Whales and cannibals

Here's another late review you never knew you needed.

Watched "In the Heart of the Sea" last night on Stan (the home of the "not quite A level" movie, it seems.)    You may or may not recall - this was the fairly recent box office flop of Ron Howard (and star Chris Hemsworth) based on (one of the) real life inspirations for Moby Dick:  the sinking of the whaling ship Essex after being rammed a couple of times by a whale.

First things first:   yes, it's a chance for me to whine about historical movies again, and whether or not I approve of what liberties they take with facts.

But, as far as how factual it was, I don't have too much to complain about:  it seems it was more or less accurate, with one notable exception.

Spoiler section:   No, the whale didn't pursue the survivors as the movie suggests.   This story element is understandable in a dramatic sense, but also a bit patently silly.   I think it should have been dropped, but true, it is hard to come up with dramatic highlights in a story of lifeboats drifting at sea.  End of Spoiler section.

But, apart from that, I have to say, it seemed a very good attempt at the general depiction of Nantucket whalers' lives at that time.   And the practical side of how whaling was done was, I'm pretty sure, quite authentic.   There are couple of articles linked below which certainly indicate this.

And while aware of the Essex story, I had forgotten about the cannibalism that was a large part of it;  the movie isn't gory in what it shows, but it doesn't shy away from the topic either.   The bit where the bones were strewn on the floor of the boat when the captain was saved was, apparently, accurate.

So, overall, I recommend the movie for this reason alone.

However, at the technical level, there were two very curious problems.

The minor one:   Chris Hemsworth did seem to have trouble with staying in the same accent.  Not that I'm sure what a Nantucket whaler from the 1800's should have sounded like, but his accent did seem to wander.  Did the voice coach give up?  Is Chris too big a star to correct?

The major one:  For a big budget movie with a famous director and star, it did have some really serious issues with the uneven quality of the special effects.   The land based look of the film is very fine - the recreation of Nantucket looks authentic.  But at sea, it is sometimes a very different matter.  As my son said during one of the worst looking sequences (when the ship first runs into bad weather), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End  looked more convincing, even in fantasy like conditions. (I still feel that that movie is seriously underrated, by the way.)

Then there are later sequences where some shots look fine, but they are intercut with other shots which have the glow-y fake look that I've complained about in the Lord of the Rings movies and the Star Wars prequels.  The inter-cutting of variable quality shots in the one sequence makes it look very obvious, if you ask me.  

I would guess that two different effects companies worked on the shots which were then spliced together, and somehow they never got the "look" to match.  If I were Ron Howard, I would be rather upset about this.

Or am I imagining it all?  I doubt it.

Anyway, I don't want to put anyone off watching it for these reasons.   Because, well, the life of the seamen in those days was ridiculously tough, and the history of whaling from Nantucket is very fascinating.

To get a good summary, here's a lengthy article in The Smithsonian by the author of the book (Nathaniel Philbrick) that the film is based on.  It's a great read.

As for an article that talks more generally about how often whales sank ships, you probably can't do better than this one at Quartz.   Here's a key section:

In fact, nearly 200 years after the Essex went down, a huge mystery still hangs over the story: Was the sperm whale that attacked the Essex actually acting out of vengeance—and are these great animals even capable of such calculated violence?

Not just the Essex

It might seem that way given that the Essex was hardly the only whaleship to be rammed by a sperm whale. Others include the Pusie Hall in 1835, the Lydia and the Two Generals in 1836, the Pocahontas in 1850, the Ann Alexander in 1851, and the Kathleen in 1902 (all except the Pusie Hall and the Pocahontas sank). Another, the Union, went down near the Azores in 1807 after running into a whale in the night. These perilous encounters with sperm whales ended abruptly after the mid-1800s, thanks in part to the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859—a substitute for whale oil—as well as to rising wages, as Derek Thompson explained in The Atlantic. Another factor was that after 1850 most new ships were built not with wood but iron, which even an 80-ton whale can’t splinter. Tellingly, the last ship that sank due to a run-in with a sperm whale, the Kathleen, had been built in 1844, and was therefore made of wood.

The mystery of Mocha Dick

However, there might have been other sperm-whale attacks than just these seven—particularly if the legend of Mocha Dick is true. The story, first recorded by newspaper editor Jeremiah Reynolds, tells of a mammoth white whale near Isla Mocha, off the Chilean coast, that was famed for assailing whaleships. (As you probably have guessed, Melville took even more of his inspiration from the Mocha Dick legend than the story of the Essex.) The whale was said to have sunk some 22 whaleships between 1810 and 1830.

And as for cannibalism at sea:  this review in The Economist of Philbrick's book indicates he talks in detail about it:

With almost voyeuristic minuteness he has found out that when a body is deprived of water, the lips shrink as if amputated, the gums blacken, the nose withers to half its length, and the skin so contracts round the eyes as to prevent blinking. He has discovered that the fat on starving bodies turns to a “translucent gelatinous substance” and that the meat such a body could yield would be of doubtful nutritional value without fat to accompany it. He can tell us too about the psychological effects of starvation, and the descent into “feral” behaviour as evidenced by Auschwitz survivors. 

On that gruesome note, I'll end.

The frightening appointments begin....

Michael Flynn, Trump’s new national security adviser, loves Russia as much as his boss does - Vox

From the article, look what Powell thinks of him:

Colin Powell wasn’t pulling punches.

“I spoke at DIA last month,” the former secretary of state wrote
in a hacked email released this summer. “Flynn got fired as head of
DIA. His replacement is a black Marine 3-star. I asked why Flynn got
fired. Abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad
management, etc. He has been and was right-wing nutty every [sic] since.”

Update:  wow, look at what CNN's reporting about the right wing social media nuttiness of Flynn's son, who works closely with Dad.

Update 2:  perhaps Flynn won't accept, because there are some real issues with his on line behaviour.  In July, the Jerusalem Post reported:

The former general– who GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump considered for his running mate, and who last week delivered a primetime speech to the Republican National Convention– was responding to accusations by the Clinton campaign that Russia was behind a hack of the Democratic National Committee, and a subsequent leak of e-mails, in order to help Trump's candidacy.

Flynn wrote that "the corrupt Democratic machine will do and say anything" to get Clinton elected. "This is a new low," he said, retweeting a message that read: "Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore."

He has since apologized for the retweet, calling it "a mistake."

Yellen speaks sense

Federal Reserve Chair Throws Cold Water On Trump's Economic Plan : The Two-Way : NPR

Let's wait for Trump to release his flying monkeys onto her.

A curious line

A curious line from the "yay for the coming break up of the EU - I don't like regulation, so I don't like it" column by Adam Creighton:

Not to mention the inflationary potential of Trump’s promised $US550 billion ($735bn) infrastructure binge financed by a huge tax cut.

Sarcasm?  With small government, libertarian-ish economists, and their fondness for Lafferism, it can be hard to tell...

About selfie deaths

Data Scientists Chart the Tragic Rise of Selfie Deaths: The team also found that the most common cause of death was falling from a height. This reflects the penchant for people taking selfies at the edge of cliffs, at the top of tall structures, and so on.

Water also accounts for a large number of deaths. And a significant number involve water and heights—things like jumping into the sea from a height and so on.

Interestingly, in India, trains feature significantly as a cause of selfie death. “This trend caters to the belief that posing on or next to train tracks with their best friend is regarded as romantic and a sign of never-ending friendship,” they say.

Another feature is the significant proportion of selfie deaths in the U.S. and Russia caused by weapons. “This might be a consequence of the open gun laws in both the countries,” the team suggests.

Because they were healthier in the first place?

Older Moms May Live Longer | TIME

Both do like labels...

The Link Between Autism and Trans Identity - The Atlantic

Sorry, still more Trump talk to consider

Megyn Kelly: Trump's lawyer threatened me, seemed OK with me getting physically hurt.

You should read it, to have an idea of the nastiness of (some) people supporting Trump.

Into the Right

Inside the Sacrifice Zone | by Nathaniel Rich | The New York Review of Books

Interesting review of a book by someone trying to understand the American Right by talking to them.

Too many things I want to copy, but I hadn't realised that Louisiana was another State that did the Lafferite thing and not have it work:

Louisiana’s governor is among the most powerful chief executives in the nation, a legacy that dates back to Huey Long’s administration, and under Governor Bobby Jindal’s dictatorship, between 2008 and 2016, the state’s prospects declined with unprecedented severity. After he reduced corporate income taxes and expanded the exemptions granted to oil and gas companies, the state’s revenue tumbled roughly $3 billion. He transferred $1.6 billion from public schools and hospitals to oil companies in the form of new tax incentives, under the
theory that the presence of oil and a robust petrochemical infrastructure were not incentives enough. (The Louisiana Legislature is not only soaked with oil and gas lobbyists—during a recent session there were seventy for 144 legislators—but many lawmakers themselves
hold industry jobs while serving in office.) Jindal fired 30,000 state employees, furloughed many others, cut education funding by nearly half, and sold off as many state-owned parking lots, farms, and hospitals as he could.

Despite these punishing cuts, he managed over the course of his administration to turn a $900 million budget surplus into a $1.6 billion deficit. National agencies downgraded the state’s
credit rating. The damage was so great that it helped to bring about one of the most unlikely election results in recent American history. Jindal’s successor is John Bel Edwards, a Democrat—the only one to hold statewide office. Edwards is vehemently pro-life and agnostic about climate change, but he is determined to hold the oil and gas industry responsible for funding their share of coastal restoration. He currently enjoys a 62.5 percent approval rating. Almost a year into his first term, however, despite several emergency measures, the state remains in arrears.

And yet I see that Louisiana just voted 58% to 38% for Trump!


Much of the book review talks about the conservative paradox - why so many people who vote Republican do so against their own interests.  The author comes up with a "deep story" that she thinks explains it best:

The deep story that Hochschild creates for the Tea Party is a parable of the white American Dream. It begins with an image of a long  line of people marching across a vast landscape. The Tea Partiers—white, older, Christian, predominantly male, many lacking college degrees—are
somewhere in the middle of the line. They trudge wearily, but with resolve, up a hill. Ahead, beyond the ridge, lies wealth, success, dignity. Far behind them the line is composed of people of color, women, immigrants, refugees. As pensions are reduced and layoffs absorbed, the line slows, then stalls.

An even greater indignity follows: people begin cutting them in line. Many are those who had long stood behind them—blacks, women, immigrants, even Syrian refugees, all now aided by the federal government. Next an even more astonishing figure jumps ahead of them: a brown pelican, the Louisiana state bird, “fluttering its long, oil-drenched wings.” Thanks to environmental protections, it is granted higher social status than, say, an oil rig worker. The pelican, writes Hochschild,

needs clean fish to eat, clean water to dive in, oil-free marshes, and protection from coastal erosion. That’s why it’s in line ahead of you. But really, it’s just an animal and you’re a human being.

Meanwhile the Tea Partiers are made to feel less than human. They find themselves reviled for their Christian morality and the “traditional” values they have been taught to honor from birth. Many speak of “sympathy fatigue,” the sense that every demographic group but theirs receives sympathy from liberals. “People think we’re not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees,” one Tea Partier tells Hochschild. “But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.”

When Hochschild tells her deep story to some of the people she’s come to know, they greet it rapturously. “You’ve read my mind,” says one. “I live your analogy,” says Mike Schaff. She concludes that they do not vote in their economic interest but in their “emotional self-interest.”
What other choice do they have?

 All very interesting...

A typical story

Wired started a recent article with this anecdote:

In mid-October I wandered into a Trump field office in Youngstown, Ohio and met Coni Kessler, a kind 75-year-old Youngstown native with penciled-on eyebrows and a Women for Trump button on her Trump 2016 t-shirt. She sat me down in a chair just beside her, and for more than an hour, explained why she detested Hillary Clinton and was ecstatic to vote for Trump this year.

Clinton, she told me, is an atheist who wears an earpiece during debates so billionaire George Soros can feed her talking points. The day Clinton collapsed into the back of her van when she was sick with pneumonia? According to Kessler, the Clintons hired a young actress to run up and give Clinton a hug for a staged photo after the collapse. Kessler also said she’d seen videos of Bill Clinton raping an underage girl but that the video had mysteriously disappeared. She wondered why no one was talking about Bill Clinton’s illegitimate, half-black son. And she said that whenever she talks negatively about Clinton online, “they”—presumably the technology overlords—shut her phone down.

At some point, I stopped Kessler to ask her where she’d gotten all these stories, stories I knew were false Clinton conspiracy theories. Her answer: “It was on my Facebook page.”

Piketty on the Trump win

We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail | Thomas Piketty | Opinion | The Guardian

I think he makes quite a bit of sense.

His views will, however, be completely rejected by a large slab of the Right because, for tribalistic reasons, they will reject that he has any point about climate change, and will reject any talk of increasing taxes as "socialism".

How is that fundamental problem with the Right to be overcome?   

Is anything else happening in the world?

Keeping up with the anti-Trumpism is pretty exhausting, but how can you resist, really?

A few random thoughts:

*  as a customer, I would not be impressed if Trump turned up in the restaurant I was eating in.  Would you trust an undocumented waiter not to take a stab at him, or turn the gas on and leave pronto?  But, it seems, he had a few well wishers at 21 Club, and given a burger there costs $36, you can just tell that this was a audience which would get this benefit from his policies:

When our meal ended, we wandered over to the front bar room. An hour later, people lined up to see Trump and his family exit. (An NBC video would show him saying “we’ll get your taxes down” as he made his way out.) Only one or two people among the dozens clapped. Many of the others were frantically snapping pictures with their smartphones. One man nearby shouted “Thank you, Donald.”

 *  What's irritating about the Trumpkins complaining about the nation wide protests is that they would have to be fooling themselves (well, they already have, but go with me here) if they were to deny that if the shoe was on the other foot - Trump had lost but with 1,000,000 + of the popular vote - the pro-Trump protests would have been full of armed wingnuts in the streets fully primed by Trump's pre-election "the system's rigged" rhetoric.     The situation would have been a thousand times scarier.

*  There is, however, due to Trump's lack of transparency re taxes, business arrangements, and exposure to foreign lending, some added legitimacy to the campaign to not just wave him into the White House.  If ever there were people with damaging disclosures to be made about Trump in any respect, now is the time to make them.

*  I've noticed quite a few tweets in #Trump by people saying in response to Megyn Kelly's "Trump bullied me" line words to the effect "Hey you started it by bullying him with that rude first question you asked."   We're not dealing with normal people here, to put it mildly:  protective of their hero getting asked a clear and direct question about his history of extreme sexism is "bullying".  Dimwits.

*  Vox has an interview with a social scientist about why social media is so bad for democracy - a favourite theme of mine - and large parts are worth reproducing here:

Jonathan Haidt

... I’m a fan of the political scientist Karen Stenner, who divides the groups on the right into three: The laissez-faire conservatives or libertarians who believe in maximum freedom, including economic freedom and small governance; the Burkean conservatives, who fear chaos, disruption, and disorder — these are many of the conservative intellectuals who have largely opposed Trump.

And then there are the authoritarians, who are people who are not necessarily racist but have a strong sense of moral order, and when they perceive that things are coming apart and that there’s a decrease in moral order, they become racist — hostile to alien groups including blacks, gay people, Mexicans, etc. This is the core audience that Trump has spoken to.

That’s not to say that most people who voted for him are authoritarians, but I think this is the core group that provides the passion that got him through the primaries...

Sean Illing

What you’re describing sounds like an expansion of the culture war. Is it your view that culture wars have subsumed all of our politics and that policies are just props in this broader battle?

Jonathan Haidt

Yes, that’s right. There are existential questions at stake, and this election has felt really apocalyptic for both sides. The right thinks the country is crashing into a void and that Trump, while crazy, is our only hope. The left thinks Trump will bring about a fascist coup, a war with China, or a betrayal of our alliances.

So there is an apocalyptic feeling here. Sacred values are at stake. There really can be no compromise between these two visions....

Ok here's the part about social media:

Jonathan Haidt

We haven’t talked about social media, but I really believe it’s one of our biggest problems. So long as we are all immersed in a constant stream of unbelievable outrages perpetrated by the other side, I don’t see how we can ever trust each other and work together again.

I don’t know what we’re going to do about social media. I’m hopeful that future generations will learn social media responsibility and somehow manage to communicate without demonizing the other side.

We have to recognize that we’re in a crisis, and that the left-right divide is probably unbridgeable. And if it is, we’ll have to give up on doing big things in Washington, and do as little as we possibly can at the national level. We’re going to have to return as much as we can to states and localities, and hope that innovative solutions spring from technology or private industry.

Polarization is here to stay for many decades, and it’s probably going to get worse, and so the question is: How do we adapt our democracy for life under intense polarization?

Sean Illing

There are some who think we’re not quite as polarized as it seems. The idea is that what often appear to be deep divisions are really just products of people living in echo chambers, and that this amplifies differences and obscures commonalities. I’m not terribly persuaded by this, but perhaps it’s worth considering.

Jonathan Haidt

There’s certainly a debate among political scientists about this, but I’m a social psychologist, so I’m not looking at people’s views about policy; I’m looking at their views about each other. And if you look at any measures of what people think about people on the other side, those have become vastly more hostile. That’s what concerns me.

In the 1960s, surveys asked people how they’d feel if their child married a Republican or an African American or a Jew, and back then some people really didn’t want their kids to marry someone of a different ethnicity, but a different political party wasn’t as big a deal. Now the opposite is true.

So I’m quite confident that there is affective polarization or emotional polarization in recent years.

Can't she even Google?

So, Judith Sloan seems to be completely unaware that Prince Albert of Monaco has a conservation foundation in his name, and has taken particular interest in recent years in ocean conservation.

Now look, that information wasn't exactly in the forefront of mind either (although I have a vague idea I had read about his conservation activism before), but at least I know to Google a topic before shooting my mouth off.

Or does she just see words about conservation and immediately go "Bahh...what rubbish"?

With the Trump election, Right wing rudeness combined with ignorance must be at some global high watermark at the moment.

Update:   tone and style is the speciality of some of the women who comment at that blog:

It's like Australia's special little 4chan for people over 65 of both sexes.

Pretty much what you would expect with a Breitbart transition team

Career civil servants should not serve in the Trump administration.

After that article was written, the big news is that Eliot Cohen, a Never Trumper who was on the Douthat side of the "should good people serve Trump, or not" argument has now changed his mind:

A topical article

Can Steve Bannon and Breitbart News Be Both Pro-Israel and Anti-Semitic? - Israel – Forward.com

Short answer:  yes.  From the article:

Breitbart News isn’t the only place where anti-Semitism and Zionism
go hand in hand. Anti-Semitic attitudes abound in Poland, for example,
even as Poland has a strong diplomatic relationship with Israel.

This duality is a central component of “Trumpism,” said Yael
Sternhell, a Tel Aviv University professor of history and American
studies. Though Trump has flip-flopped on the Middle East, he has
professed an ultra-right view of Israel that would seem to outflank even
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He also has a Jewish
son-in-law, and a daughter who converted to Judaism. At the same time,
many of Trump’s followers spout anti-Semitism.

“As long as Jews are in Israel fighting the ‘good fight’ with the
Arab world as a bastion of American ideals and values in the Middle
East, then they are very useful and admirable allies,” said Sternhell.
“Once they are home demanding a multi-cultural democracy, demanding that
the country accommodate their religion, their belief and their custom
that is a different story.”

And more:

Some on the alt-right, the emerging group of racist activists who
support Trump, oppose the close U.S.-Israel relationship as part of a
broader critique of U.S. interventionism abroad. Yet they admire Israel
as a “model for white nationalism and/or Christianism,” according to the
right-wing online encyclopedia Conservapedia. Some also see Jewish
immigration to Israel as helping their cause of a Jew-free white
America.

The coexistence of anti-Semitism and right-Wing Zionism “in Trump’s world
make sense,” said Todd Gitlin, the Columbia University sociologist and
cultural commentator in an email to the Forward.


“Anti-Semitism and right-wing Zionism are varieties of ultra
nationalism, or, to put it more pejoratively (as it deserves to be put)
tribalism. They both presume that the embattled righteous ones need to
bristle at, wall off, and punish the damned outsiders. They hate and
fear cosmopolitan mixtures. They make a fetish of purity. They have the
same soul. They rhyme.”

Yes, pretty stupid

Group of U-Va. students, faculty ‘deeply offended’ by Thomas Jefferson being quoted at school he founded - The Washington Post

Talk about playing into the hands of the Trumpian anti-political correctness overreaction.   Although, as someone in comments says, the university does have 20,000 students and "only" 469 signed the letter; so is it a case of the media playing up university level immaturity?  To an extent, probably; but there were faculty members signing too....  

Mary Beard on the Trump election

Her article about how she missed the late night drama of the Trump election is both witty and serious.  Her last paragraphs:

Trump and Trump’s policies are truly ghastly, but you have to face the fact that a very large number of people actually voted for him. What is more, resentment at “the elite” has morphed into a proud contempt for truth, expertise and knowledge – not unlike Michael Gove’s jibe at “experts” before the Brexit vote. And in the broader context of political rhetoric, the idea that he won’t be as bad as he claimed is more, rather than less, worrying. I thought that the conciliatory speech was the worst thing I had heard all evening. The idea that he could be thanking Clinton for her service to the country (“I mean that very sincerely”) and be speaking of “binding the wounds of division” – when only the day before he’d promised to impeach her and poured salt into the very wounds he was now promising to heal – beggars belief. It has nothing to do with being “gracious” (as the television pundits had it), and everything to do with words not meaning anything. It was precisely what ancient rhetorical and political theorists feared almost more than anything else: that speech might not be true, and the corrosive effect of that on popular power.

So if we have a big job in a Trump (and Brexit) world, it is not simply to limit the damage. It is also to restore the place of knowledge as necessary for the political process, and not as something that merely reeks of privilege – and to revalue the nature of rhetoric, from “Crooked Hillary” to “taking back control”. Politicians may always have lied, but at least the Greeks and Romans worried about that. We have come almost to take it for granted.

Swamp not drained - actually being replenished with filthier water

Donald Trump’s Great Bait and Switch - The New Yorker

Obama's right

I just saw a clip on the new of Obama saying regarding Trump something close to this:  "I don't think he's ideological, really.  He's more of a pragmatist, which can be a good thing.  It depends on the people he surrounds himself with.  Am I worried about his administration - of course I am."

Yes, it's Obama being generous, and assessing Trump right.  I mean it's abundantly clear, the number of times Trump contradicts himself, that he has no well thought out ideological positions.  He tells the audience what he thinks they need to hear in order to advance his own self interest. 

To take a skerrick of "looking on the bright side" on Trump*, there is a case to be made that a Cruz presidency would have been more dangerous, because you can't imagine him ever changing a position based on pragmatism winning over ideology.  He would be absolutely impervious to contrary advice.

The crucial thing with Trump, though, is that with the appointment of Bannon as adviser, and a likely cabal of ideologically driven AGW deniers/lukewarmers and economic Laffer-ites around him, there is virtually no reason to believe he will get sound advice.

* although this may end up being as fruitless an exercise as asking whether Mussolini, if he were German, would have made a better leader for pre-war Germany than Hitler.

About banking regulation

Trump Should Repeal Frank Dodd - And Replace It With Obama And Clinton's Sensible Alternative

This isn't a topic I devote time to studying, but news of soaring bank stocks due to their anticipation that they'll be less regulated under Trump should, I would have thought, make anyone with more than a goldfish memory when it comes to financial crises a tad nervous.

Tim Worstall makes a reasonable sounding suggestion here, but it involves a new tax, and what hope is there that the GOP would run with that?

Update:  I was just looking at other columns by Worstall, and noticed in comments to one in which he sites a "ridiculous EU regulation" story, it is noted that he is a UKIP supporter.   I had overlooked that before.   His credibility just took a large hit.

Wow. Filipino crazy leader more reasonable than the GOP

Philippines to ratify climate pact

The Philippines will ratify a global pact aimed at taming climate change,
President Rodrigo Duterte said Monday, reversing his opposition to the
historic United Nations agreement he previously dubbed "crazy".
In announcing the decision to sign up to the Paris Agreement, Duterte said he still
had misgivings but his cabinet members overwhelmingly disagreed with
him.

"After so much debate, the climate change (agreement), I will sign it because it was a unanimous vote except for one or two (in cabinet)," Duterte told reporters.

What's it say about the Republicans that nutty and dangerous Duterte accepts this better than they seem able to?

The Sun is cooler, but not the Earth

Record heat despite a cold sun  - RealClimate

An important post here at Real Climate, showing how the temperature is going up despite the sun being slightly cooler.

Make sure you read to the end, where you can read of the failed predictions of Australian skeptic Archibald in 2009.

Interesting conflicts

The massive conflicts of interest in Trump's business empire

Reasons I find it hard to blame Hillary Clinton for her loss

It's not that I am exactly a fan of Hillary Clinton, but I couldn't really see the aged Bernie Sanders doing well in this election either; and I don't really know why the Democrats could not come up with a third, younger alternative.   But all of this post election analysis makes me feel sorry for Clinton when people start pointing the finger at her, for the following reasons:

*  as people now realise, the vote for Trump was not huge - it just happened in the right States;  

*  when it comes down to a matter of 100,000 or so votes in 3 states, then Clinton probably can plausibly site the Comey late intervention as a key factor - it clearly did influence polls close to the election; it may well have energised the turnout for the Trump vote, and suppressed the turnout for Clinton, just enough to swing it Trump's way;

*  by election eve, the near universal media opinion that, despite the FBI situation, Clinton was going to win may also have suppressed her voter turnout just enough to swing the election, too.  Why vote if she looks a certainty anyway?

*  it's not Clinton's fault she came down with mild pneumonia, sufficient to give the Right wing conspiracists video with which to run their ridiculous "she's about to die" propaganda.  The effect of Right wing media/social media information bubble is so important to where American politics are at the moment, and no one really knows how to overcome it.

*  the "deplorables" comment was not as bad as it was made out to be when the full context is read.  It was a mistake, but I find it hard to condemn her for it, given that the true argument is really only over the exact percent of deplorables in the Trump camp.

Things you probably didn't realise about the white female vote in the US

White Female Voters Continue to Support the Republican Party - The Atlantic

The flood of post-election analysis we are seeing is turning up some interesting stuff - such as the point made in this article that no one should really be surprised that white women didn't rush to support Hillary.  The fact is, as a group, they've been leaning GOP for a while now.

An interesting bit of activist journalism here

Do You Have Information About Abortions Trump May Have Paid For? Let Us Know.

Many people read Trump's non- answer to Maureen Dowd earlier this year as strongly indicating he has paid for a girlfriend, or wife, to have an abortion.  If he has, and a huge slab of his voting base were vehement pro-lifers, I think we have a right to know whether he has or hasn't, especially in light of his policy to now assist the restriction of abortion.

I suppose his dimwit followers might just forgive him, just as they have his history of adultery and fornication.  But Democrats forgive sexual indiscretion in politicians, too.  Maybe both sides take hypocrisy on abortion more seriously?

Krugman predicts

Interesting to note that Paul Krugman warns, as he did with Brexit, that people should not expect the US economy to tank in the short term just because of the Trump election.   In the long term - yes, sure, his policies are terrible in virtually all respects. 

But it can take a while for bad decisions to fully kick in with their economic effects.

So easily swayed

What a ridiculously gullible fellow Adam Creighton proves to be.  Heaps of empathy for women too, obviously.  (It's not the first time I've noticed his empathy issues, too.)

He's most interested in the one about the 11 herbs and spices...

Donald Trump is about to learn all of America's 'deep secrets'



(I bet I didn't get to make that joke first.)

Needs more analysis

I see that Right wing sites, and conservative Catholic blogs are crowing about Trump doing well with Catholics, although the current analysis is based on exit polls which, I thought, had been shown up again as not that accurate.  Anyway, this is despite evidence from before the election that Trump was not doing well with Catholics.

The Tablet provides a little bit more perspective - pointing out that Trump did well with white Catholics:

Actually, he did as well as Romney did with the white Catholic vote - something that I hadn't realised before.

But Hispanics - still a long way to go to convince a majority of them.

The Tablet also notes in another article that, when it comes to "liberal" referenda which the Church was against, they were still nearly all passed, which suggests that the power of the conservative Catholic vote is  not what Conservative Catholics think it's cracked up to be.

So, there is this ongoing difficult question of whether this Catholic vote is coming from mere "cultural Catholics", or actively practising ones.   There is strong evidence, of course, that a small minority of even Mass attending Catholics adhere to the Church's teaching on reproductive health;  despite pockets of Conservative Catholic leadership (Cardinal Burke has announced his pleasure at Trump's win, for example), there is a pretty good case that the congregations are quite liberal.   But it is not that easy to find research which differentiates between types of Catholics.

Hence, I would be interested to see more research on this topic. 

And on a final note:  look how consistent the Jewish vote is for Democrats in that graphic above.   Jewish neighbourhoods in the States are not going to be happy at the moment.  

A more modest suggestion for some on the electoral college

So, some on the Left seem to think they have a chance of convincing the Electoral College to not vote in Trump.  Vox explains in detail why this just won't happen - well, short of Trump doing his long mooted  shooting of a person in the street, I suppose; even then, who knows?   If it was a protester, his followers would probably forgive him.

Anyway, instead of trying to convince Electoral College members to refuse to vote him in, perhaps the Left should try to convince them of something less dire, but important to transparency in government.  That is, withhold their vote in the college unless he has first disclosed his tax returns.

Still pie in the sky;  but slightly less pie in the sky than what some want now.

Quantum consciousness, revisited

Can Quantum Physics Explain Consciousness? - The Atlantic

The shock election of Trump made me miss a pretty good article here looking at a relatively new suggestion (apart from the Penrose line) about how quantum effects could work in the brain. 

Weekend Photo 2

She had a bit of a dig in the garden this morning....

Weekend photo 1

The explanation:  I was having a beer at the Pig N Whistle yesterday, and spotted Thor at the bar.  Dr Strange was also there, but I didn't get a pic.

By way of further explanation:  the Supernova nerdfest was on at the Convention Centre next door.

An important point to remember

The electoral college system means that Trump actually won by the barest of margins.  As the Washington Post explains:

A tale of two movies

The election of Trump has made talking about movies seem like unimportant trivia; but I said in my 10,000th post that I wanted to write about two I saw last weekend.  And I should try to distract myself.  So here goes:

1.  Interstellar.

Look, I admit - with Matthew McConaughey (an actor I have never liked) in the lead, there was every chance I wouldn't like it.

But I was completely unprepared for the awfulness of this movie in every respect:

a.   (and this is where the main blame has to go) The Worst Script Ever Written For What Was Meant to be Serious, Adult Science Fiction.   I can just imagine the actors saying to their agent "Christopher Nolan?  Big budget outer space adventure?  Sign me up!", and then despairing when they actually read the lines they were supposed to deliver.

The dialogue was terrible, undeliverable in an convincing fashion by any actor - but with McConaughey doing his Texas drawl turn, it was unbearable.

And look, I'm no cynic about "love talk" in movies, and emotional scenes - I'm a Spielberg fan after all, and the endings of Ghost, ET and even Shakespeare in Love  reduced me to tears;  but the whole relationship stuff in this movie just rang false from beginning to end.

b.   apart from the lines, and clunky exposition (seriously, the old pencil through folded paper explanation for a wormhole just before they are about to enter the wormwhole?  Is Nolan surrounded only by Yes men?)  the whole concept of the story was so derivative and underwhelming.  It's a cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr Who, but with none of the awe of the former and none of the emotional resonance of at least some of the Tennant episodes of the latter. 

c.  good direction?   I couldn't detect anything special.  Good visual effects?:  I was much more impressed with Gravity than anything in this.  Good music?:  it was continually invasive and preaching a seriousness that the story itself was failing to hit.

d.  Improbabilities in the story?  Well, I want to make the point that I am not really even emphasising these - I don't usually engage in hypothetical logic challenges to movies - such as why didn't they send in more probes instead of humans; and the whole "by his bootstraps" paradox of time travel.  That didn't matter to me - the movie was still bad enough on every other level that I am utterly surprised how it got any good reviews at all.

Jason Soon - didn't you make a positive comment about this movie?   It's off to the cinema re-education camp for you if you did.

2.   Dr Strange

Great fun.

As I expected, Cumberbatch and Swinton are just terrific.

I wanted to note in particular that I find Swinton almost mesmerising, at least in this type of role.  (I haven't really seen her in any lengthy part where she plays a normal woman - but as with her White Witch in the first Narnia movie, there is just something about her elocution and the features of her smooth, alabaster face that means I can't take my eyes off her for a second.) 

The script is very witty, the visuals are impressive (yes, Jason, even if Nolan first did folding cities first - he didn't do them in such an exciting fashion), and I liked how one oft-repeated effect - the portal with the residual fire sparks that would fall to the ground - was rather like how you would expect old fashioned magic to look - a bit different from the normal glowing rocks and holographic style effects.

As with Guardians of the Galaxy, parts of the movie had that retro 70's science fiction book cover palate about them, and I also liked the cleverness of the final battle being the reverse of (what I take to be) the typical ending of a Marvel movie.

The movie started very strongly in America, and around the world, although I wonder if depression at the Trump election might cause a bigger drop off in box office this week end than would otherwise happen?

And God knows, if the nation ever needed a real time bending superhero, it is now. 

In an attempt to cheer me up: rat tickling, revisited

What fun to be a rat-tickle researcher, hey?  As reported at NPR:

That's a part of the brain that processes touch, and when Ishiyama tickled the rats, it caused neurons in that region to fire. The rats also seemed to giggle hysterically, emitting rapid-fire, ultrasonic squeaks. Earlier research has shown rats naturally emit those squeaks during frisky social interaction, such as when they are playing with other rats.

Next, Ishiyama pretend-tickled the rats by moving his hand around the cage in a playful manner. Rather than withdraw, the rats sought more contact. Again, he saw the neurons in the somatosensory cortex firing, even though the rats weren't being touched. This suggested to him that anticipation of tickling could trigger the region of the brain that responds to touch — even without the physical stimulus.

Finally, Ishiyama stimulated the somatosensory cortex directly, by sending an electrical signal directly into the brain. The rats squeaked the same way, suggesting that this region really is the tickling epicenter of a rat's brain.

Actually, given that the research involved electrodes being stuck in their brains, I'm not sure if I should feel sorry for the rats.  Now I'm feeling depressed again...

Excuse me while I talk to monty, again...

Monty, has this convinced you yet that you can only talk to unpleasant fools for so long before it makes you foolish for engaging with them - at least if the engagement is on the basis that you think you have any hope of changing their minds?

Look, I know you like to see some good in everyone, and there (nearly always) is.   But when pointing out their wilful foolishness is met with mere rudeness, disdain and a repetition of tribalism, there is no point.  It is no accident that any Left leaning or even centrist commenter gave up on the site years ago. 

I could go on and do yet another summary of how the blog is deeply offensive, if not dangerous, from the top down.  But you and my handful of long time readers have heard it all before.

What prompts me to write this time is that I reckon the reaction to Trump at the place should be seen as a reason why no right minded person can in good faith engage with them further.  There is, to my mind, simply no way to usefully engage with fools who, for mere tribalist reasons, are willing to overlook the character, behaviour and proposed policies of Trump.   This is unforgivable foolishness of a magnitude I could not formerly imagine - particularly coming from anyone (as many at the blog do) who professes a Christian faith.

We know the American Right was divided over Trump, and we have to give credit to those columnists who are now likely just as gobsmacked as you and I.  But the threads of Catallaxy are full of non-serious tribalists - long fooled on climate change; gullible on economics; sexist if not misogynistic; bigoted.   They are not for turning - or engaging with - if they cannot see the danger and foolishness of Trump and his policies.

Attack them by all means in other ways - but the one on one engagement - forget it, I reckon.

A Creighton fail

Global banks back in the firing line

Adam Creighton tries here to explain an important thing US Republicans are likely to do - reform banking regulations - but I honestly think he does a really poor and jumbled job of it.  

A genuine worry

It's really quite painful watching passionate, intelligent liberals on American TV, such as Stephen Colbert, trying to process how such an offensive man as Trump could win enough support to get over the line.  (Although remember, he did not win the popular vote: especially if you take the third party vote into account, a substantial majority of those who did vote were against Trump:

Nationally, third-party candidates did relatively well in this election. With most of the ballots now counted, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson gained over 3% of the popular vote, and the Green party’s Jill Stein got 1%. Altogether, candidates who did not represent either of the two main parties got around 4.9% of the popular vote (in 2012, third-party candidates only managed 1.7%, and in 2008, 1.4%).

It’s easy to see why people point the finger at third-party votes. In Michigan, where the election was so close that the Associated Press still hasn’t called the result, Trump is ahead by about 12,000 votes. That’s significantly less than the 242,867 votes that went to third-party candidates in Michigan. It’s a similar story elsewhere: third-party candidates won more total votes than the Trump’s margin of victory in Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida. Without those states, Trump would not have won the presidency.)

Anyway, I was watching this lengthy clip from Colbert's first post election show, and its clear he is emotionally upset about it all.  While there are many laughs to be had (I particularly like God's cameo near the end), watching it made me feel more anxious and depressed in sympathy with Colbert, even if, by confirming that the whole of the country hasn't gone nuts, it shouldn't:

I'm not the only one who blames Fox News

Simon Wren-Lewis writes:

mainly macro: Trump: Misleading the People: 

The story is in fact told better than I ever could by Bruce Bartlett, who worked in the Reagan White House and for George HW Bush, so I’ll just summarise it here. The story starts under Reagan, who provided pressure to withdraw the Fairness Doctrine, which was similar to what keeps UK broadcasters from being partisan. Initially that allowed the rise of talk radio, and then Fox News. Gradually being partisan at Fox meant misinforming its viewers, such that Fox viewers are clearly less well informed than viewers of other news providers. One analysis suggested over half of the facts stated on Fox are untrue: UK readers may well remember them reporting that Birmingham was a no-go area for non-Muslims.

But why is this causal, rather than simply being a mirror on the rightward drift of the Republican base? The first point is that there is clear evidence that watching Fox news is more likely to make you vote Republican. The second is that, like the tabloids in the UK, this propaganda machine can turn on party leaders and keep them from moving left. The third is that it is also a machine for keeping the base angry and fired up and believing that nothing could be worse than voting for a Democrat. It is Fox News that stops Republican voters seeing that they are voting for a demagogue, conceals that he lies openly all the time, incites hatred against other religions and ethnic groups, and makes its viewers believe that Clinton deserves to be locked up. Just as UKIP (and perhaps now the Conservative party) is the political wing of the tabloids, so Trump is a creature of Fox news.

Also worth remembering...

....don't bother, they're heeeeere

I knew a columnist would soon enough write along the lines of "if, like an arrogant teenager, the American GOP voting public thinks they know what's best, sometimes it's better to let them learn for themselves that they don't."  And here is that column from the Washington Post.

Of course, the thing that freaks out parents, half of Americans, and about 80% of the rest of the globe, is how much grief said teenager will cause everyone  in the process.

For a solid dose of pessimism, of course we can drop in on Andrew Sullivan, whose column "The Republic Repeals Itself" is as depressed as you would expect, but even he points out the obvious:

The only sliver of hope is that his promises cannot be kept. He cannot bring millions of jobs back if he triggers a trade war. He cannot build a massive new wall across the entire southern border and get Mexico to pay for it. He cannot deport millions of illegal immigrants, without massive new funding from Congress and major civil unrest. He cannot “destroy ISIS”; his very election will empower it in ways its leaders could not possibly have hoped for. He cannot both cut taxes on the rich, fund a massive new infrastructure program, boost military spending, protect entitlements, and not tip the U.S. into levels of debt even Paul Krugman might blanch at. At some point, a few timid souls in the GOP may mention the concepts of individual liberty or due process or small government or balanced budgets. At some point even his supporters may worry or balk, and his support may fade.

Actually, given that you can never tell what a bullshit artist like Trump is really thinking, and that the reality of the difficulty of governing is about to hit him like a bus (I thought he even had a look of worry on his face in his victory speech - his Ritchie Rich son* looked definitely regretful), I fully expect disappointment amongst his supporters to start building very quickly.   This is usually the case with politicians who are light on policy, but big on "hope and change".  (Yes, OK, Obama pretty much fitted that category, but did manage to be a competent and a good president.  But he was, at least, a politician who knew the ropes.   There is obviously no real reason to expect that the Hollywood scenario of an accidental president turning out to be great in the role and beloved of the people could happen with this buffoon.)

Perhaps the biggest worry, apart from Generals having to wrestle the nuclear codes out of his tiny fingers when an Islamic President mean-tweets him, is the likely clownish quality of the advisers and administrators he surrounds himself with.   But, I guess, as with Boris Johnson in the UK, give clowns actual responsibility and at least some of them have to change their rhetoric fast.  

And at the end of the day (gee, how am I managing to be quasi optimistic?) what everyone has to keep reminding themselves - both the doomsayers and the gloaters - is that in terms of popular vote, pretty much exactly half of the country rejected Trump.    Which doesn't seem to me to say much for fool Scott Adams - if being a "master persuader" means just influencing the small percent of the voting public that ever moves from one side to the other, it doesn't seem to be such an awe inspiring thing at all.  (Oh, and Scott, your young girlfriend is going to dump you soon enough, and you can go back to the comfort of your money and 4chan pals.)

* Didn't Trump indicate he would be in charge of cyber-security in his administration?
 

Sounds about right

There’s no way around it: Donald Trump is going to be a disaster for the planet - Vox

The article does, in fact, contain a note of (highly qualified) optimism at the end.

The truth is, Democrats have absolutely no reason for holding back on calling out all politicians (and their followers) who deny AGW as absolute gullible fools being led up the path to destruction by a mere handful of contrarians.  I mean, Clinton tried the tactic this election of "not scaring the horses" by not mentioning it, and look how that panned out.  

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft...

I'm too scared to look over at the threads at Catallaxy - they'll be so high on the red cordial they won't come down for a month.   Of course, they'll own whatever the hell happens under what (I presume) is going to be a Trump presidency.  (You would have thought the dire Prime Ministership of Tony Abbott would have taught them a lesson in being careful what you wish for - and Trump is a bull in a china shop several orders of magnitude larger than Tone.)

Anyhow, there is still the possibility that Trump will not make it to the Presidency.  First, the count is not finished, but hardly anyone is expecting the rest to go well for Hillary.  If he does win, Mexico may invade Washington successfully just to replace him, and all other nations would cheer them on.  Or perhaps Trump will announce he will not take up the job if he'll just get an Emmy for The Apprentice.   The Academy would give him a whole two hour show if he was serious.

And any aliens watching the planet for the last 50 years will no doubt feel this is the right time to intervene.  I would welcome our new overlords as being more predictable than Trump and his nutty, dangerous advisers.

Will they ever learn?

Some good advice to Republicans in Congress from Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post:

Tuesday evening (we hope) we will have a definitive president-elect, most likely Hillary Clinton. Republicans, especially members of Congress, should take a deep breath. Their Clinton derangement syndrome, only partially justified by her ethical malfeasance, has gotten out of control, blinding even the most thoughtful Republicans. Republican activists and party leaders will have plenty to answer for after the Donald Trump campaign ends. So, if I may suggest, Republicans should zip it for a while.

If Clinton wins Tuesday, the GOP would have lost a third presidential election in a row, this one in large part because of their hate-filled, irrational and extreme rhetoric and aversion to reality. They may well lose the Senate majority as well. Frankly, millions of Americans, including frustrated Republicans (whether they grudgingly voted for Trump or abandoned the GOP to vote for Clinton or a third party), don’t really want to hear Republican blather on about impeachment. They don’t want lectures from nativists and fabulists such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity about, well, anything. They don’t want to hear that the GOP is now on a search-and-destroy mission to make certain we have a failed president.

Here’s a novel approach: Root for the president’s success, even if it is Hillary Clinton. We are a country at war and with deep problems; wishing her failure means wishing our country and free people misfortune. Extend her the benefit of the doubt. Look for areas of agreement. Don’t dictate the terms of debate. Keep a civil tongue. Tell their own rabble-rousers to pipe down for just a few months.

Yes, when you think back over it, did they learn nothing from the failure of their pursuit of Bill Clinton over his (rather sordid) sex life?   Or from watching the Obama birthers fail?   Both of these targets are now in overall good standing with the American public (if you ignore conspiracy nutters, at least), yet you get the feeling many Republicans will happily try to pursue Hillary Clinton over matters which are, again, essentially nothing to do with good governance.  

Election prediction

I've been playing with the Washington Post electoral college "do it yourself" map, and my guess on the election outcome would be either 308 or 323 to Clinton, depending on North Carolina.  As Monty seems to be predicting 307 to Clinton, I'll take the high road and go for 323.

Update:   Well, I got the last election right!

America - where witchcraft still matters to politics

If ever there was a "jumps the shark" moment in this election campaign, it was last weekend when the Washington Post felt it had to address the absurdity of Right wing culture warrior hero Drudge promoting the idea that Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman goes to occult dinners to drink blood and other unmentionables.    Tweets from concerned Americans (concerned about "spirit cooking") remain a sight to behold:

Yes, America - the nation that put men on the Moon - still has a significant block of people worried that witches could take over the White House.   Is there any Western nation with that level of contradiction? 

As it happens, I had been going to post about witches and politics for another reason.   Before Halloween, I was reading this good article from last year about two books looking again at the Salem witch hunt, and it put me in mind of Trump's campaign against Hillary because of one of the theories about how Salem could have happened:

In Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1974)—now considered a classic of interpretive social history—Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum uncovered a long-standing fissure inside the Salem community that closely aligned with opposing sides in the trials. The accused came largely from the families of well-off, market-minded, centrally positioned farmers and merchants, their accusers from poorer, tradition-bound folk living in the town’s interior. The trials, then, can be seen as a backlash phenomenon, a struggle to ward off deep-rooted social change—nothing less, in fact, than the onset of modern capitalism and the values it advanced.

Substitute "globalisation" for "modern capitalism", and you have a strong parallel to why the simple minded, "blue collar billionaire's" followers are prepared to treat Hillary like a witch, with many of them now also believing it of her literally. 

The best of anti-Trump

Over the last week, before the Clinton polling losses appeared to stabilise, there was a lot of passionate, if not panicky, anti-Trump writing to be found.  Here are three pieces I liked:

*  Andrew Sullivan (not my favourite writer, generally speaking) did do a good job at calling Trump out as an awful and dangerous proto-fascist, as I think more in the media should be prepared to say.  Have a read of this:

This is what we now know. Donald Trump is the first candidate for president who seems to have little understanding of or reverence for constitutional democracy and presents himself as a future strongman. This begins with his character — if that word could possibly be ascribed to his disturbed, unstable, and uncontrollable psyche. He has revealed himself incapable of treating other people as anything but instruments to his will. He seems to have no close friends, because he can tolerate no equals. He never appears to laugh, because that would cede a recognition to another’s fleeting power over him. He treats his wives and his children as mere extensions of his power, and those who have resisted the patriarch have been exiled, humiliated, or bought off.

His relationship to men — from his school days to the primary campaign — is rooted entirely in dominance and mastery, through bullying, intimidation, and, if necessary, humiliation. His relationship to women is entirely a function of his relationship to men: Women are solely a means to demonstrate his superiority in the alpha-male struggle. Women are to be pursued, captured, used, assaulted, or merely displayed to other men as an indication of his superiority. His response to any difficult relationship is to end it, usually by firing or humiliating or ruining someone. His core, motivating idea is the punishment or mockery of the weak and reverence for the strong. He cannot apologize or accept responsibility for failure. He has long treated the truth as entirely instrumental to his momentary personal interests. Setbacks of any kind can only be assuaged by vindictive, manic revenge.

He has no concept of a non-zero-sum engagement, in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he is psychically at peace. (This is one reason why he cannot understand the entire idea of free trade or, indeed, NATO, or the separation of powers.) In any conflict, he cannot ever back down; he must continue to up the ante until the danger to everyone around him is so great as to demand their surrender. From his feckless business deals and billion-dollar debts to his utter indifference to the damage he has done to those institutions unfortunate enough to engage him, he has shown no concern for the interests of other human beings. Just ask the countless people he has casually fired, or the political party he has effectively destroyed. He has violated and eroded the core norms that make liberal democracy possible — because such norms were designed precisely to guard against the kind of tyrannical impulses and pathological narcissism he personifies.

Wow, hey?   Vicious but, I think, very accurate.

*  Adam Gopnik:  always a great writer, follows a very similar path:

The truth is that Trump’s “positions” on specific issues are more or less a matter of chance and whim and impulse (Of course women should be punished for having abortions! Ten minutes later: no, they shouldn’t) while his actual ideology, the song he sings every day, the one those listeners and followers gleefully vibrate to, is one anthem, and it is the sound of the authoritarian and anti-democratic impulses Americans have rejected since the founding of this country. Call them what you will—populist authoritarianism or extreme-right-wing ethno-nationalism—the active agents within a Trump speech and energizing a Trump rally are always the same: the worship of power in its most brutal and authoritarian forms (thus his admiration for Vladimir Putin and for the Chinese Communists who assaulted the protesters at Tiananmen Square); the reduction of all relations to dominance contests; the contempt for rational argument; the perpetual unashamed storm of lies; the appeal to hysterically exaggerated fears of outsiders; and, above all, the relentless sense of ethnic grievance that can be remedied only by acts of annihilating revenge. His is the ideology not of democratic patriotism but of a narrow nationalism alone—the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. He will “level the playing field” with the terrorist spectre of ISIS by forcing soldiers to commit war crimes; he will not merely kill our enemies but annihilate their families. His platform is resentment and his program is revenge, and that is an ideology with many faces and one name. This is fascism with an American face.

*   And, at a more technical level, the detailed explanation by Matthew Yglesais of the Clinton email issue, the low level security risk of which the media has never really tried to properly explain, is really good.  It starts:

Because Clinton herself apologized for it and because it does not appear to be in any way important, Clinton allies, surrogates, and co-partisans have largely not familiarized themselves with the details of the matter, instead saying vaguely that it was an error of judgment and she apologized and America has bigger fish to fry.

This has had the effect of further inscribing and reinscribing the notion that Clinton did something wrong, meaning that every bit of micro-news that puts the scandal back on cable amounts to reminding people of something bad that Clinton did. In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.

This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.

Yes, this is the .....

Or, for the non English reader:

I think this justifies a little introspective.

Why do I do this?  Obviously, back when I started this in 2005, it seemed that blogging could be an important and entertaining aspect of the internet landscape, but that hope has all but gone, with most people moving into the short sugar hit of Twitter to get an opinion out with minimal effort or analysis, or diverting into Facebook if they want to spend all day talking about themselves.   All a bit of a pity, I reckon.

I've long since moved into treating the blog as a sort of open diary of thoughts and events, but one that avoids oversharing with respect to my own family and circumstances - I don't see great dignity in that.   If anyone out there wants to follow what I'm interested in, that's fine;  but it's not as if I'm really trying to satisfy anyone but myself.    (And a good thing too, given my very modest long term hit-rate!)

It also serves a useful function as a list of handy bookmarks that is always accessible; and for noting things I may want to find again in future, such as the odd recipe I like.   

And here's the thing - I never know whether I should say this here, but I can pick any old archive page on this blog, and nearly always be pleased with what I find.   The range of topics covered; reviewing the ways in which my opinion has subtly changed over the years; predictions that turned out very accurate (see Rudd, K, amongst others); reminders of trips taken; the odd good photo; and finding links to stories and articles that I still find interesting, esoteric and/or well written -  I think (he says immodestly) this is a great little corner of the internet.  And I find I want to keep recording opinions and material on it, in the way I have for 11 years now.

As for its utility, apart from pleasing its author, I do have vague hopes that sometimes I may link to something hard to find that some Googling reader finds very useful and important.  I also wonder whether my kids (and wife) will find it interesting to read in future, either in my declining years or after I'm gone.  At the moment, they know about it, but rarely care to read it.  (Do writers' families ever spend much time reading the writer's work?)  While I will always want to avoid Facebook style disclosure, I hope they find some of my personality, and love for them, to be discernable in a future reading.

And so, onwards with the blog.   I saw both Interstellar and Dr Strange on the weekend - I really want to write about them! 

Friday American follies

I'm pretty busy, but a few things to observe:

*  The Christian Science Monitor notes that not only Kansas has been playing with Laffer-ite tax cutting experiments, but so have Wisconsin and North Carolina:

But with a deadlocked Congress barely able to pass a budget, let alone rewrite the tax code, Republican-led states such as Wisconsin, Kansas, and North Carolina have taken the lead – all sharply reducing taxes on individuals and businesses in pursuit of growth and jobs.
The results have ranged from poor to middling, suggesting that the most oft-cited success story – Texas – is more the result of the state’s energy economy than its fiscal policy.

As I have repeatedly noted, the Kansas experiment has had terrible outcomes,  but even in Wisconsin the policy has been at the cost of the education sector.   Seems a long term losing proposition to me...

*  The Guardian ran an article about concerns in America that cannabis legalisation is leading to corporate "Big Marijuana" that will push use just as recklessly as Big Tobacco.   My position - yes, it's hard to see how the American system of light regulation of this product will not lead to an unwanted increase in use by younger people, with long term detrimental consequences for educational outcomes and the economy.  Americans have this way of swinging from one extreme to another - the overly punitive drug laws were bad in their own way, too, for people simply using and not trading.  But legalisation with limited input into what's sold is an unnecessary extreme in the other direction. 

*  Just how depressed should one be at the state of America when Trump can even stand a chance of being elected?   One is tempted to despair at the gullibility of humans, but I guess the modern atheist would say it has always been thus.   Given the long history of bad ideas that people have proved capable of believing, I'm not sure that you can argue that they are dumber than they used to be, despite how obvious a conclusion that sometimes appears.   I still think the current blame ultimately has to come down to the awful, propaganda enabling effect of Right wing media and the information bubble it creates; and to a large extent, you have to blame Rupert Murdoch for his morally bankrupt willingnessly to make money this way.   People may not be fools, but their gullibility at the hands of information manipulators can certainly make them act very foolishly indeed.

 

Epidemics where you don't expect them

Official: Fourth-largest city in Russia has HIV epidemic

This Russian city has a population of 1.5 million (which means, I guess, that Russian cities must be pretty small on average, if it's the fourth largest) and has 1.8% of its population with HIV.  It's to do with drugs and (heterosexual) sex:

While the majority of new infections are acquired through intravenous
drug use, heterosexual sex is rising as a source of transmission and
accounts for just over 40 percent of new cases.

HIV infections in Russia are concentrated in large manufacturing
cities in southern Siberia and along drug trafficking routes that begin
in Central Asia and extend to Europe. Russia's Sverdlovsk Region, of
which Yekaterinburg is the capital, is the region most heavily infected
with HIV in Russia, according to Savinova.

Cease all time travelling now!

The US election has been reminding me lately about the classic Ray Bradbury time travel short story "A Sound of Thunder," wherein a time traveller inadvertently (by treading on a butterfly while dinosaur hunting) causes the world's time line to swap to a tyrant being elected.

I think this is a semi-plausible explanation of how a dangerously ignorant, conspiracy mongering doofus with the worst child-like personality traits can be edging close to becoming President.*

I'm not sure which organisation may be conducting time travel experiments at the moment (I wouldn't put it past CERN at the LHC, though), but they have to call a halt till after the election.



* I still don't believe he will win, though.  I would still put that at "high confidence," too.

PS:  I did Google to see if anyone else has been drawing a connection between this short story and this election - surprisingly, there seems to not be many, but there was one link to a person who wrote about this in August.   It's really hard these days to be the first with an idea!

Questioning "broken windows" policing

How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born, And Went Terribly Wrong : NPR

The consensus seems to be that it probably did contribute somewhat to less crime, but not as much as early proponents claimed it did.   I hadn't heard of this research before

In Chicago, the researchers Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush analyzed what makes people perceive social disorder. They found that if two neighborhoods had exactly the same amount of graffiti and litter and loitering, people saw more disorder, more broken windows, in neighborhoods with more African-Americans.

Hardly surprising

Hostility toward women is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support - Vox

You see in the Australian blogosphere, too.

Fair warning

There will soon be reason to dance in the streets, and/or shower me with money and thanks.  {Pay attention to the money part, in particular, kind readers.*}

I've noticed that I am getting very close to making my 10,000th published post....

*  I would like to think that a bit of information, from somewhere on this blog, that someone has been led to by Google has, for some reason, proved to be very useful and important to that person, somehow.  No one has ever left a comment to that effect, but who knows.  Of course, it might also take another 10,000 years for that to happen, too....

A click too far

It's remarkable how making just one extra click can dissuade me from checking in on the details of what Andrew Bolt, or Tim Blair, are complaining or writing about.

Since News Ltd (or News Corp, or whatever - I keep forgetting what it exactly is now) changed their blogs so that you just got a headline and one sentence, I find I just usually can't be bothered clicking further to read more.   I mean, I've disagreed with them about 8 times out of 10 (9.8 times out of 10 if we're talking Bolt alone) on most issues over many years now, and particularly dislike the puffed up, multi-media, Fox News lite act that Andrew Bolt has become, but at least I used to be able to get annoyed with them with just one click from my blog.  Now I can't, and I can't be bothered with the further click to confirm my annoyance.

I would be very surprised if their click rate hasn't tanked, as I've noticed some at Catallaxy saying a similar thing. 

This'll set off the Latin mass Catholics

In Show Of Unity, Pope Francis Marks 500th Anniversary Of Protestant Reformation : The Two-Way : NPR

Sargent gets it

Greg Sargent, in the Washington Post, ends a post about the ridiculous and offensive (to reasonable people) way Trump is trying to play the latest email news with this:

...it’s remarkable that at this point, the political world just shrugs when one of the two major party nominees suggests that there is no legitimate way that our institutions can clear his political opponent of criminality. Either she is a criminal, or the FBI is corrupt to its core. That’s Trump’s actual argument, and it sometimes seems as if barely anyone raises an eyebrow anymore when he makes it.

As many have observed, Trump has broken the media's outrage meter by the relentless weight of outrageous statements.