimes more, with Israel, their populations have never stopped seeing Israel as an enemy, especially after its most recent assault on Gaza.

Analysts say the incentives of keeping U.S. aid, which makes up a limited portion of each country’s budget, are minor compared to their fears of alienating their populations by appearing complicit in what many see as ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Though the rulers of both countries frequently brook little dissent, often using repression to silence internal criticism, analysts say they cannot afford to ignore public opinion.

“It’s no joke going up against Trump, particularly for Egypt and Jordan,” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute in Washington. But since “this would really be a bridge way too far for much of public opinion,” he added, “there is no other option for an Arab leader. I don’t see what else they could do.”

 There is more at the link - although I am not sure if it is open or paywalled....

 Update:   Hey, even the extremely pro-Trump site Hot Air agrees with the New York Times - 

Sorry, But Trump Is Wrong on Resettling Palestinians in Jordan and Egypt

 Update 2:  The laughable spin of the Wall Street Journal:

The reaction to Mr. Trump’s flyer was predictably hyperbolic. Some called it “ethnic cleansing,” as if the U.S. military would round up two million Gazans against their will. Others criticized Mr. Trump for U.S. imperialism, contrary to his campaign theme of deriding foreign interventions. For those reasons and more, his Gaza daydream is fanciful.

But note that Mr. Trump expressed admirable sympathy for the Palestinians and their plight. The Gaza strip “has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades and so bad for the people anywhere near it,” he said Tuesday at a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Who could disagree with that?

Some sympathy:  "You lost, now you have to move to another country."

In which I find something useful via Helen Dale

As I have long said, I am no fan at all of Helen Dale and her writings, but occasionally, very occasionally, I will drop into Twitter X and see what she is commenting on.

This time, she linked to an article she wrote about another writer's book about the indigenous academia world of "settler-colonialism", a phrase of no obvious meaning (much like a mantra simply made to repeat in front of other academics)  which I have seen used endlessly on the Twitter accounts of the likes of Professor Sandy O'Sullivan - the indigenous/Irish academic who is, for my money, a hot favourite for any award there may be for the worst waste of money on academic research funding in Australia (see the list at the end of the article linked).      

I'm still not sure who claims credit for the term - Dale claims a lot of Australian academia helped it spread, but she's light on details.  Nonetheless, this part of Dale's article about it seems to me to explain it well:

This replacement of history with myth leads Kirsch to argue the ideology is a “political theology,” that is, a secularised religious concept expressed civically. A form of original sin where the everlasting process of colonisation means never-ending exploitation, racism, misogyny, and genocide, it suggests only the Noble Savage that is the Native can redeem us.

In one of the field’s most influential papers, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck of SUNY New Paltz and K. Wayne Yang of UC San Diego write that “relinquishing settler futurity” is necessary if we are to imagine “the Native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone.”

And here’s me thinking futurity referred to a competitive equestrian event for younger horses.

As Kirsch says, “The goal is not to change this or that public policy but to engender a permanent disaffection, a sense that the social order ought not to exist.”...

Much of On Settler-Colonialism turns on Kirsch’s argument that because it requires policies that can never be implemented (“deport 97 per cent of the US population!”), it’s merely depressing and stupid. “America should not exist” is never analysed with a view to doing anything apart from making the place miserable with itself. 

Yes:  this is exactly what it has been like to watch indigenous rights street protest in Australia for the last couple of decades - as silly as watching 1960's communists trying to muster support for abolishing capitalism, and simply designed, so it seems, to perpetuate grievance without any sensible work as to how to actually improve things.

I will add to this later...

A good idea

Yeah, I didn't realise that was a meme from the movie, which I haven't seen for many decades.

I've no doubt mentioned before, though, that I'm pretty sure Paulin Kael called it "an anti-exploitation exploitation movie" and that phrase has stuck in my mind...

Column on tariff threats states the obvious

Of course, the Republican Party is now only comprised of the dumb and conspiracy addled, cynical, and dishonest (and the people in each of those categories are all in for culture wars too), so of course they will claim Trump is the smart tactician in his current tariff threat rounds which have been put on hold.

An article in the New York Times states the obvious about why it is not a good long term strategy:

“I don’t want to use names, but tariffs are very powerful, both economically and in getting everything else you want,” Mr. Trump said during remarks in the Oval Office. “When you’re the pot of gold, the tariffs are very good, they’re very powerful and they’re going to make our country very rich again.”

The president is right that the American economy is a powerful weapon, and that a trade war would hit other countries harder. Canada and Mexico in particular are deeply dependent on trade with the United States. They send more than 80 percent of their exports to the United States, and could be crippled by a prolonged fight.

But many economists say the strategy will cost the United States, too. They estimate that as strong as the American economy is, trade wars will weaken it by raising prices, stalling investment, slowing growth and dragging down exports. Many farmers and businesses who would see their costs go up and export markets evaporate have protested the risk.

Even if the president ultimately does not follow through on tariffs, the uncertainty his policies are creating could discourage businesses from investing in new factories and hiring workers until they have a clearer picture of how trade will unfold.

Emily Blanchard, an economics professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, argued that the tariff threats would eat away at U.S. economic leverage. She said that Mr. Trump was “undermining the trust that provides the foundation of U.S. strength” by throwing around the country’s weight in global markets.

If companies and investors expect the United States to deploy tariffs regularly, they will hedge against future disruptions by reducing their reliance on American markets, she said. “Trade policy is an economic weapon that becomes less powerful every time it is used,” she said....

Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator and vice president at the Asia Society, said Mr. Trump was correct that trade wars would be more painful for Canada and Mexico. “There is no doubt that our partners will be more severely impacted than the United States, with over three-fourths of their exports destined for our market,” she said.....

Beyond the effects on companies, trade experts said there could be longer-term damage to U.S. interests. That is because the tariff threats would eat away at international confidence that the United States will abide by trade rules and norms that govern when governments deploy tariffs and why.

Edward Alden, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the United States had nurtured a system of international rules and predictability for decades. With Trump’s decision to move ahead with tariffs over the weekend in a “random, incomprehensible fashion, he said, “that era has come to an end.”

“The United States is now signaling that tariffs are an all-purpose club to be used for whatever policy goal the president wishes,” he said. “That formula will create enormous, in many ways unprecedented, uncertainty not just in North America but in the entire global economy.”

Hence, just as Australia was a victim of Chinese reprisal tariffs due to their not liking Scott Morrison's comments on COVID, Trump now thinks he can use tariffs for simply anything he doesn't like.

This is such a bad example to be setting, just as implicit sabre rattling over the Panama Canal is a bad example to both Russia and China.

 

 

 

Watch out, Darwin

With all the threats being made by Trump over the Panama Canal, let's remember that it's all about Chinese companies operating not the canal itself, but port facilities near it:

Two of the five ports adjacent to the canal, Balboa and Cristóbal, which sit on the Pacific and Atlantic sides respectively, have been operated by a subsidiary of Hutchison Port Holdings since 1997.

The company is a subsidiary of the publicly listed CK Hutchison Holdings, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate founded by Hong Kong businessman Li Ka-shing.

It has port operations in 24 countries, including the UK.

Although it is not state-owned by China, says Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, there have been concerns in Washington over how much control Beijing would be able to exert over the company.

A wealth of potentially useful strategic information on ships passing through the waterway flows through these ports.

"There is an increasing geopolitical tension of economic nature between the US and China," Mr Berg says. "That kind of information regarding cargo would be very useful in the event of a supply chain war."

CK Hutchison did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.

The bids to operate those ports faced almost no competition, according to Andrew Thomas, a professor at the University of Akron who has written a book on the canal. "The US at the time didn't really care about these ports and Hutchison faced no objection," he says.

Chinese companies, both private and state-owned, have also strengthened their presence in Panama through billions of dollars in investments, including a cruise terminal and a bridge to be built over the canal.

This "package of Chinese activities", as described by Mr Thomas, might have prompted Trump's assertion that the canal is "owned" by China, but operation of those ports does not equate to ownership, he stresses.

Beijing has repeatedly said that China's ties with Latin America are characterised by "equality, mutual benefit, innovation, openness and benefits for the people".

And this all put me in mind of Darwin and its port being leased to a Chinese company.

Wikipedia summaries the latest in its controversy as follows:

In August 2019, a proposal was launched by Federal Labor MP Nick Champion to re-nationalise the port, thereby ending Chinese control.^[17]

A 2021 review of the leasing arrangements found there were no national security grounds to overturn the lease.^[18] In October 2023, the federal government announced it will not cancel Landbridge's lease after another review.^[18] The announcement brought to an end to an eight-year saga regarding Chinese control of the port.^[18]

 So given that Trump is an idiot, who would be surprised if he next tries telling the Australian government it has to end that lease, or else tariffs will be imposed?

 

Maybe a "reply all" issue...

As we can all agree the Trump administration is going about as appallingly as expected (I knew, before he did his press conference, that he would try to bring in DEI as a reason for a plane crash, with no evidence whatsoever), I am instead avoiding posting about him as he is too awful to contemplate.

Instead, this story is half amusing:

A local health district in New South Wales has apologised after an administrator accidentally sent an email to junior doctors calling them a “workforce of clinical marshmellows [sic]”.

The email, seen by Guardian Australia, was sent by a medical administration manager at a hospital who appears to be complaining about a doctor’s response to a rostering issue.

The misfired message starts: “Seriously!

“I wonder if any of them realise that they are a doctor and that this is what happens. Oh that’s right … I forgot. Life style [sic] before career,” the message continued.

“God help us in the future. We are going to have a workforce of clinical marshmellows!”

The union representing doctors, the Australian Salaried Medical Officers’ Federation (Asmof), called the message “tone-deaf” and “unacceptable”, particularly “when NSW is facing a healthcare workforce crisis”.

A spokesperson for the relevant local health district said: “Junior medical officers (JMOs) work hard and are a vital part of our health service, and we sincerely apologise for the hurt and frustration caused by a recent email that was circulated.

“We are committed to fostering a workplace where junior medical officers feel valued and respected. The email did not reflect this commitment or our values, and we have written to the relevant JMOs to apologise. The matter is being addressed appropriately,” they said.

When you read stories like this, it makes you wonder whether the issue is still the conservatism within the older members of a profession that leads to the attitude that because they coped with some ridiculous and dangerously long work hours when an intern, the youngsters should be able to cope with the same - or else they are too soft to be a good doctor.  That's a very bad attitude.

Well, if you're going to give it away...

I noted recently that I cancelled my Washington Post subscription, in an attempt to punish Bezos for sucking up to Trump, including by a noticeable increase in "well, maybe Trump isn't all that bad" columns in the paper.

I knew that this would likely prompt "please come back, at a discount price!" offers, but I wasn't quite prepared for how low they would eventually go.

This low:   99 cents (Australian) a month for a year, then increasing to $9 a month.  Cancel anytime.

Well, significantly decreasing the amount of money I'm paying to next to nothing might be punishment enough for now.  I re-subscribed...

Seems like I should try the same exercise at the NYT now!

Less than a life time away is no time at all

As I have grown older, I keep having the odd combination of thinking that World War 2 now seems a long time ago; but also that anything that happened less than 100 years in the past is not so far away from now, really. *

I'm sure it's a result of the combination of formerly knowing many people, including my parents, who were in the war but have passed away quite a few years ago, while also feeling that anything that has happened within a life span that I might achieve isn't that far in the past.   

Anyway, this is just by way of preamble that I was a little surprised to realise that today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and later this year it will be same anniversary of the end of the war.   (I had this thought about the end of the war last year, and now here it is, upon us.)   

 It adds some..complexity?...to the feelings about the situation in Israel/Gaza now, too. 

*  And in the bigger picture - my "meta" take on the current unsettled state of the world is that it's due to the revolution in self understanding that came with Darwinian evolution, Einstein and the realisation of the incredible age and size of the universe all happening only a "short" time ago - barely 150 years - which is not enough time for cultures to come to grips with it.

More "let's welcome our new Chinese overlords"

I'm referring, only partly ironically, to all of the tech world turmoil that the Chinese AI company DeepSeek has caused in the last week.   This Newsweek article summarises it well, I think.  

It does strike me as a little odd that tech stocks should tumble on the basis of unverified claims regarding the cost and type of chips used to create it - but I guess the dramatically lower cost to high end users factor alone might convince analysts that there really must be something to it.  (It might also be seen as a good excuse to put a correction into an overheated bubble, perhaps?)

Also: I still don't really understand how you make a heap of money from releasing an open source product this way.

But anyway, on the weekend, I downloaded the app (on Android) and in my limited use so far - yes I'm really impressed.

I have mentioned more than once that the most useful AI product I have found is Perplexity, because it gives links to its sources of information, making it easy to check that it isn't "hallucinating" part of its answer.   

Well, DeepSeek works in a very similar way, with links provided, and also this (kind of odd, but interesting) feature where it explains the "reasoning" used to give the actual answer prior to composing the answer.

I strongly recommend people trying it.

The tech bros' new clothes

Good to see this explained succinctly:

Camping with the King

This has long been noted by normal people as a peculiar thing about the Republicans concern with masculinity:

Yes, the Trump act is full of camp, which some even deploy as reason not to be concerned about his strongly autocratic desires:

The worst is yet to come

Well, it does indeed feel like that Decemberists song "Everything is Awful", with the Trump inauguration and the somewhat distressing feeling that we are living in one of the Batman movies, as far as the weirdo cast of characters is concerned.  

A billion or so words have been spilt online already about it, but here are my various thoughts:

a.    if anything, far too few words have been spoken as to how incredibly dangerous it is for any world leader to be believe they are on a divine mission:

 “Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom, and indeed to take my life,” he said, referencing a July 13 assassination attempt in which a bullet grazed his ear. “But I felt then and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Maybe it's because no one intelligent thinks he's a sincere believer in God, and this is just his usual narcissism spun to appeal to his Christofascist base?    But this is the entire problem with him as a politician - we're supposed to just live with the fact that something he says might be meant to be taken seriously, or might be completely unrelated to what will actually happen.    It's absurd, and it's absurdly dangerous if he is sitting in charge of a nuclear arsenal.

b.   Elon and the salute:   my theory, for what it's worth, is that he was high on ketamine (or something else), especially when you see the head movements in this video:

 

And yes, I reckon it was a Nazi salute done as a troll by a man off his face. Hilarious, Elon.

The inevitable falling out with Trump can't come soon enough.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Musk isn't approaching some sort of personal crash and burn - drug overdoes, car accident while under the influence, being shot by a former lover.  Would not be surprised in the slighest.

c.    The Pardons:   Biden's for Milley and Fauci and the J6 committee were well deserved, and if there a serious non MAGA republican left in the country, they ought to be thanking him for saving the Republicans from embarrassing themselves by wasting months on go no-where investigations, and suffering electorally for it.

The pardons of Biden's family - I'm not aware of specific threats to investigate or prosecute them, but if any had been said, it's fine as far as I'm concerned.

I understand that Democrat concern that it gives Trump carte blanche to do the same, and to encourage his administration (and family) to do absolutely anything under cover of a last minute pardon.   But such an authoritarian way of operating is not to go unnoticed, and Trump already has shown he hasn't a skerrick of interest in law and order if he thinks it's done him wrong (see all Jan 6 criminals pardoned, as well as crypto drug boy Ulbricht.)    In short - Trump didn't need the example of Biden to pardon actual criminals.  And if any of those released go on a revenge killing against any informant - it will be on Trump's head.

 

The "vibes" presidency

I think this Ezra Klein opinion piece in the New York Times (gift linked):

Trump Barely Won the Popular Vote. Why Doesn’t It Feel That Way?

is quite fair and accurate.   Let me extract some bits:

In 2024, Donald Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 points. Trump and Democrats alike treated this result as an overwhelming repudiation of the left and a broad mandate for the MAGA movement. But by any historical measure, it was a squeaker.

In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points; in 2016, Hillary Clinton won it by 2.1 points; in 2012, Barack Obama won it by 3.9 points; in 2008, Obama won it by 7.2 points; and in 2004, George W. Bush won it by 2.4 points. You have to go back to the 2000 election to find a margin smaller than Trump’s.

Down-ballot, Republicans’ 2024 performance was, if anything, less impressive. In the House, the Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression; in the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won; among the 11 governor’s races, not a single one led to a change in partisan control. If you handed an alien these election results, they would not read like a tectonic shift.

And yet, they’ve felt like one. Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory. The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout. This is partially because he’s surrounded by some of America’s most influential futurists. Silicon Valley and crypto culture’s embrace of Trump has changed his cultural meaning more than Democrats have recognized. In 2016, Trump felt like an emissary of the past; in 2025, he’s being greeted as a harbinger of the future.

In July of 2024, Tyler Cowen, the economist and cultural commentator, wrote a blog post that proved to be among the election’s most prescient. It was titled “The change in vibes — why did they happen?” Cowen’s argument was that mass culture was moving in a Trumpian direction. Among the tributaries flowing into the general shift: the Trumpist right’s deeper embrace of social media, the backlash to the “feminization” of society, exhaustion with the politics of wokeness, an era of negativity that Trump captured but Democrats resisted, a pervasive sense of disorder at the border and abroad and the breakup between Democrats and “Big Tech.”

I was skeptical of Cowen’s post when I first read it, as it described a shift much larger than anything I saw reflected in the polls. I may have been right about the polls. But Cowen was right about the culture.

Klein then examines each of the things Cowen discussed.   I'll skip the social media talk, and go to the bit about corporations wanting to move Right:

The second factor is the corporate desire to shift right. Over the 2020s, corporations shifted left, driven by disgust with Trump, pressure from their work forces and perceived pressure from their customers. This was reflected in the endless corporate pronouncements over this-or-that social issue, the many green pledges, the construction of vast D.E.I. infrastructures and a general aesthetic of concerned listening on behalf of executives. Whatever mix of sincerity and opportunism motivated these changes, it curdled into resentment in recent years.

You can hear this in the interview Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder who has emerged as a major Trump adviser, did with my colleague Ross Douthat. “Companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution,” he said. “The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.” The biggest vibe shift Cowen misses in his list is the anger C.E.O.s — particularly tech C.E.O.s — came to feel toward their own workers and their desire to take back control.

Trump’s election acted as the pivot point for this trend, giving corporate leaders cover to do what they’d long wanted to do anyway. “The election has empowered some top executives to start speaking out in favor of conservative policies, from tax cuts to traditional gender roles,” The Financial Times reported. Announcement after announcement from major corporations pulling out of climate change compacts or dismantling D.E.I. systems have been a vibes multiplier, creating the sense of a major shift happening at all levels of American society.

I like his take on the feckless Zuckerberg:

I interviewed Zuckerberg in 2018, as he was still processing the backlash from the 2016 elections. He told me Meta had failed “on preventing things like misinformation, Russian interference.” He worried over “a big rise of isolationism and nationalism.” What made him confident in the future was that, among millennials, “the plurality identifies as a citizen of the world.”

Now Zuckerberg is going on Joe Rogan’s show, chain dangling from his neck, to say that the fact-checking Meta was doing was like “something out of ‘1984,’ ” that companies like his own became too hostile to “masculine energy” and that what makes him optimistic about Donald Trump is “I think he just wants America to win.”

And this paragraph near the end is, I think, exactly right:

Perhaps the cultural momentum of Trumpism will give Trump’s presidency added force. But it is at least as likely that it lures Trump and his team into overreach. It is always dangerous to experience a narrow victory as an overwhelming mandate. Voters — angry about the cost of living and disappointed by Biden — still barely handed Trump the White House. There is little in the election results to suggest the public wants a sharp rightward lurch. But Trump and his team are jacked into the online vibes-machine and they want to meet the moment they sense. I doubt there would have been ideological modesty in any Trump administration, but I am particularly skeptical we will see it in this one.

Re: David Lynch

David Lynch has passed away.   It's hard to dislike an eccentric artist who manages to get eccentric movies made in Hollywood; and certainly I did enjoy Twin Peaks a lot, at least until it became clear it had that common problem of a mystery series that seemed to have been set up before knowing how it would be resolved.  (Well, I assume this is what happened.  But I never looked into it.)

That said, I think that his films are a tad overrated by critics, for my tastes.   But I would always watch him in interviews, and he seemed a nice enough guy in real life.  

Bullet bitten

I cancelled my Washington Post subscription, even though in the process they offered another year at $4 a month, which is incredibly cheap.

I just can't see another way a message can be sent to its owner's interference with the paper's content.   

I had been saying I was probably more inclined to cancel the New York Times - but Bezos's games with the paper and direct sucking up to Trump (and reported turmoil within the staff) just didn't leave a choice.

I'm sure my action will now result in regret and realignment by Bezos, and then I can resubscribe - hahahaha.     I live in hope.

PS:  what tipped me over the edge was a column this morning praising Trump for getting the apparent peace deal in Gaza through - claiming that his "mad man" approach to foreign affairs works and maybe we need more of it!  At the time of posting, there are only 4 comments, but I'm expecting it will attract many, many more criticisms by the end of the day.