Cause for slight optimism

China's world-leading coal consumption fell for the third straight year in 2016, government data showed Tuesday, as the planet's biggest carbon emitter struggles to break its addiction to the heavily polluting fuel.

Coal consumption fell by 4.7 percent year-on-year in 2016, and the share of coal in the country's energy mix slipped to 62.0 percent, down 2.0 percent year-on-year, the National Bureau of Statistics said in a report.

Overall coal production also fell, dropping 9.0 percent to 3.41 billion tonnes in 2016.
The data suggests that "coal consumption probably peaked around 2014," according to a statement from environmental group China Dialogue.

It added that "there is still some concern about a 'rebound' in coal demand if China continues to stimulate its economy by infrastructure investment".

The link.

As the world turns...

I hadn't heard this before, and I don't know if the Indian commentator, writing in The Japan Times, is reliable, but according to him, Putin is getting friendly with the Taliban in Afghanistan, for his own reasons:

Almost three decades after the end of the Soviet Union’s own war in Afghanistan — a war that enfeebled the Soviet economy and undermined the communist state — Russia has moved to establish itself as a central actor in Afghan affairs. And the Kremlin has surprised many by embracing the Afghan Taliban. Russia had long viewed the thuggish force created by Pakistan’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence agency as a major terrorist threat. From 2009 to 2015, Russia served as a critical supply route for U.S.-led forces fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan; it even contributed military helicopters to the effort.

Russia’s reversal on the Afghan Taliban reflects a larger strategy linked to its clash with the U.S. and its European allies — a clash that has intensified considerably since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea spurred the U.S. and Europe to impose heavy economic sanctions. In fact, in a sense, Russia is exchanging roles with the U.S. in Afghanistan.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan used Islam as an ideological tool to spur armed resistance to the Soviet occupation. Reasoning that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, the CIA trained and armed thousands of Afghan mujahedeen — the jihadi force from which al-Qaida and later the Taliban evolved.

Today, Russia is using the same logic to justify its cooperation with the Afghan Taliban, which it wants to keep fighting the unstable U.S.-backed government in Kabul. And the Taliban, which has acknowledged that it shares Russia’s enmity with the U.S., will take whatever help it can get to expel the Americans.

Something you don't read about every day

Tiny (and I mean tiny) people/aliens sightings - a wave of which apparently took place in Malaysia in 1970!

Jason Soon can perhaps inform us of his knowledge of these matters...

DNA data storage keeps getting better

I forgot to mention a month or so ago - one good thing (the only good thing?) to come out of having Trump as President is that the AAAS ran a big subscription campaign to get more people supporting science, which meant I now get full access to Science magazine for a year for the princely sum of $50 (US)!  

This week's edition had a story about new techniques being done to see how good DNA data storage could be - and the answer is very, very good.   From the free article about it:

Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks....

Erlich thought he could get closer to that limit. So he and Dina Zielinski, an associate scientist at the New York Genome Center, looked at the algorithms that were being used to encode and decode the data. They started with six files, including a full computer operating system, a computer virus, an 1895 French film called Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, and a 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon. They first converted the files into binary strings of 1s and 0s, compressed them into one master file, and then split the data into short strings of binary code. They devised an algorithm called a DNA fountain, which randomly packaged the strings into so-called droplets, to which they added extra tags to help reassemble them in the proper order later. In all, the researchers generated a digital list of 72,000 DNA strands, each 200 bases long.

They sent these as text files to Twist Bioscience, a San Francisco, California–based startup, which then synthesized the DNA strands. Two weeks later, Erlich and Zielinski received in the mail a vial with a speck of DNA encoding their files. To decode them, the pair used modern DNA sequencing technology. The sequences were fed into a computer, which translated the genetic code back into binary and used the tags to reassemble the six original files. The approach worked so well that the new files contained no errors, they report today in Science. They were also able to make a virtually unlimited number of error-free copies of their files through polymerase chain reaction, a standard DNA copying technique. What’s more, Erlich says, they were able to encode 1.6 bits of data per nucleotide, 60% better than any group had done before and 85% the theoretical limit.

So, at 215 million gigabytes of storage per gram, I was curious as to how much information could be potentially stored in a human body's worth of DNA.

Googling the question "how much does all the DNA in a human weigh?" came up with estimates that seem to vary from around 6 g to 300g, but then there is also the question of DNA in all the microbes we host in our guts.  

But sure, it seems that, in theory, a human could be an enormous data storage device...

Some great Colbert

Like all late night chat show hosts, Stephen Colbert has some nights that are better than others, but I really thought this series of bits from yesterday's show, talking about the Republican's underwhelming reform to Obamacare, the rather odd Ben Carson, and spying on us through Samsung TVs, were all very funny:







I'm very pleased that he is now doing so well, ratings wise.

Rich and thick

Peter Thiel gave a talk the other night at some energy conference, and curiously, it has not yet been widely reported.

But here is what one site has quoted:

HOUSTON -- Peter Thiel, the technology investor and advisor to President Donald Trump, questioned the global push toward restricting carbon emissions as "group think" while speaking Tuesday at an international energy conference here.

"I'm not sure I'm an extreme skeptic of climate change, but I have my doubts about the extreme ways that people try to push it through," he said. "Even if climate change is quite as bad as people think it is, if we group think we're more likely to misdiagnose the problem. Maybe it's methane emissions, and the real problem is eating steak."

I suppose I should be cautious and note that perhaps he is not being entirely serious with that last line.

But he supports Trump, so why should I give him any benefit of the doubt?  No, I'm going with the Greek yoghurt theory - he's rich and thick.

"Not an extreme skeptic" = fence sitting lukewarmer, happy to watch temperatures rise with no carbon pricing because "taxes - I hate taxes", and then say "well, they were right 30 years ago - too late to do anything about CO2 now.   Here, I've got this great geoengineering idea I can sell you.  Please pay in bitcoin to my floating island in Tahiti.  See ya." 

Update:   other reports don't repeat the "steak" comment, which is odd.  From Axios:

"I don't know whether I am an extreme skeptic on climate change, but I have my doubts about the extreme way that people try to push it through, and I would say that I would be much more convinced of climate change, of the need to do something, if I thought there was a more open debate in which both sides were given a full hearing."

 And other sites point out that he has provided funding for some clean energy ideas (some sounding very improbable.)  

But no, he is simply not to be trusted on climate change.   Or anything much, in my books...

Bubble world

Surely this is what it feels like to an outsider visiting North Korea and hearing everyone endorsing how great their Dear Leader is doing?   Being told how He will protect them from the nefarious forces that want to harm them?

Because I have never seen anything like the self delusion that is accompanying those endorsing Trump.   Look at Steve Kates, with this fantasy today:

I don’t know whether this was what Trump intended but the stories about Russian hacking the election have gone absolutely dead, as have almost all stories related to Obama having placed some kind of phone surveillance on Donald Trump himself. Having become blindingly clear that the Obama White House had indeed initiated that surveillance, with the virtual certainty that none of it would have been done without Obama’s complicity, the entire episode seems to have vanished into air. Since there is nothing that can any longer be used in bringing Trump down, it has gone into hibernation across the media and will remain that way unless something happens that the left and the media believe can again be used to undermine Trump.

This is part of what disturbs me about the blog support network on the right. It is entirely defensive. A story that was utterly preposterous, that Trump and his associates had collaborated with the Russians was, and is, treated as a genuine issue that needs to be sorted out, rather than as a pathetic and disgusting ploy by a bunch of leftist loons and their scribes to harm Trump and short circuit his election.

The only way this can possibly be explained is that he lives in an absolute self imposed information bubble - only reading news from Fox or Breitbart (or worse) that he knows in advance will align with his pro-Trump stance.

In totalitarian states, the State has to impose the media control that leads to such brainwashing - in the West, citizens gleefully impose it on themselves, building self reinforcing belief systems impervious to outside information - because it is, by definition, not to be trusted.

The other thing to note is the paranoia and siege mentality involved - Kates is always beating it up into a "end of civilisation" crisis if Trump (or at least Republicans) lose control of their country.   And, indeed, Bannon is known as a "clash of civilisations" panic merchant, and Trump will use that language when it suits. 

As for Kates' claim that no one is talking about the Trump Obama tweets now, he obviously cares not to observe twitter on matters Trump, or read the NYT, where this account of Trump's mad tweeting Saturday was given (again, apparently leaked by people close to him):

That led to a succession of frantic staff conference calls, including one consultation with the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, as staff members grasped the reality that the president had opened an attack on his predecessor.

Mr. Trump, advisers said, was in high spirits after he fired off the posts. But by midafternoon, after returning from golf, he appeared to realize he had gone too far, although he still believed Mr. Obama had wiretapped him, according to two people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.

He sounded defiant in conversations at Mar-a-Lago with his friend Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media, Mr. Ruddy said. In other conversations that afternoon, the president sounded uncertain of the procedure for obtaining a warrant for secret wiretaps on an American citizen.

Mr. Trump also canvassed some aides and associates about whether an investigator, even one outside the government, could substantiate his charge.

Kates in his bubble world wouldn't have heard of this...

This won't fit neatly into the Conservative Catholic narrative

I think the Catholic Herald is pretty mainstream and moderate/conservative as far as Catholic media outlets go, so this story does not come from a liberal Catholic site:

A spokesman for Egypt’s Catholic Church has praised local Muslims for helping embattled Christians after a series of Islamic State attacks in Sinai.

Fr Rafic Greiche, spokesman for the Coptic Catholic Church, said Christians must differentiate between ordinary Muslims and extremists.

“Ordinary Muslims are kind and try to help however they can – they’re often first on the scene, rescuing the injured and taking them to hospitals,” he told Catholic News Service March 3, as Christians continued to flee Egypt’s North Sinai region.

Fr Greiche said the attacks had affected only Coptic Orthodox Christians, but added that Catholic churches and schools in Ismailia had offered shelter to Orthodox families with help from Caritas.

Fr Greiche said Islamic State militants were now “strongly entrenched” in North Sinai, having been allowed by the Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood organisations to use tunnels from the Gaza Strip.

It is, though, a worry to read how IS is running around the Middle East trying to find a new area to terrorise.  

The Daily Trump

Yeah, I get a bit sick of posting about Trump all the time too, but honestly, it's so incredible to watch this weird situation, falling as it does so close to unbelievable fiction, it's hard to stop.  So today's highlights:

*  I've really been enjoying John Cassidy's pieces on Trump at The New Yorker:  it's a calm style that is perhaps all the more effective for it.   Here, in his latest piece, he opines: 

Trump has learned a couple of things since the start of his Presidential campaign, in 2015. The first is that the media, especially the broadcast media, has an insatiable desire for “news breaks,” even fake ones, and thus is easy to manipulate. The second is that he can say virtually anything, however false or outrageous, without suffering any political consequences with his base. He can call a female journalist a “bimbo,” insult a political opponent’s wife, make bogus accusations of widespread voter fraud, say Obama founded ISIS, claim he won a bigger majority in the Electoral College than any President since Reagan—and none of it alienates his core supporters. Arguably, these outbursts make them like him more.

In his tweets this weekend, however, he may, just possibly, have gone too far. Trump has now added his voice to the calls for a proper public investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. The only way for Congress to properly assess the truth of Trump’s claim about Obama would be to call on Comey and other senior officials to provide a full accounting of the interagency investigation into alleged contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates. Is that really what the White House wants?

He then summarises what we do know, from leaks and public comments, in a calm way, and how none of it backs up Trumps claims of Obama's direct and personal involvement.  With Comey's response, it is quite the opposite.

*   Back to the question though - who is manipulating who in Trump world?   As Axios notes, Trump has just made a series of Tweets directly about stories he was obviously watching on the teeth gratingly awful  Fox & Friends.     Now, are the editors of that show pitching stories to please Trump?    Does Trump believe everything they claim, uncritically?  

I think most people, with common sense, are concluding that yes, he does believe, uncritically, anything  which he thinks useful propaganda, because he's a dumb, insecure, narcissist.  If challenged, he will not "own" his own judgement, he'll just deflect by claiming "well, that's what other people say."

And some people think this is not something to be very concerned about.... 

What would happen if you actually had an experiment where someone at Fox put up a story that ran against a long held Trump belief or bias?    (Ha!  As if that will happen - there's no money in scaring away your nutty base.   All Murdochs are too cynical to put the interests of actually educating the viewers ahead of making money.)

*  Speaking of Trump re-tweets of Fox, here is The Washington Post on one of them:   You'll never guess who tweeted something false he saw on TV. 

*  If former CIA directors think things are bad, they probably are:

As Michael Hayden, the CIA director under George W. Bush, noted on Morning Joe on Monday, “We’ve been in continuous crisis now for 45 days, and none of it has been externally stimulated. This is all an intramural game within our own government. No one’s tickled us from abroad. So I can only imagine what this is going to look like when we actually start to get pressure, events start to happen, that do require that sober, methodical response from a government that doesn’t appear as if it’s gotten itself organized yet.”

 And in the same article, someone asked in December some good questions, the answers to which no one has a right to feel confident about:

In December, Elizabeth Saunders, a professor at George Washington University who studies decision-making in foreign policy, listed eight questions she had about how President Trump would handle an overseas crisis: Where is Trump physically, since he’s so frequently away from the White House? What is the state of Trump’s relations with U.S. intelligence agencies? Which of Trump’s staffers briefs him on the crisis? Which officials are brought into the deliberations about what to do? How many options are given to Trump and how are they described? Will those who oppose the preferred option express their concerns? Who will execute Trump’s decision? And will a record be kept of how the decision was made?

Message to JC

You're being stupid and getting sucked into the Catallaxy conspiracy zone.  Kates has gone down the rabbit hole completely - don't follow him.

Here are key points you conspiracists are ignoring:

*  the FBI was reported as being party to the warrant applications;

*  you have to be nuts (like Kates) to think that Comey is a Democrat stooge, given the obvious advantage it gave to Trump to declare that the email investigation was being re-opened, so close to the election;

*  Comey is already reported to have taken offence at Trump's claim - he is obviously prepared to stand up and be counted about the bona fides of the application for a warrant, and whatever it was it authorised them to do;

*  it doesn't matter if Obama knew what was going on - and he presumably was advised.   That is not corruption in any way, shape or form.   What upset Democrats, after the loss of the election - was the fact that Obama did know some of what was going on, and studiously avoided making any official comment on it.  Obama (if I recall correctly) even felt, post election, that he had to make it clear to his fellow Democrats that he just couldn't do that, due to perception that it would be an abuse of his position during an election.
 
Update:  CL, who is prone to partisan fantasy, calling it "bigger than Watergate" if Obama knew of the warrant and investigation, is just ridiculous.   (He is, clearly, becoming more and more ridiculous with what he will claim as he ages.)    If intelligence agencies believe there has been hacking and release of emails by a foreign nation with a clear intent to influence an election, and there is a string of contacts between Trump connected people and that foreign nation preceding a change in party policy more favourable towards it - of course the existing Presidential administration of any party should be concerned, and knowledge of further investigation about it is entirely appropriate.

Update 2:   A CNN report just out starts with:

FBI Director James Comey was "incredulous" over the weekend after President Donald Trump's allegation via Twitter that former President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap of his phones during the campaign, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

Update 3:  message to monty:  for goodness sake, can you just point out to them that the FBI and Justice Department are not the same entity as President Obama.   And yes - we do not know the details of the warrant, and what and who it authorised as the target.

But it is 100% clear, from Comey's reaction, that he is deeply offended at the suggestion - implicit from Trump's tweets that it was Obama personally telling them what to do -  that he was dancing to the tune of Obama.

Update 4:  Sheesh - CL is just like Trump:  will just say anything, completely and utterly without concern for detail and accuracy and established fact. Leaves the rest of us wondering if he's nuts, prematurely senile, or knowingly bloviating and trolling for deliberate effect? 

There is no point in engaging with such blowhards...

Juices, noted

Yesterday, I drank for the first time "cold pressed" mandarin juice, manufactured in Brisbane from Australian produce, apparently, and I thought it very nice.  

Which reminded me - a long time ago, in Malaysia, I bought watermelon juice, made in the juicer while I waited.  From memory, there was a sugar syrup added too, but I also recall it being very nice.

Is there a reason that, in Australia, despite the myriad of juice combinations you can now see on the supermarket shelf, none seem to contain watermelon juice?   Does it not preserve well?

Alfred's gay period

I re-watched Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train for the first time in decades over the weekend, and it was an interesting experience.  It's far from the director's best film - the climax is a little silly - but it is, of course, a great premise for a movie.

What I couldn't remember wondering about on first viewing was the degree to which the audience is meant to recognize the villain of the piece, Bruno - the stranger who proposes exchange murders, and then carries one out,  leaving tennis playing Guy in a bit of a pickle - is homosexual.  Certainly, on viewing it now, the hints seems everywhere - but is that just because I have read somewhere in the years since I saw it that this was indeed deliberate?      

Realising that it was based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, and knowing that gay elements appear in her other stories, I would have thought that the homosexual side would have been clear in that source material.   Yet according to Wikipedia, the movie screenplay made more of out of a homoerotic element that was only "hinted at" in the novel.  

Now that we have gay studies as part of academia, there's lots of "queer" movie analysis on the net about the movie, together with Rope, the other Hitchcock film with a clear homosexual subtext.   (With Rope, it's hardly in dispute, given it was a fictionalised version of the real life Leopold and Loeb murder - and they did have a sexual relationship.)  You can Google for "Queer studies Hitchcock" if you are inclined.

Anyway, what I didn't realise about all of this was that the actor who appeared in both films, Farley Granger (who played Guy in Strangers, the definitely heterosexual character) was clearly bisexual in real life.   His Wikipedia entry contains an awful lot of information about his sex and relationship life, much of it surprising, presumably sourced in many respects from a memoir he published in 2007.

He was, it would seem, someone who it would be difficult to categorise as other than genuinely bisexual, right from the start:

It was during his naval stint in Honolulu that Granger had his first sexual experiences, one with a hostess at a private club and the other with a Navy officer visiting the same venue, both on the same night.^[13] He was startled to discover he was attracted to both men and women equally, and in his memoir he observed, "I finally came to the conclusion that for me, everything I had done that night was as natural and as good as it felt ... I never have felt the need to belong to any exclusive, self-defining, or special group ... I was never ashamed, and I never felt the need to explain or apologize for my relationships to anyone .... I have loved men. I have loved women."^[14]

You can then read in the rest of the Wikipedia entry about the enormously lengthy list of flings and relationships he subsequently had with both men and women had throughout his long career of (mostly) pretty B grade movies and TV. 

Incidentally, Robert Walker, who played Bruno, seems to have been definitely heterosexual - or, at least, I would presume so seeing he had been twice divorced by age 30, and had children.  He suffered serious mental health issues, and died of a combination of alcohol and an injection his psychiatrist gave him (!) at the age of 32.  (He could easily pass for older in Strangers, I reckon.)

I haven't read whether Hitchcock knew of Granger's sexual inclinations before using him in two movies with a gay subtext.  (Apparently, Granger even slept with the gay screenwriter for Rope, but whether Hitchcock ever found out, I don't know.)  But it is a little odd how Hitchcock also liked using Cary Grant, who, despite a string of marriages, was widely rumoured to have been in at least one homosexual relationship when he was younger.  

Anyway, old Hollywood certainly carried its fair share of gossipy intrigue.  And the degree to which Hitchcock didn't mind using homosexual subtexts as a signal that the characters were prepared to do anything, within or outside the bounds of society's mores, is somewhat interesting.

The Trump non management style

Oooh - I do still sometimes find a link to something worthwhile in a Catallaxy thread. Sure, it's a bit like finding a diamond ring in the bottom of a septic tank, but this one is good:   an article from last week about Trump's lack of management skills, as told by several people who have worked for him in decades past.

And let's be honest here - the mere fact there are so many people close to Trump willing to talk to the press about how things are not going well in the White House (the Washington Post cites 17 in today's article, which Trump is bound to hate), there must be plenty of genuine concern about him from those in the know.

A "normal" Presidency does not face such sustained, critical, leaking so intensely at its start, and it is not credible that it is all coming from Obama aligned figures.  

As I was saying about the problem in the Catholic Church

Remember last week I was saying how the Catholic Church had tied itself in knots by trying to insist it had never been wrong before?   Well, here it is, plain as day, in the Catholic Herald:

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has said that it would be good for Pope Francis to answer the dubia, and that Francis cannot contradict Pope St John Paul II’s teaching on marriage.

In an interview with Crux to mark the publication of his new book, Archbishop Chaput was asked what he thought was at stake in the debate over marriage and Amoris Laetitia.

The document does not mention Communion for the remarried, but some bishops, including those of Malta and Germany, have claimed it authorises the practice.

John Paul II and Benedict XVI reaffirmed Church teaching that the remarried may not receive Communion, except possibly when they try to live “as brother and sister”.

Archbishop Chaput said that this teaching, and Jesus’s prohibition of adultery, could not be changed: “It seems to me that it’s impossible for us to contradict the words of Jesus, and it’s also impossible for a teaching to be true 20 years ago not to be true today when it’s the teachings of the pope.

Also, The Guardian ran a pretty good summary of the current controversy within Rome:

Civil war in the Vatican as conservatives battle Francis for the soul of Catholicism

He has no evidence

I see that JC, and others at Catallaxy, were convinced that Trump wouldn't be making claims of Obama's direct and personal involvement in "wiretapping Trump Tower" without evidence.

Time for them to wake up to understand how Trump is a con man who uses Right wing conspiracy theories to (what he thinks) is his advantage. He did it with birtherism; he is using Right wing conspiracy theory again.

There were reports that the Breitbart article was being circulated in the White House on the Friday.  There were reports that he was furious that Sessions did the (at least half) honourable thing in his recusing himself from investigations about Russian involvement. There were reports that his staffers (left back in Washington) were surprised at the Saturday morning tweet storm.   His press spokesman had no idea when any evidence would be offered.  (See my previous post.)

The response to questions that he produce evidence (as I predicted, there will be none provided) - punt it over to Congress and say that Trump will not speak of it again.  (Let's see if he can keep to that.)

The circumstances are overwhelming clear - Trump was inspired by a Right wing radio host, via Breitbart, to make exaggerated but serious claims against Obama personally as a diversionary tactic and with no evidence.  His staffers have been left struggling how to respond, and the best they have come up with "we'll say it's Congress's responsibility and therefore it would be inappropriate for us to keep speaking about it."

And his gullible base swallow it whole.

Look, if anyone thought that it was bad how the Bush administration and its agencies convinced voters (and other nations) to join in the Iraq invasion based on unreliable evidence, they should be horrified at how easy it will be for Trump to convince his base of any stupid over-reaction he wants to make against some international provocation.

And finally:  to be clear, I think it very likely the reports that there was a successful application to the court for a wiretap of some sort are correct.  If Trump wants us all to know the evidence that led to that successful issuing of a warrant - fine.  Lots of people would have liked to have known that - before the election.

Update:   This Hot Air post about it by Allahpundit (who is often accused in comments of being a rabid anti-Trumper, because he dares to question Trump) is pretty reasonable, and notes this:

Does Trump really want another high-profile Comey press conference, this time laying out precisely why the FBI was suspicious of, say, Paul Manafort’s communications with Russia? How do you suppose that would play politically for the White House?

 Update 2:  Fascinating, from the NYT.  (Both for content, and how everywhere is leaking in Washington!):

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, asked the Justice Department this weekend to publicly reject President Trump’s assertion that President Barack Obama ordered the tapping of Mr. Trump’s phones, senior American officials said on Sunday. Mr. Comey has argued that the highly charged claim is false and must be corrected, they said, but the department has not released any such statement.

Mr. Comey, who made the request on Saturday after Mr. Trump leveled his allegation on Twitter, has been working to get the Justice Department to knock down the claim because it falsely insinuates that the F.B.I. broke the law, the officials said.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment. Sarah Isgur Flores, the spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

Mr. Comey’s request is a remarkable rebuke of a sitting president, putting the nation’s top law enforcement official in the position of questioning Mr. Trump’s truthfulness. The confrontation between the two is the most serious consequence of Mr. Trump’s weekend Twitter outburst, and it underscores the dangers of what the president and his aides have unleashed by accusing the former president of a conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump’s young administration.

Continue reading the main story

A careless, dumb, gullible President with a gullible, dumb voter base not interested in facts

I'm waiting for some better analysis of the Trump "Obama tapped me, it's like Watergate" tweets before posting about it in too much detail.   But as far as I can tell so far, what's likely to have happened is this:

*  Trump read a Breitbart article by Pollack,  expanding on a Mark Levin call that Congress should investigate "the Obama administration" for "monitoring" Trump Tower.

*  Trump, apparently (or acting) unaware of previous reporting of leaks that FISC approval for a FISA warrant had been sought and granted in October,  tweets about it as if "the Obama administration" means Obama personally, and at least appears to accept, gullibly, everything in the Breitbart report as being true.  (Such as the line "No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons..")

*  In fact, in previous leaks, it was said that the FBI sought and obtained the FISA warrant.  Other reports say "The Justice Department and the FBI".  In any event:

a.    The Justice Department is not "Obama";

b.    The fact that the FBI - whose Trump friendly announcement of the nothing burger of a further investigation of Clinton emails should surely be compelling evidence of it not being in the pocket of the Obama administration - was asking for it shows that an independent investigative body thought there was serious evidence making it worth getting the warrant.

*  Nonetheless, Trump, either deliberately, or through his dumb, carefree attitude to facts and a willingness to say anything to shore up his base, claims it was all about Obama, personally, wiretapping "his phones".

*  His dumb, gullible, couldn't care about facts, base, swallows this whole, and are about to go on Sunday rallies to support their dangerous cult leader.

Here's why this is dangerous:

This may well blow over as a case of Trump carelessness and his easy manipulation into making claims by the Right wing media.   (Whether it is also a case of him deliberately manipulating his base - who knows?)   He will be challenged to produce the evidence that Obama was personally involved (and that he managed to sway the FBI to join in) and it will not be there.    He and his Right wing conspiracy mongers - they've been doing this for over 20 years - will just go down muttering that they still think he did it.

But the thing is - when he faces a real life crisis in his administration, say, a serious terror attack, who can possibly trust that he will not take the same careless, fact free lines in his response, and encourage the same to his stupid base, and that this will cause real trouble?

 Update:

Comment by nutty Australian Trump conspiracist noted:

 Update 2:   The American Right has brainwashed itself into believing and promoting conspiracy for nearly a couple of decades now - who can forget that as late as 2015, 43% of Republicans still believed Obama was a secret Muslim;  in 2010-2011, polling showed between 31 to 45% believed he had been born outside of America;   in 2016, Gallop showed Republicans hitting a new high in believing that climate change is happening and is caused by humans - but it's still only around 40% holding that view compared to 85% of Democrats.  (Furthermore, only 20% of Republicans think it will be a problem in their lifetime.)  And let's not bother looking at all the cynical use of Benghazi claims and conspiracy by Republicans, that went no where but are doubtless still believed by their base in large numbers.

It is unhealthy for any society or group of people to be so prone to believing nonsense conspiracies - I've complained before about the unusual degree to which it seems the residents of many Muslim countries will accept conspiracy.

So it is with America (and Australia, for that matter) too - but Trump is exactly the wrong person to lead the country out of the corrosive effect of conspiracy belief, with his attitude that he can say anything, regardless of facts.

Update 3:   Here's the succinct version of my post, from The New Yorker News Desk:

It would seem that Trump, in the same spirit of diversion, has conflated the work of the courts, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies with “Obama.”

That article also gives a good summary of a favourite Trump tactic:

One of President Trump’s most consistent rhetorical maneuvers is a fairly basic but often highly effective one—the diversionary reverse accusation. When he is accused of benefitting from “fake news,” he flips the neologism on its head; suddenly CNN, the Times, and the rest are “fake news.” When Democratic politicians such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi call for investigations of his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials, Trump posts pictures of those critics meeting publicly with Vladimir Putin and calls for an investigation. This happened on Saturday. He fogs the language and clouds the issue.

(Those of my readers who are familiar with CL, who has long commented at Catallaxy, will recognize this as his constant tactic over the years, too.   It's always hard to tell, when people use such an obvious tactic repeatedly, whether they have managed to convince themselves that it's really a convincing response, rather than just a transparent debating trick to show "winning".)

Update 4:    Gary Kasparov sounds very accurate in this series of tweets (read from the bottom up):

And for Jason Soon:  I just noticed this in Kasparov's Wiki entry:

Kasparov collaborated with Max Levchin and Peter Thiel on The Blueprint, a book calling for a revival of world innovation, planned to release in March 2013 from W. W. Norton & Company. The book was never released, as the authors disagreed on its contents.

Update 5:    you could almost feel sympathy for the Trump clean up team; except for the fact that if they had any moral and decent judgement, they would never have taken their jobs in the first place:

Certainly took their time...

‘False prophet’: Duterte, the Catholic Church and the fight for the soul of the Philippines

Making cannabis safer

Nearly a year ago, I made the observation here (see the comments to this post) that it seems odd that, if countries are going to legalise cannabis use, they don't also regulate it to make it safer.   I mean, they do it with alcohol (at least within venues where it is served - and I see some places ban the sale of nearly pure ethanol as an alcoholic beverage); why should another legal drug avoid nearly all regulation as to its content?

It's been well recognized for years that THC content has been increasing, for example:  why not legalise strains with a set upper limit?   Also, it seems reasonably well established CBD can be protective of the brain - why not regulate that the sold product has to have a certain balance between it and THC?

Anyway, my very reasonable suggestion has been endorsed by some researchers in the UK.

They do note that not much is known about what a protective does of CBD might be, and the problem might be (I would guess) how many years of research it may take to be more certain about it.

But I thought its protective effects were established enough to at least know you would be doing no harm to take a stab at mandating a certain content for it.

I expect John will be along to comment on this!

Meet the Russians

I have to say, the "Trump campaign and the Russians" keeps looking  worse for Trump.  You know it's bothering him, too, when he issues a series of tweets that's its all a witch hunt, and the leaks are the real story.   (That's silly - if there is no story, there's no reason for anyone to leak.)

I have never written off the possibility of this hurting Trump in a major way, but it is seeming more and more likely that it will.

And man, aren't Trumpkin/wingnuts struggling with their false equivalence stories about Democrats and meetings with Russians?    But they'll convince themselves of anything - they're so ridiculously partisan they'd convince themselves the Moon is made of cheese if it would help their culture warrior dumbo-in-chief.

Obsessions of conservatives and libertarians

I don't have much doubt that the QUT s18C Racial discrimination case was poorly handled all around, and I have sympathy for the students involved.    So some legislative corrections to how these cases are handled procedurally are at least warranted.

I also get the impression (without looking into it in too much detail) that Gillian Triggs has made mistakes in her defence of the handling of the matter.  But at the same time, her treatment by conservatives in the Coalition, and the intense journalistic and editorial support for them in The Australian, has amounted to a nutty jihad that has lasted years now.   Despite her errors, I think the overwhelming impression the public is left with is that conservatives (and the odd libertarian) in the government, and a newspaper, are absolutely obsessed with her, and seem to think there is still nothing better to do than hound the head of a commission because of perceived slights to them and their journalist pal Andrew Bolt.

I can't really recall anything like this in Australian politics - and the sooner the nutty conservatives in the Coalition split from their parties, the better it would be.