Good luck, I say sarcastically...

I've mentioned this always coked-up sounding MAGA tradie from Melbourne who now comments all the time at Catallaxy:

There is much excitement generally at that blog as they grasp at all and any last minute figures that they think proves Trump is about to have not just a slim victory, but a glorious, vanquishing-his-enemies-forever type of victory.   

If Trump loses, and I expect he will, Catallaxy will be an interesting place to watch.   Steve Kates, at the very least, will require sedation for a month.

Monday quantum physics

I have been watching Youtube videos on quantum physics recently, and thought that these two were very good, from the point of view of explaining how the ideas evolved.  As the guy who made them says:

More in-depth than most presentations for laypersons, but without the mathematical rigour needed by a specialist in the field.

These are 5 years old now, and unfortunately, he seems to have stopped at two.  Although I haven't watched his other videos, it would seem he got into some huge fight with both creationists and post-modernists and stopped making videos.

Anyway, so I don't lose track of them in future:

 

and

Insulting commentary from both sides of the fence

No doubt France has a serious issue with Muslim extremism - as does Britain with the random terror attacks that have gone on there over the last few years.  It is an awful problem.

However, given that the latest attack happened inside of a Catholic church, this has sent the Catholic cranks of Catallaxy over the top:

Given that the Muslim population of France is apparently 5,670,000 or so, I wonder if CL thinks all of them should be rounded up and sent on a decade's long flotilla of ships over the Med to, where exactly?, just some random bit of desert where they can be quietly dumped?   Or only the "recalcitrant" Muslims - which I assume you can assess by asking them all to fill in a survey question "Are you for or against the beheading those who insult the Prophet?"   

Anyway, CL does actually do something useful later on the blog - he points to a Twitter commentary on the matter by ageing Mahathir Mohamad, in which he brings up the low standards of the West by noting that many women there wear g-strings and people go nude on some beaches.   That is, shall we say, unhelpful.   (I particularly dislike how his criticism which reads "The killing is not an act that as a Muslim I would approve" which leaves open the suggestion that he thinks other Muslims with sterner opinions than him might not be unreasonable in approving it.*)

Time for him to ride off into the sunset, I think.

*  Oh, I see know that he did also say that Muslims have "the right" to kill millions of French based on how many Muslims the French have killed in history, but I think that tweet has been deleted.   That's even worse, I suppose, but it is more along the lines of one of those rhetorical flourishes (equivalent to the CL one) where you know he would say if pressed  "I wasn't meaning that it should be done - of course that would be terrible in reality")

All the more reason not to like sport

I was surprised by this:  

I would have guessed more Democrat donations from the NBA.   And is baseball more Democrat because it has its biggest  fans in liberal, North East states?

Anyway, I'll take it as another piece of evidence in justification of my general rule of thumb that sport is basically all bad and a waste of time and money, except for when it leads to 24 hour bar openings. 

But Mum, I don't want to control monkey brains with light

 

I underestimated the stupidity of Trump supporters/cultists

I was opining earlier in the year that the problem for Trump would be the inability to hold campaign rallies due to COVID-19.  Little did I realise that not only the intense narcissism of Trump would mean that he would insist on them, but his dumb cult followers would attend, even in the freezing cold:

At least seven people were hospitalized and 30 had to receive medical attention during and after a Tuesday evening campaign rally with President Trump in Omaha, Nebraska.

You would have to suspect that campaign induced spread of COVID is going to be a significant factor in reduced Republican turn out.

Update:  just been amusing myself on a meme generator page -

 

That rare thing: stand up I like

You all know I am generally not a big fan of stand up comedy.   But no one probably recalls that I thought the (deliberately?) amateurish show Aaron Chen Tonight, which turned up on some obscure ABC secondary channel slot a couple of years ago, was likeable.

Well, superstardom seems to be escaping Mr Chen, but Youtube has thrown up at me some more recent short clips of his stand up (probably because I watch Uncle Roger videos), and I do find his whole comedy persona pretty funny:

Much worrying speculation

Maybe you've seen on Twitter this nightmarish scenario:   Trump loses, but not by enough of a margin to immediately concede, and in fact announces a bunch of lawfare to try to knock out enough votes to let him cling on.

At this time, perhaps midway through a couple of months of chronic uncertainty as to who the real winner is, China decides to make a move on Taiwan, confident that America doesn't know who speaks for them anyway (and while redneck militia take pot shots in the streets against Democrat protesters who think Trump must step down.)   

It has a worrying sort of plausibility about it, no?

The BBC wrote:

Is China preparing to invade Taiwan? It's a question being discussed with feverish intensity on many China forums right now. And what should be one of the top geopolitical concerns for the incoming US president.

The temperature was raised further last on 13 October when China's President Xi Jinping visited a People's Liberation Army (PLA) Marine Corp base in southern Guangdong province and told the marines there to "prepare for war".

In response some newspapers ran headlines suggesting an invasion is imminent.

It almost certainly isn't. But there are good reasons for the urgency with which China experts are now discussing the future of Taiwan.

I don't know:  the main reason for doubting the scenario is that it would seem China would be buying itself a region full of bitter and unhappy citizens - more trouble than it's worth, I would have thought.

 

 

Girls are weird

Sorry for the Bart Simpson-like analysis in the heading, but this does seem really odd to me:

Girls who do not live with both parents from birth to age two may be at higher risk of starting puberty at a younger age than girls living with both parents, research published in the open access journal BMC Pediatrics suggests. The authors suggest that their findings support the hypothesis that stress in early life may influence puberty onset. The risk of early puberty onset could potentially be mitigated by interventions aiming to improve child wellbeing, according to the authors.  

A team of researchers from Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, U.S., found that girls who did not live with both parents from birth to age two were 38% more likely to begin their period before the age of 12 compared with girls who lived with both parents. Girls who did not live with both parents between the ages of two and six were 18% more likely than girls whose parents lived together to begin their period before the age of 12.

I am surprised that stress at such a young age can have such a specific biological effect 9 or 10 years later.

My quick assessment of Rogan as not worth paying attention to seems vindicated

 

Yes. Increase the court.

This woman is showing no good sense on anything:

 

Another worry

At the Washington Post:

A seven-hour international flight to Ireland this summer has been linked to 59 coronavirus cases in the country, Irish researchers said in a report.

Thirteen of the 49 passengers onboard tested positive for the novel coronavirus, even though the flight was only 17 percent full, according to the report released last week by the Irish Department of Public Health. Those 13 passengers went on to infect 46 more people throughout Ireland, the report says, which “demonstrates the potential for spread of SARS-COV-2 linked to air travel.”...

Masks were utilized by nine of those 13 infected passengers, with one child not wearing a mask and three passengers’ mask use “unknown,” the report noted.

A full return to something like "normal" international air travel is likely some way off.

 

The writing process

I thought this interesting, because I have a story I would like to write (would prefer it as a screenplay, to be honest) but while I can imagine certain scenes very well, haven't got the overall thing to work in my mind yet:

 

If you want some really worrying reading today...

...try this abstract from a new paper in Nature Geoscience:

Equilibrium climate sensitivity above 5 °C plausible due to state-dependent cloud feedback

The equilibrium climate sensitivity of Earth is defined as the global mean surface air temperature increase that follows a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. For decades, global climate models have predicted it as between approximately 2 and 4.5 °C. However, a large subset of models participating in the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project predict values exceeding 5 °C. The difference has been attributed to the radiative effects of clouds, which are better captured in these models, but the underlying physical mechanism and thus how realistic such high climate sensitivities are remain unclear. Here we analyse Community Earth System Model simulations and find that, as the climate warms, the progressive reduction of ice content in clouds relative to liquid leads to increased reflectivity and a negative feedback that restrains climate warming, in particular over the Southern Ocean. However, once the clouds are predominantly liquid, this negative feedback vanishes. Thereafter, other positive cloud feedback mechanisms dominate, leading to a transition to a high-sensitivity climate state. Although the exact timing and magnitude of the transition may be model dependent, our findings suggest that the state dependence of the cloud-phase feedbacks is a crucial factor in the evolution of Earth’s climate sensitivity with warming.

What an appalling man, and President

This was really shockingly shallow and narcissistic:  

“That’s all I hear about now. Turn on television, ‘Covid, Covid, Covid Covid Covid.’ A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. ‘Covid Covid Covid Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore,” Trump said. (In case it’s not clear, the plane crash he referred to was made up.)

As I have said before, I can only assume that anyone who works in the American health system who knows the truth must be grinding their teeth daily.  It would have to mean that only the most dimwitted who work in that industry could vote for him.

Very deadpan, and funny

This one's for Jason, who hasn't made an appearance in comments for a long time.  From The Onion:

 

So, how's the debate going?

Which means his cult members will think he's doing fantastic, because he's confirming their "insider who thinks he/she knows what's really going on" status.  The rest of the country, though... 

Update:

Again, his cult members, who are all about punishing those who don't align with their politics, will see no problem.

Hugh Hewitt: Give me my tin-pot dictatorship and give it to me NOW!

What a laugh:

 Get this next bit:

It's too much for even the White House to take seriously?   

As always with Hewitt's columns at WAPO, the comments are about 99% mocking him.   This one is moderate in tone, but sums it up correctly, for anyone who isn't part of the Trump cult:

Just a minor detail

So I just had a look at the New York Post to see what is behind the pants wetting excitement on the low information Right about Tony Bobulinski.

Seems to be all about an email in which Hunter Biden makes (what Tony says is a) cryptic reference to Joe Biden getting a cut in a deal with a Chinese firm in 2017.

I had to read way down the article to get to this:

What is not clear yet is whether Joe Biden had secret stakes in any of Hunter’s other deals. As for this one, while the date on the May 2017 email would be nearly four months after Biden left the White House, it’s not known when discussions among the partners and with the Chinese first began. Certainly they started before the email.

And while such deals would be legal for Joe Biden when he left government service, the facts take on extra significance during a campaign where China policy is a frequent topic — and a big dispute between Trump and Biden.

So, when the Right sees sudden disclosure of a Trump company in China making money, it's all just shrug shoulders, legitimate business deals.   And they have no interest whatever in the fact that no one understands Trump's  true financial position because Trump has stonewalled on providing the information for at least 5 years.

But when its Joe Bodin, it's a matter of national security that he (possibly) had a cut in a deal in China.   

Right. 

Just a random thought...

....it's been rattling around my mind for a while that whiny, whiny Trump is like an unfunny version of Rodney Dangerfield.  He "don't get no respect", and no  laughs either.  I think his deliberately stupid dancing at rallies has re-kindled the thought.

Someone else somewhere would probably have made the comparison a while ago, but I personally haven't seen it.   Oh look, someone did a "deepfake" video last year that has Trump's face on Dangerfield's head.  Doesn't look all that different, though.