Poor Mexico

I had the impression that the drug wars and general rate of murder and mayhem had been improving recently in Mexico.  But not according to one report (which Mexico disputes).  Second most violent nation in the world, it says.  (Which, actually, does sound a stretch.)  

I've seen some travel shows through the country in the last year or so, and it always looks to me like an interesting place to visit. 

What is truth?

Certainly, as Matthew Yglesias convincingly shows, it's not what Trump and Republican speak.   Here's the opening section:

Unknowns always exist in politics, but in the case of the Trump administration, that’s severely compounded by his habit of constantly lying. That’s especially true because the lying disease seems to be catching.

High-ranking administration officials regularly stand before the public and say things that plainly aren’t true. Increasingly, so do many of their leading allies in Congress. Not just in the sense that they make exaggerated or contestable claims about the likely impact of their policies — though they do that too — but in the sense that they aren’t even correctly stating what their policies are.

On the campaign trail, for example, Trump promised time and again that his administration would build the Keystone XL pipeline and do it with American steel. His actual executive orders do not require this. But even after his administration clarified that he wasn’t requiring the pipeline to be built with American steel, Trump stood before the cameras at an Environmental Protection Agency event and said, “If you want to buy pipelines in this country, you’re going to buy your steel here and you’re going to have it fabricated here.”

There’s no sneaky verbiage here or technical explanation of some sense in which this is accurate. Trump is just claiming to have ordered something he never ordered — just as how in the alternative universe of Trumpland, he held the best-attended inauguration in history and had the most productive first 100 days since FDR.

There’s always been a certain amount of dishonesty in politics, but Trump has taken it to a new level — and seems to be making it work. His allies in Congress have adopted the same technique, and it’s the core of House Republicans’ health care sales job. 

 He then goes on to list examples of lies about the Obamacare repeal, and notes this:

It’s worth emphasizing that this kind of lying is different in character from what we are used to hearing in politics.

Politicians, for example, exaggerate routinely about the job-creating punch of whatever new initiative they’re touting, far beyond what most objective analysts would state. But typically, politicians select economic policies that they truly believe would boost economic growth and create jobs. There happens to be systematic ideological disagreement about whether tax cuts supercharge the economy or environmental regulations kill growth.

But what you don’t hear is politicians saying they are cutting taxes when they are actually raising them, or claiming to have put in place a rule to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when they actually did the opposite. 

On the ACHA, in contrast, House Republicans just voted for a law that will let insurance companies charge patients with preexisting conditions arbitrarily high premiums to avoid covering them. And they are running around the country saying the opposite.

 It is a ridiculous situation that only self blinded culture warriors could defend.

Sacked for all the wrong reasons? (Maybe I'm wrong)

Bigger news than the Labor rebirth of Malcolm Turnbull is the Trump sacking of Comey.

The funny thing is, I see that the FBI has had to issue a letter correcting a lot of what Comey claimed  at his committee meeting last week - which exaggerated the seriousness of the renewed Clinton email investigation - and that certainly does hurt his credibility.

Yet (if I am reading it right) it seems as if Trump is sacking him for not having gone harder after Clinton, and hence it looks completely partisan and virtually corrupt.

I think this is going to hurt Trump bigly.   (I know, we stop copying his childish talk, but it's hard not to.)

Update:   oh, it seems I was reading it wrong.    At least Vox says the reason is (on the face of it) in support of Clinton.  

Update 2:   I'm not sure who is interpreting this right.   I can't really see how the Vox interpretation is correct....

Budge it

I'm pretty busy today, so not much time to comment.

But - the Federal Budget seems to be annoying all the right people, so it's probably OK, more or less.

It's about time Turnbull became the Labor-lite Prime Minister we all hoped him to be.  (Ha ha.)

I don't think Abbott has surfaced yet - what would be good would be for him to do a complete dummy spit, and leave with a few other Libs and Nationals to join Bernadi to forge a new dead end party that would attract votes only from Catallaxy readers and Andrew Bolt.

But he's probably not brave enough...

The jokes write themselves

Noticed in the Jakarta Post of all places:

Due to its yellowish color and strong odor, beer has oftentimes been likened in jest to urine.

However, one brewery in Denmark, has been taking the comparisons way too literally, as it is making beer using the said human waste.

According to CBS news, local corporation Norrebro Bryghus is using the unconventional liquid in their malting process by fertilizing the traditional barley grain with human urine.

The cleverly named “Pisner” pilsner, which comes from a wordplay between the type of beer and local slang, was made from contents of urinals at the largest music festival in Northern Europe.

All in all, over 50,000 liters of human urine  was used as an alternative to traditional animal manure or factory-made fertilizer products, the report said.

I hate to think what recreational drugs might be in urine sourced from music festive (I assume, of the doof doof type.)

Macron as "closest thing to libertarian"?

Jason Soon noted here yesterday that Macron was someone libertarians should be happy with, and while I see that while he is indeed credited with some economic liberalising ideas, he also has plenty of others which American or Australian libertarians would run a mile from.  Here are some of them, as chosen from a list at the BBC:

Would make public investments worth €50bn spread over five years for environmental measures, apprenticeships, digital innovation and public infrastructure

Foreign aid: Eager to increase spending in Africa but wants to help countries stand on their own two feet in defence terms

• In areas of special need - notably poor suburbs (banlieues) - would limit class sizes in primary schools to 12 pupils per teacher
• Would ban children's use of mobile phones at school
• At the age of 18 French teenagers would get a "Cultural Pass" worth €500 to spend on cultural pursuits such as the cinema, theatre, books

Energy and environment

• Calls for half of food provided in school and work canteens to be organic or locally produced
• Would promote France as a world leader in developing green technologies
• Advocates renovating one million poorly insulated homes

He is, of course, also pro EU, an institution which I don't notice many libertarians celebrating.

Anyway, Macron is fully on board with climate change - quite possibly the single biggest distinguishing thing between a libertarian and a sensible person.    

Rural men and city women both missing out on marriage

I'm talking about Japan:

Generally higher rates of unmarried men in eastern Japan prefectures and among women in prefectures home to major cities have led some analysts to say the trend of women moving to cities and men staying in rural areas to carry on family businesses in agriculture and other industries may explain the differences.

A National Institute of Population and Social Security Research report released last month showed a record 23.37 percent of men aged 50 nationwide in 2015 had never married, compared with a record 14.06 percent for women of the same age.

Among Tokyo and 46 other prefectures in the country, the highest for men was Okinawa in southwestern Japan at 26.20 percent and the lowest Nara in western Japan at 18.24 percent, while the highest for women was Tokyo at 19.20 and the lowest Fukui in central Japan at 8.66 percent.

An official of the northeastern Japan prefecture of Hokkaido, which logged the second-highest unmarried percentage of women at 17.22 percent, said a higher rate in the capital city of Sapporo has pushed up the average for the island prefecture.

"Hokkaido has long been said to have less social pressure for marriage. In Sapporo in particular, women may be feeling less pressed to marry, as there are many singles around them," the prefectural official involved in marriage promotion said.

Also included on the list of 10 prefectures with the highest rates of unmarried women are such major cities as Osaka, Fukuoka and Kyoto.

Still sounds unpleasant

A new, nonsurgical weight-loss procedure — which involves inserting a tube down a patient's throat and suturing the stomach — is safe and effective, a new study finds.

During the procedure, which is called endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty, doctors insert a long tube down a patient's esophagus to the stomach. Then, they sew "pleats" into the stomach, which makes it resemble an accordion.

The procedure reduces the volume of the stomach, so that patients feel fuller faster and therefore eat less, said lead study author Dr. Reem Sharaiha,

Link is here.

Let's drop in on the Ship of Fools as they watch the French election results

a.k.a. "Catallaxy":

All calm and under control, then.   (Can't wait for Steve Kates to turn up, too.)

Update:

 Update 2:  for a calm survey of the actual political landscape in France, this article from The Atlantic seems pretty good.

Update 3:  struth seems to broadening his critique of France, probably due to his losing his money:

Life in Pyongyang

NPR talks to an American back from a recent second visit to Pyongyang, who says that life seems relatively normal, at least in that city:

On what has changed since Lee's last trip to North Korea

I have to point out that I've only been in Pyongyang, which is the showcase capital. This is a city of elites, and so I'm only getting that side of the picture. It's like only going to Manhattan, rather than seeing the rest of the United States.

That said, it's surprising given what we hear about the sanctions how things have progressed. Everybody has a smartphone — sometimes two. Everybody is on their phones. They're all playing video games. They're doing what we do with our cellphones as well, they're checking the news, messaging their friends.

There's quite a bit more English, which is interesting. English is the main language that children learn here. There's certainly a lot more cars, which is surprising given the concern about fuel shortages.

I did some shopping today ... and it's just amazing the kinds of products that they have on the shelves. [That] certainly wasn't the case when I started coming to North Korea. So, in some ways, life has improved for the people of Pyongyang.

That said, I think that things are still incredibly difficult in the countryside. They have a chronic food shortage, and that's only going to get worse, of course, with the tightened sanctions.

I didn't expect that bit about English, either.

And even with state controlled media, it seems they are not being whipped into a frenzy (or if the attempt is being made, it's not working?):

It's amazingly calm. You would be surprised at how calm things are here, and I have to say that like most North Koreans, I've been largely cut off from the screaming headlines that we've been seeing. I didn't have Internet access for several days. And, as you probably know, most North Koreans don't have Internet access. They get their news from their own state media, so unless they read about it in their own state media, or see it on the evening news, they're not very aware of it.

To be honest, it's remarkable, we are not seeing people who are preparing for war. They've had a month, really, of some big anniversaries. They celebrated May Day. I did go to a May Day celebration in the park, where they were singing and dancing and drinking.
But they're getting ready now for a busy season of rice planting in May, so they're gearing up for that. They are completely unfazed, it seems, by all the rhetoric that we're hearing overseas.

Plain packaging win (it seems)

Are there tears in the Sinclair Davidson, Tim Wilson and John Roskam households this morning?

Because Sinclair may have to put his passport back in the draw after getting some international invites to talk at tobacco sympathiser meetings about how plain packaging doesn't really work (the signs are that governments just don't believe him);  Tim looks likely to have been proved completely and utterly wrong in every respect  about his warnings while he was on the tobacco funded IPA's payroll; and similarly John Roskam's institute might get less funding from tobacco and have to go asking for Gina for more.  

Because - it looks very likely that the WTO has decided that Australia (and any other country that wants to do it) can do plain packaging on tobacco and not be an illegal barrier to trade.

Yes, laugh out loud

It's not that often that I do laugh out loud at a short tweeted video, but the one here, which looks like it has been retweeted a huge number of times already,  really does look so bizarre I could not help it.

Self serving mush

Gee, Chris Kenny is a political commentator well worth ignoring, isn't he?   Here is the start of his excuse making ramble in The Australian today on the state of politics:

Wandering around the US last month I was reminded about the less than compelling place that partisan politics has in our daily lives. 

Even in the Democrat heartlands of California and Hawaii, whether in the big cities or the back blocks, Americans didn’t mention politics or their new President unless I raised the topic. They were — to use a phrase — relaxed and comfortable; just getting on with their lives.   [My note:  it's hardly common in any country, is it, to ask a tourist to discuss what they think about your country's politics?]

 This, of course, should be no surprise and it merely confirmed my instincts as I mulled over what we are told are tectonic shifts in the political mood in Western liberal democracies.

Brexit, Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and even Pauline Hanson are often characterised as evidence of a far-right, populist upsurge. This analysis often veers into patronising or demeaning references to the voting public.   [Yes Chris - protestor bashing, redneck rallies for Trump spouting know lies were just typical examples of all political rallies from the last 50 years, hey?]

If this were true, what could be the trigger? Why would this be happening? And where will it take Australian politics? [Gee, what might Chris think is the reason - oh yeah, the Lefty political/media class has gone completely nuts and out of touch.  Like the significant majority of American voters for actually voted for Hillary, I suppose, you moron.]

Perhaps much of the political/media class has misjudged what is going on. Maybe this is less a case of the public mood shifting than voter realisation that the political/media class has shifted from a once centrist axis.

 And so on and so on.   A predictable worthless commentator if ever there was one.

Yet another post about the Guardians 2 movie I didn't care for much

Oddly, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 opened overseas a week ahead of the USA, and hence there are some reviews from there only coming out now.

I found myself just about in complete agreement with the very mixed review in the New York Times, and was happy to read this out to my son over breakfast, citing vindication for the comments I had made to him about the Yondu killing spree section of the film:

At times, Mr. Gunn’s ambitions badly backfire. Like the first movie, this one is jammed with action-driven sequences, some wildly bloated and most of them cartoonish. For one fight, though, he cranks the music and lets the screen bleed as the ostensible good guys kill one villain after another, the casualties falling to the sound of a head-bobbing song. Tonally, the episode feels unpleasantly sour and wrong for this young series, which is best when it goes light; it’s a bummer watching another director attempt the kind of smiling sadism that not even Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino can always pull off.

Interest piqued

I'm far, far from being a Christopher Nolan fanboy, but I have to admit, the new trailer for his forthcoming Dunkirk has a very pleasing look of realism about it.  (In reality, there probably will be plenty of CGI in it, but if you can't tell, it doesn't matter.)



Of course, it may look great but still have no emotional connection to the audience, and he did write it himself (which is a warning sign, given he and his brother did the God awful dialogue in Interstellar.)   But the claim is that Dunkirk is actually light on dialogue.

We shall see....

Nothing if not inconsistent

Are Republican congressmen (well, there was barely a female to be seen) just not that bright?   Because I thought the optics of them guffawing over their Obamacare repeal at the White House was clearly bad - especially when the long term consequences look certain to hurt the poor and give tax cuts to the rich.   There will be no excuse that they did it with some sort of regret, but it just had to be done as an economic necessity, as other Right wing policy sometimes sells itself.  No - the history books will show they celebrated, essentially just because they finally got enough on their own side to vote for an ideologically driven, but socially harmful, law.  Congrats, boys...

And as for Trump:  well, we know he's an narcissistic, immature idiot who just thinks a win's a win and that's all that matters.  But to go from celebrating with Ryan to praising the Australian health system??   Could he possibly be any more intellectually inconsistent?   Well, I guess it takes an intellect, first of all...

Adam throws a tantrum

Adam Creighton, being of a libertarian mind, cannot bring himself to support the idea that banks or investors should base decisions on taking the largest environmental issue the world has seen into account.   Libertarians are stupid this way - either they are greedy rich grubs who spend part of their squillions protecting their income by ridiculing the idea that there is any problem with CO2 at all (see Koch brothers), or even if they do believe that climate change is real and that the precautionary principle means there should be action against it, they can't be bothered being concerned about nothing much being done about it (because "big government", or "I hate Hillary Clinton," or something..see Nassim Taleb.)   And if it's a matter of it taking harm to a mining company to help ensure coal burning stops adding to CO2 - well of course that's offensive, because "you're stopping someone making money".

Hence Adam spends his time criticising Westpac today, because it said it won't finance Adani.

Given that it seems most economists think that Australian banks are relatively well placed financially, I am not at all confident that Adam's criticises are accurate or fair.   Some of his criticisms are obviously ideological, and I would need someone with a better understanding of banking systems and regulation to parse it before I trusted his assessment.

An entry exam too far

Last weekend, I posted about the rather extraordinary story of romantic deception that was in the SMH magazine.

Today, we have a more oddball tale of deception in what sounds more or less like a private pre-spy school in Washington DC.  (Who knew they existed?)

Long story short - a guy ingratiates himself with staff at such a school, and with retired spies more generally, with stories that he used to work in some agency or other, killing bad guys and so on.  Some young male students fall for his stories that he may be recruiting them for his still active covert group, but some of the training involves visits to his apartment.  (Uh-oh.)

Then, Levin began inviting his protege back to his Arlington apartment building to practice drawing a weapon — shirtless. Soon, the man said, Levin began fondling him and giving him prostate exams, telling him the inspections were key to his recruitment. Levin also washed him in the shower, according to the alleged victims’ lawsuit, which was filed by lawyers Tamara Miller, a former Justice Department deputy chief, and Peter Masciola, a retired brigadier general.

Although Levin told him that he was free to refuse, the Arlington man said he did not want to imperil his candidacy for the clandestine organization or risk losing out on government jobs.

About the same time, Levin had persuaded a second young student at the Institute of World Politics to get in the shower, under similar pretenses, the lawsuit says.

The whole story is interesting though, because of the way it suggests that retired spies don't really talk in detail to each other about places they worked for, and what they did.  Which makes it conveniently easy to concoct a past.

As someone in comments after the article says:

The general impression, from reading this story, is that there are a bunch of stupid people in the IC.

(I also how hope that the pun in the title to this post is now appreciated.)

Two other points about Guardians 2

*   The Washington Post has an article noting that the movie really doubles down on the use of retro pop music, and it did feel a tad excessive compared to the more restrained use in the first movie.  The article criticises this whole genre of movie as getting a bit lazy:

When needle drops have been curated carefully and deployed judiciously, they can enhance a film’s atmosphere and its characters’ unspoken feelings. Too often, though, they’re lazy ploys to earn the audience’s buy-in, or to signal the connoisseurship and impressively arcane tastes of the filmmaker. Music that should be used to convey added layers of environmental and emotional information is instead used simply for nostalgia appeal and self-congratulation.

Yes, I concur.

*  Has anyone else yet mentioned that Ego's origin story seems to draw on the idea of a Boltzmann Brain?  Let me Google it - yes, someone at IMDB has already commented on this.  (It is very hard to be first on the internet!)

Speaking of China

The BBC is reporting that morning in Beijing currently looks like this:

Makes me want to cough just looking at it.

And how bad is the air quality?  Spectacularly bad:

Beijing's environmental agency said that as of 11:00 local time (03:00 GMT), the PM2.5 reading - which measures pollution in the form of small breathable particles - was 500 micrograms per cubic metre.

The WHO says the maximum safe level should be 25 micrograms per cubic metre.