Past influences

The Trump presidency is too depressing to watch everything on TV about him, but the one hour doco Meet the Trumps on SBS earlier this week was pretty good.  It's still up on SBS on Demand, I think.

It wasn't overly detailed, but just hit some of the key points of his life.  (One thing I haven't heard, though, is why he is a teetotaller.  Sure, his brother died an alcoholic, but it seems rare to find such an extrovert refraining from even alcohol.)

Anyway, the main thing I wanted to comment on was his early career dealing with Roy Cohn, the infamously unpopular lawyer who I actually didn't know much about until I watched that "Angels in America" play on TV some years ago.  (We all have gaps in our knowledge.)

I'm not sure who it was on Meet the Trumps who was denouncing Cohn, but he had met him and could not stress enough what an absolutely appalling, dislikeable man he found him to be.  Which I thought was interesting - the portrait of him in Angels seems not to have been overblown at all.

Anyway, here's an article in The Guardian about Cohn being a (sort of) mentor to Trump.

Witches -V- Trump

So, a bunch of witches are planning on a Trump attack.   Instructions to join in are available on line.

Well, as much as I'd like it to work, it has been tried before.  I didn't realise Life magazine ran a story on it in 1941, though. 

True, the attempted supernatural attacks didn't cause Hitler to curl up and die.  But he was pretty sick for most of the war.    Even if the witches can only cause Trump to have chronic farting, like Hitler, I think it's worth a go...

Happy anniversary, movable type

A businessman intent on making money in a world dominated by the Catholic Church, Johannes Gutenberg created, instead, a revolution – and sowed the seeds for many more.

February 23, 1455 has been cited as the date Mr. Gutenberg began to print the first edition of his eponymous Bible. The idea for the printing blocks came from Asia, where the Chinese had invented a printing technique almost a millennium before. His ink was a concoction that blended traditional ink with oil, helping it flow and transfer from printing blocks to paper. The press itself, meanwhile, was the type of screw press familiar to farmers across the continent, more commonly used for pressing olives or grapes.

To this motley assortment of preexisting ideas, Gutenberg added an important innovation: movable type, the first in the Western world. He drew on the skills he had acquired growing up in a family of skilled craftsmen to produce letter molds from a metal alloy. The molds were durable, and could withstand hundreds of printings. Arranging and rearranging these letters in a type tray, he produced pages from the Bible and began to run off copies, far faster than previous scribes or publishers could do by hand or using full-page blocks of type.

He died broke, though.  Link.

Nuttier than I thought

I think Steve Bannon sounds nuttier than ever in his "WE WERE VICTORIOUS AND YOU BE WILL CRUSHED UNDER OUR HEEL" (I think that's a fair summary) comments at CPAC.

Yes, makes me so confident to see someone like him with the ear of the President of the USA.

I did find this video amusing, though.

Down Mexico way

What?:

Paul Ryan tours the US-Mexico border on horseback

I was hoping there was a photo of him on a rise, looking down at the huddled masses, as that headline, for some reason, immediately reminded me of this:

and made me wonder who else may be making the trip:   

Penalty rates

Can I regain some "cred" to my "conservative leaning" claim at the top of the blog by noting that I think the Fair Work Commission's decision to reduce Sunday penalty rates is overdue and justified?  In fact, I think they should have gone a bit further, especially with casuals.

Of course, it won't affect a great many small businesses that dealt with the excessive penalty rates by just ignoring them.   Maybe I can even make a bit of a Laffer-like argument here, and note that the result might mean a net improvement for hospitality workers as a whole, if it encourages businesses to actually pay to the award.  But that could be being too optimistic.

Message to Jason

I know it's an edited version of a paper, but no, it's a rambling article that I would call far from "excellent".

I personally find Allan a very grating character - and certainly I don't understand why he continues to work in a sector he seems to find appalling.  I am sure I could find him more convincing if he actually left the Australian university sector and wrote his criticisms from outside of it.  Preferably from another country, since he seems to rate them much more highly.

That said - yes, his criticisms of the number of law schools and graduates pumped out by them, and the way they study now, sound all entirely valid.

His generic criticism about how and what they are taught, however - I very much doubt he is someone I should pay attention to in that regard. 

The path to how we got to the strange and dubious changes to tertiary education generally in Australia seems to me to be complicated and leave plenty of room for criticism of both Left and Right for each being a bit conned in their own way by a self serving education sector.   But given the recent debacle of the private vocational education players, I have a bit of trouble with listening to critiques from the Right on anything to do with education.

Get a grip

With more analysis of why New South Wales was barely coping with electricity demand during one of the days of its recent, really remarkable, heatwave in the news, I feel the need to make one observation:

Get a grip, people:  the risk of losing power for an hour or two a year in a modern city is not the end of civilisation.

Going back  a few decades in Queensland, at least, before concern about how our electricity was generated was even on the radar, summertime blackouts in my part of Brisbane (all of 7 or 8 km from the inner city) were hardly that unusual.   Storms at that time seemed much more likely to cause very widespread blackouts than they are now, and I seem to recall people considered it an inconvenience but not a crisis. 

Now, you get a city with a "brownout" of an hour, again really due to the weather and the high demands it causes, and everyone acts as if it is a crisis.

Sure, it's good to work on fixing the problem that causes it:  continual supply is ideal and (like improvements to Queensland's transmission infrastructure) are worth working towards.

But let's not go overboard with how bad the current situation is...

A weirdly dysfunctional presidency

It's been obvious since he won the election, particularly, that Trump is an emotionally needy man-child who craves approval.  But this story at Politico, which indicates that his inner circle fully understands this, and will then go out and feed stories to the Right wing bubble media so that they will turn up on their boss's cable TV viewing and make him happier, really indicates something that sounds truly unique and strange in modern democracy.

To be fair, the story does also confirm that he reads the New York Times daily (waiting, waiting, for the hint of approval, I guess);  but it is also obvious that it simply upsets him and leads to his "fake news" attacks.

Speaking of fake news, as this Washington Post article noted last week, the key to the success of such attacks with his base is that they live in a Right wing media bubble, where Fox News is the key source of news for an extraordinary high number of them.   The role of the Right wing internet "news" outlets is also no doubt important.

This is why Rupert Murdoch has been key to the dumbing down and intense polarisation of American (and to a significant extent, Australian) politics.   

Not a good idea to try

Hey, I missed this article in The Atlantic in January:

What Happens If You Stick Your Head in a Particle Accelerator?

Interestingly, we have a good idea that it's not going to be good for your health - a Soviet scientist did get his head accidentally zapped by a proton beam of very high strength in 1978, and although it didn't kill him, he was painlessly injured.    

Message to monty

Telling you nothing new, but the CL approach to history follows some simple, immutable, rules:

a.  no Labor (or in America, Democrat) politician ever did anything great, ever.  Or, if pressed, deserves credit for anything great.
b.  the Catholic Church was the greatest, most heroic, institute for the advancement of humanity, ever;
c.  all figures in history have to pass the purity test of their attitude to abortion and contraception before anything positive can be said about them.    

When markets don't work as you want

A good article looking at the complexities of the Australian electricity system and why it is having trouble coping with the necessary change to clean energy.

No, it only sounds like an autocrat who fearmongers about, and scapegoats, ethnic groups for shoring up his appeal to his gullible base

Trump administration seeks to prevent ‘panic’ over new immigration enforcement policies

From the report:

Kelly’s new DHS policies considerably broaden the pool of those who are prioritized for deportations, including undocumented immigrants who have been charged with crimes but not convicted, those who commit acts that constitute a “chargeable criminal offense,” and those who an immigration officer concludes pose “a risk to public safety or national security.”

The Trump administration “is using the specter of crime to create fear . . . in the American community about immigrants in order to create an opening to advance the indiscriminate persecution of immigrants,” said Clarissa Martínez-de-Castro, deputy vice president at the National Council of La Raza. “This administration is saying, ‘Now, everybody is going to be a priority,’ and the devil may care.”

But don't panic!: 

“We do not need a sense of panic in the communities,” a DHS official said in a conference call with reporters to formally release the memos to the public.

“We do not have the personnel, time or resources to go into communities and round up people and do all kinds of mass throwing folks on buses. That’s entirely a figment of folks’ imagination,” said the official, who was joined on the call by two others, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to answer questions. “This is not intended to produce mass roundups, mass deportations.”
 

That Milo matter

I'd already criticised Bolt's judgement for playing footsie with the obnoxious internet character Milo Yiannopoulos just because he criticises the Left, so Andrew doesn't really get much credit for having dropped him now.   And Tim Blair, a frequent Milo promoter, is conveniently away at the moment, so the fate of his former endorsements is yet to be seen.  

I watched bits and pieces of (one of the) interviews that got MY into trouble, and there's no doubt from it that, despite protestations made now (designed to try to save his lucrative book deal, presumably), he expressed no great moral concern about pederasty with consent, given the way he was talking about his enthusiastic participation in it as a 14 year old, and his reluctance to criticise the man (a priest, even) he claims it was with.  His statement today that he was the victim of the priest is just completely at odds with how he conducted himself in the interview, where he was happy to paint himself as the knowing instigator of enjoyable sexual encounters as a precocious young (gay) teenager.   He explained this as part of his then rebelliousness, but expressed no shame or regret.   

He may genuinely despise paedophiles, for all I know, and he's hardly the first* gay man** to make the distinction between paedophilia and pederasty, and grant some sympathy to the latter.  But I would bet he's the first openly gay man making money on the American wingnut media circuit to muse along those lines and not realise it was going to go over like a lead balloon.

I said before his writing seemed like that of an intellectual lightweight;  the abrupt (possible?) ending of his career this way helps confirm he's a bit short on the smarts.  

So, no great loss to society that he's lost his book deal, and (I would hope) a job at Breitbart.

About time he got a real job, preferably one completely out of the public eye.  It's not good for his soul.*** 

* As Gerard Henderson likes to go on and on about, pederasts were seeking understanding, if not sympathy, via public appearances back in the 1970's in the media, including - gasp! - the ABC

** I was tempted to say "public intellectual", but that would be extremely generous, if not sarcastic

*** Which, evidently, he believes in, given that he claims at heart to still be a Catholic

Update:   I see from a Spectator piece on this that Jason Soon linked to, this comment about the people on the Right who are still supporting Milo despite his pederasty comments:

Those people – and I think they’re a tiny minority – are either childishly innocent or hopelessly stupid. There’s no kinder way to say it. Either way, their opinion doesn’t matter. 

Can you guess which choice I go for?   [Lots of support for MY still in the Catallaxy threads.]

Conspiracy time

I can't be bothered checking right now, but I presume that the wingnut conspiracy Right must have claimed within minutes of its announcement that the Russian UN Ambassador's sudden death was at the hands of the Deep State trying to oust Trump, or at least start a war with Russia, or something?

On the upside

I'm a bit worried that I sounded too critical of the Catholic Church;  some may think I'm starting to endorse "progressive" Christianity of the Spong variety.

So, as a corrective to that, let me make a few comments.

The Church on social teaching in the modern era is pretty sound - in terms of its views on economics and the role of government,  it largely strikes a sensible balance in its support of capitalism, while acknowledging an important role for government intervention and even unions (as long as they're not outright supporting communism) in making for a fair society.   Libertarians views for minimal government find no significant support there, and those from the Acton Institute are pushing a marginal view with no real credibility. 

In terms of international aid, charity work, and the provision of health services in the West, too, it does great work with the only issue being the knots it ties itself in regarding women's reproduction, all due to it's view on abortion and contraception.  (The latter does deserve some revision, but let's not go there right now while I'm trying to look on the bright side.)

The Church also has taken the "right" side of science on climate change and pollution, and shames the Evangelicals of American who are foolishly prepared to go with the idea that God just won't let the Earth overheat no matter how much humans try.

As for theology and doctrine and where its future lies:  I remain completely unconvinced that the future for Christianity lies in redefining it so that the matter of the reality of God or a supernatural realm becomes unimportant, or irrelevant.  Yet this is the danger that skeptical examinations of theology and religion always face; it seems almost an inevitable path that progressive theology leads down, and it's why conservative Catholics refuse to allow the first step to be taken.  

But my point is that denial of a problem of how theology and doctrine is to take into account dramatic changes in understanding of the nature of the Universe (and human biology) is no answer either.   And the reason for my previous post was to argue that the Church's institutional response has in some key respects made the matter harder to deal with, not easier.

Lead poisoning by bullet

It does seem odd that it has taken doctors a long time to fully take into account that leaving bullet fragments in the body (something recommended a surprising amount of times, apparently) can lead to long term lead poisoning.  This article at The Atlantic explains why, though, and it makes for a good read.

Internal conflicts

An article at the Catholic Herald takes the line that the Church is now in a "full blown" doctrinal crisis.

I must admit, the article makes a pretty strong case.

There are two issues relevant here:   on the one hand, there's the matter of who can access the sacraments; but the bigger issue is that so much of that question is tied to the matters of sex and marriage.

But I tend to think this is all part and parcel of a slowly evolving crisis of Catholicism hitting modernity - the debatable point being when do we say "modernity" began.

Although it can be argued that it goes back much further, I'm inclined to think the really serious challenge starts with Darwin.  (And don't forget, the other big change in understanding humanity comes with knowledge of the true, vast extent of the universe, which only dates from about 1925.)  Catholicism, to its credit, somehow never got caught up in denying evolution, and it can even claim a hand in the idea of the Big Bang; but that doesn't mean that both don't present challenges to the concept of Original Sin.   Close on Darwin's heal, Freud may have been nuttily obsessed with some of his pet ideas, but he and Jung successfully set the groundwork for people assuming they have to dig deep into their unconscious to understand their "true" self, which is then perceived as essentially immutable.  By the end of the 20th century, the ubiquity of computers and the rise of the idea that everyone is a meat robot, with no free will but only the trick perception of free will, has become more pervasive and only exacerbates the role of the unconscious, and as such it's (of course) extremely corrosive to the idea of a Church, or God's Grace, having any significant role in life.

These forces, combined with the Church's over-reach in push back against modernity with it formalising the Pope's infallibility, followed up by using it in the mid 20th century for a doctrine that seems, to put it mildly, esoteric to the modern mind (I'm talking the Assumption of Mary); and then the rejection of contraception even if it's of a kind that prevents conception (yes, even a condom used by a married couple renders the sex "wrong"); the Church has been losing doctrinal credibility at a slow but steady pace over  about 150 years.

The Church's attempt to get cool with modernity, via Vatican 2, brought up its own logical difficulties, with the insistence on a "properly informed conscience" being paramount in assessing moral behaviour, while denying that any Catholic could reject the Church's teaching on what is moral.  And it was all undercut by the lack of compelling logic in the blanket rejection of contraception in the same decade.

The result is that in a very large part of the globe,  the congregations have taken doctrine, and the use of the sacraments, into their own hands, effectively:  confession and the power it implied in the local priest has almost vanished; the concept of sexual sin has been greatly diminished;  in fact the whole definitive categorisation of the seriousness of different sins is seen as improbable now;  and people with failed marriages (especially if the fault is all their partner's) resent the idea that they cannot participate in communion if they re-partner.   (Annulments are possible, but seen as an unnecessarily complicated de facto acceptance of divorce.)   Those who are living outside of the Church's teaching on sexuality will often just partake in communion anyway - they are very unlikely to hear a condemnation of their behaviour from the pulpit, and unless they want to grandstand, the priest handing out communion is not to know what they do in the bedroom.  For those in gay relationships, there has been the startling turnaround in sympathy for them amongst the laity, and many clergy.  The Church's behaviour in the child abuse scandals in many nations, as well as its less than stellar role in confronting European fascism in the mid 20th century, have further hurt the perception of the Church's moral authority.

So yes, I think the Church is facing a very difficult future.   Intellectually, I am inclined to think that some sort of schism may be the only way of resolving it, but it's not as if the Church's assets can be easily divided up between the conservatives and the more liberal elements.    So the Henry VIII approach can't be repeated.  Which perhaps means that it is really is going to continue dragging out for years yet.

Monday bits and pieces of interest

*  Mission Impossible 6 starts filming in Paris in April.   Same director as last time, although he says it will be a very different Ethan Hunt.   Sounds a bit like a revisit to the family drama stuff in M:I3, which was OK but I don't think I've ever re-watched.   Anyway, can almost guarantee I will see it.

* A case of a brain tumour causing "hyper-religiosity" and visions of talking with the Virgin Mary.   Rather reminiscent of Joan of Arc.

* I finally see how to link to a particular Axios story - this one about how Republicans, with supreme hypocrisy and with no proper justification from the past (didn't Reagan have to increase some taxes to make up revenue short fall after his first cuts?), are now prepared to cut taxes and let the deficit grow.  Stephen Moore is for this:  Krugman derides him continually, so he'll be impressed. In fact, Krugman has already a post up explaining that for demographic and other reasons, no one should be planning on very high growth in the next few years. 

*  I watched Snowpiercer on Stan on Saturday.   As I say, it's remarkable how it seems Stan is exclusively for only B grade movies.  This one has a very silly premise, but I knew that going in.    It's worth watching for the scenery chewing performance of Tilda Swinton alone.  As I have said before, she just sucks all attention to herself (in a good way - she's really remarkable.)   

*  When even Fox News hosts start complaining that Trump is going too far in his "the media is the enemy of the people" line, you know he really is going too far.   The drumming up of fear that seems crucial to Trump's appeal to his base is increasingly ridiculous, with his and his staff's allusions to attacks that never happened, but still apparently works with his dimwitted fans.   Speaking of which, it is a wonder that Triumph the Comedy Insult Dog escaped with his life after his interactions with Trumpkins at the inauguration.  Pretty funny, though:

Churchill: friend of science

Did you know that Winston Churchill was quite interested in science and did his own bits of popular science writing in his day?   No, nor did I.

This Nature article, written because of the recent re-discovery of an essay he wrote "Are we alone in the Universe?" in 1939, is a great read.   Here are some extracts:

Winston Churchill is best known as a wartime leader, one of the most influential politicians of the twentieth century, a clear-eyed historian and an eloquent orator. He was also passionate about science and technology.

Aged 22, while stationed with the British Army in India in 1896, he read Darwin's On the Origin of Species and a primer on physics. In the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote popular-science essays on topics such as evolution and cells in newspapers and magazines. In a 1931 article in The Strand Magazine entitled 'Fifty Years Hence'¹, he described fusion power: “If the hydrogen atoms in a pound of water could be prevailed upon to combine together and form helium, they would suffice to drive a thousand-horsepower engine for a whole year.” His writing was likely to have been informed by conversations with his friend and later adviser, the physicist Frederick Lindemann.

During the Second World War, Churchill supported the development of radar and Britain's nuclear programme. He met regularly with scientists such as Bernard Lovell, the father of radio astronomy. An exchange about the use of statistics to fight German U-boats captures his attitude. Air Chief Marshal Arthur 'Bomber' Harris complained, “Are we fighting this war with weapons or slide rules?” Churchill replied, “Let's try the slide rule.”²

 Once again, evidence that conservatism in the modern political world (especially in America) has undergone a worrying change.