Hot hot hot

I can't remember the last time it was 40 (or 41?) degrees in the part of the Brisbane where I live.  But yesterday it was hot, still, and the temperature dropped to 27 degrees overnight, making for a very unpleasant weekend.  I don't know how the people of Western Sydney, who have had a much worse run of heatwave weather than Brisbane, have been able to put up with it.  It certainly makes one disinclined to go out, at least if the airconditioning is working at home...

And heat is in the news globally.   Last week it was in the news that the Arctic has had 3 bursts of sudden winter temperature rises this northern winter, and the Washington Post analysed it this way:

Scientists believe that a number of different factors are feeding into these warming events, including the steady march of climate change and interactions between the air and Arctic sea ice, which global warming is melting a little more each year. And a good low-pressure system, like the one that barreled through this week, can help to jump-start these kinds of sudden warming events by carrying a large amount of warm air up to the North Pole all at once.

The presence of the storm itself isn’t exactly unusual, according to atmospheric physics expert Kent Moore of the University of Toronto. Each year, there are some storms that roll through the northern Atlantic. What’s uncommon is just how far north some of them have been making it lately.

“There’s these extratropical cyclones that appear to be tracking farther north than they usually do, and these low-pressure systems are bringing the heat up into the polar region,” he said. It’s unclear why this happens, he added. But when it does, temperatures can vault up above zero degrees, or in extreme cases, sometimes even above freezing.

In a recent paper published in December, Moore notes that these types of anomalous warming events have been recorded since the 1950s — but they usually only occur once or twice a decade. Scientists believe that factors related to climate change may now be making it easier for weather systems like this week’s storm to carry warm air into the Arctic.

Changes in Arctic sea ice extent are one major issue. As a result of global warming, temperatures in the Arctic are rising at about twice the global average rate, and one of the consequences is a reduction in Arctic sea ice. These changes are most obvious in the warm summer months, when sea ice is at a minimum anyway — but lately, scientists have been observing record lows for the frozen winter months as well, a time of year when the ice is actually expanding. But where it is missing, those parts of the ocean become warmer.
“As that sea ice moves northward, there’s a huge reservoir of heat over the north Atlantic,” Moore said. “As we lose the sea ice, it allows essentially this reservoir of warmth to move closer to the pole.”

I think it's fair to say that it seems that the energy from global warming is acting to stir up the atmosphere so that warm air and cold air masses are being distributed to places they normally wouldn't be.  Or wouldn't be so often...

Low score for consistency

Look, Judith Sloan - no one in their right mind treats you or Alan Moran seriously when you talk energy and renewables, because you both deny climate change is real and therefore think there is absolutely no reason a nation should be considering clean energy at all, let alone try to develop policies to encourage its growth.   All of your commentary is therefore tainted unavoidably.

But can you at least try to be a bit more consistent.  And stop with the bold shouting, while you're at it.

Today at Catallaxy (my italics, her bold):

And here’s a point that the greenies fed Barrie: there have been more peaks in wholesale electricity prices in Queensland than SA this year – therefore nothing to do with renewables.  Of course, this is just spin.

The peaks generally last a very short time and the key is average electricity prices.  Here are the figures for 2017:

But in the Australian, 19 July 2016:

It is unusual for any story related to South Australia to appear on the front page of this newspaper. But when wholesale electricity prices in that state reached more than 30 times the prices recorded in the eastern states last week, the broader interest in the issue is obvious.

To give you a feel for the figures, last Thursday at 1.45pm, the wholesale power price in South Australia was recorded at $1001 per megawatt hour, compared with prices of between $30/MWh and $32/MWh for the eastern states. At one point, the maximum price in the state hit $1400/MWh.

Not a lot of mention about average electricity prices detectable there.

Left wingers really need to be less snobbish, sometimes

I'm not really surprised by the Domino's Pizza article in the SMH today - it has been hard to believe for some time that all of the franchisees of such a cut throat priced business could make a good living out of it, and not face the strong temptation to illegally cut staff wages to make it "work".  

That said, I was sort of encouraged to see that Dominos had started to charge a Sunday surcharge, due to increased staff costs, which made me think the franchisor was at least being realistic about improving their franchisees' bottom line in the face of penalty rates that most fair minded people feel have gotten out of hand.

But it is annoying to see Bernard Keane respond with a Left wing snob comment:

One suspects he hasn't tried one since last century, and may be completely unaware of their considerably improved range and quality over the last 5 years or so.   Even their vego pizza is not bad. 

I really don't see why anyone should be a food snob about any fast food, which (if eaten once a week) does no one harm and (if the price is right) can keep everyone in a family happy. 

Why isn't gas generation subsidised, somehow?

With the argument over electricity generation going on, I make the following observations:

*  no one seems to be disputing that there would in fact have been enough electricity for South Australia to avoid load shedding last Wednesday if an additional gas generator had been turned on.  

*   The SA government and Labor politicians therefore blames the Australian Energy Market operator for not having directed Pelican Point to go fully online.   The authority (if not them, then someone) tried to blame the government for not telling it via an emergency direction to turn on the generator.  (The government responds that realising a forecast high temperature does not count as an "emergency" - and that seems more than a reasonable argument.)

*  The Federal government, up to and including Turnbull, has politicised the blackouts to an extraordinary and quite  sickening degree:  using it as an opportunity to deride renewable energy and promote coal as it if is a magic elixir, instead of the more obvious question - how do you make a system that already has adequate capacity use it to avoid brown outs.

* Ross Gittins wrote a plain speaking article a few days ago explaining what lots of people have said - the core of the current problems revolve around government policies regarding gas.   Here's Gittin's conclusions:

Turnbull blames South Australia's blackouts on its excessive enthusiasm for renewable energy which, pending the development of storage arrangements, has a problem with intermittent production.

He doesn't admit his parity-pricing policy is contributing. It was expected that gas-fired power generation would ease the transition from coal-fired to renewable generation.

That's because gas-fired power stations emit far less carbon dioxide and can be turned on and off as required to counter renewable energy's intermittency.

Guess what? South Australia has a new and big gas-fired generator at Pelican Point, near Adelaide, but it's been mothballed.

Why? Because the operator had a long-term contract for the supply of gas at a price set at the pre-export-parity level, and decided it was more lucrative to sell the gas into the East Asian market.

Last week Turnbull had the effrontery to argue that now gas-fired power had become uneconomic, we needed to fill the gap by subsidising new-generation "clean" coal-fired power stations.

Small problem. They're hugely expensive, only a bit less emissions-intensive than existing coal-fired stations, can't easily be turned on and off, and would supposedly still be operating 60 years later.

If there's a case for subsidising any fossil fuel-powered generators the obvious candidate is the gas-fired plants the feds' export-parity pricing policy has rendered uneconomic.

So great is the coal industry's hold over the Coalition that, not content with subsidising increased supply of coal from Adani and others at a time when coal is a sunset industry, Turnbull is now making up excuses to subsidise increased demand for coal by local electricity producers.

Economists are always telling politicians not to try picking industry winners. In reality, the politicians are far more inclined to back known losers.

 I cannot see any flaw in the argument in the highlighted paragraph.....

And finally:   maybe I am not reading widely enough, but has any journalist or commentator explained more about what's behind the Turnbull/Frydenberg/Morrison rapid new found love affair with coal?   It seems kinda suspiciously like they are responding to intense behind the scenes lobbying that the public might not be fully aware of ...

Update:  Lenore Taylor's article is a fine, angry bit of commentary which covers a lot of the above, but still doesn't uncover anything about specific recent lobbying efforts.

Current temperatures

Out of curiosity, just checked current temperatures (the Google result is accurate, is it?) for Penrith and Parramatta - both 44 degrees.  Birdsville - 43.  Walgett (well inland in northern NSW) - and a routinely hot place, I'm told - is 42.

Is it urban heat island effect that makes Western Sydney so hot?

"Conservative carbon tax"

Further on the point that a carbon tax being promoted by a couple of Reagan era fellows doesn't stand a chance.  From Vox:

A carbon tax won’t get enacted over the next four years unless Republicans get on board. But most of the Republicans currently in Congress loathe new taxes. Many of them also don’t believe global warming is real. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to see why they’d sign up for a big carbon tax, no matter how many times you write “conservative” on the packaging.

Some numbers: To date, exactly zero Republicans currently in Congress have publicly endorsed a carbon tax. On the contrary, last June, every single member of the House GOP voted for a resolution saying a carbon tax “would be detrimental to American families and businesses, and is not in the best interest of the United States.”

A year ago, carbon tax supporters did have one bit of leverage. Republicans also really dislike President Obama’s climate policies, which involved intricate EPA regulations like the Clean Power Plan. It’s entirely possible that some conservatives could’ve been sold on adopting a carbon tax in exchange for curtailing EPA power. Except then Donald Trump got elected and promised to scale back those rules anyway. Today, as Grover Norquist points out, Republicans have little incentive to sign up for a carbon tax trade

Death in the news

*  An anonymous junior doctor from Sydney notes that three of her colleagues have committed suicide.  Doubts about the whole culture of making juniors work long hours under much pressure (because their forebears did it, so why can't they?) have been around for so long, but it never seems to be satisfactorily resolved.   A combination of money and culture is the problem, I guess...

*  The Washington Post had a story yesterday about people who chose to do their suicide live streamed on Facebook.   Very disturbing, but how to stop it?

* I haven't read all of this yet, but at the NYT Magazine, an article about a somewhat nutty sounding transhumanist who drove a coffin shaped bus around the US campaigning against death.  

Maybe this is where the wall should be built

NPR notes:

Thousands more troops and billions more dollars are needed to break the war in Afghanistan out of a "stalemate," the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan warned Congress on Thursday.
Army Gen. John Nicholson also told the Senate Armed Services Committee that outside powers have increased their meddling in Afghanistan over the past year, especially Russia, in ways that make it tougher for the U.S.-backed government in Kabul to make and keep gains against insurgents.
That's why the U.S. and its allies must send more troops and spend more money to help the Afghan military become more effective at attacking and defeating its enemies and keeping control of the ground they capture.

What a neverending mess.  

More on that NOAA fight

I see that Science has a good, dispassionate, look at the Bates/Karl dispute.  

It confirms there is nothing harmful to climate science to it.

Hearing sounds before they arrive

I've heard about this mystery before:  how it is that people witnessing a large meteorite passing overhead sometimes report hearing sounds from it, but before any sound waves could have arrived from that distance.

A new theory as to what is happening is this:

Concurrent sound associated with very bright meteors manifests as popping, hissing, and faint rustling sounds occurring simultaneously with the arrival of light from meteors. Numerous instances have been documented with −11 to −13 brightness. These sounds cannot be attributed to direct acoustic propagation from the upper atmosphere for which travel time would be several minutes. Concurrent sounds must be associated with some form of electromagnetic energy generated by the meteor, propagated to the vicinity of the observer, and transduced into acoustic waves. Previously, energy propagated from meteors was assumed to be RF emissions. This has not been well validated experimentally. Herein we describe experimental results and numerical models in support of photoacoustic coupling as the mechanism. Recent photometric measurements of fireballs reveal strong millisecond flares and significant brightness oscillations at frequencies ≥40 Hz. Strongly modulated light at these frequencies with sufficient intensity can create concurrent sounds through radiative heating of common dielectric materials like hair, clothing, and leaves. This heating produces small pressure oscillations in the air contacting the absorbers. Calculations show that −12 brightness meteors can generate audible sound at ~25 dB SPL. The photoacoustic hypothesis provides an alternative explanation for this longstanding mystery about generation of concurrent sounds by fireballs.

Hard to believe

As noted at Axios:

A group of former senior U.S. officials from past Republican administrations have called for a tax on carbon emissions to help fight climate change, per the Financial Times. The group — known as the Climate Leadership Council — is led by James Baker, former secretary of state for George H.W. Bush and Treasury secretary for Ronald Reagan; George P. Schultz, former secretary of state under Reagan; and Henry Paulson, former Treasury secretary under George W. Bush.

They are scheduled to meet with White House officials later today, including Vice President Mike Pence, Jared Kushner and Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, to present their plan for addressing global warming. They argue the proposal — which would tax carbon emissions at $40 per ton, with all of the revenue recycled in dividends paid back to the public — will "embody the principles of free markets and limited government."

Why this matters: The proposal puts influential members of the GOP on the record as favoring action on climate change — a position that is not publicly supported by establishment Republicans, as most GOP members have promised a rollback of emissions regulations now that they have control of both houses of Congress and the White House.

This is the exact policy that James Hansen (actually, a registered Republican) has supported for a decade or two, no?  I don't know whether I've ever seen much discussion amongst economists about how well it might work, but it's probably 100 times better than the current Republican policy - do nothing.

The true blockage to this ever being possible would be Republicans - including Trump - acknowledging that climate change is real, after all their years of denial and conspiracy mongering.

Can't see it happening, but it's encouraging that some Republicans - and old ones at that!* - are willing to push for it.

* Maybe I have to qualify my continual dismissal of anyone over 80 being unreliable on everything!

Stoat loses trust in Timmy

I noted recently that I hadn't realised Tim Worstall was in Farage's party and a pro Brexit-er, and as such, his judgement in anything should be seriously downgraded.

Now long time slightly contrarian climate blogger William Connolly seems annoyed to realise that Tim swallowed David Rose's article whole.

The Stoat should have paid attention to me...

Message to monty

Well, this is a bit of a surprise.  It seems to me the uber Catholics of Catallaxy (CL, db and Philippa, primarily, but some of the others too) do seem to be admitting shame about the extent of the Catholic Church child abuse issue as a result of the present inquiry. 

Yet, they still seem to hold the view that it was started as a Catholic witch hunt by Gillard, designed to hurt Abbott.  (I don't think there was ever any credible reason to believe that this was a primary - or even secondary - motive of Gillard.  But they hated her with a passion and were willing to fantasise about her evil plottings.)  In any event, it would seem that some are of the grudging view that some good is coming out of the exercise.  Quite a turnaround.

As for their insistence on celibacy not being relevant - why is Philippa, seemingly changed by her peripheral involvement in an investigation of a priest having an affair with another woman, insisting still that celibacy is not an issue at least in the case of priests having affairs with adult women??   

Could you ask that question of her?   I think she blocks emails, as she fantasises I am obsessive stalker.

Women and hair

A short article at The Atlantic gives some historical background as to why modern Western women disdain body hair.  (It doesn't cover that most recent trend, by that's been discussed a lot elsewhere.)  Some extracts:

The campaign against body hair on women originates in Darwin’s 1871 book Descent of Man, explains Herzig. Men of science obsessed over racial differences in hair type and growth (among other aspects of physical appearance), and as the press popularized these findings, the broader American public latched on. Darwin’s evolutionary theory transformed body hair into a question of competitive selection—so much so that hairiness was deeply pathologized. “Rooted in traditions of comparative racial anatomy, evolutionary thought solidified hair’s associations with ‘primitive’ ancestry and an atavistic return to earlier, ‘less developed’ forms,” Herzig writes. Post Descent, hairiness became an issue of fitness.

An important distinction in this evolutionary framework was that men were supposed to be hairy, and women were not. Scientists surmised that a clear distinction between the masculine and the feminine indicated “higher anthropological development” in a race. So, hairiness in women became indicative of deviance, and researchers set out to prove it. Herzig tells the story of an 1893 study of 271 cases of insanity in white women, which found that insane women had excessive facial hair more frequently than the sane. Their hairs were also “thicker and stiffer,” more closely resembling those of the “inferior races.” Havelock Ellis, the scholar of human sexuality, claimed that this type of hair growth in women was “linked to criminal violence, strong sexual instincts … [and] exceptional ‘animal vigor.’”...

....“In a remarkably short time, body hair became disgusting to middle-class American women, its removal a way to separate oneself from cruder people, lower class and immigrant,” writes Herzig.

As hemlines rose, threatening to reveal hairy limbs, women took extreme measures to remove hair.  In the 1920s and ’30s, women used pumice stones or sandpaper to depilate, which caused irritation and scabbing. Some tried modified shoemaker’s waxes. Thousands were killed or permanently disabled by Koremlu, a cream made from the rat poison thallium acetate. It was successful in eliminating hair, and also in causing muscular atrophy, blindness, limb damage, and death. Around the same time, X-ray hair removal emerged as another treatment option. Women would sit for three or four minutes in front of the invisible rays of a boxed X-ray machine, and the radiation would do its work. So great was the appeal of each hair withering away in its sheath that for nearly two decades women underwent dangerous radiation that led to scarring, ulceration, and cancer.

Men and body hair seems more a matter of more temporary fashion.   The 70's perception of masculinity still looks funny today, although I suppose hipster beards is something of a return to hairiness as manliness.   I'm not sure as to the average hipster's attitude to their bodily hairiness, though.    

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.