Adventures in cluelessness

A bleat today from Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy:

It does seem to me that the shared values that have maintained our society and civilisation are fracturing. The left for reasons best understood by themselves have chosen to normalise political violence and hate.

This from the man who controls a blog abandoned for years now by any political moderate* due to the aggressive, belligerent and belittling style of attack routine in threads and increasingly present in posts.   Where sexism and demeaning comments about gays, all Muslims, women and all by a tiny handful of politicians are commonplace, and the livid hatred of the last couple of Labor PM's was continually on display by people banned from Bolt.

 * all except one, who ignores my entreaties to not deem it worthy of his occasional presence.

No wonder Donald hates Arnold

More "can you imagine the Right wing/wingnut commentary on this if it had happened under Obama"?

As noted at Axios:

Reuters has a new report on the raid in Yemen this weekend that resulted in the death of Navy SEAL William "Ryan" Owens. It includes some shocking claims from anonymous U.S. military officials:

• Trump approved the raid without proper intelligence, ground support, or contingency plans.
• The intelligence lapses caused the SEAL team to drop into a reinforced compound with a larger group of Al Qaeda soldiers than expected.
• The "brutal firefight" that killed Owens also resulted in the deaths of 15 women and children, including an 8-year old girl.

Why it matters: A leak like this is highly unusual in the military community — and especially shocking when it comes just 12 days into a new presidency. It raises questions about Trump's standing among his military leaders, as these officials have now thrown their commander-in-chief under the bus.

And as for Right wing commentary, look at Hot Air:

I’ve read the NYT, WaPo, and Reuters accounts of what happened but I can’t recall a single piece of hard evidence alleged that would suggest the White House, rather than military planners, screwed this up. 

Update:  contrast the remarkable fairness of the mainstream news blogs Slate and Vox both saying that people shouldn't rush to judgement about it being Trump's fault.   (Compared to how right wing blogs would treat Obama.)   But the fact still remains (as Vox says):  it seems pretty remarkable that someone within in the military is prepared to complain about Trump so early.  (Again, if it had been military sources leaking against Obama, we would have never heard the end of it from Republicans and their media.) 

At least it's a good sign that Trump doesn't the full support of the military.

Roubini on Trump

Seems to me that Roubini's thoughts on the longer term economic effects of Trumpism are reasonable.  I liked this part, in particular:

Trump’s actions suggest that his administration’s economic interventionism will go beyond traditional protectionism. Trump has already shown his willingness to target firms’ foreign operations with the threat of import levies, public accusations of price gouging and immigration restrictions (which make it harder to attract talent).

The Nobel laureate economist Edmund S Phelps has described Trump’s direct interference in the corporate sector as reminiscent of corporatist Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Indeed, if Barack Obama had treated the corporate sector in the way that Trump has, he would have been smeared as a communist; but for some reason when Trump does it, corporate America puts its tail between its legs.

A great description of Trump

From Slate:

To say Donald Trump is a binary thinker is to give the president of the United States too much credit for the complexity of his views. Trump is a cartoonish thinker. Terrorist Muslims are storming the gate, conniving criminal Mexicans are doing the same, inner-city Chicago is worse than Afghanistan, and it goes on and on and on. It’s a school of thought cultivated by a steady diet of Fox News with a helping of Breitbart on cheat days. Completely unaware of what he doesn’t know, and utterly uninterested in discovering it, Trump storms around saying outlandish things and padding his ongoing narrative by explaining the things everyone knows already. It’s like the class clown who didn’t do the homework got called on by the teacher and, after embarrassing himself in front of the entire class, got elected president of the whole country.

The latest glimpse into Trump’s world of cartoonish thinking comes via the Associated Press, which reported Wednesday that during the president’s phone call with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto last week, the president of the United States, joking or not, implied that perhaps he should just invade Mexico.

Send in troops! To Mexico! Why not? I’m the president! This is what presidents do and say in movies that I’ve seen. It’s a thought so ill-constructed it could be confused as the plot line of a sequel to Canadian Bacon....

You might want to brace yourself now for when Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping speak on the phone. 

An unexpected danger from a delicious food

Lychees can be dangerous.  Quite a surprise:

For more than two decades, apparently healthy children in the Indian region of Bihar suffered sudden seizures and lost consciousness. A third of them died, leaving doctors baffled. 

But a team of American and Indian scientists say they have found the cause of the mystery illness, which killed more than 100 children a year: eating too many lychees on an empty stomach.

The research, published in medical journal The Lancet, has found lychees — particularly unripe fruits — contain an amino acid that affects blood glucose levels.

That reminds me - they must not have become very cheap this year, because we hardly seem to have had any at home.  

If there was any doubt: a complete jerk

There's a remarkable account of Trump's call with Malcolm Turnbull in the Washington Post - and I am a bit puzzled as to why anyone from the White House with knowledge of the call would have confirmed to a reporter - in a lot of detail - how much of an aggro, self aggrandising jerk Trump was to poor old Malcolm.

It certainly makes it seem very much on the cards, as was reported yesterday, that Trump will change his mind on taking the Manus Island/Nauru refugee/prisoners.  

Thiel goes country shopping

Weirdo billionaire Peter Thiel loves New Zealand, I see, saying some years ago that it's the country that most aligns with his view of the future.   Which means, I guess, he really loves an economy based on dairy cows  and hobbit films, with next to no manufacturing,  and increasingly entrenched inequality due to the low taxes rich people like him have to pay.  Of course he would like the place. 

I know - on the face of it, the figures for the New Zealand economy currently looks quite OK; but I just have a hunch it's a case of too many eggs in one or two baskets.

And this guy paints a simple picture of how lowering taxes just makes inequality worse:  

VICE: Hi Tim, could anyone have predicted such a dramatic transition over the past two decades?
Tim Hazledine: I mean, which part? We were a very equal society and really prided ourselves on the living wage, or social wage, and then we hit the 1980s and went the other way. As inequality increased economists began to recommend trade-offs. The thinking was that you can reduce inequality by raising taxes. Many argued that would in turn reduce economic growth, because we would be taxing our big industries.

But that's not what happened right? Instead big earners revolted and taxes were lowered?
That's right. Cutting the tax rate was supposed to encourage really smart, energetic people to work hard. But these people basically said thank you very much, played some more golf and then went on more holidays, which didn't help at all. What the OECD study and a few others have revealed is that no, it's not even a trade-off. Not taxing to sustain economic growth is not bad for good—it's bad for bad. The countries that have higher inequality are doing poorer.

 

I have to say...

....listening to both Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison over the last 24 hours, am I the only person who is really sick of them spending so much time on attacking and blaming Bill Shorten and Labor rather than justifying and detailing the benefits of their policies? 

I didn't think much of Bill Shorten's appearance at the Press Club this week, either.

I honestly don't think it is just increasing cynicism with my age:  we genuinely have a very uninspiring and low calibre bunch of politicians nationally at the moment.

By improbable light sail to the stars

A feature at Nature News talks about a rather improbable sounding proposal to sent a small light sail to Proxima Centauri.  Even if it works, the amount of time it spends in the star system destination - 2 hours!

Lucky for me, I guess...

Study provides new evidence that exercise is not key to weight control

A Brexit consequence

Interesting article at a French news website, noting how many expat English men and women living in Europe, and previously able to enjoy reciprocal health care benefits, are now facing a very uncertain future.

I very much doubt Brexit has any chance of being a long term success.  

It has been hot...

January was hottest month on record in Sydney and Brisbane, says weather bureau

I have been meaning to post about how unpleasantly, and continuously, hot and humid it has been in Brisbane this summer, and I'm glad to see it was not just in my imagination. 

A conservative judge and a silly argument

Of course I don't spend much time contemplating the US Supreme Court and how sensible its judges sound, but I do note that an article says of Trump's appointment (Gorsuch):

In the Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor cases, which challenged the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate on religious-liberty grounds and were eventually heard by the Supreme Court, Gorsuch sided strongly with the plaintiffs.

“The opinion of the panel majority is clearly and gravely wrong—on an issue that has little to do with contraception and a great deal to do with religious liberty,” he wrote in a dissent in the Little Sisters of the Poor case. “ When a law demands that a person do something the person considers sinful, and the penalty for refusal is a large financial penalty, then the law imposes a substantial burden on that person’s free exercise of religion.”

But the Little Sisters of the Poor case was based on a contorted and silly argument:  that by the sisters signing a form that said they would not provide an employee cover that included contraception, they were morally complicit in the government then providing the cover  that would cover it.

As this article explained in detail - this was a nonsense argument.  If Gorsuch's line is taken literally, there would be a heap of things the religious could avoid.   

I agree with this explanation

David Roberts at Vox:

Trump isn’t an evil geniusAnd that’s not what matters anyway.

My theory is that authoritarian demagogues are more alike than they are different. Most of them are narcissists. They are, at root, fearful, paranoid, and tribal, which drives the macho posturing and obsession with loyalty. They have a kind of animal cunning for how to manipulate people, dominate, and accrue power.

But for the most part they aren’t evil geniuses. (One of Russian journalist Masha Gessen’s recurring themes about Putin is what a “grey, ordinary man” he is.) Indeed, evil geniuses are pretty rare — or, to put it more precisely, narcissistic, paranoid tribalists are rarely geniuses, because genius requires a certain detached perspective, an ability to step outside oneself, which is precisely what narcissists lack.

What authoritarian regimes do is blunder forward, grasping and grabbing power whenever and wherever they can, building secretive inner circles, surrounding themselves with supplicant state media, demonizing dissenting voices, and punishing enemies. They do this not because of some 12-dimensional chess analysis of the political landscape, but because that’s what narcissism and zero-sum thinking does. They are more like animals driven by instinct than chess masters driven by strategy, though of course there’s a range (with Trump being on the far blinded-by-narcissism end).

If we’re looking to understand the course an authoritarian takes through a country and its history — what’s he’s accomplished, what’s likely to happen next — the place to look is not his intent, but the institutions and norms of the country he seeks to dominate. They, not his ultimate goals and desires, are what most determine the ultimate shape and consequences of a regime.