Bubble world

Surely this is what it feels like to an outsider visiting North Korea and hearing everyone endorsing how great their Dear Leader is doing?   Being told how He will protect them from the nefarious forces that want to harm them?

Because I have never seen anything like the self delusion that is accompanying those endorsing Trump.   Look at Steve Kates, with this fantasy today:

I don’t know whether this was what Trump intended but the stories about Russian hacking the election have gone absolutely dead, as have almost all stories related to Obama having placed some kind of phone surveillance on Donald Trump himself. Having become blindingly clear that the Obama White House had indeed initiated that surveillance, with the virtual certainty that none of it would have been done without Obama’s complicity, the entire episode seems to have vanished into air. Since there is nothing that can any longer be used in bringing Trump down, it has gone into hibernation across the media and will remain that way unless something happens that the left and the media believe can again be used to undermine Trump.

This is part of what disturbs me about the blog support network on the right. It is entirely defensive. A story that was utterly preposterous, that Trump and his associates had collaborated with the Russians was, and is, treated as a genuine issue that needs to be sorted out, rather than as a pathetic and disgusting ploy by a bunch of leftist loons and their scribes to harm Trump and short circuit his election.

The only way this can possibly be explained is that he lives in an absolute self imposed information bubble - only reading news from Fox or Breitbart (or worse) that he knows in advance will align with his pro-Trump stance.

In totalitarian states, the State has to impose the media control that leads to such brainwashing - in the West, citizens gleefully impose it on themselves, building self reinforcing belief systems impervious to outside information - because it is, by definition, not to be trusted.

The other thing to note is the paranoia and siege mentality involved - Kates is always beating it up into a "end of civilisation" crisis if Trump (or at least Republicans) lose control of their country.   And, indeed, Bannon is known as a "clash of civilisations" panic merchant, and Trump will use that language when it suits. 

As for Kates' claim that no one is talking about the Trump Obama tweets now, he obviously cares not to observe twitter on matters Trump, or read the NYT, where this account of Trump's mad tweeting Saturday was given (again, apparently leaked by people close to him):

That led to a succession of frantic staff conference calls, including one consultation with the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, as staff members grasped the reality that the president had opened an attack on his predecessor.

Mr. Trump, advisers said, was in high spirits after he fired off the posts. But by midafternoon, after returning from golf, he appeared to realize he had gone too far, although he still believed Mr. Obama had wiretapped him, according to two people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.

He sounded defiant in conversations at Mar-a-Lago with his friend Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media, Mr. Ruddy said. In other conversations that afternoon, the president sounded uncertain of the procedure for obtaining a warrant for secret wiretaps on an American citizen.

Mr. Trump also canvassed some aides and associates about whether an investigator, even one outside the government, could substantiate his charge.

Kates in his bubble world wouldn't have heard of this...

This won't fit neatly into the Conservative Catholic narrative

I think the Catholic Herald is pretty mainstream and moderate/conservative as far as Catholic media outlets go, so this story does not come from a liberal Catholic site:

A spokesman for Egypt’s Catholic Church has praised local Muslims for helping embattled Christians after a series of Islamic State attacks in Sinai.

Fr Rafic Greiche, spokesman for the Coptic Catholic Church, said Christians must differentiate between ordinary Muslims and extremists.

“Ordinary Muslims are kind and try to help however they can – they’re often first on the scene, rescuing the injured and taking them to hospitals,” he told Catholic News Service March 3, as Christians continued to flee Egypt’s North Sinai region.

Fr Greiche said the attacks had affected only Coptic Orthodox Christians, but added that Catholic churches and schools in Ismailia had offered shelter to Orthodox families with help from Caritas.

Fr Greiche said Islamic State militants were now “strongly entrenched” in North Sinai, having been allowed by the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood organisations to use tunnels from the Gaza Strip.

It is, though, a worry to read how IS is running around the Middle East trying to find a new area to terrorise.  

The Daily Trump

Yeah, I get a bit sick of posting about Trump all the time too, but honestly, it's so incredible to watch this weird situation, falling as it does so close to unbelievable fiction, it's hard to stop.  So today's highlights:

*  I've really been enjoying John Cassidy's pieces on Trump at The New Yorker:  it's a calm style that is perhaps all the more effective for it.   Here, in his latest piece, he opines: 

Trump has learned a couple of things since the start of his Presidential campaign, in 2015. The first is that the media, especially the broadcast media, has an insatiable desire for “news breaks,” even fake ones, and thus is easy to manipulate. The second is that he can say virtually anything, however false or outrageous, without suffering any political consequences with his base. He can call a female journalist a “bimbo,” insult a political opponent’s wife, make bogus accusations of widespread voter fraud, say Obama founded ISIS, claim he won a bigger majority in the Electoral College than any President since Reagan—and none of it alienates his core supporters. Arguably, these outbursts make them like him more.

In his tweets this weekend, however, he may, just possibly, have gone too far. Trump has now added his voice to the calls for a proper public investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. The only way for Congress to properly assess the truth of Trump’s claim about Obama would be to call on Comey and other senior officials to provide a full accounting of the interagency investigation into alleged contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates. Is that really what the White House wants?

He then summarises what we do know, from leaks and public comments, in a calm way, and how none of it backs up Trumps claims of Obama's direct and personal involvement.  With Comey's response, it is quite the opposite.

*   Back to the question though - who is manipulating who in Trump world?   As Axios notes, Trump has just made a series of Tweets directly about stories he was obviously watching on the teeth gratingly awful  Fox & Friends.     Now, are the editors of that show pitching stories to please Trump?    Does Trump believe everything they claim, uncritically?  

I think most people, with common sense, are concluding that yes, he does believe, uncritically, anything  which he thinks useful propaganda, because he's a dumb, insecure, narcissist.  If challenged, he will not "own" his own judgement, he'll just deflect by claiming "well, that's what other people say."

And some people think this is not something to be very concerned about.... 

What would happen if you actually had an experiment where someone at Fox put up a story that ran against a long held Trump belief or bias?    (Ha!  As if that will happen - there's no money in scaring away your nutty base.   All Murdochs are too cynical to put the interests of actually educating the viewers ahead of making money.)

*  Speaking of Trump re-tweets of Fox, here is The Washington Post on one of them:   You'll never guess who tweeted something false he saw on TV. 

*  If former CIA directors think things are bad, they probably are:

As Michael Hayden, the CIA director under George W. Bush, noted on Morning Joe on Monday, “We’ve been in continuous crisis now for 45 days, and none of it has been externally stimulated. This is all an intramural game within our own government. No one’s tickled us from abroad. So I can only imagine what this is going to look like when we actually start to get pressure, events start to happen, that do require that sober, methodical response from a government that doesn’t appear as if it’s gotten itself organized yet.”

 And in the same article, someone asked in December some good questions, the answers to which no one has a right to feel confident about:

In December, Elizabeth Saunders, a professor at George Washington University who studies decision-making in foreign policy, listed eight questions she had about how President Trump would handle an overseas crisis: Where is Trump physically, since he’s so frequently away from the White House? What is the state of Trump’s relations with U.S. intelligence agencies? Which of Trump’s staffers briefs him on the crisis? Which officials are brought into the deliberations about what to do? How many options are given to Trump and how are they described? Will those who oppose the preferred option express their concerns? Who will execute Trump’s decision? And will a record be kept of how the decision was made?

Message to JC

You're being stupid and getting sucked into the Catallaxy conspiracy zone.  Kates has gone down the rabbit hole completely - don't follow him.

Here are key points you conspiracists are ignoring:

*  the FBI was reported as being party to the warrant applications;

*  you have to be nuts (like Kates) to think that Comey is a Democrat stooge, given the obvious advantage it gave to Trump to declare that the email investigation was being re-opened, so close to the election;

*  Comey is already reported to have taken offence at Trump's claim - he is obviously prepared to stand up and be counted about the bona fides of the application for a warrant, and whatever it was it authorised them to do;

*  it doesn't matter if Obama knew what was going on - and he presumably was advised.   That is not corruption in any way, shape or form.   What upset Democrats, after the loss of the election - was the fact that Obama did know some of what was going on, and studiously avoided making any official comment on it.  Obama (if I recall correctly) even felt, post election, that he had to make it clear to his fellow Democrats that he just couldn't do that, due to perception that it would be an abuse of his position during an election.
 
Update:  CL, who is prone to partisan fantasy, calling it "bigger than Watergate" if Obama knew of the warrant and investigation, is just ridiculous.   (He is, clearly, becoming more and more ridiculous with what he will claim as he ages.)    If intelligence agencies believe there has been hacking and release of emails by a foreign nation with a clear intent to influence an election, and there is a string of contacts between Trump connected people and that foreign nation preceding a change in party policy more favourable towards it - of course the existing Presidential administration of any party should be concerned, and knowledge of further investigation about it is entirely appropriate.

Update 2:   A CNN report just out starts with:

FBI Director James Comey was "incredulous" over the weekend after President Donald Trump's allegation via Twitter that former President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap of his phones during the campaign, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

Update 3:  message to monty:  for goodness sake, can you just point out to them that the FBI and Justice Department are not the same entity as President Obama.   And yes - we do not know the details of the warrant, and what and who it authorised as the target.

But it is 100% clear, from Comey's reaction, that he is deeply offended at the suggestion - implicit from Trump's tweets that it was Obama personally telling them what to do -  that he was dancing to the tune of Obama.

Update 4:  Sheesh - CL is just like Trump:  will just say anything, completely and utterly without concern for detail and accuracy and established fact. Leaves the rest of us wondering if he's nuts, prematurely senile, or knowingly bloviating and trolling for deliberate effect? 

There is no point in engaging with such blowhards...

Juices, noted

Yesterday, I drank for the first time "cold pressed" mandarin juice, manufactured in Brisbane from Australian produce, apparently, and I thought it very nice.  

Which reminded me - a long time ago, in Malaysia, I bought watermelon juice, made in the juicer while I waited.  From memory, there was a sugar syrup added too, but I also recall it being very nice.

Is there a reason that, in Australia, despite the myriad of juice combinations you can now see on the supermarket shelf, none seem to contain watermelon juice?   Does it not preserve well?

Alfred's gay period

I re-watched Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train for the first time in decades over the weekend, and it was an interesting experience.  It's far from the director's best film - the climax is a little silly - but it is, of course, a great premise for a movie.

What I couldn't remember wondering about on first viewing was the degree to which the audience is meant to recognize the villain of the piece, Bruno - the stranger who proposes exchange murders, and then carries one out,  leaving tennis playing Guy in a bit of a pickle - is homosexual.  Certainly, on viewing it now, the hints seems everywhere - but is that just because I have read somewhere in the years since I saw it that this was indeed deliberate?      

Realising that it was based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, and knowing that gay elements appear in her other stories, I would have thought that the homosexual side would have been clear in that source material.   Yet according to Wikipedia, the movie screenplay made more of out of a homoerotic element that was only "hinted at" in the novel.  

Now that we have gay studies as part of academia, there's lots of "queer" movie analysis on the net about the movie, together with Rope, the other Hitchcock film with a clear homosexual subtext.   (With Rope, it's hardly in dispute, given it was a fictionalised version of the real life Leopold and Loeb murder - and they did have a sexual relationship.)  You can Google for "Queer studies Hitchcock" if you are inclined.

Anyway, what I didn't realise about all of this was that the actor who appeared in both films, Farley Granger (who played Guy in Strangers, the definitely heterosexual character) was clearly bisexual in real life.   His Wikipedia entry contains an awful lot of information about his sex and relationship life, much of it surprising, presumably sourced in many respects from a memoir he published in 2007.

He was, it would seem, someone who it would be difficult to categorise as other than genuinely bisexual, right from the start:

It was during his naval stint in Honolulu that Granger had his first sexual experiences, one with a hostess at a private club and the other with a Navy officer visiting the same venue, both on the same night.^[13] He was startled to discover he was attracted to both men and women equally, and in his memoir he observed, "I finally came to the conclusion that for me, everything I had done that night was as natural and as good as it felt ... I never have felt the need to belong to any exclusive, self-defining, or special group ... I was never ashamed, and I never felt the need to explain or apologize for my relationships to anyone .... I have loved men. I have loved women."^[14]

You can then read in the rest of the Wikipedia entry about the enormously lengthy list of flings and relationships he subsequently had with both men and women had throughout his long career of (mostly) pretty B grade movies and TV. 

Incidentally, Robert Walker, who played Bruno, seems to have been definitely heterosexual - or, at least, I would presume so seeing he had been twice divorced by age 30, and had children.  He suffered serious mental health issues, and died of a combination of alcohol and an injection his psychiatrist gave him (!) at the age of 32.  (He could easily pass for older in Strangers, I reckon.)

I haven't read whether Hitchcock knew of Granger's sexual inclinations before using him in two movies with a gay subtext.  (Apparently, Granger even slept with the gay screenwriter for Rope, but whether Hitchcock ever found out, I don't know.)  But it is a little odd how Hitchcock also liked using Cary Grant, who, despite a string of marriages, was widely rumoured to have been in at least one homosexual relationship when he was younger.  

Anyway, old Hollywood certainly carried its fair share of gossipy intrigue.  And the degree to which Hitchcock didn't mind using homosexual subtexts as a signal that the characters were prepared to do anything, within or outside the bounds of society's mores, is somewhat interesting.

The Trump non management style

Oooh - I do still sometimes find a link to something worthwhile in a Catallaxy thread. Sure, it's a bit like finding a diamond ring in the bottom of a septic tank, but this one is good:   an article from last week about Trump's lack of management skills, as told by several people who have worked for him in decades past.

And let's be honest here - the mere fact there are so many people close to Trump willing to talk to the press about how things are not going well in the White House (the Washington Post cites 17 in today's article, which Trump is bound to hate), there must be plenty of genuine concern about him from those in the know.

A "normal" Presidency does not face such sustained, critical, leaking so intensely at its start, and it is not credible that it is all coming from Obama aligned figures.  

As I was saying about the problem in the Catholic Church

Remember last week I was saying how the Catholic Church had tied itself in knots by trying to insist it had never been wrong before?   Well, here it is, plain as day, in the Catholic Herald:

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has said that it would be good for Pope Francis to answer the dubia, and that Francis cannot contradict Pope St John Paul II’s teaching on marriage.

In an interview with Crux to mark the publication of his new book, Archbishop Chaput was asked what he thought was at stake in the debate over marriage and Amoris Laetitia.

The document does not mention Communion for the remarried, but some bishops, including those of Malta and Germany, have claimed it authorises the practice.

John Paul II and Benedict XVI reaffirmed Church teaching that the remarried may not receive Communion, except possibly when they try to live “as brother and sister”.

Archbishop Chaput said that this teaching, and Jesus’s prohibition of adultery, could not be changed: “It seems to me that it’s impossible for us to contradict the words of Jesus, and it’s also impossible for a teaching to be true 20 years ago not to be true today when it’s the teachings of the pope.

Also, The Guardian ran a pretty good summary of the current controversy within Rome:

Civil war in the Vatican as conservatives battle Francis for the soul of Catholicism

He has no evidence

I see that JC, and others at Catallaxy, were convinced that Trump wouldn't be making claims of Obama's direct and personal involvement in "wiretapping Trump Tower" without evidence.

Time for them to wake up to understand how Trump is a con man who uses Right wing conspiracy theories to (what he thinks) is his advantage. He did it with birtherism; he is using Right wing conspiracy theory again.

There were reports that the Breitbart article was being circulated in the White House on the Friday.  There were reports that he was furious that Sessions did the (at least half) honourable thing in his recusing himself from investigations about Russian involvement. There were reports that his staffers (left back in Washington) were surprised at the Saturday morning tweet storm.   His press spokesman had no idea when any evidence would be offered.  (See my previous post.)

The response to questions that he produce evidence (as I predicted, there will be none provided) - punt it over to Congress and say that Trump will not speak of it again.  (Let's see if he can keep to that.)

The circumstances are overwhelming clear - Trump was inspired by a Right wing radio host, via Breitbart, to make exaggerated but serious claims against Obama personally as a diversionary tactic and with no evidence.  His staffers have been left struggling how to respond, and the best they have come up with "we'll say it's Congress's responsibility and therefore it would be inappropriate for us to keep speaking about it."

And his gullible base swallow it whole.

Look, if anyone thought that it was bad how the Bush administration and its agencies convinced voters (and other nations) to join in the Iraq invasion based on unreliable evidence, they should be horrified at how easy it will be for Trump to convince his base of any stupid over-reaction he wants to make against some international provocation.

And finally:  to be clear, I think it very likely the reports that there was a successful application to the court for a wiretap of some sort are correct.  If Trump wants us all to know the evidence that led to that successful issuing of a warrant - fine.  Lots of people would have liked to have known that - before the election.

Update:   This Hot Air post about it by Allahpundit (who is often accused in comments of being a rabid anti-Trumper, because he dares to question Trump) is pretty reasonable, and notes this:

Does Trump really want another high-profile Comey press conference, this time laying out precisely why the FBI was suspicious of, say, Paul Manafort’s communications with Russia? How do you suppose that would play politically for the White House?

 Update 2:  Fascinating, from the NYT.  (Both for content, and how everywhere is leaking in Washington!):

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration.

Continue reading the main story

A careless, dumb, gullible President with a gullible, dumb voter base not interested in facts

I'm waiting for some better analysis of the Trump "Obama tapped me, it's like Watergate" tweets before posting about it in too much detail.   But as far as I can tell so far, what's likely to have happened is this:

*  Trump read a Breitbart article by Pollack,  expanding on a Mark Levin call that Congress should investigate "the Obama administration" for "monitoring" Trump Tower.

*  Trump, apparently (or acting) unaware of previous reporting of leaks that FISC approval for a FISA warrant had been sought and granted in October,  tweets about it as if "the Obama administration" means Obama personally, and at least appears to accept, gullibly, everything in the Breitbart report as being true.  (Such as the line "No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons..")

*  In fact, in previous leaks, it was said that the FBI sought and obtained the FISA warrant.  Other reports say "The Justice Department and the FBI".  In any event:

a.    The Justice Department is not "Obama";

b.    The fact that the FBI - whose Trump friendly announcement of the nothing burger of a further investigation of Clinton emails should surely be compelling evidence of it not being in the pocket of the Obama administration - was asking for it shows that an independent investigative body thought there was serious evidence making it worth getting the warrant.

*  Nonetheless, Trump, either deliberately, or through his dumb, carefree attitude to facts and a willingness to say anything to shore up his base, claims it was all about Obama, personally, wiretapping "his phones".

*  His dumb, gullible, couldn't care about facts, base, swallows this whole, and are about to go on Sunday rallies to support their dangerous cult leader.

Here's why this is dangerous:

This may well blow over as a case of Trump carelessness and his easy manipulation into making claims by the Right wing media.   (Whether it is also a case of him deliberately manipulating his base - who knows?)   He will be challenged to produce the evidence that Obama was personally involved (and that he managed to sway the FBI to join in) and it will not be there.    He and his Right wing conspiracy mongers - they've been doing this for over 20 years - will just go down muttering that they still think he did it.

But the thing is - when he faces a real life crisis in his administration, say, a serious terror attack, who can possibly trust that he will not take the same careless, fact free lines in his response, and encourage the same to his stupid base, and that this will cause real trouble?

 Update:

Comment by nutty Australian Trump conspiracist noted:

 Update 2:   The American Right has brainwashed itself into believing and promoting conspiracy for nearly a couple of decades now - who can forget that as late as 2015, 43% of Republicans still believed Obama was a secret Muslim;  in 2010-2011, polling showed between 31 to 45% believed he had been born outside of America;   in 2016, Gallop showed Republicans hitting a new high in believing that climate change is happening and is caused by humans - but it's still only around 40% holding that view compared to 85% of Democrats.  (Furthermore, only 20% of Republicans think it will be a problem in their lifetime.)  And let's not bother looking at all the cynical use of Benghazi claims and conspiracy by Republicans, that went no where but are doubtless still believed by their base in large numbers.

It is unhealthy for any society or group of people to be so prone to believing nonsense conspiracies - I've complained before about the unusual degree to which it seems the residents of many Muslim countries will accept conspiracy.

So it is with America (and Australia, for that matter) too - but Trump is exactly the wrong person to lead the country out of the corrosive effect of conspiracy belief, with his attitude that he can say anything, regardless of facts.

Update 3:   Here's the succinct version of my post, from The New Yorker News Desk:

It would seem that Trump, in the same spirit of diversion, has conflated the work of the courts, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies with “Obama.”

That article also gives a good summary of a favourite Trump tactic:

One of President Trump’s most consistent rhetorical maneuvers is a fairly basic but often highly effective one—the diversionary reverse accusation. When he is accused of benefitting from “fake news,” he flips the neologism on its head; suddenly CNN, the Times, and the rest are “fake news.” When Democratic politicians such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi call for investigations of his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials, Trump posts pictures of those critics meeting publicly with Vladimir Putin and calls for an investigation. This happened on Saturday. He fogs the language and clouds the issue.

(Those of my readers who are familiar with CL, who has long commented at Catallaxy, will recognize this as his constant tactic over the years, too.   It's always hard to tell, when people use such an obvious tactic repeatedly, whether they have managed to convince themselves that it's really a convincing response, rather than just a transparent debating trick to show "winning".)

Update 4:    Gary Kasparov sounds very accurate in this series of tweets (read from the bottom up):

And for Jason Soon:  I just noticed this in Kasparov's Wiki entry:

Kasparov collaborated with Max Levchin and Peter Thiel on The Blueprint, a book calling for a revival of world innovation, planned to release in March 2013 from W. W. Norton & Company. The book was never released, as the authors disagreed on its contents.

Update 5:    you could almost feel sympathy for the Trump clean up team; except for the fact that if they had any moral and decent judgement, they would never have taken their jobs in the first place:

Certainly took their time...

‘False prophet’: Duterte, the Catholic Church and the fight for the soul of the Philippines

Making cannabis safer

Nearly a year ago, I made the observation here (see the comments to this post) that it seems odd that, if countries are going to legalise cannabis use, they don't also regulate it to make it safer.   I mean, they do it with alcohol (at least within venues where it is served - and I see some places ban the sale of nearly pure ethanol as an alcoholic beverage); why should another legal drug avoid nearly all regulation as to its content?

It's been well recognized for years that THC content has been increasing, for example:  why not legalise strains with a set upper limit?   Also, it seems reasonably well established CBD can be protective of the brain - why not regulate that the sold product has to have a certain balance between it and THC?

Anyway, my very reasonable suggestion has been endorsed by some researchers in the UK.

They do note that not much is known about what a protective does of CBD might be, and the problem might be (I would guess) how many years of research it may take to be more certain about it.

But I thought its protective effects were established enough to at least know you would be doing no harm to take a stab at mandating a certain content for it.

I expect John will be along to comment on this!

Meet the Russians

I have to say, the "Trump campaign and the Russians" keeps looking  worse for Trump.  You know it's bothering him, too, when he issues a series of tweets that's its all a witch hunt, and the leaks are the real story.   (That's silly - if there is no story, there's no reason for anyone to leak.)

I have never written off the possibility of this hurting Trump in a major way, but it is seeming more and more likely that it will.

And man, aren't Trumpkin/wingnuts struggling with their false equivalence stories about Democrats and meetings with Russians?    But they'll convince themselves of anything - they're so ridiculously partisan they'd convince themselves the Moon is made of cheese if it would help their culture warrior dumbo-in-chief.

Obsessions of conservatives and libertarians

I don't have much doubt that the QUT s18C Racial discrimination case was poorly handled all around, and I have sympathy for the students involved.    So some legislative corrections to how these cases are handled procedurally are at least warranted.

I also get the impression (without looking into it in too much detail) that Gillian Triggs has made mistakes in her defence of the handling of the matter.  But at the same time, her treatment by conservatives in the Coalition, and the intense journalistic and editorial support for them in The Australian, has amounted to a nutty jihad that has lasted years now.   Despite her errors, I think the overwhelming impression the public is left with is that conservatives (and the odd libertarian) in the government, and a newspaper, are absolutely obsessed with her, and seem to think there is still nothing better to do than hound the head of a commission because of perceived slights to them and their journalist pal Andrew Bolt.

I can't really recall anything like this in Australian politics - and the sooner the nutty conservatives in the Coalition split from their parties, the better it would be. 

Gene networks and evolution

An article at BBC - Earth explains the idea.

Not as intriguing an idea as morphic resonance - but more likely to be true...

Nice photos

The Atlantic put up some photos from The Smithsonian 2016 photo contest, and they're all great.

The first one, showing a rugged part of the Isle of Skye, really caught my eye for its alien landscape looks:

So that's what "acting Presidential" is meant to sound like?

Trump raises all sort of questions about just how dumb and credulous voters and pundits can be, but fortunately there is enough liberal pushback against some of the ridiculously over-enthusiastic reception given to Trump's teleprompted* speech to re-assure us the nation isn't completely nuts.

David Frum has a very well argued, moderate take in The Atlantic, and I liked this line in particular:

The purpose of these joint-session speeches is not, actually, to reassure the president’s base that the leader of the country is mentally well.

But he doesn't deal with the most outrageous inconsistency (and most queasily quasi fascist element) of the speech:   Trump's starting with a (belated) condemnation of a hate crime against foreigners for daring to be in America (the Kansas shooting), and then spending much of the speech again telling Americans that the nation is under siege from dangerous foreigners who'll kill you or sell your kids drugs if given half the chance.

The idea of creating an agency specifically for highlighting crimes committed by (undocumented?) immigrants has not, as far as I can see, been condemned as widely as it should.  Here's the Washington Post:

… I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American Victims. The office is called VOICE — Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement. We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests.

This proposal, introduced in a memo from Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, has received a lot of negative feedback. (When Trump mentioned it, Democrats groaned.) One issue is that there are negative historical echoes to isolating criminal behavior by one group of people. As the Atlantic notes, the Ministry of Justice in 1930s Germany collected and publicized reports of Jewish criminal activity.

I reckon all the immigrant and "terrorism within our borders" talk has the grubby fingerprints of Bannon all over it.   And ss EJ Dionne Jnr writes in the Washington Post,  in his piece entitled "Trump Still Wants You to be Very, Very Afraid":

And his call to create an office in the Department of Homeland Security called VOICE (“Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement”) was a demagogic propaganda effort to suggest that immigrants are especially prone to committing acts of violence when, in fact, they are not.

No Trump speech is complete without a reference to Chicago’s murder rate, which he mentions constantly because the national crime statistics don’t bear out his implication that the nation is more unsafe than ever.

And Trump wants Americans to be very, very afraid of the threat of terrorism by way of rationalizing his unjustifiable policies barring refugees from a selected group of majority-Muslim countries. “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside of America,” he declared. For good measure, he added: “We cannot allow our nation to become a sanctuary for extremists.” I bet his speechwriters were proud of those scary phrases, “a beachhead of terrorism” and “a sanctuary for extremists.” That’s the way to get people really alarmed.

Update:  Krugman is scathing of the pundit response, as usual:

The big news from last night’s speech is that our pundits is not learning. After all the debacles of 2016, they swooned over the fact that Trump — while still lying time after time and proposing truly vile initiatives — was able to read from a teleprompter without breaking into an insane rant. If American democracy falls, supposed political analysts who are actually just bad theater critics will share part of the blame.

The subsequent point he explains, about how coal jobs left decades ago, and are simply not going to come back, is well made.

Update 2:  William Saletan, at Slate, once again makes the comparison between George W Bush and Trump, and the contrast between the first speeches both gave to Congress is incredibly stark:

“America has never been united by blood or birth or soil,” Bush declared in his 2001 inaugural address. “We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these principles. Every citizen must uphold them. And every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American.” In his first speech to Congress—delivered almost exactly 16 years ago on Feb. 27, 2001—Bush told Americans: “We all came here for a reason. … Juntos podemos. Together, we can.” He called on Congress to make America not just wealthy, but “generous and just.”

As president, Bush failed to fulfill those aspirations. But Trump doesn’t even acknowledge them: In his remarks Tuesday night, Trump spoke not of generosity, justice, or ideals but of blood, birth, background, and soil. “We are one people, with one destiny,” he proclaimed. “We all bleed the same blood. We all salute the same great American flag.” A fascist leader could have uttered the same words. In place of Bush’s plea to welcome immigrants, Trump said refugees should “return home.”

*  Apparently, Presidents using teleprompts is OK now in Wingnut land.

 

Ho hum

I'm a bit busy, and the news feels strangely boring today. 

Well, at least you can read more about the tensions within the Catholic Church here.  While the author is on the conservative side, the picture he paints seems relatively accurate.

The Mormons deal with this sort of issue, if I understand them correctly, just by having its leader declare that God's passed on the message to him that the Church has been wrong for the last 100 years.   Easy peasy.  The Catholic Church instead has tied itself into knots about how it has never been truly wrong, making change that much harder.

That's my simplified version of the current problem!

A radiation spike

Well, I didn't know planes were sent to sniff out radiation spikes to see if they can tell where they're from.  Currently one may be sniffing around Europe.

Interesting post at Atlas Obscura...

Yet another "bad father" story

Just when you think you might have heard every gobsmacking story about what a terrible father Evelyn Waugh could be, out comes another book with another one:

In 1958, while on military training in Cyprus, Auberon Waugh accidentally shot himself in the chest with a machine gun. He was nineteen. Over the next ten days he fought for his life, having lost a lung, two ribs, part of his hand and his spleen. His mother Laura flew out immediately to be by his side. His father, Evelyn, preferred to remain at home. “I shall go out to travel home with Laura if he dies”, Waugh wrote detachedly to his friend Lady Diana Cooper. In the event, this was unnecessary; Auberon was brought back to England and installed at the Queen Alexandra Military hospital. Even so, it was a further week before Waugh managed to go and visit his son. By this point, Auberon had developed a chest infection due to a back abscess and again feared that death was near. “Dear Papa”, wrote Auberon on what he thought would be his deathbed. “Just a line to tell you what for some reason I was never able to show you in my lifetime, that I admire, revere and love you more than any man in the world.” The next month, with Auberon still too ill to be operated on, Waugh stopped his allowance of £25 a month. Auberon wept “bitter tears of rage”.

A few minor Oscar observations

*  Jimmy Kimmel was likeable enough as a host.  I'm not sure why they let TV hosts put their same segments from their TV show on the Oscars, though.

*  Meryl Streep seems to have plateaued in the ageing process.  I think she has looked the same for the last 15 years.  Nicole Kidman, on the other hand, seems to be going backwards in age.  Much "work" involved, I suspect.

*  Shirley McLaine, to her credit, seems to spend little or no money on face work;  she's 82 and still pretty funny, if somewhat loopy.

*  Steven Spielberg not spotted in the audience, for once.  :(

 

Corporate tax cuts aren't magic

Found via Axios, Stephen Roach with an argument against the Trumpian take on corporations and tax:

Corporate tax cuts are coming in the United States. While this push pre-dates last November’s presidential election, President Donald Trump’s Make-America-Great-Again mantra has sealed the deal. Beleaguered US businesses, goes the argument, are being squeezed by confiscatory taxes and onerous regulations – strangling corporate earnings and putting unrelenting pressure on capital spending, job creation, and productivity, while sapping America’s competitive vitality. Apparently, the time has come to give businesses a break.

But this argument raises an obvious question: If the problem is so simple, why hasn’t this fix already been tried? The answer is surprising. 

For starters, it is a real stretch to bemoan the state of corporate earnings in the US. Commerce Department statistics show that after-tax corporate profits (technically, after-tax profits from current production, adjusted for inventory and depreciation-accounting distortions) stood at a solid 9.7% of national income in the third quarter of 2016.

While that is down from the 11% peak hit in 2012 – owing to tepid economic growth, which typically puts pressure on profit margins – it hardly attests to a chronic earnings problem. Far from anemic, the current GDP share of after-tax profits is well above the post-1980 average of 7.6%.

Trends in corporate taxes, which stood at just 3.5% of national income in the third quarter of 2016, support a similar verdict. Yes, the figure is higher than the post-2000 level of 3% (which represents the lowest 15-year average tax burden for corporate America since the 2.9% reading in the mid-1990s); but it is well below the 5.2% average share recorded during the boom years of the post-World War II era, from 1950 to 1969. In other words, while there may be reason to criticize the structure and complexities of the US corporate tax burden, there is little to suggest that overall corporate taxes are excessive. 

Conversely, the share of national income going to labor has been declining. In the third quarter of 2016, worker compensation – wages, salaries, fringe benefits, and other so-called supplements such as social security, pension contributions, and medical benefits – stood at 62.6% of national income. While that represents a bit of a rebound from the 61.2% low recorded in the 2012-2014 period, it is two percentage points below the post-1980 average of 64.6%. In other words, the pendulum of economic returns has swung decisively away from labor toward owners of capital – not exactly a compelling argument in favor of relief for purportedly hard-pressed American businesses.

Update:  and on the Australian scene, Greg Jericho sums up the Grattan Institute's report that lowering the corporate tax rate is going to hurt the budget bottom line significantly, with any expected benefits taking too long to arrive to avoid that.  

Sounds quite plausible to me.  

More than neurons

Ed Yong has stopped writing his blog, but here he is at The Atlantic, with a good article about some neuroscientists getting sick of the approach of other neuroscientists.  A sample:

John Krakaeur, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has been asked to BRAIN Initiative meetings before, and describes it like “Maleficent being invited to Sleeping Beauty’s birthday.” That’s because he and four like-minded friends have become increasingly disenchanted by their colleagues’ obsession with their toys. And in a new paper that’s part philosophical treatise and part shot across the bow, they argue that this technological fetish is leading the field astray. “People think technology + big data + machine learning = science,” says Krakauer. “And it’s not.”

He and his fellow curmudgeons argue that brains are special because of the behavior they create—everything from a predator’s pounce to a baby’s cry. But the study of such behavior is being de-prioritized, or studied “almost as an afterthought.” Instead, neuroscientists have been focusing on using their new tools to study individual neurons, or networks of neurons. According to Krakauer, the unspoken assumption is that if we collect enough data about the parts, the workings of the whole will become clear. If we fully understand the molecules that dance across a synapse, or the electrical pulses that zoom along a neuron, or the web of connections formed by many neurons, we will eventually solve the mysteries of learning, memory, emotion, and more. “The fallacy is that more of the same kind of work in the infinitely postponed future will transform into knowing why that mother’s crying or why I’m feeling this way,” says Krakauer. And, as he and his colleagues argue, it will not.That’s because behavior is an emergent property—it arises from large groups of neurons working together, and isn’t apparent from studying any single one.

Oscars for movies barely seen

Given the odd backlash against La La Land, and the hosting by Jimmy Kimmel, I was curious to watch the Oscars this year.  (I think we have last year's show recorded on a hard drive, but I haven't watched it.)

Now that I know the results in the "sorry about that mistake, La La fans" climax, I have to make the observation, as many others no doubt will too, that the Best Picture Oscar for years now seems to go to critical favourites which have next to no appeal to a wide audience.

Moonlight might be fine film, but how much appeal can an episodic  film about an American black man coming to terms with being gay and living in crime affected Miami hold for a wider audience?  I see that the movie has made $22 million in the US - that's good for an arthouse flick, but it's not a lot of tickets.

Seems to me that the last, broadly popular, movie that won Best Picture was The King's Speech in 2010.  (In 2012, Argo did a respectable enough $136 million in the US, but only made $96 million overseas.  King's Speech made $414 million globally.)

Shockingly, I see that the 2009 winner, The Hurt Locker, made only $17 million in the US.  That's tiny.  Even The Artiste from 2011, which I would have guessed was the biggest Best Picture Box Office bomb, made $45 million in the US and $133 million globally. 

Getting an Oscar might be nice, but producers must surely prefer the cash of an actually popular movie...

Depressing stories for a Monday

*  Bill Paxton's unexpected death:  seems that his likeability on screen was matched in his personal life. 

*  Slate has a lengthy article on horrendous, ethics free, medical experiments by US doctors in Guartemala post World War 2. 

*   Did you notice the story from a couple of weeks back that ocean oxygen levels are dropping, due to warming oceans?  No, well, it's all in accordance with predictions, apparently, and is another reason that techno optimists who think everything will be OK if we just make everyone rich enough to get enough airconditioning are wrong. 

Past influences

The Trump presidency is too depressing to watch everything on TV about him, but the one hour doco Meet the Trumps on SBS earlier this week was pretty good.  It's still up on SBS on Demand, I think.

It wasn't overly detailed, but just hit some of the key points of his life.  (One thing I haven't heard, though, is why he is a teetotaller.  Sure, his brother died an alcoholic, but it seems rare to find such an extrovert refraining from even alcohol.)

Anyway, the main thing I wanted to comment on was his early career dealing with Roy Cohn, the infamously unpopular lawyer who I actually didn't know much about until I watched that "Angels in America" play on TV some years ago.  (We all have gaps in our knowledge.)

I'm not sure who it was on Meet the Trumps who was denouncing Cohn, but he had met him and could not stress enough what an absolutely appalling, dislikeable man he found him to be.  Which I thought was interesting - the portrait of him in Angels seems not to have been overblown at all.

Anyway, here's an article in The Guardian about Cohn being a (sort of) mentor to Trump.

Witches -V- Trump

So, a bunch of witches are planning on a Trump attack.   Instructions to join in are available on line.

Well, as much as I'd like it to work, it has been tried before.  I didn't realise Life magazine ran a story on it in 1941, though. 

True, the attempted supernatural attacks didn't cause Hitler to curl up and die.  But he was pretty sick for most of the war.    Even if the witches can only cause Trump to have chronic farting, like Hitler, I think it's worth a go...

Happy anniversary, movable type

A businessman intent on making money in a world dominated by the Catholic Church, Johannes Gutenberg created, instead, a revolution – and sowed the seeds for many more.

February 23, 1455 has been cited as the date Mr. Gutenberg began to print the first edition of his eponymous Bible. The idea for the printing blocks came from Asia, where the Chinese had invented a printing technique almost a millennium before. His ink was a concoction that blended traditional ink with oil, helping it flow and transfer from printing blocks to paper. The press itself, meanwhile, was the type of screw press familiar to farmers across the continent, more commonly used for pressing olives or grapes.

To this motley assortment of preexisting ideas, Gutenberg added an important innovation: movable type, the first in the Western world. He drew on the skills he had acquired growing up in a family of skilled craftsmen to produce letter molds from a metal alloy. The molds were durable, and could withstand hundreds of printings. Arranging and rearranging these letters in a type tray, he produced pages from the Bible and began to run off copies, far faster than previous scribes or publishers could do by hand or using full-page blocks of type.

He died broke, though.  Link.

Nuttier than I thought

I think Steve Bannon sounds nuttier than ever in his "WE WERE VICTORIOUS AND YOU BE WILL CRUSHED UNDER OUR HEEL" (I think that's a fair summary) comments at CPAC.

Yes, makes me so confident to see someone like him with the ear of the President of the USA.

I did find this video amusing, though.

Down Mexico way

What?:

Paul Ryan tours the US-Mexico border on horseback

I was hoping there was a photo of him on a rise, looking down at the huddled masses, as that headline, for some reason, immediately reminded me of this:

and made me wonder who else may be making the trip:   

Penalty rates

Can I regain some "cred" to my "conservative leaning" claim at the top of the blog by noting that I think the Fair Work Commission's decision to reduce Sunday penalty rates is overdue and justified?  In fact, I think they should have gone a bit further, especially with casuals.

Of course, it won't affect a great many small businesses that dealt with the excessive penalty rates by just ignoring them.   Maybe I can even make a bit of a Laffer-like argument here, and note that the result might mean a net improvement for hospitality workers as a whole, if it encourages businesses to actually pay to the award.  But that could be being too optimistic.

Message to Jason

I know it's an edited version of a paper, but no, it's a rambling article that I would call far from "excellent".

I personally find Allan a very grating character - and certainly I don't understand why he continues to work in a sector he seems to find appalling.  I am sure I could find him more convincing if he actually left the Australian university sector and wrote his criticisms from outside of it.  Preferably from another country, since he seems to rate them much more highly.

That said - yes, his criticisms of the number of law schools and graduates pumped out by them, and the way they study now, sound all entirely valid.

His generic criticism about how and what they are taught, however - I very much doubt he is someone I should pay attention to in that regard. 

The path to how we got to the strange and dubious changes to tertiary education generally in Australia seems to me to be complicated and leave plenty of room for criticism of both Left and Right for each being a bit conned in their own way by a self serving education sector.   But given the recent debacle of the private vocational education players, I have a bit of trouble with listening to critiques from the Right on anything to do with education.

Get a grip

With more analysis of why New South Wales was barely coping with electricity demand during one of the days of its recent, really remarkable, heatwave in the news, I feel the need to make one observation:

Get a grip, people:  the risk of losing power for an hour or two a year in a modern city is not the end of civilisation.

Going back  a few decades in Queensland, at least, before concern about how our electricity was generated was even on the radar, summertime blackouts in my part of Brisbane (all of 7 or 8 km from the inner city) were hardly that unusual.   Storms at that time seemed much more likely to cause very widespread blackouts than they are now, and I seem to recall people considered it an inconvenience but not a crisis. 

Now, you get a city with a "brownout" of an hour, again really due to the weather and the high demands it causes, and everyone acts as if it is a crisis.

Sure, it's good to work on fixing the problem that causes it:  continual supply is ideal and (like improvements to Queensland's transmission infrastructure) are worth working towards.

But let's not go overboard with how bad the current situation is...

A weirdly dysfunctional presidency

It's been obvious since he won the election, particularly, that Trump is an emotionally needy man-child who craves approval.  But this story at Politico, which indicates that his inner circle fully understands this, and will then go out and feed stories to the Right wing bubble media so that they will turn up on their boss's cable TV viewing and make him happier, really indicates something that sounds truly unique and strange in modern democracy.

To be fair, the story does also confirm that he reads the New York Times daily (waiting, waiting, for the hint of approval, I guess);  but it is also obvious that it simply upsets him and leads to his "fake news" attacks.

Speaking of fake news, as this Washington Post article noted last week, the key to the success of such attacks with his base is that they live in a Right wing media bubble, where Fox News is the key source of news for an extraordinary high number of them.   The role of the Right wing internet "news" outlets is also no doubt important.

This is why Rupert Murdoch has been key to the dumbing down and intense polarisation of American (and to a significant extent, Australian) politics.   

Not a good idea to try

Hey, I missed this article in The Atlantic in January:

What Happens If You Stick Your Head in a Particle Accelerator?

Interestingly, we have a good idea that it's not going to be good for your health - a Soviet scientist did get his head accidentally zapped by a proton beam of very high strength in 1978, and although it didn't kill him, he was painlessly injured.    

Message to monty

Telling you nothing new, but the CL approach to history follows some simple, immutable, rules:

a.  no Labor (or in America, Democrat) politician ever did anything great, ever.  Or, if pressed, deserves credit for anything great.
b.  the Catholic Church was the greatest, most heroic, institute for the advancement of humanity, ever;
c.  all figures in history have to pass the purity test of their attitude to abortion and contraception before anything positive can be said about them.    

When markets don't work as you want

A good article looking at the complexities of the Australian electricity system and why it is having trouble coping with the necessary change to clean energy.

No, it only sounds like an autocrat who fearmongers about, and scapegoats, ethnic groups for shoring up his appeal to his gullible base

Trump administration seeks to prevent ‘panic’ over new immigration enforcement policies

From the report:

Kelly’s new DHS policies considerably broaden the pool of those who are prioritized for deportations, including undocumented immigrants who have been charged with crimes but not convicted, those who commit acts that constitute a “chargeable criminal offense,” and those who an immigration officer concludes pose “a risk to public safety or national security.”

The Trump administration “is using the specter of crime to create fear . . . in the American community about immigrants in order to create an opening to advance the indiscriminate persecution of immigrants,” said Clarissa Martínez-de-Castro, deputy vice president at the National Council of La Raza. “This administration is saying, ‘Now, everybody is going to be a priority,’ and the devil may care.”

But don't panic!: 

“We do not need a sense of panic in the communities,” a DHS official said in a conference call with reporters to formally release the memos to the public.

“We do not have the personnel, time or resources to go into communities and round up people and do all kinds of mass throwing folks on buses. That’s entirely a figment of folks’ imagination,” said the official, who was joined on the call by two others, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to answer questions. “This is not intended to produce mass roundups, mass deportations.”
 

That Milo matter

I'd already criticised Bolt's judgement for playing footsie with the obnoxious internet character Milo Yiannopoulos just because he criticises the Left, so Andrew doesn't really get much credit for having dropped him now.   And Tim Blair, a frequent Milo promoter, is conveniently away at the moment, so the fate of his former endorsements is yet to be seen.  

I watched bits and pieces of (one of the) interviews that got MY into trouble, and there's no doubt from it that, despite protestations made now (designed to try to save his lucrative book deal, presumably), he expressed no great moral concern about pederasty with consent, given the way he was talking about his enthusiastic participation in it as a 14 year old, and his reluctance to criticise the man (a priest, even) he claims it was with.  His statement today that he was the victim of the priest is just completely at odds with how he conducted himself in the interview, where he was happy to paint himself as the knowing instigator of enjoyable sexual encounters as a precocious young (gay) teenager.   He explained this as part of his then rebelliousness, but expressed no shame or regret.   

He may genuinely despise paedophiles, for all I know, and he's hardly the first* gay man** to make the distinction between paedophilia and pederasty, and grant some sympathy to the latter.  But I would bet he's the first openly gay man making money on the American wingnut media circuit to muse along those lines and not realise it was going to go over like a lead balloon.

I said before his writing seemed like that of an intellectual lightweight;  the abrupt (possible?) ending of his career this way helps confirm he's a bit short on the smarts.  

So, no great loss to society that he's lost his book deal, and (I would hope) a job at Breitbart.

About time he got a real job, preferably one completely out of the public eye.  It's not good for his soul.*** 

* As Gerard Henderson likes to go on and on about, pederasts were seeking understanding, if not sympathy, via public appearances back in the 1970's in the media, including - gasp! - the ABC

** I was tempted to say "public intellectual", but that would be extremely generous, if not sarcastic

*** Which, evidently, he believes in, given that he claims at heart to still be a Catholic

Update:   I see from a Spectator piece on this that Jason Soon linked to, this comment about the people on the Right who are still supporting Milo despite his pederasty comments:

Those people – and I think they’re a tiny minority – are either childishly innocent or hopelessly stupid. There’s no kinder way to say it. Either way, their opinion doesn’t matter. 

Can you guess which choice I go for?   [Lots of support for MY still in the Catallaxy threads.]

Conspiracy time

I can't be bothered checking right now, but I presume that the wingnut conspiracy Right must have claimed within minutes of its announcement that the Russian UN Ambassador's sudden death was at the hands of the Deep State trying to oust Trump, or at least start a war with Russia, or something?

On the upside

I'm a bit worried that I sounded too critical of the Catholic Church;  some may think I'm starting to endorse "progressive" Christianity of the Spong variety.

So, as a corrective to that, let me make a few comments.

The Church on social teaching in the modern era is pretty sound - in terms of its views on economics and the role of government,  it largely strikes a sensible balance in its support of capitalism, while acknowledging an important role for government intervention and even unions (as long as they're not outright supporting communism) in making for a fair society.   Libertarians views for minimal government find no significant support there, and those from the Acton Institute are pushing a marginal view with no real credibility. 

In terms of international aid, charity work, and the provision of health services in the West, too, it does great work with the only issue being the knots it ties itself in regarding women's reproduction, all due to it's view on abortion and contraception.  (The latter does deserve some revision, but let's not go there right now while I'm trying to look on the bright side.)

The Church also has taken the "right" side of science on climate change and pollution, and shames the Evangelicals of American who are foolishly prepared to go with the idea that God just won't let the Earth overheat no matter how much humans try.

As for theology and doctrine and where its future lies:  I remain completely unconvinced that the future for Christianity lies in redefining it so that the matter of the reality of God or a supernatural realm becomes unimportant, or irrelevant.  Yet this is the danger that skeptical examinations of theology and religion always face; it seems almost an inevitable path that progressive theology leads down, and it's why conservative Catholics refuse to allow the first step to be taken.  

But my point is that denial of a problem of how theology and doctrine is to take into account dramatic changes in understanding of the nature of the Universe (and human biology) is no answer either.   And the reason for my previous post was to argue that the Church's institutional response has in some key respects made the matter harder to deal with, not easier.

Lead poisoning by bullet

It does seem odd that it has taken doctors a long time to fully take into account that leaving bullet fragments in the body (something recommended a surprising amount of times, apparently) can lead to long term lead poisoning.  This article at The Atlantic explains why, though, and it makes for a good read.

Internal conflicts

An article at the Catholic Herald takes the line that the Church is now in a "full blown" doctrinal crisis.

I must admit, the article makes a pretty strong case.

There are two issues relevant here:   on the one hand, there's the matter of who can access the sacraments; but the bigger issue is that so much of that question is tied to the matters of sex and marriage.

But I tend to think this is all part and parcel of a slowly evolving crisis of Catholicism hitting modernity - the debatable point being when do we say "modernity" began.

Although it can be argued that it goes back much further, I'm inclined to think the really serious challenge starts with Darwin.  (And don't forget, the other big change in understanding humanity comes with knowledge of the true, vast extent of the universe, which only dates from about 1925.)  Catholicism, to its credit, somehow never got caught up in denying evolution, and it can even claim a hand in the idea of the Big Bang; but that doesn't mean that both don't present challenges to the concept of Original Sin.   Close on Darwin's heal, Freud may have been nuttily obsessed with some of his pet ideas, but he and Jung successfully set the groundwork for people assuming they have to dig deep into their unconscious to understand their "true" self, which is then perceived as essentially immutable.  By the end of the 20th century, the ubiquity of computers and the rise of the idea that everyone is a meat robot, with no free will but only the trick perception of free will, has become more pervasive and only exacerbates the role of the unconscious, and as such it's (of course) extremely corrosive to the idea of a Church, or God's Grace, having any significant role in life.

These forces, combined with the Church's over-reach in push back against modernity with it formalising the Pope's infallibility, followed up by using it in the mid 20th century for a doctrine that seems, to put it mildly, esoteric to the modern mind (I'm talking the Assumption of Mary); and then the rejection of contraception even if it's of a kind that prevents conception (yes, even a condom used by a married couple renders the sex "wrong"); the Church has been losing doctrinal credibility at a slow but steady pace over  about 150 years.

The Church's attempt to get cool with modernity, via Vatican 2, brought up its own logical difficulties, with the insistence on a "properly informed conscience" being paramount in assessing moral behaviour, while denying that any Catholic could reject the Church's teaching on what is moral.  And it was all undercut by the lack of compelling logic in the blanket rejection of contraception in the same decade.

The result is that in a very large part of the globe,  the congregations have taken doctrine, and the use of the sacraments, into their own hands, effectively:  confession and the power it implied in the local priest has almost vanished; the concept of sexual sin has been greatly diminished;  in fact the whole definitive categorisation of the seriousness of different sins is seen as improbable now;  and people with failed marriages (especially if the fault is all their partner's) resent the idea that they cannot participate in communion if they re-partner.   (Annulments are possible, but seen as an unnecessarily complicated de facto acceptance of divorce.)   Those who are living outside of the Church's teaching on sexuality will often just partake in communion anyway - they are very unlikely to hear a condemnation of their behaviour from the pulpit, and unless they want to grandstand, the priest handing out communion is not to know what they do in the bedroom.  For those in gay relationships, there has been the startling turnaround in sympathy for them amongst the laity, and many clergy.  The Church's behaviour in the child abuse scandals in many nations, as well as its less than stellar role in confronting European fascism in the mid 20th century, have further hurt the perception of the Church's moral authority.

So yes, I think the Church is facing a very difficult future.   Intellectually, I am inclined to think that some sort of schism may be the only way of resolving it, but it's not as if the Church's assets can be easily divided up between the conservatives and the more liberal elements.    So the Henry VIII approach can't be repeated.  Which perhaps means that it is really is going to continue dragging out for years yet.

Monday bits and pieces of interest

*  Mission Impossible 6 starts filming in Paris in April.   Same director as last time, although he says it will be a very different Ethan Hunt.   Sounds a bit like a revisit to the family drama stuff in M:I3, which was OK but I don't think I've ever re-watched.   Anyway, can almost guarantee I will see it.

* A case of a brain tumour causing "hyper-religiosity" and visions of talking with the Virgin Mary.   Rather reminiscent of Joan of Arc.

* I finally see how to link to a particular Axios story - this one about how Republicans, with supreme hypocrisy and with no proper justification from the past (didn't Reagan have to increase some taxes to make up revenue short fall after his first cuts?), are now prepared to cut taxes and let the deficit grow.  Stephen Moore is for this:  Krugman derides him continually, so he'll be impressed. In fact, Krugman has already a post up explaining that for demographic and other reasons, no one should be planning on very high growth in the next few years. 

*  I watched Snowpiercer on Stan on Saturday.   As I say, it's remarkable how it seems Stan is exclusively for only B grade movies.  This one has a very silly premise, but I knew that going in.    It's worth watching for the scenery chewing performance of Tilda Swinton alone.  As I have said before, she just sucks all attention to herself (in a good way - she's really remarkable.)   

*  When even Fox News hosts start complaining that Trump is going too far in his "the media is the enemy of the people" line, you know he really is going too far.   The drumming up of fear that seems crucial to Trump's appeal to his base is increasingly ridiculous, with his and his staff's allusions to attacks that never happened, but still apparently works with his dimwitted fans.   Speaking of which, it is a wonder that Triumph the Comedy Insult Dog escaped with his life after his interactions with Trumpkins at the inauguration.  Pretty funny, though:

Churchill: friend of science

Did you know that Winston Churchill was quite interested in science and did his own bits of popular science writing in his day?   No, nor did I.

This Nature article, written because of the recent re-discovery of an essay he wrote "Are we alone in the Universe?" in 1939, is a great read.   Here are some extracts:

Winston Churchill is best known as a wartime leader, one of the most influential politicians of the twentieth century, a clear-eyed historian and an eloquent orator. He was also passionate about science and technology.

Aged 22, while stationed with the British Army in India in 1896, he read Darwin's On the Origin of Species and a primer on physics. In the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote popular-science essays on topics such as evolution and cells in newspapers and magazines. In a 1931 article in The Strand Magazine entitled 'Fifty Years Hence'¹, he described fusion power: “If the hydrogen atoms in a pound of water could be prevailed upon to combine together and form helium, they would suffice to drive a thousand-horsepower engine for a whole year.” His writing was likely to have been informed by conversations with his friend and later adviser, the physicist Frederick Lindemann.

During the Second World War, Churchill supported the development of radar and Britain's nuclear programme. He met regularly with scientists such as Bernard Lovell, the father of radio astronomy. An exchange about the use of statistics to fight German U-boats captures his attitude. Air Chief Marshal Arthur 'Bomber' Harris complained, “Are we fighting this war with weapons or slide rules?” Churchill replied, “Let's try the slide rule.”²

 Once again, evidence that conservatism in the modern political world (especially in America) has undergone a worrying change.

But look - the public I have conned don't want it

The continuing hide of Professor Stagflation of Catallaxy, um, continues.

Sinclair Davidson today:

One small problem: the electorate are somewhere else. It seems to me that the electorate do not want a tax, a price, a scheme, a what-ever-you-want-to-call-it that increases electricity prices. People want cheap and reliable electricity.

Yes, and why (at least in significant part) would that be?  Because you and your IPA and Catallaxy economist mates (including Rupert's national paper) have waged a PR campaign for years, based on deceptive and dishonest non-scientist charlatans (and the global handful of climate contrarian scientists) that no carbon pricing is in any way necessary, as climate change is a bunch of bollocks.

Davidson gets some credit from me for not swallowing Trumpism whole - but this line he runs is very much like the massive hypocrisy in the Trump declaration that he, once and for all, was ending the rumours that Obama was not born in the US.   

If he's going to comment on the public's reticence on carbon pricing, he should acknowledge his side's role in it.  And while he's at it, update us on the "no statistically significant global temperature increase since 1995 line" too. 

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.