It's very hard to fathom...

....how anyone can listen to the rambling, disjointed (rather ADHD sounding, actually) self-pitying and narcissistic style of a Trump press conference and not be highly concerned about the fact that he is President of a fantastically powerful, nuclear armed nation.  I've seen 10 year olds with better and more sustained coherence when speaking.  

What's more, I reckon there's good reason to speculate that it is this very concern - about his mental suitability for the role - that is behind the leaking against him.  Can you imagine the frustration a competent intelligence adviser must feel in having to boil down a complicated, multi-party issue into one page of highlights, and even then not being sure if he's absorbed it? 

Yet Trump will still have his supporters, and it leaves the rest of us puzzling about the dire effects of everything from the use of the internet as the ultimate propaganda tool for outright liars, the corrupting effect of reality TV, and how the culture wars can overpower everything from science to the perception of reality.

I also hadn't realised how truly awful the apparently highly influential (and very young) Stephen Miller had come across in his media appearances last Sunday until I saw clips of them on Colbert last night.  He truly has the creepy, dead eyed look of an android with mental health and anger issues, and yes, Trump praised his performance.   Have a look at this, which wasn't even his worst performance:



These are very strange and disturbing times...

Update:  I liked John Cassidy's take on the Trump press conference in the New Yorker.

Spank me, doctor?

Good post title for a review of A Dangerous Method, no?

I had intended seeing it at the cinema, but never got around to it.  But it is currently on SBS on Demand, for those in Australia, at least.

For those who don't know - the movie is about the early career of Carl Jung and his interaction with Freud and a patient/lover Sabina Spielrein.  Yes, it is basically a true life story, and having read a bit of Jung in my time, there were key scenes that were recognizably drawn from Jung's memoirs.  

How did it work as a film?    I would say it's good without being great.   Its best feature was the terrific acting of Keira Knightley, yet I see she received no nominations for any award.  Michael Fassbender was OK as Jung, but I thought Viggo Mortensen was pretty forgettable as Freud, yet they got all the award nominations.  Odd.  

The movie looks good and the subject matter was always interesting, but being (largely - see below) based on real life that wasn't bent too far out of shape, the story doesn't really have a dramatic structure that's very satisfying.   I felt the movie particularly failed to explain the origin of Jung's interest in the occult and paranormal.  The famous scene (if you know anything about them) in which Jung argues with Freud that there should be more to psychoanalysis than sex, and feels vindicated by sudden bangs coming from the bookcase, seems to come out of nowhere.   But anyone who had read much about him knows better:   I think I have on the bookshelf a (largely unread) copy  of Jung's 1903 doctoral dissertation "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena":  he had been interested in the subject for a long time, and it seems to me the movie might somehow have shown evidence of that before he started to complain to Freud.

Apart from that complaint, here's where I get to mull over the matter of where lines should be drawn in purportedly historical movies that invent key scenes for dramatic purposes.  I am surprised to read that there is considerable dispute over whether Jung and Sabina ever actually became physical lovers - let alone the kinky, spanky kind of lovers featured as the most memorably odd thing about their relationship in the film.

Sure, they had a romantic relationship of some kind (well known from their letters and diaries) but their exchanges never amount to a 100% clear evidence of sex.  Here's an article in Psychology Today discussing this:

However, much of the film turns around the dramatic invention that Jung and Sabina had a sexual affair, characterized by bondage and sadomasochistic practices. These lurid scenes are likely to be the ones that most people who see the film will take away with them. There is no concrete evidence of their having had an affair, let alone the sadomasochistic elements so vividly portrayed in the movie.

A Huffington Post interviewer confronts Cronenberg directly on this point, to which he replies: "An invention with justification. I was taken to task by a young woman who had seen the trailer. She was trying to convince me that Sabina and Jung never had sex. In her letters Sabina wrote about Jung in poetic terms, this woman claimed. You could have sexual poetry, I wanted to point out to her. But in her diary and letters to Freud, Sabina wrote, ‘I gave Jung my maidenhood, my innocence.' In the Victorian era that could only mean one thing. They had a sexual affair. We coupled that with how she talked about her father and being beaten, how that turned her on sexually..."

I think it may be a stretch when he says, Sabina's written statement that she gave Jung her "maidenhood," her "innocence," could only mean one thing. After all, so much of their discourse had to do with symbols and it's possible that she was speaking metaphorically. At the same time, I think it's quite well-established that Jung later had a long-term mistress, Toni Wolff. So, I'm not trying to whitewash his character. In fact, the Wikipedia entry on Sabina Spielrein reports, "The historian and psychoanalyst Peter Loewenberg argues that this was a sexual relationship, in breach of professional ethics, and that it ‘jeopardized his [Jung's] position at the Burghölzli and led to his rupture with Bleuler and his departure from the University of Zurich.'" In an interview about the film, Jungian analyst, Dr. Thomas Kirsch says, "I have no idea whether Jung had a sexual affair with Sabina Spielrein. This is a subject which has been written about extensively. Zvi Lothane, a psychoanalyst and historian, wrote of his conviction that they had a sexual affair in his earlier papers. In a later paper he reversed his opinion..."

 I think it fair to say from this that the movie could entirely justify portraying them as lovers.  What's far less justifiable is the sadomasochism as a key element in their sexual relationship.

As the writer of the Psychology Article says, Jungian professionals tended to like the film, but at the same recognised that it could harm the public's regard for Jungian analysis.  Oh well.

So, my feeling on whether this breached the line of acceptable invention:  yes, but I guess I don't feel too worked up about it.  It was only an incrementally crossed line - and it was not really dramatically unforgiveable.   (Unlike, say, the ridiculous inventions in Elizabeth that I complained about last year.) 

One final bit of trivia:  I was interested in this comment by the director in the Psychology Today article (my bold):

In an interview, Cronenberg says: "What's in the movie is perfectly accurate because it was from a letter-writing period. At that time in Vienna, there were between five and eight mail deliveries per day. If you wrote a letter in the morning, you expected to get an answer by the afternoon. It was their internet. So there were many, many letters. These people were very obsessive about detail and the minutiae of their lives (what their dreams were and what they ate) and what that signifies. We had lots of info. I can back up almost every line of dialogue with quotes from letters."

 Huh.   Five to eight deliveries a day?   Postmen must have been busy...

Get a grip, fools

There's a bit of problem here with the Wingnut reaction to Flynn's resignation:  if their hero Trump was to meet their expectations, he could have tried to ride it out.  He could have taken their line that this was "the Deep State" trying to interfere with legitimate government elected by a landslide and he wasn't going to fall for it.

But he didn't.

So what can Wingnuts do about that?  Nothing.

Except get a grip and take a look in the mirror at the paranoid, conspiracy believing nutters they've become.

Update:  speaking of nutty, conspiracy believing Rightwingers on the Australian front:  just how proud is Sinclair Davidson that the blog he runs hosts his paranoid and gullible co-worker Steve Kates, who fears the US is having a "potential" constitutional crisis because Obama is behind the Flynn resignation?  "Police state" mutterings are in his posts too.

To what level of paranoia and Trump love does Kates have to rise before SD says "mate, enough:  you can't run your paranoid theories here any more." 

Go Colbert

I'm pleasantly surprised to read that Colbert's late show is actually rating well, now that Trump is President.

But I think the Slate article explaining this is pretty wrong when it says " He doesn’t convey anger so much as he does bemusement..."    To the contrary, I've already commented here a few times about how genuinely upset, and angry, he's appeared to be since the Trump win.  I think the audience is coming back because he is so passionately appalled by the Trump presidency.  

He is not above the cheap, but very funny joke, though.   You have to watch this clip right to end to see what I mean:

I trust it's labelled as "Extra Short" size...

Noted from AP:

SHANGHAI (AP) -- There's a Trump toilet, a Trump condom, a Trump pacemaker and even a Trump International Hotel among hundreds of trademarks in China that don't belong to Donald Trump. But after a decade of grinding battle in China's courts, the president was expected to get an unlikely win this week: the rights to his own name.

One White House loony gone, probably only 30 or so more to go...

So, Trump knows that all the leaking is a problem, tweeting:

The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington?

What's the bet that he thinks leaking per se is the problem, not the vast conflicts within the White House and Republicans which is its root cause, and that with many of the latter thinking that Trump himself is a mentally unstable danger, it's going to be really hard to stop.

Vox has an interesting article about the warring camps within the White House.

Update:  another Vox article, explaining how Flynn was all Trump's fault - for hiring him in the first place.  But Trump loves sycophants - it's his narcissism at play.

Not for Valentine's Day

Mob Kills Eloped Lovers After Storming Afghan Police Station 

In a horror romance story out of Afghanistan:

The authorities said there were only 30 police officers at the station facing a mob of 250 to 300 heavily armed men. “If police had fired bullets at the people, a massacre could have happened,” said Hafiz Abdul Qayoom, the governor of Nuristan, claiming the police had no option but to surrender the couple to the mob, especially after three officers had suffered gunshot wounds from the angry crowd.

Enayatullah, the district governor in Wama, who like many Afghans uses only one name, said the couple were apparently killed soon after they had been taken out of the police station.

“We asked for additional police, but the road to the district was closed due to snow,” he said. “If the police had resisted more, a disaster would have taken place.”

Salam Khan, 22, a witness from Fatiha’s village, Sar-i-Pul, said he saw what had happened to the couple after the police surrendered them. “Some of Fatiha’s relatives, her cousins, were beating her with their fists and saying, ‘Why did you do this?’ Then her older brother got angry and shot her with a hunting rifle and her younger brother shot her with an AK-47. I don’t know how many bullets they fired,” Mr. Khan said, speaking by telephone from the remote village.

For Valentine's Day

Penis shrinkage, a side effect of prostate cancer surgery, is temporary, study finds

Xenu preserved

Here's a good and entertaining read about L Ron Hubbard's life and works - perhaps a tad more sympathetic than what most non Scientologists would write.   I hadn't heard this before:

At a remote compound in Trementina, New Mexico, plans have been made to preserve his writings forever, in an underground vault designed to withstand a nuclear blast. Written on steel and encased in titanium capsules filled with argon gas, they might conceivably outlast most of the other works that our civilization has produced. Future generations may well read Hubbard, assuming that he is all that survives. But they might be the only ones who will.

How distressing to think that future visiting aliens (long after humans have left the scene) might think this convincing evidence or a real, all pervasive, religion.

Nuclear revival not coming

In other news from The Japan Times, have a read of this story of the financial trouble and difficulties Toshiba is in over some new American nuclear plants it said could be built quickly and on budget:

On Tuesday, Toshiba is expected to announce a massive write-down, perhaps as big as $6.1 billion, to cover cost overruns at Westinghouse, which now owns most of Shaw’s assets. The loss may actually eclipse the $5.4 billion that Toshiba paid for Westinghouse in 2006 and has forced the Japanese industrial conglomerate to put up for sale a significant stake in its prized flash-memory business. Toshiba had to sell off other assets last year following a 2015 accounting scandal.

Toshiba made a big bet on a nuclear renaissance that never materialized, in part because it couldn’t build reactors within the timelines and budgets it had promised. The company had anticipated that Westinghouse’s next-generation AP1000 modular reactor design would be easier and faster to execute — just the opposite of what happened. Now Toshiba may exit the nuclear reactor construction business altogether and focus exclusively on design and maintenance.

“There’s billions and billions of dollars at stake here,” says Gregory Jaczko, former head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). “This could take down Toshiba and it certainly means the end of new nuclear construction in the U.S.”

It really seems that intense skepticism over the revival of nuclear as an answer to global warming is justified.   (John Quiggin is vindicated, in short.)

It's a cultural thing

Wow.  Japanese litigation sounds as ambulance chasing as anything you see in America:

Twenty-eight girls and women suffering what they say are side effects from a cervical cancer vaccine that was recommended by the government demanded compensation from the state and drugmakers Monday as their trial opened at the Tokyo District Court.
The plaintiffs, ranging in age from 15 to 22, said they have experienced a wide range of health problems, including pain all over their bodies and impaired mobility, after receiving the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines between 2010 and 2013.
Each is demanding ¥15 million in damages.
Erina Sonoda, a 20-year-old college student, said she started to suffer strong menstrual pain after receiving the second of three recommended shots of the Cervarix vaccine, and the pain spread to other parts of her body after the third vaccination.
Due to agonizing pain, Sonoda said she has difficulty walking without a cane and often must use a wheelchair.

Have a look at the PR photo at the link, too.

I suspect that there is a strong cultural element to this.   The Japanese, for reasons not entirely clear, are extremely cautious about anything "unnatural" to do with women's reproductive health.  The prime evidence for this:  the contraceptive pill was only legalised in 1999, and its use is still startling small:

In 1999, Japan became the last industrialized country to legalize oral contraceptives (OCs). Have contraceptive use patterns changed as a result?

An analysis of national survey data indicates that, as of 2014, prevalence of condom use and OC use was 83% and 3%, respectively, among all Japanese women aged 16 to 49. According to the UN, among married women in 2011, the proportions using OCs were 1% (Japan), 16% (U.S.), 21% (Canada), 28% (U.K.), 37% (Germany), and 41% (France). Prevalence of OC use in Japan did not significantly change following government approval.

So with this background, hysterical reaction to an injection that affects something to do with female reproduction was probably foreseeable.

Where is the pressure to embrace coal coming from?

Alan Kohler gets stuck into the Coalition (and Turnbull) for their silly coal embrace:

It’s true that wind and solar are intermittent, since the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun doesn’t shine all the time. But instead of helping the states to deal with this problem sensibly, Coalition politicians including the Federal Minister for Energy Josh Frydenberg, are just trying to score points and embed the hoax.

It raises a broader issue: why is politics the only part of society doing this?

The academic, scientific, corporate, not-for-profit sectors have long ago accepted that the problem is real and are working towards a more sustainable future; the only ones not showing leadership are the nation’s leaders.

The line I highlighted is the one that most interests me.  Where is the pressure coming from on the Coalition to aggressively promote coal?

Is it just generically from the Minerals Council?  It has the feeling of something more specific...

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.