Only took a week...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My suggestion for a new Australia Day date

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post title refers to both:

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

and 

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

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

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

Leaks and lies

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

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

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

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

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

 But read the whole thing...

Against pill testing

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

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

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

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

Silly trivia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cartoon they refer to is this:

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

Inadequate Google blog searching, revisited

Why does this happen???

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

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

Nothing came up trying Bing.

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

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

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

Why does this happen??

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

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

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

Very witty

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

Cleaning up the vomit story

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

Pet rat problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lost post

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

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

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

Not right in the head - in three parts

1.  Dimitrious Gargasoulas, the guy who went on the shocking killing rampage on Friday in his car in Melbourne.   The Daily Mail has a run down on his recent Facebook entries, all of which indicate he had been ranting and obviously mentally unwell for sometime.  Friends are quoted saying he was seriously drug addled by ice; the police knew him from a violent past.  The Facebook entries indicate some religious element to his derangement, but none of the entries indicate it was Islamic.    If anything, they in fact indicate he thought he was following an esoteric Kurdish, pre-Islamic religion.

2. The people who comment at Catallaxy.   If a random attack first appears that it might be Islamic terrorism, there is no persuading them, ever, that it wasn't.   Their compelling evidence - the one tourist witness who was on video saying that Gargasoulas was yelling "allah akhbar" from his car.   Oddly, it seems no other witness has come forward to confirm it, nor is there any phone video around to back it up.  Gargasoulas was yelling and ranting, and his actions did resemble some recent overseas Islamic terrorism: doesn't it seem to reasonable people at least possible - maybe even likely - that the tourist mistakenly thought he heard the phrase?  The only other evidence - a friend quoted by the Daily Mail saying that Gargasoulas had recently "converted to Islam."   Yet, the Facebook rants don't support that, at all. There has been no one saying he has ever stepped foot into a mosque.

But the high functioning fools of Catallaxy - for that is what most of them are - latched onto "it's Islamic terrorism" and won't let go.   Even the weirdo Fisk - who I have not been able to make sense of for years - is seeming to play some sort of anti-immigration game with this.

In any event, even if it were later proved that he had yelled what the tourist thought he did -  if every religion is supposed to be responsible for the killings of its clearly mentally ill so-called converts, I'd like to know how many Christian or Catholic "terrorists" there have been over the years.  

3.  David Leyonhjelm:  I've said before he seems to me to be kind of depressed since the last election, probably because all of the Senate balance of power attention has switched to One Nation and Xenophon.  But he is a deeply foolish man - one who doesn't have normal sensibilities and constantly seems to seek controversy for the sake of attention - to do what he did on Friday. 

When China sounds more reasonable than America

A short post (well, they are all short) at Axios noted that Steven Bannon thought it a good idea to compare Trump's speech to that of China's president Xi Jinping at Davos.

Who knows why he thought that, when Xi sounds like the one being modern, reasonable, and moral:

Here's Trump today:

For many decades, we've enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we've defended other nation's borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America's infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. We've made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon. One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.

And here's Xi on Tuesday:

We should commit ourselves to growing an open global economy to share opportunities and interests through opening-up and achieve win-win outcomes. One should not just retreat to the harbor when encountering a storm, for this will never get us to the other shore of the ocean. We must redouble efforts to develop global connectivity to enable all countries to achieve inter-connected growth and share prosperity. We must remain committed to developing global free trade and investment, promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation through opening-up and say no to protectionism.

And by the way: isn't it very odd that Republicans (or at least, Trump Republicans) should be concerned about infrastructure, when it's their combination of lower taxes and "must balance the budget" that set up the country for decreasing spend on infrastructure in the first place?  (OK, I am assuming that's the story here - I don't have the links at hand to prove it. Oh alright, I'll Google it for this piece last year in The Atlantic:

To get a sense of Ryan’s pre-election view of the infrastructure question, however, consider his response when The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein asked, during the Washington Ideas Forum in late September, whether he would help Trump pass “a $550 billion, or more, infrastructure program.” Ryan laughed loudly and slapped his hand on the arm rest of his chair. “That’s not in the ‘Better Way’ agenda,” the speaker replied, referring the six-point plan he and other House GOP lawmakers unveiled earlier this year as their campaign platform. “Just so you know, we just passed the biggest highway bill since the 1990s.”

After years of delays and stopgap bills, Congress did approve a six-year, $305 billion highway bill last December, but the Obama administration and advocates for infrastructure investment considered the legislation woefully short of the amount needed to bring the nation’s roads and bridges into good repair. Before the 2009 stimulus, infrastructure had enjoyed mostly bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. But while there remain a solid number of Republican lawmakers who want to increase spending on transportation and other upkeep, the hurdle in recent years has been finding a way to pay for it. Congress has not raised the gas tax in more than two decades, and ideas to finance infrastructure in other ways have not gone far.