The French way

For a nation pretty relaxed about things like nudity and extramarital affairs, it seems the French have remained quite conservative compared to other countries regarding how kids are made. 

In this article at France 24:  Inside France's black market for sperm (some headline, hey?) we learn that -

On September 24, French lawmakers begin debating a government-proposed bill to extend the right to medically assisted procreation (MAP) to all women, a highly sensitive subject in France. Under current rules, single women and lesbian couples are barred from access to fertility treatment. This discrimination has fostered the rise of a thriving underground market for sperm that carries enormous legal and sanitary risks.

The article details how single or lesbian women have been, um, sourcing sperm via the underground online market, and the men who offer their services are sometimes not in it for altruistic reasons:

The donor, who says he belongs to the first category, claims to have fathered dozens of babies and now moderates a 1,100-member closed Facebook group that connects single and lesbian women with donors in France. He says he has seen a clear increase in both the number of donors and the number of women seeking donors on the Facebook group lately. But he has also noted a rise in inappropriate proposals, especially when it comes to donors seeking free sex, or a financial reward for their services.

“Some ask to be paid €30, €500 or even €1,000 for their ‘donations’,” he says, adding that he has to exclude at least 10 people from the group each month because of such demands.

Seriously, how brash do you have to be to offer to donate sperm to a lesbian, but only via sex?

But it is not an unusual thing in France, apparently, seemingly due to a strange law which perhaps encourages crazily opportunistic men to offer sex to lesbians/single women.   (Although, it also seems from what follows that there may be a genuine cultural feeling that personal delivery, so to speak, is just more natural and the way it should be.   You have to remember the French are not immune from dubious health ideas - homoeopathy is popular there.)

Can you imagine any Australian guy even bothering to try this on with an Australian lesbian?:

Once a woman has selected her donor online, there are three ways to carry out the insemination. Most opt for artificial insemination (AI), in which the donor collects his sperm in a small container and the woman uses a needleless syringe, a turkey baster or a pipette to inject the semen into her vagina. One alternative is partial insemination (PI), which involves penetration just before ejaculation. The other is natural insemination (NI) – in other words, sex.

The AI method, which entails “handling” the sperm but remains the least intrusive for the woman, is strictly forbidden in France and carries a penalty of up to two years in prison and a €30,000 fine. “By handling the sperm, we’re talking three things: collecting it, retaining it and finally manipulating it with one’s hands [by way of a syringe, for example],” APGL’s Faget explains.

For the purpose of this investigation, FRANCE 24’s reporter set up a profile on a popular donor app. Within 48 hours she had received more than 50 “likes” and invitations to start a conversation with potential donors. Most of them advocated natural insemination as their preferred method, with many even conditioning their donation to its use. Offering his reasons, “Joe”, 28, wrote: “I just believe this is how it should be done, it’s more effective too.”

“Jack”, 35, said he would only be prepared to donate through NI and that it would be done “over a timespan of seven to nine days in a row (to make sure you get pregnant), as both bodies are physical and [generate the] chemicals that are needed for a successful fertilisation: It’s a dance for two to make three ☺.” He also said that he was “very interested in helping out lesbian couples and getting them both pregnant in the same cycle”.

“Bebeaide” (or Babyhelp in English), 42, who claims to have impregnated at least five women in the Paris region, initially told FRANCE 24’s reporter that he did not mind donating via the less intimate AI technique, but later told her that it would be a shame to not at least attempt partial insemination because it “maximises the chances” of getting pregnant. “It would just entail sexual intercourse at ‘the moment of’, no strings attached, no foreplay. Your partner can participate in the act,” he proposed.

According to Doctor Chalas, there is some truth to the claim that sexual intercourse works better, however disturbing the propositions. “The conception rate from sexual intercourse is around 25 percent, and 21 percent from a medically assisted intrauterine insemination with frozen donor sperm – so those two methods are comparable,” she says. “But an artificial insemination carried out at home is a lot less efficient, with a conception rate of around 10 percent.”

One other thing I learn form the article - in parts of Europe, some men can make a significant supplement to their income via donation to sperm banks:

 One reason for the dearth of sperm donors is the absence of remuneration. While donors in Denmark can be paid more than €500 per month for their semen, all donations must be free in France – a principle doctors and politicians are both attached too. Another factor is the lengthy vetting process donors have to go through, including interviews with psychologists and biologists, along with fertility and chromosome tests, and screening for possible STDs. Only the candidates who clear all tests and fit within the 18-45 age bracket are accepted.

Anyway, it looks like French law will change and things will be more like it is in other countries.   But there will probably still be French men prepared to selflessly put themselves through several rounds of sex to aid women who want to get pregnant.

 

Yeah, this is a little surprising

Good, though:

Extinction Rebellion (Melbourne), if you're listening...

Stop bothering people trying to get to work or, more importantly, hospital or court (where appointments really matter), and target something that has played and continues to play a disgusting role in climate change denial/inaction:

The IPA, of course:

As for climate scientists in semi-supporting ER:  they know that the official position of the group in terms of targets are completely unachievable, but they feel that anything that seems to help political action in the right direction is at least not worth attacking.   See some comments here on Twitter:

The pathetic Lindsay

Update:  Allahpundit at Hot Air talking about Graham:

It’s amazing how able he is to compartmentalize his disgust at Trump’s Syria policy with his zeal in defending Trump on impeachment, frankly. They’re two distinct matters, granted, but politicians use leverage they have over one matter to exact concessions on unrelated matters all the time. Pundits keep warning that Trump is playing with fire by antagonizing Senate Republicans on Syria at the very moment that they’re about to take his fate in their hands on impeachment, but is he really playing with fire? Graham is heartbroken about abandoning the Kurds and yet here he is on Fox trying to blow up the impeachment effort on the president’s behalf before it even reaches the Senate. With ass-kissing like this, why should Trump feel pressure to throw the Senate GOP a bone on foreign policy?

Weirdo aliens return?

Gee.  Odd, possible alien related, cow mutilations are back in the news, at least at NPR:

Harney County Sheriff's Deputy Dan Jenkins has been working the cattle cases and has gotten dozens of calls from all over offering tips and suggestions.

"A lot of people lean toward the aliens," Jenkins says. "One caller had told us to look for basically a depression under the carcass. 'Cause he said that the alien ships will kinda beam the cow up and do whatever they are going to do with it. Then they just drop them from a great height."

Some history:

Back in the 1980s, one of Terry Anderson's mother cows was mysteriously killed overnight. Standing at his ranch near Pendleton, Ore., Anderson points to the exact spot where he found her on top of a mountain.

He remembers his cow lying dead, her udder removed with something razor sharp.

"And not one drop of blood anywhere," Anderson says.

He has never gotten over it.

"It's just left a really strange feeling with me since that day. You can't explain it," Anderson says. "And, you know, no one else has been able to explain it."

I would be a lot more convinced if there were good, clear photos of the "precision" cutting that could only have been done with a sharp instrument.

A fast food observation

Oh my.  The Filet-O-Fish has shrunk to something like a toddler sized snack.  It's tiny.  

Is McD losing more market share lately.  It deserves to...

Has Fox found a way to abandon Trump?

Remember I said that Fox News had created a cult, and didn't know how to end it?

I wonder if the Trump Turkey/Kurd decision is seen by Lachlan as giving them a way to dump him?

More important than the breakfast twits, however, will be the way the evening Trump worship sessions handle this.

An unfortunate realisation in another late movie review

This time - American History X.

Bleak films about racist neo-Nazis are not generally my cup of tea, so I hadn't bothered catching up with this one until now.

It was better than I expected, perhaps because I hadn't realised that it was actually a redemption story, and so had the spark of old fashioned optimism about it.   It's not perfect, and I had not realised (or had forgotten if I had read it before) that the director had disowned the film when it came out - a very serious case of "creative differences" between him and the studio, obviously.   A lot of the acting was very good, but that black teacher hero was a bit over the top in solemn earnestness.

By far the most surprising thing was the unpleasant realisation about how much of the speech the neo-Nazi Norton makes to his buddies (before they trash a Korean run supermarket) could have come straight out of a Donald Trump campaign rally:



Distressingly,  it seems that the person who posted that to Youtube did so because of approval of the sentiment in the speech, and lots of comments agree with him.    Which goes to show the healthy state of the American mindset under Trump.  [Sarcasm, of course.]

Fungi and your pancreas

I said in comments that I would make a post about an article at Nature, explaining that fungi around your pancreas may not be a good thing:

The communities of microorganisms that occupy specific regions of the body are often altered in cancer¹, and these microbiomes — particularly their bacterial components — are a current focus of cancer research. One example is pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA), for which changes in the bacterial community occupying the pancreas have been documented². This lethal disease often goes undetected until it has reached advanced stages, and the prognosis is usually very poor³. Writing in Nature, Aykut et al.⁴ reveal that the fungal component of the pancreatic microbiome (known as the mycobiome) is also altered in PDA. In fact, an abundance of a specific fungal genus actually promotes the disease.

I didn't even realise that fungi made up a significant part of our normal mycobiome, but apparently they do:

The mycobiome is a historically under-recognized player in human health and disease, but its role in both is essential. Harmless organisms called commensals, including fungi, inhabit mucosal surfaces such as the linings of the gut, nose and mouth, and can activate inflammatory processes as part of the immune system’s response to injury or infection. In some cases, changes in the biodiversity of fungal communities are linked to aggravated inflammatory-disease outcomes. For example, intestinal overgrowth of Candida albicans — a fungus that causes oral thrush in babies — has been associated with severe forms of intestinal ulcers⁵ and with mould-induced asthma⁶. Moreover, it is becoming apparent that there is a relationship between the gut mycobiome and human cancers, including colorectal and oesophageal cancer⁷. 

President Flexo

Is it possible that I might be the first person to make this comparison?   I have my doubts, but Googling doesn't bring anything up that I can see.

This recent tweet of Trump:

along with his "stable genius" claim, which Trump cultists would presumably assure us are just his sense of humour, reminds me that Trump is very much like the robot character Flexo from Futurama.  You might recall that he is the robot Bender's evil twin, who constantly claims to be joking after making offensive comments:

 "Well I don't feel as bad as you look! [Laughs] Nah, I'm just messing with you, kid. You're alright. That's some face you got, though. I think they got a cream for that. [Laughs again] Nah, you're great."

I see that many other people think Trump is a lot like an aged Zapp Brannigan - and of course I can see that too.  Trump combines the worst characteristics of both.

And of course, Rupert Murdoch is Professor Farnsworth - never a better match. 

Is it wrong...

...to hope he gets just a little tear gassed?

Although, truth be told, he is such a self promoting publicity tart he's probably figuring that it would be good for his career and will be hoping for it himself.

Has he ever been on Sunrise?  He would probably kill to get a regular slot on that.

Update:   I was rather busy with domestic duties on the weekend, but now I see that the post has caused considerable consternation at Catallaxy yesterday.

Sinclair linked to it in his open thread (with his usual lack of accuracy with English - see his comment in the thread) only to find that one person in particular at Catallaxy pretty much agreed with me, and went further in her criticisms of Wilson.   SD started demanding an apology (on behalf of Tim?) and the end result seems to be either a banning (or self banning) of the commenter.  Many others want her back.

The funny thing is, this departed commenter had made one of the most offensive comments about Greta Thunberg recently, which, to his credit, Sinclair edited when he noticed it.   (To the discredit of everyone else at the blog, no one else had called her out for it.)

So, I inadvertently helped one of the more obnoxious commenters disappear from there.  Cool!

And by the way, it's pretty funny that Sinclair tried to make a big deal out of this, when he went all in defending his good mate's fantasies about Muslims blowing up an ABC panel.    

 

Wandering the streets, again

Not sure how old this Anglican church building would be, but pretty old by Brisbane standards, I bet:

Wingnut fantasy world watch

Look, all I can say that it's lucky this bloke didn't live during any witch hunt era, because his belief in his powers of interpretation of facial expressions (and even the shape of a jaw, which is freaking hilarious when you wonder what he would make of Mitch McConnell) shows exactly the same level of nutty, misplaced overconfidence in I-can-read-their-face-and-know-exactly-what-is-really-going-on-in-that-mind that would have led to more than a few women being torched:

Or is it just part of a creative writing exercise he's doing? It has that strange structure about it...

I've upset him before in a post in which I (quite respectfully, actually) noted his confession of depression, and expressed surprise at how many angry wingnuts at Catallaxy had come out to support him with their own tales of past issues with depression. 

But really, I am not sure he's out of an unhealthy mindset if he genuinely believes such rubbish.

How to be a berserker

Wired has a recent article that starts:

The legendary Viking warriors known as berserkers were renowned for their ferocity in battle, purportedly fighting in a trancelike state of blind rage (berserkergang), howling like wild animals, biting their shields, and often unable to distinguish between friend and foe in the heat of battle. But historians know very little about the berserkers apart from scattered Old Norse myths and epic sagas. One intriguing hypothesis as to the source of their behavior is that the berserkers ingested a specific kind of mushroom with psychoactive properties. Now an ethnobotanist is challenging that hypothesis, suggesting in a recent paper in The Journal of Ethnopharmacology that henbane is a more likely candidate.

Henbane is a flowering weed that grows in Scandinavia, that had been used for some time:

It's been around since ancient Greece and has been used in various cultures throughout history as a narcotic, painkiller, cure for insomnia, and anesthetic. It's a common treatment for motion sickness and can produce short-term memory loss. It can knock out someone for 24 hours, and in rare cases henbane can lead to respiratory failure. It's also been investigated as a possible truth serum. Henbane even found its way into early European beers, gradually being replaced with hops after the passage of the Bavarian Purity Law in 1516.

Those characteristics don't sound rage inducing, but who knows:

Fatur argues that while both the mushrooms and henbane could account for increases in strength, altered consciousness, delirium, jerking and twitching, and red face commonly associated with the berserkers, aggressive rage is not common with the mushroom. Fatur cites several cases involving angry behavior associated with plants related to henbane, containing the same alkaloids.

All rather speculative. 

Speaking of vikings, I am close to booking a ticket for next year's Ring cycle in Brisbane.   My "best" choice, for the cheap tickets left, is either to be sitting on the top balcony in the back row;  the top row down the side and near the front but with some form of view restriction; or in the stalls right near the stage with a restricted view that means I may not see all the words on the surtitle.  

I can't work out if it will be better to be near the front and being fully immersed in the music, but not knowing what they are singing; or up in the stratospheric second balcony and being able to see everything, at least if I use opera glasses.  

Either way, perhaps if I take henbane before the performance, it will be particularly memorable.

   
 

It's the vibe

I don't talk about Scott Morrison much lately, because he strikes me as a shallow flim flam man of no substance or significant ideas who is not worth talking about.   The only positive thing I can say about him is that he has been annoying me a tad less than Tony Abbott, who was more "in your face" with ridiculous culture war decisions - Bronwyn Bishop as speaker, a knighthood to Prince Philip, for God's sake, as well as his rhetorical nastiness to Julia Gillard.  It's going to take some effort by Morrison to make himself a more ignoble PM than Abbott.

But, he may be working himself up to it, if he's going to continue the "mini-Trump" lines:

 
I think Trump's speech to the UN was just obviously retrograde and a mish-mash of wrong and muddled thoughts (as if nations retreating into what their "patriots" think is right is anything other than an invitation for selfish and unethical behaviour towards other nations - and their own citizens - to thrive), and perhaps the only reason it didn't get more critique along those lines is because the world knows it was delivered by an absurd figure.   Sure, the UN has lots of faults - but Trump's prescription is more likely to exacerbate than fix them.

If you want to see an impressive example of the polar opposite of Trump and his speech (that is, a strong defence of nations all pulling together for mutual benefit delivered by a smart and sophisticated sounding politician) have a look at the speech given by Singaporean PM Lee Hsien Loong:



So why does Morrison make a mini Trump (and mini Brexit) speech now?   There is no obvious reason that I can detect.   I don't think Morrison is the sort of man to dwell on these sort of issues much, so is there some figure in the background trying to tell him how to sound like a deep thinker? 

Or is he just an opportunistic twit who has decided to jump on at least part of the "vibe" of the most retrograde parts of Conservative thought going around at the moment? 

It would be good to know.

Republican conspiracy belief considered

Peter Beinart has a good piece in The Atlantic looking at the somewhat puzzling question as to why the American Right, despite holding the Presidency and a lot of power elsewhere, are still believing so many conspiracies.   How much can I extract?:

...over the past week, Trump’s defenders have spread one conspiracy theory after another about the intelligence-community insider who exposed the call. Stephen Miller, Breitbart, and Fox News have all called the whistle-blower an agent of the “deep state”—a phrase, popularized by Alex Jones, suggesting that a cabal of spies secretly run the government. (The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer once likened this notion to believing in the tooth fairy.)

On its face, this descent into self-delusion isn’t surprising. In the Trump era, Republican conspiracy theorizing has grown omnipresent. Trump himself has suggested that Antonin Scalia might have been murdered, climate change is a Chinese hoax, Ted Cruz’s father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Clintons may bear responsibility for the murder of Jeffrey Epstein, and wind turbines cause cancer. In 2016, more than three-quarters of Trump supporters said Barack Obama was “hiding important information about his background and early life.”

But dig into the academic research on conspiracy theories, and you realize how odd the current environment actually is. Until Trump, scholars assumed that holding the White House inoculated parties from conspiracism. They viewed conspiratorial thinking as a weapon of the weak, which couldn’t seriously threaten the republic because its adherents wielded so little influence in government.

That’s what makes today’s GOP so unusual and so dangerous. Never before in modern American history has a political party been this paranoid and this powerful at the same time.

In their book, American Conspiracy Theories, which tracks paranoid thinking in U.S. politics from 1890 to 2010, the University of Miami political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent conclude that “conspiracy theories are for losers.” Such theories, they argue, are “most likely to issue from domestic groups who fail to achieve power, objectives or resources.” This makes sense. The more dispossessed you feel, and the less you identify with the people running the government, the easier it is to imagine them hatching a shadowy plot to screw you.  ...

Beinart goes on to explain that if a party is in control, its members generally start believing less in conspiracies.  But it hasn't worked that way with Republicans, and the question is why.

The best explanation is that even though a white male Christian Republican holds the presidency, many white Christian Republican men still feel persecuted by those in power. Trump and other top Republicans fan this belief constantly.

Beinart goes on to argue that the white male Christian loss of power is largely fantasy, but:

...white male income has stagnated in recent decades, the country has grown more racially and religiously diverse, and gender norms have changed. And this has helped Republicans convince their supporters that they are America’s real victims. Republicans, according to polling this year by the Pew Research Center, are more likely to say that men face a lot of discrimination than they are to say women face a lot of discrimination. They’re more likely to say that whites face a lot of discrimination than to say blacks or Hispanics do. And they’re more likely to say evangelical Christians experience discrimination than Muslims do.

This itself reflects a detachment from reality. And it has made many Republicans susceptible to the conspiratorial thinking that, in the past, was reserved for groups that really were on society’s margins. 

 All very interesting and all very plausible.  Makes no mention of how the internet has (inadvertently) ramped up the ability of conspiracy belief to spread and be maintained.   That is a huge part of the story.

The worst aspect, though, is that the key global problem of climate change has had action from America (and Australia) stymied because of (parts of) the Right's persistent conspiracy belief about it in the face of well grounded scientific evidence.   

Interesting

The Guardian reports:

Another major insurer, Axis Capital, has shunned the Adani Carmichael coal project and withdrawn a bid to underwrite the construction of the mine’s rail line.

The withdrawal, first reported by Reuters, follows announcements from 15 of the world’s leading insurers which say they either won’t support the Carmichael mine, or won’t insure thermal coal projects.

It also presents a clear opportunity to activist groups seeking to stop the construction of Carmichael. Those efforts have targeted companies – on their front pavement and in the boardroom – who might provide logistical or financial support to Adani...

John Quiggin, a professor of economics at the University of Queensland, has said the Carmichael project “can’t proceed” without insurance.

So activists may not have to superglue themselves to the track, after all?  Or read up on rail line demolition for amateurs.   (I'm scared to Google the topic myself, just in case some it sets off some cyber alert in ASIO.)

Sounds about right

From The Onion:

From the article:

“It’s really not that complicated: Eat a sensible amount of plain, ordinary food each day, and then we won’t have to do all these confusing studies and you won’t have to worry anymore,” said Blair Amundsen of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who explained that Americans continually eat such large quantities of bad food—drinking 24-ounce mocha lattes in the morning, ordering pizza for lunch, making hot dogs for dinner—that it’s almost impossible to determine which bad things are hurting them the most. “We wouldn’t have to churn out all this goddamn research on red meat if you didn’t eat it three meals a day, okay? So maybe just try something normal like a sandwich—not the huge kind with so much meat you have to cut it into pieces before you can fit it into your mouth, but a regular, standard-sized sandwich with lettuce and tomatoes and stuff on it. And don’t try to correct your weird, bad eating habits with a diet of nothing but salad for a month, because that’s weird and bad too. Please stop whatever you’re doing now and, for like a week, just eat normal. We’re every bit as exhausted as you are with all this food study shit.”

Yeah, I have to say, some of those American deli sandwiches, with like 4 cm of sliced meats in them, are just over the top.   Seinfeld was eating one of them in a recent episode, even though I doubt from his slim figure that it's not a regular part of his diet.

American candidates

So, it would seem Bernie's health rules him out, and the Democratic candidate for President will be Biden or Warren.

I really don't follow American politics in the same level of detail that other people do, so I haven't paid much attention to Warren.  But Biden does seem too old and past it, and while Warren herself is 70, she looks younger and pretty fit.  She seems a lot younger than Trump, even though he is only 3 years older.    

Lots of people I trust on twitter say she's good at explaining stuff, and Zuckerberg has it in for her, so she probably should be the next President.   She is said to have Wall Street in a panic because she wants a wealth tax (but only kicks in at $50 million)  Surely Democrats can stand up to the rich who think that will be a disaster?

Americans can be a bit weird in their view of tax though.  They fantasise about upward mobility so much that they can imagine how annoyed they would be if facing a wealth tax, even if they're personally forever stuck on a barely living wage and have so few assets that urgent health care could send them bankrupt. 

I know the feeling

Before the internet broke my attention span I read books compulsively. Now, it takes willpower

More reason to impeach him

It's one (dangerous) thing for wingnuts to talk about Democrats trying to stage a coup;  a much, much worse thing when their cult leader makes the same claim.

Some well deserved mocking

On the story about Trump and his ideas as to how to bolster the border:

And this:

So much for that (already long debunked) theory

A report on a new planetary carbon audit that came up with these key findings:

• CO₂ out-gassed to the atmosphere and oceans today from volcanoes and other magmatically active regions is estimated at 280 to 360 million tonnes (0.28 to 0.36 Gt) per year, including that released into the oceans from mid-ocean ridges
• Humanity's annual carbon emissions through the burning of fossil fuels and forests, etc., are 40 to 100 times greater than all volcanic emissions

Telling each other conspiracy theories has killed the Right

Jonathan Chait explains how The Federalist started a false and conspiracy laden claim about the whistleblower rules changing, which was taken up with enthusiasm by Trump and his cult followers, but the Intelligence Inspector General has denied it completely.  Does the Federalist retract?  No, it  claims some element of vindication to gloss over the fact they were completely wrong and have mislead and dumbed down the Trump base, again.

And how about this for a complete disgrace - a key Trump adviser using language bound to fire up the lurid conspiracy of the dangerous armed wingnut Trump base:

Of course he does

Hey, just dropped into Mark Latham's twitter feed, to see that now he's devoting time to defending Trump, including re-tweeing Trump's "you can't impeach me, I'm too great at being President" tweets:

How pathetic.

Latham, with his obsession with testosterone fuelled Right wing takes on matters, truly belongs with the losers at Catallaxy.  Maybe he is already commenting there?

Today's Trump madness

Even Ed Morrissey, one of the more conservative columnists at Hot Air, is embarrassed with Trump's use of "treason":

It’s incredible that we have to explain this to adults, but what Trump describes here bears absolutely no resemblance to treason — not even in a moral sense, let alone the legal sense over which Trump rants. Article III Section 3 of the Constitution establishes the only legal definition of treason:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

In other words, it requires a declaration of war (which we haven’t had since World War II) and explicit aid to the enemy named by it. Bzzzzt! Thank you for playing! Nor is what Schiff did treason in a moral sense; he’s attacking Trump, not the United States of America. We do not have lese majeste laws in the US; one is allowed to criticize the president, even unfairly, even dishonestly, without it being a case of treason....

If Barack Obama had accused Republicans pushing the birther conspiracy theory of treason and called for their arrest, his critics would have screamed for Obama’s impeachment. If Trump wants to make a case that Schiff’s dishonest about him abusing his office, then just stick to that. It would be a lot easier to defend Trump against allegations of abusing the powers of his office if Trump wasn’t going all Red Queen in demanding Schiff’s arrest for a non-existent crime. Just sayin’. 

The New York Times notes this:

WASHINGTON — President Trump was repeatedly warned by his own staff that the Ukraine conspiracy theory that he and his lawyer were pursuing was “completely debunked” long before the president pressed Ukraine this summer to investigate his Democratic rivals, a former top adviser said on Sunday.

Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Mr. Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said he told the president there was no basis to the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and did so on behalf of the Democrats. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Bossert said he was “deeply disturbed” that Mr. Trump nonetheless tried to get Ukraine’s president to produce damaging information about Democrats.

And in Australia, of course our jellyback and sycophantic PM would say this in response to a phone call from Trump:

"The Australian Government has always been ready to assist and cooperate with efforts that help shed further light on the matters under investigation," a Federal Government spokesperson told the ABC.

"The PM confirmed this readiness once again in conversation with the President."

 And of course, lots of Australians would be thinking "so that's why the reception in Washington looked rather over the top."

I'd love to know the questions Barr will put to our government:  "So, this Alexander Downer - come on, level with us, is he some sort of spy?"

In further examples of Barr debasing the role of AG:

Finally, I was amused by the sarcasm in this:

Sounds cool

The Guardian notes:

Sweden’s navy HQ is returning to a vast underground cold war fortress designed to withstand a nuclear attack, in what has been seen as a defensive move against a resurgent Russia.

After a 25-year absence, the navy will once again be commanded from beneath billions of tonnes of granite as the country strives to build up its defences in response to the perceived threat from Moscow.

The top secret naval base on Muskö, about 25 miles (40km) from Stockholm, resembles a cross between Tracy Island from Thunderbirds and the film set of You Only Live Twice, where James Bond grappled with arch villain Ernst Blofeld in his headquarters beneath a volcano.

Completed in 1969, it boasts cavernous underground docks that can shelter warships, with miles of tunnels, offices and a hospital.

Yes, he is panicking

I find it pretty telling that the Trump cultists are still running with "nothing to see here" regarding impeachment, despite the fact that the Trump tweet rate is at "panic stations" levels, indicating that even their Dear Leader knows he is in trouble. 

I haven't checked for myself, but someone on Twitter said a short time ago that he's re-tweeted 50 or 60 times today or yesterday, including the one that mentions "civil war" - always a great look in a President!

I wonder - maybe one way of knowing something is truly "up" would be by news of a meeting between some high level Republicans and Lachlan or Rupert Murdoch.   Because their whole problem is the bind of how they dump Trump without losing all of his cult followers, and the key to his cult is to be found at Fox News.

Update:   I keep feeling a bit torn about whether to describe Trump cultists as incredibly dumb, incredibly blind, or both.  I mean, a lot of these people hold down jobs - academics or professionals some of them - so is it a case of cult blindness just makes you seem dumb?   Were Germans who hated Hitler having this discussion amongst themselves in the 1930's?

Update 2:  For Steve Kates, there is no reason to expend charity, given his routine, hyperbolic condemnations of all of those who do not agree with him:  

What does get me down is that there is not more disgust in America such that not only will PDT with certainty win the election, but the Republicans will also sweep the House and pick up another half dozen in the Senate. If the Dems represent somewhere near the middle of where political sentiment now is, the West is truly lost and we will all in good time end up with political controls on our lives similar to those in China.

As for our diseased and addled media, anyone at the ABC, to take just one example, who thinks there is a case for any Democrat candidate to win against PDT is a terrifying example of political inanity, with zero morality and less judgement.

Dumb and nasty. 

Update 3:  David Von Drehle writes on the importance of Fox News in any move on Trump:

With impeachment gathering steam, the fate of President Trump is in the hands of a single institution. Not the Senate, though that’s the body established by the Constitution to make the ultimate decision to remove a president. I’m thinking of Fox News....

As it happens, Trump’s crisis finds Fox News at a turning point. With the sale of his company’s movie arm to Disney, founder Rupert Murdoch has cashed out a large part of his empire while anointing his eldest son, Lachlan, the chief executive of the media business. The death of Roger Ailes, accused sexual harasser and Fox News visionary, opens the way to fresh thinking — which the channel sorely needs, given its median audience age of about 65 .

Amid this flux, it is intriguing that Fox News added a veteran politician to its rather compact board of directors earlier this year and placed him in charge of nominating future board members. Paul D. Ryan, former House speaker, has as much reason as any conservative Republican in America to nurse a gigantic grudge against the president. To have him advising the new Fox News leadership on strategy and future directions cannot bode well for the aging star of the Donald Trump Show.

Von Drehle goes on to argue that Paul Ryan has every reason to seek revenge on Trump, and as such, his role at Fox is bad news (for the President.)

Not exactly "corruption"

Lots of writers who think Trump is good for impeachment for his dealings with Ukraine nonetheless admit that the Hunter Biden "jobs for the boys" story is not a great one for Joe Biden either.

This article at The Atlantic:   Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption talks about how this is happening all the time on both sides of politics probably takes it too far with using "corruption" in the headline, though.

I guess that one of the problems of dealing with it, though, is that there is also a legitimate case for saying that the children of political figures should not be unduly punished by having certain jobs that they may legitimately be well qualified to hold off limits only because of what their parent does.  (Not that I am saying Hunter fits into that category.)   I don't know how you could stop the children of politicians benefiting from the perception that they are influential with their parent.

The internal Fox wars still hot

An interesting post at Hot Air by Allahpundit - Chris Wallace from Fox has thrown petrol on the fire between between the two camps at his network. Here's the key part of it:

According to Wallace, diGenova is working with Giuliani on the Biden business with Ukraine. The guy whom Tucker invited on as some sort of dispassionate legal analyst to counter Napolitano turns out to be a secret participant in the matter that’s being analyzed, Trump’s interactions with Zelensky and his government. I didn’t see the first Tucker segment with diGenova but you can watch the second here. He’s introduced merely as a former U.S. Attorney, and Carlson prefaces their conversation by noting that legal opinion is split on the point about a “thing of value” that Napolitano had made. In other words, diGenova was presented to the audience as nothing more or less than a seasoned lawyer whose acumen led him to a different opinion than Judge Nap’s. Tucker even laughed at one point at Shep’s claim that diGenova is a “partisan.”

Now here comes Wallace to imply that the entire segment was basically a fraud, with diGenova concealing a glaring conflict of interest....

Did Tucker know and conceal the information? Presumably he was in the dark, but he’s a buddy of Trump’s and has been known to talk foreign policy with him by phone. Did Trump ever idly mention to him that Rudy *and Joe diGenova* are working on the Ukraine thing? Also: Did Fox executives know of diGenova’s role? If so, why did they conceal the conflict of interest? If not, will there be any sanction against diGenova for not disclosing his involvement in the Ukraine stuff before appearing on a segment to comment on it?

Relatedly, who greenlit this on-air revelation by Wallace? It’s to Fox’s credit that they allowed it to be reported knowing the questions it would raise about diGenova’s segments this week and his role on the network going forward, but I’m surprised that they allowed it to be done in such a showy way. They could have relegated it to a story on the Fox News website and then quietly warned Tucker not to have him back on, or at least to be forthright about disclosing his role in the Ukraine matter next time.
 

Late movie review - Spotlight

It's on Netflix, and I've been meaning to watch it for a while.

It's very competently made, and I think Mark Ruffalo is the stand out actor in it.

But I was surprised that the story did not have more examples of actual obstructionism from the Catholic establishment.  My son said he was expecting thugs for the church to come around and threaten one of the journalists.  I didn't trust the white haired editor (or whatever he was) - I thought it would turn out he had actively suppressed previous stories.  But even that theory came to naught.   As Peter Bradshaw said in his review:

We keep hearing about how the church is going to come after reporters who dare to challenge its authority – but this never really happens, and there is none of the paranoia of a picture like Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) or Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999).

So, yes, worth watching, interesting and competent, but a bit lacking in the level of intrigue and emotional impact.  So I would put it down as over-praised (93% on Metacritic.)   

An interesting idea has more credibility than I expected

From Gizmodo:

What If Planet Nine Is A Bowling Ball-Size Black Hole?

“Primordial black holes” are a class of proposed objects that formed as a result of the chaotic early days of the universe. Like any other black hole, they would be incredibly dense regions where gravity warps space so much that light cannot escape.

But these would weigh far less than stars, since they weren’t formed out of stars like the black holes we’ve actually observed — they would have formed out of places of leftover extra density in the rapidly expanding early universe. (And no, they wouldn’t contribute significantly to dark matter, the mysterious stuff that seems to comprise the lion’s share of the universe’s mass.)

Unwin and his collaborator Jakub Scholtz, a junior research fellow at the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology at Durham University, proposed that perhaps a primordial black hole whizzed by, interacted with the solar system’s other members, and became trapped in an orbit.

I asked Uniwn and Scholtz whether such an object would evaporate from tiny physical effects called Hawking radiation; they said that no, even a five-Earth-mass black hole would last for a very long time, far longer than the age of the universe.

If the planet really were a primordial black hole, rather than a planet-sized mass of regular matter, then it would be no use trying to find it with typical planet-searching means.

A figure in the paper, shared above, demonstrates that a five-Earth-mass black hole could fit in the palm of your hand (yes, this encounter would kill you), and a 10-Earth-mass black hole would be the size of a bowling ball.

 I didn't realise Hawking radiation would work so slowly.

More Boris Johnson

Um, wouldn't this be enough to sink most politicians, let alone Prime Ministers?:

The woman allegedly granted thousands of pounds in public funding by Boris Johnson reportedly told friends they were having an affair at the time.

Former model turned technology entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri allegedly received £126,000 in public money and had privileged access to three foreign trade missions led by the prime minister during his time as London mayor.

The Sunday Times has now reported that Ms Acuri confided to four friends that they had been having an affair during his time in City Hall. The paper said that David Enrich, now finance editor of The New York Times, claimed he had been told of the affair by two of her friends when he was working for another newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, in 2013.

His account was said by the Sunday Times to corroborate that of other sources who had spoken to Ms Arcuri.

Yet more in the ongoing series: outstanding brilliance of Boris Johnson still undetectable

Come on, Tim and Jason - my couple of not completely nutty readers who like Boris Johnson.  Surely you can't defend his UN speech as not embarrassing, can you?:

Bredan O'Neill an even bigger idiot than I thought

I'll explain it this way:   I've always disliked Brendan O'Neill's polemic style, and as a result, I haven't even paid all that much attention to his actual arguments.  And besides, Andrew Bolt likes him, so what are the chances I would?

But I see overnight that O'Neill has joined the stupid group known as "populist Right wingers who whine about the Left being dangerous thugs, while actually being the ones calling for violence."  He was on the BBC saying that Brexiteers "should" riot, being quick to qualify it by noting that such riots should not involve breaking shop windows.  (I don't think he went on to explain the exact details of the Marxist libertarian concept of "appropriate rioting".)

My Twitter feed then goes on to show me that O'Neill has over the last year been making some readily ridiculed claims that Ireland is not really that big a fan of the EU, when polling actually shows up to 90% in favour of staying.  The bemused reaction of fellow panelists (especially comedian Andrew Maxwell) is fun to watch (it's the second clip at this link.)  

More violent Brexit wankery dreams are to be found from Delingpole at Breitbart:

The more the minority Remainer Establishment carries on with its trickery, its cheating, its lies, its double-dealing, its canting, its hypocrisy, and its shenanigans, the more the majority of us will loathe it with every fibre of our beings.

We’re all too angry and determined now to accept anything but total victory.

And when we do finally crush our enemies, see them driven before us and hear the lamentation of their women, well, I doubt many of us are going to be able to spare one tear of pity. Rarely in history have bastards so totally had it coming to them!

The funny thing is, Delingpole is, physically, a scrawny human who says he has an illness that many suspect is hypochondria.   He would be the last man you would expect to be able to fight off anyone in the street.   As with many on the wingnut populist Right, it's easy to interpret the fantasies of violent victory over their enemies as psychological compensation for physical inadequacies.  (A point I've made about Catallaxy frequently too.)

Along those lines, apparently, Brexiteers don't like being told this:

We find that voting Leave is associated with older age, white ethnicity, low educational attainment, infrequent use of smartphones and the internet, receiving benefits, adverse health and low life satisfaction.

but they're not good with facing up to facts.  Such as the simple one - people voted for Brexit without understanding the complexities of achieving it, and the damage a "no deal" Brexit would cause.

Before baby formula

Science magazine notes that it's now thought that these are 3,000 year old baby bottles, from Germany:

 The carbon isotopes inside two of the vessels suggested they held milk from ruminants, such as cows, sheep, or goats. The other once held milk from another type of mammal, perhaps pigs or humans. That means babies were drinking animal milk from bottles at least 3000 years ago, the team reports today in Nature. It wouldn’t have met babies’ nutritional needs the way breast milk or modern formula does, but it could have been used as a supplementary food during weaning.

Or, I suppose, they could just be for putting milk in your ancient tea?

Anyway, the one on the right looks a bit like a fat kangaroo, no?

Send it to J Soon as well

Here's the sketch, which I think is brilliant in concept, but perhaps could have been a bit funnier in execution:

Yes of course - a court saying the Parliament has to meet is a dark era for democracy

Gawd, Brendan O'Neill is an annoying twerp given to histrionics over everything, but I think he might have reached a new peak of ridiculousness in his Spiked editorial about the Supreme Court telling the PM that he just can't close down Parliament:

Today’s Supreme Court ruling is a vile assault on the democratic order. In finding that Boris Johnson’s proroguing of parliament was unlawful, and that parliament is not prorogued, the 11 justices have made an explicitly political decision in favour of the Remainer elite....

This was a decisively political act by 11 unelected judges who have taken sides against the government of the day, and this opens up a new, dark era in British political life.  What we have seen emerge via this judgement is a borderline tyrannical layer in British politics....

This judgement is a disaster for law and for politics.

Is it the Marxist in him, or the libertarian, who hates the idea of governments having to work within the confines of the judicial arm of government?   And who hates the idea of a Parliament meeting?
 

Trump cultist watch

*  Everyone is surprised about how quickly the whistleblower complaint was released, and it certainly once again indicates that, unbeknown to Trump, he does in fact have people around him all the time who are appalled by his behaviour.   His Narcissistic Personalty Disorder prevents him from recognising it.  Most of the Trump cultists (and all round idiots - it's a Venn set diagram that is completely overlapping) who advise him were probably incapable of seeing how the doctored memo of the call could be seen as being damaging - although Axios has an article saying that there was at least some debate within some at the White House as to whether releasing it would help or hinder.   Anyway, once again I say that, whenever Trump is gone, there are going to be some ripsnorting insider accounts of outrageous and stupid things he has said and done while President.

* Australian Trump Cult central - Catallaxy - had the ridiculous CL write a post that started:

The Ukrainian impeachment hoax is over and Donald Trump won. What was that – about 48 hours?

all before the details of the whistleblower complaint were known, and on what he seems to think was an "unredacted transcript".

Of course, they being cultists, the whistleblower complaint will have no influence.  Nor will Trump being on a recording - speaking to a bunch of diplomats (!) - hinting that the "spy" who has caused him trouble really deserves execution.   They will laugh it off, because they are not only stupid, they're stupidly dangerous.   (Once again, I am at least pleased to see that the only conservative blogger I can trust to be at least on the right page re Trump - Allahpundit at Hot Air - is pretty appalled.)

As I have written before, this presidency has given us a good feel of what it must have been like being a reasonable person in the 1930's watching the rise of Hitler, progressing from:

"Oh, that loudmouth with the silly moustache?   No way people will buy into his over-the-top act.  Germans are pretty sensible, aren't they?" to "Oh my God, when will people realise the mistake they've made giving him power - they keep excusing him no matter what he says or does."

*  Hey this is pretty hilarious:   Vanity Fair claims that the Trump State Media that is Fox News is having an internal crisis as to how to drop support of Trump without losing their audience completely:

Trump’s final bulwark is liable to be his first one: Fox News. Fox controls the flow of information—what facts are, whether allegations are to be believed—to huge swaths of his base. And Republican senators, who will ultimately decide whether the president remains in office, are in turn exquisitely sensitive to the opinions of Trump’s base. But even before the whistle-blower’s revelations, Fox was having something of a Trump identity crisis, and that bulwark has been wavering. In recent weeks, Trump has bashed Fox News on Twitter, taking particular issue lately with its polling, which, like other reputable polls, has shown the president under significant water. Meanwhile, Trump’s biggest booster seems to be having doubts of his own. This morning, Sean Hannity told friends the whistle-blower’s allegations are “really bad,” a person briefed on Hannity’s conversations told me. (Hannity did not respond to a request for comment). And according to four sources, Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch is already thinking about how to position the network for a post-Trump future. A person close to Lachlan told me that Fox News has been the highest rated cable network for seventeen years, and “the success has never depended on any one administration.” (A Fox Corp spokesperson declined to comment.)

Inside Fox News, tensions over Trump are becoming harder to contain as a long-running cold war between the network’s news and opinion sides turns hot.

 They built a cult and don't know how to end it.

Update:   Some people around Trump blame it on Rudy Giuliani, and he's furious and sounds as if he's going to have a breakdown:

Giuliani unleashed a rant about the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, Barack Obama, the media, and the “deep state.” He has spoken freely about all these topics since the moment he became a surrogate in Trump’s 2016 campaign. Giuliani has aired far-right conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton’s health on national television. He has discussed his convictions about alleged Biden-family corruption with Trump in the White House residence. Still, until the Ukraine scandal broke, Trump’s allies were almost uniformly supportive of Giuliani to reporters, and current and former administration officials would often praise him for his loyalty.

Not until the back-to-back release of the summary of the Trump-Zelensky call and the full whistle-blower complaint did the mood change among this group.

This morning, a former senior White House official told me this “entire thing,” referring to the Ukraine scandal, was “Rudy putting shit in Trump’s head.” A senior House Republican aide bashed Giuliani, telling me he was a “moron.” Both individuals spoke on condition of anonymity in order to be candid.

“They’re a bunch of cowards,” Giuliani told me in response. “I didn’t do anything wrong. The president knows they’re a bunch of cowards.”...

“It is impossible that the whistle-blower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons—when this is over, I will be the hero,” Giuliani told me.

“I’m not acting as a lawyer. I’m acting as someone who has devoted most of his life to straightening out government,” he continued, sounding out of breath. “Anything I did should be praised.”

 
Heh.

The funny is, some at Catallaxy agree that Giuliani is poison, but they don't realise they are victims of his conspiracy mongering too.   

The hypersonic filler story that will never die

Just saw this on news.co.au:

I have a theory that this story sits in media companies' hard drives, with an automatic "run this ever 6 months".  It is just the most persistent "coming soon to transform your world" story that will quite possibly never come - a bit like fusion power, but on higher rotation.

More on the Biden story

A journalist who wrote about the Biden story in 2015 complains:

I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Then the Right-Wing Spin Machine Turned the Story Upside Down.

Trump and Fox News just have to say "black is white" and the low information dimwits of the Right nod along without reading another thing about it.

As for Biden "bragging" about what he did - yes, he did, and with no reference to his son at all.   I would have thought sensible people would have wondered - if this is so obviously corrupt and self serving, why would he brag about it?

The reporting is that the prosecutor was sacked (at several country's request) for not investigating corruption actively enough - the sacked prosecutor then claimed he was actively investigating Biden's company, but other journalists say this is self serving and wrong: nothing was happening.

And a new investigation has been started but is progressing slowly.   And what is the "corruption" alleged against the son anyway?  Making money from a sleazy company due to family connections - yeah, right, I can why that would upset Trump supporters (sarcasm.)

Update:  As David Graham explains:

To summarize, Biden threatened to withhold aid if the prosecutor wasn’t fired, and he was. Importantly, Biden was not freelancing, but was acting as a representative of President Barack Obama. There’s no evidence that Biden was helping his son. Shokin’s former deputy, who quit in frustration over his boss’s intransigence, told Bloomberg in May that the U.S. wasn’t pushing to drop probes of Burisma. “There was no pressure from anyone from the U.S. to close cases against Zlochevsky,” he said. “It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015.”

In effect, Biden’s pressure to install a tougher prosecutor probably made it more likely, not less, that Burisma would be in the cross hairs. But since then, the Ukrainian government has not produced any evidence of wrongdoing by Burisma, and the current prosecutor general said in May there was none. A Ukrainian interior-minister official told the Daily Beast that though Ukraine has no evidence that either Biden broke the law, the government would investigate further if the U.S. formally requested it. Hunter Biden has left Burisma’s board.

Joe Biden says he did not discuss Burisma substantively with his son, though Hunter Biden told The New Yorker it came up briefly once: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’” Given Hunter Biden’s checkered past, and the political difficulty that he has caused his father, it’s doubtful he really knew what he was doing.

Hunter Biden seems to have been trading on his father’s famous name to make a buck—a common but distasteful practice familiar from Billy Carter to Roger Clinton, and indeed up to the Trump children today. He’s not exempt from criticism for this behavior, but that isn’t the same as producing evidence that Joe Biden did anything untoward, something that no one has done so far. It’s still possible that more information will emerge that will implicate Biden in trying to assist his son, but Trump has already rhetorically convicted him without any such evidence.

But as I say, the gullible, Fox News zone that the Trump supporting Right lives in just believe anything they are told from the special information bubble they live in.

We've already forgotten about Trump and the electric chair

As Dave Roberts tweeted:

And with that, the idiotic Trump defending Right has already gaslight itself that, indeed, there is a Biden scandal that is plain to see.     

In all my life, I have just never seen a political side that is stupider.  The culture wars and internet has just made them gullible, gurgling idiots.  

Including you, JC.   How are those lungs holding out?

Free will returns

Well, at least in terms of the famous Libet experiment that many interpreted as being a neurological proof that free will is illusory.  This recent article in The Atlantic reckons it's been debunked, although it sounds like some are still arguing about it.

I never found it terribly convincing in the first place.

No otter way

How come we don't have otters in Australia?   If they are in waters as diverse as those off California, and Singapore, how come up they never ended up near Brisbane?

Anyway, I wonder this because of a short report in Science:

Stranded or orphaned baby sea otters have been given a new lease on life—and a mission: restoring damaged ecosystems along the California coast.

Sea otters are a keystone species in their native coastal environments. They prey on small herbivorous sea creatures like sea urchins, which can lead to more kelp and healthier seagrass in an area. But after being hunted for their fur to near extinction in the 19th and 20th centuries, otter populations along the California coast are still struggling. Restoring populations is not as simple as bringing in new otters, though. The animals often have strong ties to their homes, and some relocated otters have made journeys of more than 100 kilometers to return to their birthplaces.

To solve this problem, scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California created the sea otter surrogacy program in 2002. So far, they have rescued 37 stranded or orphaned otters, many of which were suffering from dehydration or hypothermia. The researchers placed the pups with surrogate mothers—captive female otters at the aquarium—until they fully recovered. When the pups were 6 months to 1 year old (the typical age an otter is weaned), the researchers released them into Elkhorn Slough (shown above), a tidal wetland about 1.5 hours south of San Francisco, California. Because the orphaned otters were very young when they were rescued, they did not have strong ties to their home ranges and most thrived in the new environment, the researchers report today in Oryx–The International Journal of Conservation.

Outstanding cleverness of Boris Johnson still undetectable

Some news, hey?   Parliament going to go ahead despite Johnson shutting it down.  Perhaps all conservatives who voted for him should just stay away and let the rest govern.   

At least Johnson's not a climate change denier, so I can't criticise him as being completely stupid.  But he jumped the wrong way on Brexit, and now can't admit it.  All rather Abbott-like, except with Abbott it was climate change which was the "if I play this the right way, I could be PM" cynical power play.  Both risen way above their level of political competency, and Johnson looking good to go down in history as just as embarrassing a PM as Abbott.