The Turnbull problem

I'm not impressed by the Turnbull performance in Parliament yesterday:  I didn't care for the theatrical personal attacks by Keating;  I don't care for them in politics generally.  Attack ideas passionately, not personalities.  And, to my mind, seeing backbenchers getting thrilled by vitriol makes them look childish more than anything else.

I'm persuaded by Peter Martin's take on Turnbull - instead of pulling the Right into line in his party, he's trying to placate them.  I don't think it's going to end well.   

I don't care for Shorten as a performance politician much either, but I think Labor remains sounder policy wise, for the moment.

A bit nutty, Jason

Jason Soon keeps noting things said by Nassim Taleb, including re-tweeting extracts of an interview with him that have appeared at Zerohedge.

As far as I can tell, he has a general reputation of being a bit of a loudmouth quasi-contrarian, but with some basic credibility behind him.   He seems, for example, to be on the right side of climate change, arguing that the potential for disastrous temperature rise really means that action should be taken, and those to the contrary bear the burden of proving their do-nothing position.

And on economics, I have the feeling he might be more or less right (if you ignore the personal sledging of Obama) that the economic problems are not really solved:  

Oh, absolutely! The last crisis [2008] hasn’t ended yet because they just delayed it. [Barack] Obama is an actor. He looks good, he raises good children, he is respectable. But he didn’t fix the economic system, he put novocaine [local anaesthetic] in the system. He delayed the problem by working with the bankers whom he should have prosecuted. And now we have double the deficit, adjusted for GDP, to create six million jobs, with a massive debt and the system isn’t cured. We retained zero interest rates, and that hasn’t helped. Basically we shifted the problem from the private corporates to the government in the U.S. So, the system remains very fragile.

So, he worries about "massive debt".   But things start looking wonky in the second part, when he is asked how the Trump administration can address this:

Of course. The whole mandate he got was because he understood the economic problems. People don’t realise that Obama created inequalities when he distorted the system. You can only get rich if you have assets. What Trump is doing is put some kind of business sense in the system. You don’t have to be a genius to see what’s wrong. Instead of Trump being elected, if you went to the local souk [bazaar] in Aleppo and brought one of the retail shop owners, he would do the same thing Trump is doing. Like making a call to Boeing and asking why are we paying so much.

OK, he's stop making any sense. So, Taleb is giving Trump for being a non-expert who talks at a level people can understand.   The problem is - he's ignoring Trump's actual, and plain to see, ignorance on a swathe of economic and other problems, and on those matters where you can tell his general direction, Trump's approach (lower taxes, big infrastructure spend, Mexican wall, the EPA) is only going to make  matters Taleb complains about ("massive debt", climate change) worse.  Not to mention that the path Trump is taking is to decrease banking regulation - no sense of a banker punishment there;  quite the opposite.

As for Trump putting "business sense" into the system - Trump proudly pays no tax and brags about using debt to his advantage, and the string of litigation against his business conduct is embarrassing.

So yeah, sorry, but I have trouble taking Taleb seriously. 

A President for thugs

"Ha ha ha" they laughed. 

President Donald Trump appeared to quip Tuesday that he would “destroy” the career of a state senator in Texas who introduced legislation that a county sheriff doesn’t like.
Rockwall County Sheriff Harold Eavenson complained about the sheriff to Trump during a meeting on Tuesday in the White House with sheriffs from around the country. Eavenson will likely be the next president of the National Sheriff’s Association, according to The Dallas Morning News.
“A state senator in Texas was talking about introducing legislation to require conviction before we could receive that forfeiture money” from drug traffickers, Eavenson said.
“Can you believe that?” Trump replied.
Eavenson continued: “I told him that the cartel would build a monument to him in Mexico if he could get that legislation passed.”
“Who is the state senator?” Trump then asked. “Do you want to give his name?”
Eavenson shrugged.
“We’ll destroy his career,” Trump said as people around him laughed.

That trolley, revisited

John Horgan has been writing some posts about philosophy over at Scientific American, and they make for some interesting and amusing reading.   I'll just note this as an example:

Post-post-postscript: In “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” Peter Singer uses a variation of the trolley problem to guilt New York Times readers into donating more to the poor. He asks us to imagine a man, Bob, watching a train bearing down on a child. Bob can pull a switch that diverts the train onto another track, but then the train will destroy Bob’s Bugatti sports car. Any sane person, Singer writes, knows that it would be "gravely wrong" for Bob not to pull the switch and save the child. It is equally wrong, he asserts, for us to spend on stuff we don’t really need rather than donating to groups that can save the lives of poor children. I was relieved when the Times published a letter that pointed out a kink in Singer’s reasoning. According to a strict utilitarian analysis, Bob should let the train kill the child, because he could then sell the Bugatti and donate the proceeds to a charity that would save lots of children.

A detailed take down of Matt Ridley

Yesterday I noted Matt Ridley's hyperventilating article that appeared in The Times (and was re-printed in The Australian).

Today I'm happy to link to a very detailed rebuttal of it by Bob Ward in a letter he sent to The Times.

Again, the people who should read it won't.

As for John Bates, he has given another interview in which he says he wasn't accusing Karl of fraud.

What's not yet clear is whether he has any problem with David Rose, Delingpole (a clown), Watts up With That and scores of other wingnut outlets reporting on his complaint as if it is a clear allegation of fraud.  

I strongly suspect Bates might have voted Trump - he has that carefree attitude to truth about him that indicates as much.

Update:   predictably, all the gullible Right wing columnists (Chris Kenny, Miranda Devine, Andrew Bolt) gobble up Ridley and Rose uncritically.   All so easily conned and fooled...

Motivated reasoning and the dishonest and foolish

The latest kerfuffle that climate change deniers and lukewarmers have come up with regarding climate change is the story of John Bates, recently retired from NOAA, who obviously has a grudge against those in the organisation who didn't follow his data preservation protocol before publishing their 2015 paper.

I think Rabbet Run has probably boiled it down to the basics pretty well:

• Bates designed an overly complicated set of procedures for climate data archiving.
• He got upper management at NOAA to sign on because the charts looked pretty.
• There were huge delays in implementation because of software problems and more.
• The process was a huge time sink.
• But it had the virtue of making Bates the Gatekeeper.
• Others were not happy with this.
• They had science they wanted to publish so they found a way around Gatekeeper Bates.
• Gatekeeper Bates went crying to Lamar Smith.
• Trump becomes president
• Denialists need an issue and cast about.

If you read Judith Curry's blog comments about it (one of the few times it is worth going there), you will see the straight talking Nick Stokes and Mosher repeatedly explain that Bates' complaint about data is now redundant - it is all available and has been for a long time - it just wasn't available as soon as Bates thought it should be.

Stokes notes that Bates' comments go beyond this, though, and suggest that he is not above making normal denier talking points.   But he was not directly involved in the paper, and those that were have made it clear that his claims are based on (to be generous) lack of knowledge of the work on the paper.

And besides, the results have been confirmed by completely independent analysis.

So, it is truly a storm in a teacup, and Bates' willingness to run to climate change denying politicians and journalists to make his "whistleblower" claims shows that any interest he may have in public understanding of science has been completely overwhelmed by personal grudges (and, I suspect, political views).  In fact, Rabbet Run's blog now suggests a personal motive.  

Of course, David Rose has blown this up into a full blown fraud allegation, complete with use of a clearly dishonest and deceptive graph which has misled his gullible readers who will not read anything critical of Bates' claims, and the graph gets reprinted by Andrew Bolt.

(After complaint, Rose amended the wording to his graph, but not the graphic itself.  The visual effect is obviously completely misleading and of course it does not suit his propaganda purposes to change it.)

Matt Ridley has also joined in the massive beat up in, claiming (if I recall him accurately enough) that it doesn't matter if independent work has verified the NOAA finding, it's still a huuuge scandal.   [Actually, yes - it matters enormously, you twit, and it makes all the difference as to whether the argument actually changes anything about the results.  It doesn't.]*

This whole process is what is infuriating about climate change debate - so many people with "motivated reasoning" to disbelieve that climate change is real, or serious, simply are being conned by dishonest propagandists and will not investigate enough to understand how they are being connned.

I wouldn't be so annoyed about it if it weren't for the way they are trying to take the world with them down their foolish path.

And now that I have finished this, I see there is a great article covering it up at Ars Technica. 

*   Here's the actual quote from Ridley's huffing and puffing article about politics influencing climate research - truly hilarious coming from him:

Colleagues of Karl have been quick to dismiss the story, saying other data sets come to similar conclusions. This is to miss the point and exacerbate the problem. If the scientific establishment reacts to allegations of lack of transparency, behind-closed-door adjustments and premature release so as to influence politicians, by saying it does not matter because it gets the “right” result, they will find it harder to convince Trump he is wrong on things such as vaccines.

 Stupid, stupid.   As Stokes and others notes - Bates offers no evidence of Karl's thumb "being on the scale", and if those using independent methods confirm Karl's result - then that is strong evidence that Bates' claim is wrong. 
  

When blowhards agree - they're probably wrong

After some quite extraordinary numbers for alleged child abuse within the Catholic Church were discussed today at the Royal Commission, I was reminded by Twitter that this was Paul Kelly's comment when Julia Gillard first established it:

And on the other side of the political fence (well, I don't think they ever have much in common), here was Sinclair Davidson's comment that same week:

The level of anti-Catholic bigotry being displayed is simply appalling. While criminal behaviour cannot and should not be condoned, this Royal Commission has started off on the wrong foot. Even before the terms have been announced.

 Both reactions look very foolish now, but they did at the time, too.

Scepticism on Republican tax and spend

On Flipboard, I see a burst of scepticism about the deficit increasing effect of Republican "less tax, but same or more spending" plan.

Here, at CSM, there is a "business as usual" estimate that paints a bad enough picture if things stay as they are:

Before beginning the Great Fiscal Policy Debate of 2017, it helps to know where we are starting from, and what would happen if government stayed on its present course. The Congressional Budget Office measures that baseline by assuming that current law remains in place for decades to come.  Gale and Auerbach project the fiscal outlook through a different lens, what they call a “business-as-usual” baseline.

They assume that temporary tax cuts continue indefinitely and that all discretionary spending will increase with the rate of inflation, despite the budget caps that Congress first enacted in 2011 but delayed in 2013 and 2015. They also assume that spending for Medicare and Social Security continues at promised levels even after their trust funds run out of money. They assume the economy continues at close to full-employment for the entire period.

Based on these assumptions, the deficit would more than double from 2.9 percent of Gross Domestic Product to 6.1 percent by 2027. The ratio of debt to GDP, now 77 percent (twice the average of the past half-century) would approach 100 percent in a decade and top 120 percent in two decades.

Those assumptions means this:

 And there, of course, lies the problem: If spending rises to 24.1 percent of GDP by 2027 but taxes increase to only 18 percent, that leaves a troubling fiscal gap. In 2027, the annual deficit under their assumptions would nearly triple in nominal terms to $1.7 trillion and more than double as a share of GDP.

And the final point:

That’s the environment in which President Trump has proposed a tax cut that would add $7.2 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, according to Tax Policy Center estimates. The outlook developed by Bill and Alan can provide a road map to help understand the consequences of such a fiscal policy.

At Bloomberg, a prediction is made that Republicans will simply let the deficit grow:

What scares deficit hawks like Maya MacGuineas, who runs the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, is the prospect of a deal to give both Trump and Capitol Hill Republicans whatever they want. In that scenario, House Speaker Paul Ryan would get the huge tax cut he has always craved, with most benefits going to the wealthy, and would agree to take politically unpopular cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security off the table, as candidate Trump promised. Trump would get the money to bulk up the military and build lots of roads, bridges and airports.

To make Ryan's tax cuts permanent without touching the big entitlement programs that drive deficits, Republicans would have to take the axe to other domestic spending.

Robert Greenstein, president of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, spearheads opposition to reducing spending on the poor and working class. But he has substantive credibility and works with some Republicans. Last week he warned there are "mounting signs" that Republicans are planning "harsher" cuts than they have offered in recent years, slashing as much as $8 trillion of non-defense spending over a decade.

That would take domestic spending, exclusive of Social Security and Medicare, to about half the average under President Ronald Reagan. The impact would fall heavily on the poor.
That would probably antagonize too many voters, though, including some who supported Republicans in 2016. The way to avoid that political trap while giving Ryan and Trump what they want? Let the deficit grow.

And what about the mooted reform of a wide ranging border tax?   Well, Fox Business, of all places, reprints an article that says "it could be a $23.2 trillion headache". 

As spotted on Twitter

The conservative admiration for Putin is getting to a silly, nauseating, level, isn't it?   

As for the news today that everyone expects Bernardi to form his own conservative party:  yes, if it works as a way of purging at least some of the climate change denying, Islamophobic, culture worrying nitwits out of the Liberal Party so that Turnbull can actually stop policy compromising his beliefs, it would be a good thing.  I think....

Yet more quantum for you...

A couple more papers spotted on arXiv:

Can the Many-Worlds-Interpretation be probed in Psychology?

Shades of Aldous Huxley in this paper - here are some extracts to give you an idea:

So, his actual suggestion for a psychological test of the many-world:

Seems to be a good idea for a movie script, at any rate.

The second paper has, I think, more of a philosophical tone.  It's by Nicolas Gisin, a Swiss physicist with a lot of experimental and practical experience.  His paper Collapse.  What else? has the following abstract:

We present the quantum measurement problem as a serious physics problem. Serious because without a resolution, quantum theory is not complete, as it does not tell how one should - in principle - perform measurements. It is physical in the sense that the solution will bring new physics, i.e. new testable predictions, hence it is not merely a matter of interpretation of a frozen formalism. I argue that the two popular ways around the measurement problem, many-worlds and Bohmian-like mechanics, do, de facto, introduce effective collapses when "I" interact with the quantum system. Hence, surprisingly, in many-worlds and Bohmian mechanics, the "I" plays a more active role than in collapse models. Finally, I argue that either there are several kinds of stuffs out there, i.e. physical dualism, some stuff that respects the superposition principle and some that doesn't, or there are special configurations of atoms and photons where the superposition principle breaks down. Or, and this I argue is the most promising, the dynamics has to be modified, i.e. in the form of a stochastic Schrodinger equation.

 Actually, the paper itself reads better than the abstract.   Here's the section on many-worlds, which I find the most interesting part of the paper:

His point about the "many-worlds" interpretation meaning that the initial state of the universe had to have been "encoded in some infinitesimal digits of some quantum state" is not an objection that I had heard of before.

It's also not clear to me what he would think of Frank Tipler's argument that many-worlds actually supports free will - which I noted in a post last month.

So, the many-worlds idea continues to intrigue everyone.   Here's a suggestion: the election of Trump might be evidence we've accidentally slipped into a totally unexpected parallel world.  If it can happen, truly, anything can...

No restraint mothers

I really find it hard to believe that pregnant women would assume that any psychoactive drug - in this case, cannabis - is harmless to their developing fetus. 

If legalisation means increasing use by mothers, I suspect that this will be another part of a subtle, long term harm to American society that I think legalisation may be setting in progress. 

There may eventually be a push back.    But unfortunately, for America, the current exemplar of a drug and alcohol free life* is just about the worst possible advertisement for temperance since Hitler.

* starts with "T"

Across the universe

It's very hard getting one's head around the full implications of quantum entanglement, or even understanding Bell's results properly.  (And, I would add, it's not just me.  If you scroll through the quantum section of arXiv, you'll find a large number of physicist types who are still arguing about it.)

That said, at Nature News there's a report about a new experiment that backs up entanglement:

The latest effort to explore the phenomenon, to be published¹ in Physical Review Letters on 7 February, uses light emitted by stars around 600 years ago to select which measurements to make in a quantum experiment known as a Bell test. In doing so, they narrow down the point in history when, if they exist, hidden variables could have influenced the experiment.

“It’s a beautiful experiment,” says Krister Shalm, a quantum physicist at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Although few expected it to disprove quantum mechanics, such experiments “keep pushing alternative theories to be more and more contrived and ridiculous”, he says. Similar techniques could, in the future, help to protect against hackers who try to crack quantum-cryptography systems, he adds.

Here' more, with a particularly important line highlighted by me:

But they left open another loophole — one that is more subtle, and impossible to fully close, says Andrew Friedman, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and a co-author on the latest paper. Bell tests also assume that experimenters have free choice over which measurements they perform on each of the pair of photons. But some unknown effect could be influencing both the particles and what tests are performed (either by affecting choice of measurement directly, or more plausibly, by restricting the options that are available), to produce correlations that give the illusion of entanglement.

To narrow this freedom-of-choice loophole, researchers have previously put 144 kilometres between the source of entangled particles and the random-number generator that they use to pick experimental settings⁵. The distance between them means that if any unknown process influenced both set-ups, it would have to have done so at a point in time before the experiment.  But this only rules out any influences in the microseconds before: the latest paper sought to push this time back dramatically, by using light from two distant stars to determine the experimental settings for each photon. “We outsource the choice to the Universe itself,” says Friedman.

The team, led by physicist Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna, picked which properties of the entangled photons to observe depending on whether its two telescopes detected incoming light as blue or red. The colour is decided when the light is emitted, and does not change during travel. This means that if some unknown effect, rather than quantum entanglement, explains the correlation, it would have to have been set in motion at least around 600 years ago, because the closest star is 575 light-years (176 parsecs) away, says Friedman, who hopes to eventually push back this limit to billions of years ago by doing the experiment with light from more distant quasars. Their results found a level of correlation that supports ‘action at a distance’¹....

Others argue that although, fundamentally, the loophole is never closable, such experiments are valuable because new theories necessarily become more improbable and contrived, or eventually, end up assuming that everything in the Universe was determined at the time of the Big Bang — a philosophical view that most physicists reject. Reworking experiments to reduce and make better assumptions is therefore worthwhile, says Shalm.

Adventures in cluelessness

A bleat today from Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy:

It does seem to me that the shared values that have maintained our society and civilisation are fracturing. The left for reasons best understood by themselves have chosen to normalise political violence and hate.

This from the man who controls a blog abandoned for years now by any political moderate* due to the aggressive, belligerent and belittling style of attack routine in threads and increasingly present in posts.   Where sexism and demeaning comments about gays, all Muslims, women and all by a tiny handful of politicians are commonplace, and the livid hatred of the last couple of Labor PM's was continually on display by people banned from Bolt.

 * all except one, who ignores my entreaties to not deem it worthy of his occasional presence.

No wonder Donald hates Arnold

More "can you imagine the Right wing/wingnut commentary on this if it had happened under Obama"?

As noted at Axios:

Reuters has a new report on the raid in Yemen this weekend that resulted in the death of Navy SEAL William "Ryan" Owens. It includes some shocking claims from anonymous U.S. military officials:

• Trump approved the raid without proper intelligence, ground support, or contingency plans.
• The intelligence lapses caused the SEAL team to drop into a reinforced compound with a larger group of Al Qaeda soldiers than expected.
• The "brutal firefight" that killed Owens also resulted in the deaths of 15 women and children, including an 8-year old girl.

Why it matters: A leak like this is highly unusual in the military community — and especially shocking when it comes just 12 days into a new presidency. It raises questions about Trump's standing among his military leaders, as these officials have now thrown their commander-in-chief under the bus.

And as for Right wing commentary, look at Hot Air:

I’ve read the NYT, WaPo, and Reuters accounts of what happened but I can’t recall a single piece of hard evidence alleged that would suggest the White House, rather than military planners, screwed this up. 

Update:  contrast the remarkable fairness of the mainstream news blogs Slate and Vox both saying that people shouldn't rush to judgement about it being Trump's fault.   (Compared to how right wing blogs would treat Obama.)   But the fact still remains (as Vox says):  it seems pretty remarkable that someone within in the military is prepared to complain about Trump so early.  (Again, if it had been military sources leaking against Obama, we would have never heard the end of it from Republicans and their media.) 

At least it's a good sign that Trump doesn't the full support of the military.

Roubini on Trump

Seems to me that Roubini's thoughts on the longer term economic effects of Trumpism are reasonable.  I liked this part, in particular:

Trump’s actions suggest that his administration’s economic interventionism will go beyond traditional protectionism. Trump has already shown his willingness to target firms’ foreign operations with the threat of import levies, public accusations of price gouging and immigration restrictions (which make it harder to attract talent).

The Nobel laureate economist Edmund S Phelps has described Trump’s direct interference in the corporate sector as reminiscent of corporatist Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Indeed, if Barack Obama had treated the corporate sector in the way that Trump has, he would have been smeared as a communist; but for some reason when Trump does it, corporate America puts its tail between its legs.

A great description of Trump

From Slate:

To say Donald Trump is a binary thinker is to give the president of the United States too much credit for the complexity of his views. Trump is a cartoonish thinker. Terrorist Muslims are storming the gate, conniving criminal Mexicans are doing the same, inner-city Chicago is worse than Afghanistan, and it goes on and on and on. It’s a school of thought cultivated by a steady diet of Fox News with a helping of Breitbart on cheat days. Completely unaware of what he doesn’t know, and utterly uninterested in discovering it, Trump storms around saying outlandish things and padding his ongoing narrative by explaining the things everyone knows already. It’s like the class clown who didn’t do the homework got called on by the teacher and, after embarrassing himself in front of the entire class, got elected president of the whole country.

The latest glimpse into Trump’s world of cartoonish thinking comes via the Associated Press, which reported Wednesday that during the president’s phone call with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto last week, the president of the United States, joking or not, implied that perhaps he should just invade Mexico.

Send in troops! To Mexico! Why not? I’m the president! This is what presidents do and say in movies that I’ve seen. It’s a thought so ill-constructed it could be confused as the plot line of a sequel to Canadian Bacon....

You might want to brace yourself now for when Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping speak on the phone. 

An unexpected danger from a delicious food

Lychees can be dangerous.  Quite a surprise:

For more than two decades, apparently healthy children in the Indian region of Bihar suffered sudden seizures and lost consciousness. A third of them died, leaving doctors baffled. 

But a team of American and Indian scientists say they have found the cause of the mystery illness, which killed more than 100 children a year: eating too many lychees on an empty stomach.

The research, published in medical journal The Lancet, has found lychees — particularly unripe fruits — contain an amino acid that affects blood glucose levels.

That reminds me - they must not have become very cheap this year, because we hardly seem to have had any at home.  

If there was any doubt: a complete jerk

There's a remarkable account of Trump's call with Malcolm Turnbull in the Washington Post - and I am a bit puzzled as to why anyone from the White House with knowledge of the call would have confirmed to a reporter - in a lot of detail - how much of an aggro, self aggrandising jerk Trump was to poor old Malcolm.

It certainly makes it seem very much on the cards, as was reported yesterday, that Trump will change his mind on taking the Manus Island/Nauru refugee/prisoners.  

Thiel goes country shopping

Weirdo billionaire Peter Thiel loves New Zealand, I see, saying some years ago that it's the country that most aligns with his view of the future.   Which means, I guess, he really loves an economy based on dairy cows  and hobbit films, with next to no manufacturing,  and increasingly entrenched inequality due to the low taxes rich people like him have to pay.  Of course he would like the place. 

I know - on the face of it, the figures for the New Zealand economy currently looks quite OK; but I just have a hunch it's a case of too many eggs in one or two baskets.

And this guy paints a simple picture of how lowering taxes just makes inequality worse:  

VICE: Hi Tim, could anyone have predicted such a dramatic transition over the past two decades?
Tim Hazledine: I mean, which part? We were a very equal society and really prided ourselves on the living wage, or social wage, and then we hit the 1980s and went the other way. As inequality increased economists began to recommend trade-offs. The thinking was that you can reduce inequality by raising taxes. Many argued that would in turn reduce economic growth, because we would be taxing our big industries.

But that's not what happened right? Instead big earners revolted and taxes were lowered?
That's right. Cutting the tax rate was supposed to encourage really smart, energetic people to work hard. But these people basically said thank you very much, played some more golf and then went on more holidays, which didn't help at all. What the OECD study and a few others have revealed is that no, it's not even a trade-off. Not taxing to sustain economic growth is not bad for good—it's bad for bad. The countries that have higher inequality are doing poorer.

 

I have to say...

....listening to both Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison over the last 24 hours, am I the only person who is really sick of them spending so much time on attacking and blaming Bill Shorten and Labor rather than justifying and detailing the benefits of their policies? 

I didn't think much of Bill Shorten's appearance at the Press Club this week, either.

I honestly don't think it is just increasing cynicism with my age:  we genuinely have a very uninspiring and low calibre bunch of politicians nationally at the moment.

By improbable light sail to the stars

A feature at Nature News talks about a rather improbable sounding proposal to sent a small light sail to Proxima Centauri.  Even if it works, the amount of time it spends in the star system destination - 2 hours!

Lucky for me, I guess...

Study provides new evidence that exercise is not key to weight control

A Brexit consequence

Interesting article at a French news website, noting how many expat English men and women living in Europe, and previously able to enjoy reciprocal health care benefits, are now facing a very uncertain future.

I very much doubt Brexit has any chance of being a long term success.  

It has been hot...

January was hottest month on record in Sydney and Brisbane, says weather bureau

I have been meaning to post about how unpleasantly, and continuously, hot and humid it has been in Brisbane this summer, and I'm glad to see it was not just in my imagination. 

A conservative judge and a silly argument

Of course I don't spend much time contemplating the US Supreme Court and how sensible its judges sound, but I do note that an article says of Trump's appointment (Gorsuch):

In the Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor cases, which challenged the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate on religious-liberty grounds and were eventually heard by the Supreme Court, Gorsuch sided strongly with the plaintiffs.

“The opinion of the panel majority is clearly and gravely wrong—on an issue that has little to do with contraception and a great deal to do with religious liberty,” he wrote in a dissent in the Little Sisters of the Poor case. “ When a law demands that a person do something the person considers sinful, and the penalty for refusal is a large financial penalty, then the law imposes a substantial burden on that person’s free exercise of religion.”

But the Little Sisters of the Poor case was based on a contorted and silly argument:  that by the sisters signing a form that said they would not provide an employee cover that included contraception, they were morally complicit in the government then providing the cover  that would cover it.

As this article explained in detail - this was a nonsense argument.  If Gorsuch's line is taken literally, there would be a heap of things the religious could avoid.   

I agree with this explanation

David Roberts at Vox:

Trump isn’t an evil geniusAnd that’s not what matters anyway.

My theory is that authoritarian demagogues are more alike than they are different. Most of them are narcissists. They are, at root, fearful, paranoid, and tribal, which drives the macho posturing and obsession with loyalty. They have a kind of animal cunning for how to manipulate people, dominate, and accrue power.

But for the most part they aren’t evil geniuses. (One of Russian journalist Masha Gessen’s recurring themes about Putin is what a “grey, ordinary man” he is.) Indeed, evil geniuses are pretty rare — or, to put it more precisely, narcissistic, paranoid tribalists are rarely geniuses, because genius requires a certain detached perspective, an ability to step outside oneself, which is precisely what narcissists lack.

What authoritarian regimes do is blunder forward, grasping and grabbing power whenever and wherever they can, building secretive inner circles, surrounding themselves with supplicant state media, demonizing dissenting voices, and punishing enemies. They do this not because of some 12-dimensional chess analysis of the political landscape, but because that’s what narcissism and zero-sum thinking does. They are more like animals driven by instinct than chess masters driven by strategy, though of course there’s a range (with Trump being on the far blinded-by-narcissism end).

If we’re looking to understand the course an authoritarian takes through a country and its history — what’s he’s accomplished, what’s likely to happen next — the place to look is not his intent, but the institutions and norms of the country he seeks to dominate. They, not his ultimate goals and desires, are what most determine the ultimate shape and consequences of a regime.

Rich and weird

From a book review of an autobiography by the daughter of famous reviewer and socialite Kenneth Tynan:

From an early age,” Tynan writes, “I had learned to accept my parents’ aberrant behavior with a kind of voyeuristic fascination.” Recounting a variety of incidents — some intimate, often funny, frequently uncomfortable, bizarre or upsetting — Tracy contends with the bedazzlements of her parents’ world, and her awareness that it fails to deliver the basics required for her well-being. Take this account of a screening her father arranged as part of the celebration of her 21st birthday:

My father told me that our friends George and Joan Axelrod had a special birthday present for me. (George was the writer of many classic screenplays, including The Manchurian Candidate and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Joan was an interior designer.) They wanted to give it to me on the evening prior to the big bash. Their pal, Sammy Davis Jr., was in town, and they had arranged to screen his personal copy of Deep Throat, the infamous porn film that had come out the previous year in the States but was still banned in Britain.

She goes on to state that she’s never seen a porn flick at this point; she barely has managed to get it on with a mellow boyfriend called Mike, also present. The 20-person screening is introduced by Sammy Davis Jr.:

As I watched him, I could only think how incredibly small he was and wonder what kind of a person traveled around the world with a personal copy of Deep Throat. I supposed he did it to impress people like my father — and this night he had clearly succeeded...

When the lights went up, I was so embarrassed I wanted to flee. But as the daughter of Kenneth Tynan, important critic and writer and übercool purveyor of all things sexual, I felt compelled to hang around, chat with the guests, and act nonchalant, as if I’d been watching this kind of thing since I was a toddler. After profusely thanking my father, Michael and his parents quickly left. Actually, I think everyone felt a bit awkward, and as soon as they could, they too escaped.

 This was a particularly 70's "sexual revolution" kind of thing, wasn't it?   That it was a sign of alleged sophistication that you were not only not embarrassed to talk about being a private viewer of pornography, but that it was cool to share in it with a like minded, insider audience.  

I was going to say that I'm glad we're over that;  but then again, I did notice the publicity being given to 50 Shades of Grey being shown on free to air TV soon.  (Yes, no doubt, it's not quite the same as Deep Throat.)

And now I crown you: Mr Supreme Court Justice

With the New York Times reporting:

President Trump summoned his top two candidates for the Supreme Court to Washington on Tuesday as he worked to build suspense around a prime-time announcement of his choice to fill a crucial vacancy, a selection certain to touch off a bruising ideological clash that could shape his presidency and have sweeping consequences for American law.

one can only hope that it will be truly crass and weird in a Trump beauty contest/reality TV kind of way:  make both candidates wait on TV for the announcement, and one have to congratulate the other.  Maybe the winner gets a bunch of flowers.  Or a gown?  Yes:  Melania can bring out a judicial gown and cloak it around the winner. 

More authoritarian dysfunction

As I say, if you can't see the danger and dysfunction in the way Trump and Bannon are trying to run the White House, you're a complete fool.

Message to monty:  why do you continue to comment at a blog full of complete fools?   Seriously, they are too stupid and (in most cases) obnoxious to be seen with in the same room. 

China benefit from Trump

The point made here seems quite plausible, doesn't it?:

Donald Trump Is Handing China the World 

President Donald Trump wants to build up the U.S. Navy, a move that could help the United States counter China’s aggressive expansion into the Western Pacific.

But the new, bigger fleet will come too late to save America from a rising China. That’s because Trump’s other initiatives—rejecting foreign alliances, throwing up barriers to global trade and withdrawing from efforts to combat climate change—are creating a power vacuum that China naturally fills.

I wouldn't be surprised if nearly all of the world moves towards the view that they'd prefer China just to have the South China Sea islands they're building, rather than an outbreak of fighting with a man-child as President who you don't want to see contemplating use of nuclear weapons.

Questions about his mental health

This article from the Daily News:

President Trump exhibits classic signs of mental illness, including 'malignant narcissism,' shrinks say 

is not as over the top as you might think.   Its explanation of what happened with Goldwater is a bit of history I didn't know, too.

What is somewhat interesting, in a way, is the matter of who is using who in the White House at the moment.   Or does the inner circle (which seems to be a mere handful) share Trump's delusions so much that they genuinely share his alternative reality and have no concerns about it?

The psychological trick, that I've noted before, is that if you pretend something is true for long enough, you can inadvertently start to believe it.   That might be what is happening there at the moment, but who knows?  Lots of good insider books to come out in the future, at any rate...

What's it like in the White House at the moment?

I wonder how long it will take before Trump and his White House controllers will admit making a mistake?   Because it seems their "alternative fact" reality-in-their-mind is that the immigration executive order implementation went swimmingly, with the main problem being the media. 

A post at Axios, though, cites someone with inside knowledge summing up the situation realistically:

Despite the bravado, others who are high-up inside the administration worry that the ham-handed handling of the ban and its rollout are indicative of bigger problems ahead. These sources say:

• Big decisions, and edits to crucial documents, are made in the dark of night, with scant input beyond the inner circle. "There are a few guys who keep everything to themselves," said a top official.
• The insular inner circle is getting more insular, as it amasses more power.
• No force within the West Wing is a sure-fire counterweight to Bannon/Miller.
• The inner circle, resentful of leaks, seeks little input from the Cabinet, outside allies or Hill leaders. A leadership aide told us yesterday afternoon: "Congressional leaders had no hand in drafting this and haven't been briefed from the White House on how it works."
• Trump is showing no signs of WANTING order: He loves the competing views, internally and externally, allowing him to be the (usually last-minute) decider.
• The place oozes paranoia. So every bad move is simply chalked up to media-hate.

I can't see an obvious way to link to individual posts at Axios, which is a pain.

A great cover

I happened to watch Late Night with Colbert through to the end last night (the inauguration day episode, where his opening monologue was funny and heartfelt), and so caught this band (The Avett Brothers) who I see have been around for a while and have quite a following in the US.   This is,  I think, a lovely cover of the George Harrison song, and they would have to be the coolest looking folky/bluegrassy band around:

Shorter Kellyanne:

"President Trump can invent facts as much as he likes because none of the mainstream media predicted he would win.  And they're mean.  They should resign and if they don't, be sacked, and leave it up to Fox News."

Link. No absurd and quasi-despotic sense of entitlement there, at all...

Having it all ways

David Frum does seem to be trying to have a bit both ways, criticising Trump but also blaming the Left for more-or-less provoking unreasonableness.   (This is a common tactic by those of the Right who don't want to fully endorse Trump - blame the Left for being silly or nasty in their identity politics and trying to "shut down debate" on all sorts of matters.  It is an unconvincing argument that seeks to justify people being stupidly ignorant of facts and adopting policies that make no sense by saying "well, you drove them to their stupid position."  Nah, sorry.   The answer to a bad policy is a better, well argued, policy.)
 

Trump and security

A good article here by Fred Kaplan at Slate, noting that there's at least one General who hates Trump's visa ban, and that rearrangements regarding the National Security Council are being driven by personalities and make no sense.  Here's a part:

On the other hand, the director of national intelligence has been a permanent member ever since the post was created in 2005, and before then, the director of central intelligence was a member. It makes no sense for the secretaries of state, defense, treasury, and other Cabinet heads to meet in the White House with the national security adviser (and sometimes with the president) to discuss and make policy without the nation’s top intelligence officer—the coordinator of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies—being part of that discussion.

The backstory here is that Trump’s national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, has floated the idea of abolishing the DNI and having all the intel agencies report to him. It is pertinent to note that a few years ago the outgoing DNI, retired Lt. Gen. James Clapper, fired Flynn from his last job in government, as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency—a move that has since embittered Flynn against the DNI and against much of the intelligence community, which disagreed with him on a number of issues. The removal of the DNI from the Principals Committee suggests that Flynn’s broader plan may be in the works.

Another new and senseless feature of this executive order is putting the president’s political strategist onboard. Karl Rove never attended NSC meetings during George W. Bush’s presidency, as important an adviser as he was on all sorts of issues. David Axelrod sat in on some NSC meetings during Barack Obama’s tenure, though he always sat along the wall, along with a few other aides and deputies; he never sat at the table or said a word.

As the president weighs national security matters, he can mingle his own political interests and instincts with the advice of Cabinet heads and the chiefs of the military and intelligence agencies; in fact, it’s his job to do just that. But the advice of this council should be rooted in U.S. national security interests; that’s why the group is called the National Security Council. Giving the president’s political strategist a seat at this table—elevating him to the same level as the secretaries of state and defense—is bound to inject a perspective that these meetings are expressly supposed to avoid. And given the inclinations of this particular strategist, Steve Bannon, the injections may sometimes be toxic.

Not the party of Reagan

Further evidence, if you needed it, that the Republicans have veered to the Right of Reagan. 

As readers know, I was no fan of Reagan, and think he lucked out more than anything, but I would still say he had more common sense and decency than Trump.  Then again, almost anyone does...

Muslims, Christians, Trump

Here, at NPR.

I see that the Right wing media is arguing along the lines of "Hey - Obama put a halt on Iraqi visas for 6 months in 200911 and no one freaked out.  Why freak out over Trump doing something similar?"

The reasons:

*  the fact that most people had forgotten Obama's action indicates that, unlike Trump, Obama wasn't throwing it out as red meat to his base, and drumming up their fear and despising of all Muslim refugees.  What's more, he had a specific reason for his actions.  Trump, as we well know, even conflates terrorism from Muslims born in America with the risk of terrorism from refugees - a dishonest and stupid thing to to.

* Recent attacks show the issue of "self radicalised" terrorism is a real problem.   Going over the top with publicising actions readily interpreted as attacks on Islam generally is, if anything, likely to make the home grown problem worse.  From the NYT:

“In my opinion, this is just a huge mistake in terms of counterterrorism cooperation,” said Daniel Benjamin, formerly the State Department’s top counterterrorism official and now a scholar at Dartmouth. “For the life of me, I don’t see why we would want to alienate the Iraqis when they are the ground force against ISIS.”

At home as well, Mr. Benjamin said, the president’s order is likely to prove counterproductive. The jihadist threat in the United States has turned out to be largely homegrown, he said, and the order will encourage precisely the resentments and anxieties on the part of Muslims that fuel, in rare cases, support for the ideology of the Islamic State or Al Qaeda.

“It sends an unmistakable message to the American Muslim community that they are facing discrimination and isolation,” Mr. Benjamin said. That, he said, will “feed the jihadist narrative” that the United States is at war with Islam, potentially encouraging a few more Muslims to plot violence. 

For an action aimed at terrorism, the order appeared to garner little or no support among experts and former officials of every political stripe with experience in the field. Jonathan Schanzer, the vice president for research at the conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said that if the temporary visa ban was used to review and improve immigration vetting procedures, it might be justified.

But he added that he knew of no obvious problems with those procedures, and no specific plans to address such issues over the 120-day ban. “The order appears to be based mainly on a campaign promise,” he said.

Update:  the Washington Post deals with how the Obama response to the Iraqi visa issue in 2011 is completely different to Trump's pandering to his base, and refusing to help Europe with the Syrian problem.

Someone else would do it better, no doubt...

A lack of moral seriousness

Yeah, it's all just a big culture war game to the likes of Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt.

Blair writes of Trump's refugee (temporary) immigration ban:  "Leftist media will be entertaining today."   Yes, that's what really matters for a writer whose sole output is anti-Left wing snark.

Bolt gets obsessed with media calling it a Muslim ban, and gets totally on board with the claimed justification - to work out better "vetting procedures" from certain countries - while not showing any interest at all in what the current procedures are, or wondering how it could be at all possible to get perfect vetting from a war torn nation, or for people who have come (for example) via living in a tent in a desert refugee camp for the last 3 years.   He is completely in the tank for Trump on this, because it aligns with his own contemptuous disregard for refugees, despite the West's role in helping generate more globally by its attempted Middle East interventions.

Bolt is the most dishonest and disgraceful writer on immigration matters in Australia today - continually blaming government for letting in thoroughly deserving refugees (be they Muslim or not) in the event that any of them, or their children, commit a crime even years after their arrival.  Governments are supposed to be able to tell which 10 year olds will be a 17 year old thief, apparently.

Neither of them are morally serious on this, or indeed on climate change, another topic of long term consequence on which they prefer to play the short sighted fool and culture war warrior.

La La Landed

My wife and I saw this much talked about movie yesterday.

I think it's very good for 3 main reasons:

1. Emma Stone is utterly charming and fantastic and they should just send her to Oscar now and tell the other contenders there is really is no point in them coming to the ceremony.  

2. It's very pleasingly directed, and avoids, in large part, the annoying over-editing of dance sequences that has afflicted modern musicals for so long.  I only read up on director Damian Chazelle after seeing the movie - 32 years old and obviously very talented.  (He co-wrote 10 Cloverfield Lane too - quite a genre difference there!)

3.  The dancing is just right for this type of movie, in that it doesn't overwhelm with technical virtuosity in the way that Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly always seemed to be dancers trying to act (this movie is the reverse), and it shows how well non professional dancers can do if they practice enough.  I think it makes the viewer feel capable of sharing in dance, too, even if it's never attempted.

It's not a perfect film - personally, I think the final interaction between Stone and Gosling should have been more intense, and some of the music tends to the bland.  Would I have been happier with a less melancholy story?  Perhaps, but it is what it is, to quote from the recent episodes of Sherlock.

It's well worth seeing.

More leaking - like a sieve

Isn't it truly remarkable that a recording of a behind closed doors Republican meeting (dealing with the huge practical difficulties of repealing Obamacare) should be leaked to the Washington Post, so early in this administration?

There is some internal turmoil going on in that party, the extent of which will no doubt be the subject of many future books.

The last Sherlock

We watched the last Sherlock last night.

Many readers from The Guardian didn't like it.  I thought it wasn't too bad, actually.  Rather too James Bond in the settings (both the prison island, and then the house surely reminded people of Skyfall?). Thematically, it reminded me a bit of a minor Graham Greene novel too - Doctor Fischer of Geneva.

It was all very improbable all round, of course, but improbable done with good intensity and directorial flare, most of the time.   (The shot of the jump out of the Baker Street flat was very poor, though.)

I would be happy to see the show continue, actually, now that its biggest mistake - the silly story arc of Mary - is well and truly gone, as is Moriarty.

Only took a week...

I'm a bit surprised that the Trump sit down interview of a couple of days ago, in which he continued obsessing about his popularity, has not gained more immediate international attention for the worrying signs it displayed about Trump's basic psychological state.  Obviously, you don't want a guy with control of a stockpile of nuclear weapons to be one who is impervious to facts and capable of such self aggrandising obsessions.

But it's clear that a huge part of the problem is the people around him - particularly the unhealthy looking Stephen Bannon, who is obviously either behind, or completely supportive of, Trump's paranoia with how the media presents him.  Here he is, quoted by the NYT:

“The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong,” Mr. Bannon said of the election, calling it “a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there.”

“The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign,” Mr. Bannon said. “Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: they were outright activists of the Clinton campaign.” (He did not name specific reporters or editors.)

“That’s why you have no power,” Mr. Bannon added. “You were humiliated.”

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” 

“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

Yes, just what you want.  An unstable, vindictive culture warrior who won't accept that the Trump victory was, in fact, very narrow, advising a vain, insecure man-child who stumbled into a presidency he didn't really expect.

Are Republican politicians worried about Trump?  According to Carl Bernstein, some are:

Bernstein said discussions going on in Washington this week were “unlike anything I have seen in 50 years as a reporter”.

“I am hearing from Republicans, and other reporters are as well, that there is open discussion by members of the President of the United States’ own party about his emotional maturity, stability,” he said.

Are Right wing commentators in Australia commenting about this at all?   Of course not - the likes of Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair are still just concentrating on how bad Lefties are for the extremely low level of protest violence and making some nasty signs about the Pres.   God knows how they would have coped in the truly violent hothouse political and social environment of the US in the late 60's and 70's. 

I have been writing for years that, as a pretty safe rule of thumb,  if anyone remains a climate change denialist, their judgement on pretty much anything else can't be trusted.

Well, this has been supplanted by a even more reliable rule:   if a person can't see the danger in Donald Trump's behaviour and statements, he or she is just blinded by culture war foolishness and is completely unreliable on all matters requiring sound judgement. 

My suggestion for a new Australia Day date

I'm starting to think that, like 1950's Catholic CL, Sinclair Davidson is man living in the wrong era - he's a throw back to somewhere, probably pre-war England?  (Don't get me started on dover beach - he's an escapee from the 13th century.) 
I say this because the way he writes, he seems regretful about missing out on historical chances to physically be able to put the boot into Leftists; perhaps he's a re-incarnation of some upper middle class Englishman in a suit, out on the street to try to wallop unionists during the General Strike.

Not for the first time, I also find his meaning unclear.   Writing on Ian McFarlanes' opinion that we should just go and change the date we celebrate Australia Day, he says "caving in to lefty demands is always and everywhere a mistake" while simultaneously acknowledging there are some good arguments for moving it.   So good arguments should never win if they are held by "Leftists" who will be seen to be getting their way if you agree?  He probably doesn't mean that, but his clarity is, as is often the case, missing.

In any event, his silly post has encouraged me to look around at potential alternative dates for Australia Day, and there is a list at SBS of various dates that have been proposed, and their reasons.

Of course, the obvious one (1 January, when the nation became official) is out for the simple of expediency of it already being a holiday, and one with too many hangovers to do any nationalistic ceremonies.

But it has occurred to me - if Anzac Day is now considered a remembrance of the day the nation first felt all grown up, but it of itself cannot bear a further burden of celebration, why not just make the next day - April 26 - a follow up holiday where we celebrate the nation that it had become?  (I see that candy at Catallaxy has come close to that - suggesting that Anzac Day be beefed up into also being Australia Day - but I can't see that working.)

As far as I can tell, there is nothing of particular significance one way or the other to make people question the date for having a particular partisanship to one group or another  - which is the problem with going for things like changing it to the date that aboriginals got certain rights.

The benefit - we get two public holidays in a row - this alone will convince many it is a worthy change.

The only downside - it may fall too close to Easter some years.  But hey, we can handle that.

...makes it harder to believe she won't be around

The post title refers to both:

a.  the current use of a slowed down version of "Flame Trees" on a road safety ad on TV here at the moment.  I can't find a link to it, which is odd.  Are all songs capable of haunting melancholia if the tempo is slowed appropriately?   I don't know - but I think it's remarkably effective.

and 

b.  the death of Mary Tyler Moore.    I've long said her 70's show is the best long running sitcom  ever made,  both funny and endearing because of the realism of the characters.  (OK, Ted pushed the boundaries of realism, although I am sure I have read of media insiders who disagree.)   It also showed a sense of balance about how life was changing - I thought the way in which Lou Grant's wife left him, not out of anything he had done wrong, but just out of a feeling that for her own growth she needed it, was a particularly poignant example of the more-or-less unintended hurt that women's inevitable increasing independence could cause.  And Mary herself could be a bit depressed about her lack of long, deep relationships - do you remember the scene where she did a mental calculation of the huge number of "dates" she had been on since she was 17?  I wonder though - that obit from the NYT I linked to calls her character "neurotic":  I wouldn't say that, and I wonder if the obit is attracting criticism for it?

I only have the vaguest memories of her on the Dick Van Dyke show, but it was a popular in our household in the 1960's, and I do remember enjoying it. 

With the importance of her shows from a feminist perspective, it's some sort of irony that she has died at the start of a period of retro anti-feminism  under Trump and Republican dominated congress.   I'm not impressed by the crassness of some young comedians (or aging rock stars) who give the impression that  sexual promiscuity is to them to be the most important aspect of modern feminism, but I hope Moore took some encouragement from the women's marches last weekend.   (I assume she was a Democrat voter - I would be dismayed if she wasn't!)  I also hope she can come and haunt the ghastly Kellyanne Conway, whose role in Trump promotion is a betrayal to her gender, not to mention Catholicism.

Leaks and lies

Yes, it isn't surprising that there is confirmation that Trump himself pushed his press secretary to come out lying about how many people were at (or watched) the inauguration;  but what is surprising is the apparent number of White House insiders who have been leaking to the media so soon after the inauguration.

 As for the reason Trump would do this - Tyler Cowan's Bloomberg column is getting a lot of attention, and deservedly so:

By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public, with the media and with other members of the administration. That makes those individuals grow more dependent on the leader and less likely to mount independent rebellions against the structure of command. Promoting such chains of lies is a classic tactic when a leader distrusts his subordinates and expects to continue to distrust them in the future.

Another reason for promoting lying is what economists sometimes call loyalty filters. If you want to ascertain if someone is truly loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid. If they balk, then you know right away they aren’t fully with you. That too is a sign of incipient mistrust within the ruling clique, and it is part of the same worldview that leads Trump to rely so heavily on family members.

In this view, loyalty tests are especially frequent for new hires and at the beginning of new regimes, when the least is known about the propensities of subordinates. You don’t have to view President Trump as necessarily making a lot of complicated calculations, rather he may simply be replicating tactics that he found useful in his earlier business and media careers.

 But read the whole thing...

Against pill testing

Those of a libertarian bent tend to support the idea of pill testing at places where youth gather to do things like listen to doof doof  music so tedious that they must take mind altering illicit drugs in order to enjoy it for more than 10 minutes.  

Yet, as I have seen argued before, this is a position motivated more by ideology than evidence that pill testing is effective.  [I'd link to my previous post about it, if only Google wasn't so pathetic in its erratic indexing of this blog.]

The latest article explaining this was at the SMH today.   Basically, the testing is far from being very accurate, and even if does identify a substance that is safe at small doses, it can't tell what the dose is.

Sounds pretty convincing to me, even if I have an ideological position against recreational drugs generally.

Silly trivia

On the one hand, when we went through an election campaign in which Trumpkin wingnuttery was full of things like slowed down video of Clinton allegedly having seizures, and a minder who was supposed to be walking around with an injector in hand, ready to sedate her at a moment's notice, I'm inclined to cut the anti Trump side a bit of slack when it comes to their now obsessing over silly things like Melania Trump's facial expression at one point of the inauguration.

But really, to be overanalysing her, and young Barron Trump, is really below the media, including Slate, isn't it?

If he didn't hold the fate of the planet in his hands, I would agree that maybe he is worth the comedy

The double slit with a twist: an important quantum experiment?

Just browsing through arXiv, as you do when there is not much on TV, and found a paper from last week by a group of Chinese researchers which sounds very significant.  Here's the abstract:

Are quantum states real? How to think about this the most important, most fundamental and most profound question in quantum mechanics still has not been satisfactorily resolved, although its realistic interpretation seems to have been rejected by various delayed-choice experiments. The heart of the matter comes down to what can describe physical reality if wavefunctions cannot. Here, to address this long-standing issue, we present a quantum twisted double-slit experiment, in which orbital angular momentum degree-of-freedom is employed to 'mark' the double slits (mimicked by spatial light modulators). Besides providing a which-slit observation interface, by exploiting the variable arrival time ascribed to the subluminal feature of twisted photons, the behavior of a photon during its time in flight is revealed for the first time. We found that the arrival time of photons does not accord with the states obtained in measurements, but agree well with the theoretical predictions calculated from their wavefunctions during the propagation. Our results demonstrate that wavefunctions describes a realistic manner of quantum entities' existence and evolution rather than only a mathematical abstraction for only providing a probability list of measurement outcomes. This finding makes an important update in understanding the role of wavefunctions in the evolution of quantum entities, inspires a new insight on nonlocality and wave-particle duality, and reminds us there is a neglected powerful resource for quantum science needing revisit.

As is common in such papers, the introduction and (this time) even the conclusion are fairly comprehensible, and you don't have to follow the maths in between.  Here's their surprising conclusion:

The cartoon they refer to is this:

I'm guessing that there might be a dispute over their interpretation of their experiment, but we'll see.  I'd be a bit surprised if this doesn't make it into science journalism soon...
 

Inadequate Google blog searching, revisited

Why does this happen???

This morning I noted how I couldn't find a post I was sure I had made here using Google Advanced search (wherein I searched the word "tempura" in my blog site - both www.opiniondominion.blogspot.com  and www.opiniondominion.blogspot.com.au.  I also dropped the "www", in case that made a difference.  I tried other words I thought likely in the post too, such as "batter").

Nothing came up.  Nothing came up when I tried it last night, too.

Nothing came up trying Bing.

I had to resort to doing a word search in a backup copy of the entire blog (opening the .xml backup file in Notepad.)

And here it is:   the post from 2015 - a fairly lengthy post which uses "tempura" many times, even in the title, not to mention "batter".

Having found the post on the backup, I even tested Google Advanced Search by cutting and pasting the short sentence  "The history of tempura as a Japanese mainstay is interesting" and told it just to search the blog address - and still nothing.

Why does this happen??

I still see in a site counter I sometimes check, for example, that someone has visited the blog because they searched "lucky snakes", and I had a post of that title many years ago.   I can also Google (not even Advanced Google) for "ox tail opinion dominion" or similarly for "paella" and I can get the posts I made where I have recorded recipes.

So why is Google so erratically unreliable about search within a Blogger blog?   Even using Advanced Search???

I've been complaining about this for years - and I am puzzled as to why it happens.

Very witty

Following on from the lying (and pro-Life Catholic - the prime example of the disgraceful low standards of conservative Catholics in supporting Trump) Kellyanne Conway's  comments yesterday,  this has appeared on twitter:

Cleaning up the vomit story

I did enjoy this lengthy explanation of the rise of the belief that Ancient Romans would use a "vomitorium" while feasting.

Pet rat problem

Eight people who worked at several rat-breeding facilities in Illinois and Wisconsin have been infected with a virus not commonly found in the United States, federal health officials said Friday. This is the first known outbreak of Seoul virus associated with pet rats in the United States, although there have been several outbreaks in wild rats, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Seoul virus is a member of the Hantavirus family of rodent-borne viruses and is carried by wild Norway rats worldwide. Most rats infected with the virus do not appear sick.

People typically become infected when they are exposed to body fluids (blood, saliva, urine) from infected rats or are bitten by them. People can't get the virus from other people or from other types of pets, the CDC said in a news release.

Symptoms of Seoul virus infection in people include fever, severe headache, back and abdominal pain, chills, blurred vision, eye redness and rash. In rare cases, infection can lead to kidney disease. Most people infected with the virus recover, according to the CDC.

Link:  8 people infected in rare U.S. outbreak of rat virus

Update:  in defence of rats, don't forget how many people are seriously affected by cat scratch disease in the US each year:

...although it was extremely rare, each year about 12,000 people are diagnosed with cat-scratch disease, and of these, 500 require hospitalization. These incidences were highest in the U.S. southern states and in households with children aged 5 to 9. 

The lost post

I'm curious - do any of my vast number of regular readers (ha) remember a post here in the last 18 months or so in which I talked about cooking tempura for the first time?   I feel certain I posted about it - including the simple recipe I ended up following despite the many variations on the net.

Yet I can't successfully find any reference to tempura here via Google Advanced Search, blog search, or even Bing.

I tried tempura again last night, and it was not as successful - I blame not being able to find my own post about it.