Spygate is failing

Trump's died in the wool "base" may soon have a problem on their hands - support for Trump's cynical and stupid "branding" of "spygate" is not getting support from Republican congressmen, or even some key Trump supporters on Fox News.    Has Rupert had enough??  (I doubt it, but this is an odd turn of events in the propaganda network):

Asked to respond to Gowdy’s remarks, a Fox News commentator known for defending the president also cast doubt on Trump’s claims. Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano (better known and often quoted by Trump as Judge Napolitano) said claims that the FBI placed an undercover spy on Trump’s campaign “seem to be baseless.”

“There is no evidence for that whatsoever,” Napolitano said. The fact that the FBI source spoke with “people on the periphery of the campaign,” he said, “is standard operating procedure in intelligence gathering and in criminal investigations.”

Update:  Politico has a story to the same effect, noting this:

Late Wednesday, Fox News host Sean Hannity hosted a lengthy segment on the matter featuring appearances by two Trump campaign aides who alleged came into contact with the informant — Carter Page and Sam Clovis. But despite Hannity’s protestations, neither affirmatively said a spy had infiltrated the campaign.

"Were you spied upon. Did a spy approach you?" Hannity asked Page.
“I’m not sure, Sean,” Page replied.

Clovis, who oversaw the campaign’s foreign policy team, told Hannity that the informant contacted him, but didn’t pump him for information.

And this:

Dershowitz joined in Wednesday morning by conceding that he was “on the way to being persuaded” that the FBI’s use of an informant was proper.

The most clueless and ridiculous political commentator in Australia

It's a wonder RMIT isn't looking for ways to sack Steve Kates, given that his political commentary on Donald Trump and the e-vil Left (by which he means anyone who does not see Trump as the masterful saviour of the world just as he does) is so deeply, deeply embarrassing he must surely be putting off some people from studying there:

Political derangement is a mental disease for which the left is highly susceptible. PDT is demonstrating that every principle they have lived by is wrong, but rather than being willing to learn, they have become even more worm-eaten than ever. It is not just sickening to watch, of course, but frightening. 

Climate denialist will be forever in denial

Another good column by Graham Readfearn showed the dishonesty and ignorance of "Jonova", who claims that the old "carbon rise lags temperature rise" argument was what set her off on her life of climate change denial, despite the fact the explanation for it was always well known.

Note the conspiracy ideation she shows too:

  She was asked if there had been a “Road to Damascus” moment for her on climate change.  She said it was in February 2007 when her husband had told her that in the Earth’s geological past, there had been a 700 year lag between a rise in temperatures and a rise in CO2.

This led JoNova to Google for a bit. While this didn’t shoot down the argument that CO2 causes climate change, it did make her think that “the media is hiding something.”  According to Jo, all the scientists know this fact, but they don’t want to debate it.

It is obvious:  to deny AGW and climate change is caused by our CO2 emissions requires strong belief in conspiracies.  

The very definition of ...

...clueless white privilege:

[And look, I'm as cynical as anyone of the overuse by the Left of "white privilege", but you really only have to visit Catallaxy to see confirmation that as a concept, it certainly exists.]

Update:  a funny-cos-it's-true tweet spotted:

As I have been saying for some years now....

Heavy Rain, Not Sea Level Rise, Is the More Immediate Climate Change Threat Now

But don't worry, the sea level rise problem will be here soon enough.

Sack Jonathan Swan

I keep complaining about how Axios, a good site with generally objective judgment, employs Jonathan Swan, whose twitter feed keeps confirming he dislikes the cultural Left and is too sympathetic to Trump because of it.

Latest evidence - he "liked" another NRO column endorsing the "Obama and the FBI were spying on the Trump campaign, this is just wrong".

Sack him!

Didn't take long

As I wrote only two months ago, regarding the revived Roseanne, it's a wonder that all of her co-stars and (I think) some of her old writers and producers agreed to go back to the show, given her history of ludicrous and offensive tweets, nutty interviews and famous fighting with her production staff in the later years of her first show.  They must have known it would be like working with a ticking bomb.   I hope John Goodman, a great character actor, didn't knock back too many movie roles for it.

I see that Breitbart has the best, wingnutty outrage comments about the cancellation, ranging from "they're shutting down free speech!" to "it is not racist to call a black woman a monkey!  have you seen her photo?" 

More twitter stuff I agree with

It's the paranoid streak in American (and Australian wingnut) politics writ large, and it is obviously unhealthy and dangerous to democracy, and why I despise Rupert Murdoch for using it for profit:

Impossible to disagree

David Frum deals with it at greater, more eloquent, length:

Trump’s perfect emptiness of empathy has revealed itself again and again through his presidency, but never as completely and conspicuously as in his self-flattering 2018 Memorial Day tweets. They exceed even the heartless comment in a speech to Congress—in the presence of a grieving widow—that a fallen Navy Seal would be happy that his ovation from Congress had lasted longer than anybody else’s.

It’s not news that there is something missing from Trump where normal human feelings should go. His devouring need for admiration from others is joined to an extreme, even pathological, inability to return any care or concern for those others. But Trump’s version of this disconnect comes most especially to the fore at times of national ritual.

The brightness on distant planets

I watched Stargazing on the ABC last week, and enjoyed it enough.  (The "world record for number of people looking at the moon" seemed rather pointless, but people seemed to support getting out and it was a science-y thing, so what the hey...)

Back here in my backyard, while I wait for the dog to finish its wee before going to bed, I've been noticing how bright Jupiter and Mars seem to be at the moment.   The brightness of Jupiter in particular put me in mind of the question of how bright things would seem if you were an astronaut on one of its moons.  I remembered that this had been dealt with in a Robert Heinlein juvenile, where he had written that the eye on Earth is flooded with light during a bright day and just ignores the excess (so to speak); the result being that even on a Jovian moon, daylight would still look pretty much as bright as a day here.

I wondered last week if this was right, and have now just Googled the topic.   It would seem to be not too far off the mark, according to explanations at Quora and this table, which indicate that being on moon of Jupiter would be brighter than a hospital operating theatre.   They're all pretty bright, aren't they?  (Oddly, it makes one comparison indicating that being on Neptune the brightness would be able the same as "typical public bathroom".)

Things would be starting to look pretty dim at Pluto (somewhere between "public bathroom" and "typical night lit sidewalk"), but you would still be able to see colours.  In fact, this very neat NASA web page lets you enter your location, and come up with the next time that the light outside would look like midday light on Pluto!   Neat.  For me, it will be tomorrow morning at 6.24 am.   (Sunrise is 6.29am.)   I know the sky is still pretty bright at that time, but I will take particular note tomorrow while at the breakfast table.   I hope my son is still there too, so I can inflict some unwanted science on him.  I love doing that to my children....

Distant, small objects

How many small planets (asteroids?) do you think they've now discovered way beyond the orbit of Pluto and Neptune?    840, apparently, which does seem a lot to me.

And one will be visited next year by that New Horizons probe that went past Pluto last year.  

Speaking of that probe, there was a talk by the NASA folk who worked on it on Radio National last week (in the Big Ideas series.  Here's a link to the podcast.)   It was very interesting.  

Live in a nasty fantasy world of their own

I am gobsmacked at the ludicrous conspiracy/fantasy world uber Catholic CL lives in, when he has this to say about the video of an African guy who quickly scaled the outside of an apartment building in Paris to rescue a dangling child:

and:

Then the commenter with the name that is no doubt meant to be sardonic, but I reckon it's accurate, weighs in:


It's not just foolish, it's nastily foolish - Muslim, African = fraudsters prepared to put 4 year old in danger, in their tiny minds.  

Nearby sorcery

NPR has a lengthy story up about poor old PNG and the uptick in sorcery motivated killings.

If ever a country could do with some re-invigoration of modern Christian evangelism, this would be it.

A sitcom appreciation

Oh look.  The very fine American sitcom (which never really took off here) The Middle has come to an end, and someone at Vox writes in praise of it as a very underrated show.  I agree.

Regarding current sitcoms from America:   have tried looking at Modern Family a few times - seems pretty awful to me.   Last time I saw Big Bang Theory, I thought it had run out of steam again (after having staged something of a recovery after the silly story lines involving Howard being an astronaut.)   I have also seen a bit of the revived Roseanne.   Sorry, but it doesn't have the same spark as the best of its first incarnation.   That actress who plays Darlene, though - she seems to have never aged.

In short, good sitcoms from the US are currently hard to find.

Marijuana legalisation scepticism noted

There's a column at WAPO by a former pot smoker, now a research psychologist (I think), who gets annoyed by the over-simplication of debate on marijuana legalisation.

Given that's what I complain about too, there's a lot in the article that I can agree with.

One matter which is new to me, though, is this suggestion:

Recent data is even more alarming: The offspring of partying adolescents, specifically those who used THC, may be at increased risk for mental illness and addiction as a result of changes to the epigenome — even if those children are years away from being conceived. The epigenome is a record of molecular imprints of potent experiences, including cannabis exposure, that lead to persistent changes in gene expression and behavior, even across generations. Though the critical studies are only now beginning, many neuroscientists prophesize a social version of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” in which we learn we’ve burdened our heirs only generations hence.