A more modest suggestion for some on the electoral college

So, some on the Left seem to think they have a chance of convincing the Electoral College to not vote in Trump.  Vox explains in detail why this just won't happen - well, short of Trump doing his long mooted  shooting of a person in the street, I suppose; even then, who knows?   If it was a protester, his followers would probably forgive him.

Anyway, instead of trying to convince Electoral College members to refuse to vote him in, perhaps the Left should try to convince them of something less dire, but important to transparency in government.  That is, withhold their vote in the college unless he has first disclosed his tax returns.

Still pie in the sky;  but slightly less pie in the sky than what some want now.

Quantum consciousness, revisited

Can Quantum Physics Explain Consciousness? - The Atlantic

The shock election of Trump made me miss a pretty good article here looking at a relatively new suggestion (apart from the Penrose line) about how quantum effects could work in the brain. 

Weekend Photo 2

She had a bit of a dig in the garden this morning....

Weekend photo 1

The explanation:  I was having a beer at the Pig N Whistle yesterday, and spotted Thor at the bar.  Dr Strange was also there, but I didn't get a pic.

By way of further explanation:  the Supernova nerdfest was on at the Convention Centre next door.

An important point to remember

The electoral college system means that Trump actually won by the barest of margins.  As the Washington Post explains:

A tale of two movies

The election of Trump has made talking about movies seem like unimportant trivia; but I said in my 10,000th post that I wanted to write about two I saw last weekend.  And I should try to distract myself.  So here goes:

1.  Interstellar.

Look, I admit - with Matthew McConaughey (an actor I have never liked) in the lead, there was every chance I wouldn't like it.

But I was completely unprepared for the awfulness of this movie in every respect:

a.   (and this is where the main blame has to go) The Worst Script Ever Written For What Was Meant to be Serious, Adult Science Fiction.   I can just imagine the actors saying to their agent "Christopher Nolan?  Big budget outer space adventure?  Sign me up!", and then despairing when they actually read the lines they were supposed to deliver.

The dialogue was terrible, undeliverable in an convincing fashion by any actor - but with McConaughey doing his Texas drawl turn, it was unbearable.

And look, I'm no cynic about "love talk" in movies, and emotional scenes - I'm a Spielberg fan after all, and the endings of Ghost, ET and even Shakespeare in Love  reduced me to tears;  but the whole relationship stuff in this movie just rang false from beginning to end.

b.   apart from the lines, and clunky exposition (seriously, the old pencil through folded paper explanation for a wormhole just before they are about to enter the wormwhole?  Is Nolan surrounded only by Yes men?)  the whole concept of the story was so derivative and underwhelming.  It's a cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr Who, but with none of the awe of the former and none of the emotional resonance of at least some of the Tennant episodes of the latter. 

c.  good direction?   I couldn't detect anything special.  Good visual effects?:  I was much more impressed with Gravity than anything in this.  Good music?:  it was continually invasive and preaching a seriousness that the story itself was failing to hit.

d.  Improbabilities in the story?  Well, I want to make the point that I am not really even emphasising these - I don't usually engage in hypothetical logic challenges to movies - such as why didn't they send in more probes instead of humans; and the whole "by his bootstraps" paradox of time travel.  That didn't matter to me - the movie was still bad enough on every other level that I am utterly surprised how it got any good reviews at all.

Jason Soon - didn't you make a positive comment about this movie?   It's off to the cinema re-education camp for you if you did.

2.   Dr Strange

Great fun.

As I expected, Cumberbatch and Swinton are just terrific.

I wanted to note in particular that I find Swinton almost mesmerising, at least in this type of role.  (I haven't really seen her in any lengthy part where she plays a normal woman - but as with her White Witch in the first Narnia movie, there is just something about her elocution and the features of her smooth, alabaster face that means I can't take my eyes off her for a second.) 

The script is very witty, the visuals are impressive (yes, Jason, even if Nolan first did folding cities first - he didn't do them in such an exciting fashion), and I liked how one oft-repeated effect - the portal with the residual fire sparks that would fall to the ground - was rather like how you would expect old fashioned magic to look - a bit different from the normal glowing rocks and holographic style effects.

As with Guardians of the Galaxy, parts of the movie had that retro 70's science fiction book cover palate about them, and I also liked the cleverness of the final battle being the reverse of (what I take to be) the typical ending of a Marvel movie.

The movie started very strongly in America, and around the world, although I wonder if depression at the Trump election might cause a bigger drop off in box office this week end than would otherwise happen?

And God knows, if the nation ever needed a real time bending superhero, it is now. 

In an attempt to cheer me up: rat tickling, revisited

What fun to be a rat-tickle researcher, hey?  As reported at NPR:

That's a part of the brain that processes touch, and when Ishiyama tickled the rats, it caused neurons in that region to fire. The rats also seemed to giggle hysterically, emitting rapid-fire, ultrasonic squeaks. Earlier research has shown rats naturally emit those squeaks during frisky social interaction, such as when they are playing with other rats.

Next, Ishiyama pretend-tickled the rats by moving his hand around the cage in a playful manner. Rather than withdraw, the rats sought more contact. Again, he saw the neurons in the somatosensory cortex firing, even though the rats weren't being touched. This suggested to him that anticipation of tickling could trigger the region of the brain that responds to touch — even without the physical stimulus.

Finally, Ishiyama stimulated the somatosensory cortex directly, by sending an electrical signal directly into the brain. The rats squeaked the same way, suggesting that this region really is the tickling epicenter of a rat's brain.

Actually, given that the research involved electrodes being stuck in their brains, I'm not sure if I should feel sorry for the rats.  Now I'm feeling depressed again...

Excuse me while I talk to monty, again...

Monty, has this convinced you yet that you can only talk to unpleasant fools for so long before it makes you foolish for engaging with them - at least if the engagement is on the basis that you think you have any hope of changing their minds?

Look, I know you like to see some good in everyone, and there (nearly always) is.   But when pointing out their wilful foolishness is met with mere rudeness, disdain and a repetition of tribalism, there is no point.  It is no accident that any Left leaning or even centrist commenter gave up on the site years ago. 

I could go on and do yet another summary of how the blog is deeply offensive, if not dangerous, from the top down.  But you and my handful of long time readers have heard it all before.

What prompts me to write this time is that I reckon the reaction to Trump at the place should be seen as a reason why no right minded person can in good faith engage with them further.  There is, to my mind, simply no way to usefully engage with fools who, for mere tribalist reasons, are willing to overlook the character, behaviour and proposed policies of Trump.   This is unforgivable foolishness of a magnitude I could not formerly imagine - particularly coming from anyone (as many at the blog do) who professes a Christian faith.

We know the American Right was divided over Trump, and we have to give credit to those columnists who are now likely just as gobsmacked as you and I.  But the threads of Catallaxy are full of non-serious tribalists - long fooled on climate change; gullible on economics; sexist if not misogynistic; bigoted.   They are not for turning - or engaging with - if they cannot see the danger and foolishness of Trump and his policies.

Attack them by all means in other ways - but the one on one engagement - forget it, I reckon.

A Creighton fail

Global banks back in the firing line

Adam Creighton tries here to explain an important thing US Republicans are likely to do - reform banking regulations - but I honestly think he does a really poor and jumbled job of it.  

A genuine worry

It's really quite painful watching passionate, intelligent liberals on American TV, such as Stephen Colbert, trying to process how such an offensive man as Trump could win enough support to get over the line.  (Although remember, he did not win the popular vote: especially if you take the third party vote into account, a substantial majority of those who did vote were against Trump:

Nationally, third-party candidates did relatively well in this election. With most of the ballots now counted, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson gained over 3% of the popular vote, and the Green party’s Jill Stein got 1%. Altogether, candidates who did not represent either of the two main parties got around 4.9% of the popular vote (in 2012, third-party candidates only managed 1.7%, and in 2008, 1.4%).

It’s easy to see why people point the finger at third-party votes. In Michigan, where the election was so close that the Associated Press still hasn’t called the result, Trump is ahead by about 12,000 votes. That’s significantly less than the 242,867 votes that went to third-party candidates in Michigan. It’s a similar story elsewhere: third-party candidates won more total votes than the Trump’s margin of victory in Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida. Without those states, Trump would not have won the presidency.)

Anyway, I was watching this lengthy clip from Colbert's first post election show, and its clear he is emotionally upset about it all.  While there are many laughs to be had (I particularly like God's cameo near the end), watching it made me feel more anxious and depressed in sympathy with Colbert, even if, by confirming that the whole of the country hasn't gone nuts, it shouldn't:

I'm not the only one who blames Fox News

Simon Wren-Lewis writes:

mainly macro: Trump: Misleading the People: 

The story is in fact told better than I ever could by Bruce Bartlett, who worked in the Reagan White House and for George HW Bush, so I’ll just summarise it here. The story starts under Reagan, who provided pressure to withdraw the Fairness Doctrine, which was similar to what keeps UK broadcasters from being partisan. Initially that allowed the rise of talk radio, and then Fox News. Gradually being partisan at Fox meant misinforming its viewers, such that Fox viewers are clearly less well informed than viewers of other news providers. One analysis suggested over half of the facts stated on Fox are untrue: UK readers may well remember them reporting that Birmingham was a no-go area for non-Muslims.

But why is this causal, rather than simply being a mirror on the rightward drift of the Republican base? The first point is that there is clear evidence that watching Fox news is more likely to make you vote Republican. The second is that, like the tabloids in the UK, this propaganda machine can turn on party leaders and keep them from moving left. The third is that it is also a machine for keeping the base angry and fired up and believing that nothing could be worse than voting for a Democrat. It is Fox News that stops Republican voters seeing that they are voting for a demagogue, conceals that he lies openly all the time, incites hatred against other religions and ethnic groups, and makes its viewers believe that Clinton deserves to be locked up. Just as UKIP (and perhaps now the Conservative party) is the political wing of the tabloids, so Trump is a creature of Fox news.

Also worth remembering...

....don't bother, they're heeeeere

I knew a columnist would soon enough write along the lines of "if, like an arrogant teenager, the American GOP voting public thinks they know what's best, sometimes it's better to let them learn for themselves that they don't."  And here is that column from the Washington Post.

Of course, the thing that freaks out parents, half of Americans, and about 80% of the rest of the globe, is how much grief said teenager will cause everyone  in the process.

For a solid dose of pessimism, of course we can drop in on Andrew Sullivan, whose column "The Republic Repeals Itself" is as depressed as you would expect, but even he points out the obvious:

The only sliver of hope is that his promises cannot be kept. He cannot bring millions of jobs back if he triggers a trade war. He cannot build a massive new wall across the entire southern border and get Mexico to pay for it. He cannot deport millions of illegal immigrants, without massive new funding from Congress and major civil unrest. He cannot “destroy ISIS”; his very election will empower it in ways its leaders could not possibly have hoped for. He cannot both cut taxes on the rich, fund a massive new infrastructure program, boost military spending, protect entitlements, and not tip the U.S. into levels of debt even Paul Krugman might blanch at. At some point, a few timid souls in the GOP may mention the concepts of individual liberty or due process or small government or balanced budgets. At some point even his supporters may worry or balk, and his support may fade.

Actually, given that you can never tell what a bullshit artist like Trump is really thinking, and that the reality of the difficulty of governing is about to hit him like a bus (I thought he even had a look of worry on his face in his victory speech - his Ritchie Rich son* looked definitely regretful), I fully expect disappointment amongst his supporters to start building very quickly.   This is usually the case with politicians who are light on policy, but big on "hope and change".  (Yes, OK, Obama pretty much fitted that category, but did manage to be a competent and a good president.  But he was, at least, a politician who knew the ropes.   There is obviously no real reason to expect that the Hollywood scenario of an accidental president turning out to be great in the role and beloved of the people could happen with this buffoon.)

Perhaps the biggest worry, apart from Generals having to wrestle the nuclear codes out of his tiny fingers when an Islamic President mean-tweets him, is the likely clownish quality of the advisers and administrators he surrounds himself with.   But, I guess, as with Boris Johnson in the UK, give clowns actual responsibility and at least some of them have to change their rhetoric fast.  

And at the end of the day (gee, how am I managing to be quasi optimistic?) what everyone has to keep reminding themselves - both the doomsayers and the gloaters - is that in terms of popular vote, pretty much exactly half of the country rejected Trump.    Which doesn't seem to me to say much for fool Scott Adams - if being a "master persuader" means just influencing the small percent of the voting public that ever moves from one side to the other, it doesn't seem to be such an awe inspiring thing at all.  (Oh, and Scott, your young girlfriend is going to dump you soon enough, and you can go back to the comfort of your money and 4chan pals.)

* Didn't Trump indicate he would be in charge of cyber-security in his administration?
 

Sounds about right

There’s no way around it: Donald Trump is going to be a disaster for the planet - Vox

The article does, in fact, contain a note of (highly qualified) optimism at the end.

The truth is, Democrats have absolutely no reason for holding back on calling out all politicians (and their followers) who deny AGW as absolute gullible fools being led up the path to destruction by a mere handful of contrarians.  I mean, Clinton tried the tactic this election of "not scaring the horses" by not mentioning it, and look how that panned out.  

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft...

I'm too scared to look over at the threads at Catallaxy - they'll be so high on the red cordial they won't come down for a month.   Of course, they'll own whatever the hell happens under what (I presume) is going to be a Trump presidency.  (You would have thought the dire Prime Ministership of Tony Abbott would have taught them a lesson in being careful what you wish for - and Trump is a bull in a china shop several orders of magnitude larger than Tone.)

Anyhow, there is still the possibility that Trump will not make it to the Presidency.  First, the count is not finished, but hardly anyone is expecting the rest to go well for Hillary.  If he does win, Mexico may invade Washington successfully just to replace him, and all other nations would cheer them on.  Or perhaps Trump will announce he will not take up the job if he'll just get an Emmy for The Apprentice.   The Academy would give him a whole two hour show if he was serious.

And any aliens watching the planet for the last 50 years will no doubt feel this is the right time to intervene.  I would welcome our new overlords as being more predictable than Trump and his nutty, dangerous advisers.

Will they ever learn?

Some good advice to Republicans in Congress from Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post:

Tuesday evening (we hope) we will have a definitive president-elect, most likely Hillary Clinton. Republicans, especially members of Congress, should take a deep breath. Their Clinton derangement syndrome, only partially justified by her ethical malfeasance, has gotten out of control, blinding even the most thoughtful Republicans. Republican activists and party leaders will have plenty to answer for after the Donald Trump campaign ends. So, if I may suggest, Republicans should zip it for a while.

If Clinton wins Tuesday, the GOP would have lost a third presidential election in a row, this one in large part because of their hate-filled, irrational and extreme rhetoric and aversion to reality. They may well lose the Senate majority as well. Frankly, millions of Americans, including frustrated Republicans (whether they grudgingly voted for Trump or abandoned the GOP to vote for Clinton or a third party), don’t really want to hear Republican blather on about impeachment. They don’t want lectures from nativists and fabulists such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity about, well, anything. They don’t want to hear that the GOP is now on a search-and-destroy mission to make certain we have a failed president.

Here’s a novel approach: Root for the president’s success, even if it is Hillary Clinton. We are a country at war and with deep problems; wishing her failure means wishing our country and free people misfortune. Extend her the benefit of the doubt. Look for areas of agreement. Don’t dictate the terms of debate. Keep a civil tongue. Tell their own rabble-rousers to pipe down for just a few months.

Yes, when you think back over it, did they learn nothing from the failure of their pursuit of Bill Clinton over his (rather sordid) sex life?   Or from watching the Obama birthers fail?   Both of these targets are now in overall good standing with the American public (if you ignore conspiracy nutters, at least), yet you get the feeling many Republicans will happily try to pursue Hillary Clinton over matters which are, again, essentially nothing to do with good governance.  

Election prediction

I've been playing with the Washington Post electoral college "do it yourself" map, and my guess on the election outcome would be either 308 or 323 to Clinton, depending on North Carolina.  As Monty seems to be predicting 307 to Clinton, I'll take the high road and go for 323.

Update:   Well, I got the last election right!

America - where witchcraft still matters to politics

If ever there was a "jumps the shark" moment in this election campaign, it was last weekend when the Washington Post felt it had to address the absurdity of Right wing culture warrior hero Drudge promoting the idea that Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman goes to occult dinners to drink blood and other unmentionables.    Tweets from concerned Americans (concerned about "spirit cooking") remain a sight to behold:

Yes, America - the nation that put men on the Moon - still has a significant block of people worried that witches could take over the White House.   Is there any Western nation with that level of contradiction? 

As it happens, I had been going to post about witches and politics for another reason.   Before Halloween, I was reading this good article from last year about two books looking again at the Salem witch hunt, and it put me in mind of Trump's campaign against Hillary because of one of the theories about how Salem could have happened:

In Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1974)—now considered a classic of interpretive social history—Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum uncovered a long-standing fissure inside the Salem community that closely aligned with opposing sides in the trials. The accused came largely from the families of well-off, market-minded, centrally positioned farmers and merchants, their accusers from poorer, tradition-bound folk living in the town’s interior. The trials, then, can be seen as a backlash phenomenon, a struggle to ward off deep-rooted social change—nothing less, in fact, than the onset of modern capitalism and the values it advanced.

Substitute "globalisation" for "modern capitalism", and you have a strong parallel to why the simple minded, "blue collar billionaire's" followers are prepared to treat Hillary like a witch, with many of them now also believing it of her literally. 

The best of anti-Trump

Over the last week, before the Clinton polling losses appeared to stabilise, there was a lot of passionate, if not panicky, anti-Trump writing to be found.  Here are three pieces I liked:

*  Andrew Sullivan (not my favourite writer, generally speaking) did do a good job at calling Trump out as an awful and dangerous proto-fascist, as I think more in the media should be prepared to say.  Have a read of this:

This is what we now know. Donald Trump is the first candidate for president who seems to have little understanding of or reverence for constitutional democracy and presents himself as a future strongman. This begins with his character — if that word could possibly be ascribed to his disturbed, unstable, and uncontrollable psyche. He has revealed himself incapable of treating other people as anything but instruments to his will. He seems to have no close friends, because he can tolerate no equals. He never appears to laugh, because that would cede a recognition to another’s fleeting power over him. He treats his wives and his children as mere extensions of his power, and those who have resisted the patriarch have been exiled, humiliated, or bought off.

His relationship to men — from his school days to the primary campaign — is rooted entirely in dominance and mastery, through bullying, intimidation, and, if necessary, humiliation. His relationship to women is entirely a function of his relationship to men: Women are solely a means to demonstrate his superiority in the alpha-male struggle. Women are to be pursued, captured, used, assaulted, or merely displayed to other men as an indication of his superiority. His response to any difficult relationship is to end it, usually by firing or humiliating or ruining someone. His core, motivating idea is the punishment or mockery of the weak and reverence for the strong. He cannot apologize or accept responsibility for failure. He has long treated the truth as entirely instrumental to his momentary personal interests. Setbacks of any kind can only be assuaged by vindictive, manic revenge.

He has no concept of a non-zero-sum engagement, in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he is psychically at peace. (This is one reason why he cannot understand the entire idea of free trade or, indeed, NATO, or the separation of powers.) In any conflict, he cannot ever back down; he must continue to up the ante until the danger to everyone around him is so great as to demand their surrender. From his feckless business deals and billion-dollar debts to his utter indifference to the damage he has done to those institutions unfortunate enough to engage him, he has shown no concern for the interests of other human beings. Just ask the countless people he has casually fired, or the political party he has effectively destroyed. He has violated and eroded the core norms that make liberal democracy possible — because such norms were designed precisely to guard against the kind of tyrannical impulses and pathological narcissism he personifies.

Wow, hey?   Vicious but, I think, very accurate.

*  Adam Gopnik:  always a great writer, follows a very similar path:

The truth is that Trump’s “positions” on specific issues are more or less a matter of chance and whim and impulse (Of course women should be punished for having abortions! Ten minutes later: no, they shouldn’t) while his actual ideology, the song he sings every day, the one those listeners and followers gleefully vibrate to, is one anthem, and it is the sound of the authoritarian and anti-democratic impulses Americans have rejected since the founding of this country. Call them what you will—populist authoritarianism or extreme-right-wing ethno-nationalism—the active agents within a Trump speech and energizing a Trump rally are always the same: the worship of power in its most brutal and authoritarian forms (thus his admiration for Vladimir Putin and for the Chinese Communists who assaulted the protesters at Tiananmen Square); the reduction of all relations to dominance contests; the contempt for rational argument; the perpetual unashamed storm of lies; the appeal to hysterically exaggerated fears of outsiders; and, above all, the relentless sense of ethnic grievance that can be remedied only by acts of annihilating revenge. His is the ideology not of democratic patriotism but of a narrow nationalism alone—the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. He will “level the playing field” with the terrorist spectre of ISIS by forcing soldiers to commit war crimes; he will not merely kill our enemies but annihilate their families. His platform is resentment and his program is revenge, and that is an ideology with many faces and one name. This is fascism with an American face.

*   And, at a more technical level, the detailed explanation by Matthew Yglesais of the Clinton email issue, the low level security risk of which the media has never really tried to properly explain, is really good.  It starts:

Because Clinton herself apologized for it and because it does not appear to be in any way important, Clinton allies, surrogates, and co-partisans have largely not familiarized themselves with the details of the matter, instead saying vaguely that it was an error of judgment and she apologized and America has bigger fish to fry.

This has had the effect of further inscribing and reinscribing the notion that Clinton did something wrong, meaning that every bit of micro-news that puts the scandal back on cable amounts to reminding people of something bad that Clinton did. In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.

This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.

Yes, this is the .....

Or, for the non English reader:

I think this justifies a little introspective.

Why do I do this?  Obviously, back when I started this in 2005, it seemed that blogging could be an important and entertaining aspect of the internet landscape, but that hope has all but gone, with most people moving into the short sugar hit of Twitter to get an opinion out with minimal effort or analysis, or diverting into Facebook if they want to spend all day talking about themselves.   All a bit of a pity, I reckon.

I've long since moved into treating the blog as a sort of open diary of thoughts and events, but one that avoids oversharing with respect to my own family and circumstances - I don't see great dignity in that.   If anyone out there wants to follow what I'm interested in, that's fine;  but it's not as if I'm really trying to satisfy anyone but myself.    (And a good thing too, given my very modest long term hit-rate!)

It also serves a useful function as a list of handy bookmarks that is always accessible; and for noting things I may want to find again in future, such as the odd recipe I like.   

And here's the thing - I never know whether I should say this here, but I can pick any old archive page on this blog, and nearly always be pleased with what I find.   The range of topics covered; reviewing the ways in which my opinion has subtly changed over the years; predictions that turned out very accurate (see Rudd, K, amongst others); reminders of trips taken; the odd good photo; and finding links to stories and articles that I still find interesting, esoteric and/or well written -  I think (he says immodestly) this is a great little corner of the internet.  And I find I want to keep recording opinions and material on it, in the way I have for 11 years now.

As for its utility, apart from pleasing its author, I do have vague hopes that sometimes I may link to something hard to find that some Googling reader finds very useful and important.  I also wonder whether my kids (and wife) will find it interesting to read in future, either in my declining years or after I'm gone.  At the moment, they know about it, but rarely care to read it.  (Do writers' families ever spend much time reading the writer's work?)  While I will always want to avoid Facebook style disclosure, I hope they find some of my personality, and love for them, to be discernable in a future reading.

And so, onwards with the blog.   I saw both Interstellar and Dr Strange on the weekend - I really want to write about them!