The Putin mystery

OK, so someone else on the net will be musing about this already, but was Putin's intervention in the Trump leakgate [sorry] matter intended to help or hurt Trump?

Because surely Putin would realise that coming out to defend him, and by saying he has a transcript of the meeting, could create more harm than assistance for Trump.  And it is at least possible that the Russians have decided that Trump is just too unreliable for them - sure he looked easily manipulated before the election, but now they see the turmoil that surrounds him, maybe they want someone more predictable in the seat?

Or is Putin not as savvy to American political dynamics as we assume?  It's not as if he has to worry about handling hostile press in his country.

Update:   I see Andrew Bolt, one of the Australian Right wing media culture warriors who seems to have an exceptionally low interest in commenting on the patent turmoil in, and incompetence of, the Trump Whitehouse, briefly notes today that the Putin intervention will not help.   He then ends with this bit of blind stupidity:

 There is an unmistakable whiff of McCarthyism - mixed, of course, with an entirely insincere and self-interested outrage - to the anti-Russian hysteria now.

Yes, of course, Andrew.  If a Democrat President was refusing to disclose tax returns and financial information relevant to his or her ties to Russia, and had campaigners making suspicious trips to the country and later Russian sourced leaks were used to campaign advantage, you'd just shrug your shoulders about it and say "stop being hysterical".

Update 2:  Homer in comments refers me to a post about Putin at Econospeak.  It is interesting.

The dumb will rise up

Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fan, exemplifies the sad, ideologically driven dumbing down of the American Right, such that they can't believe not only [climate] science, but also that Trump is the most dangerously inept, and patently unsuited by both character and intellect, person handed the task of being POTUS in living memory.   Here he is opining in a recent post (before the Comey memo news broke this morning):

Well, I’m still not sure exactly what’s going on — see Stephen’s post below for more — but what is clear is that they hope that if they gin up enough controversy, baseless or not, maybe it’ll give cover to an impeachment or 25 Amendment removal, or something. I don’t think it will happen and if it does — barring something a lot bigger and more uncontrovertible than anything they’ve come up with so far — you will have literal riots in the streets if Trump’s removed, far beyond anything you’ve seen from Democrat constituency groups like Black Lives Matter. Trump supporters have had it with the establishment, and are unlikely to go along quietly with a system they regard as deeply corrupt and devoted to their destruction. To the extent it’s interested in impeachment, the anti-Trump establishment, which likes to present itself as responsible and sensible, is playing with fire here, in a room full of gasoline that the establishment itself has pumped.

The wingnut Right used to muse about how they would rise up and "take back their country" under Obama.  They can't give up that fantasy, it seems.
 

Hey monty...

You need to talk to poor old Tom.   I really enjoy the way he has taken to running around crying "Take down their names! Take down their names!" whenever someone in comments does not toe the Kates line that Trump Is Magnificent And If You Disagree You Are a Socialist Enemy of the State; but it really does make him seem more of a paranoid loser operating from his backyard shed than he might actually be...

Trumpalooza continues...

I have a theory about Trump and what he told the Russians - McMaster might be right, that Trump wasn't even briefed that the source of the intel was the Israelis in this particular case, but Trump being vaguely aware that the US gets a lot of Middle East intel from there made the claim anyway.    Thereby causing panicky telephone calls to US intel agencies saying "we can't trust him to not stuff it up even if we don't tell him!"

Someone else on the internet has probably already come up with this, but it seems to me to fit the claims and counterclaims quite well....

Meanwhile, this morning's news that Comey wrote that Trump tried to call him off the Flynn investigation may help to explain Trump's tweet about how Comey had better hope that the meeting was not taped.   Because what may have happened here is that someone sitting in on the meeting may have said to Trump afterwards "you know, you can't really tell the FBI to call off investigations as a favour to a friend" and Trump may have said "I didn't say that...I didn't say that.  The tape will show me right."   Of course, being an idiot, the tape will probably show him wrong...

Here's what the NYT is reporting:

Mr. Comey shared the existence of the memo with senior F.B.I. officials and close associates. The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of the memo to a Times reporter.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

I really get the feeling that this may be the beginning of the end for President T.

Update:

Further to my prediction, found this via Hot Air:

They need to get on the phone to Steve Kates. 

The accelerating expansion explained?

Seems to me that a lot of Chinese are doing interesting physics now.   This sounds interesting:

A group of physicists believe they may have cracked one of nature’s codes and finally explained what causes the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Qingdi Wang, a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia (UBC), has comprised a theory to bridge some of the incompatibility issues between the theory of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity—two of the most successful theories that explain how the universe works.

Wang suggested that the universe is made of constantly fluctuating space and time.

“Space-time is not as static as it appears, it's constantly moving,” Wang said in a statement.

Astronomers discovered in 1998 that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate, which implies that space is not empty but rather filled with dark energy—likely from vacuum energy—that pushes matter away.

However, when the theory of quantum mechanics is applied to vacuum energy, it would predict that there is an extremely large density of vacuum energy, more than the total energy of all the particles in the universe. Also, Einstein’s theory of general relativity suggests that the energy would have a strong gravitational effect, which would likely cause the universe to explode.

However, physicists agree that the universe is expanding very slowly and the UBC team have made calculations that show that space is fluctuating wildly and at each point it oscillates between expansion and contraction.

As the universe swings from expansion to contraction, the two actions nearly cancel each other out, resulting in a small net effect that drives the universe to expand slowly at an accelerating rate.

“This happens at very tiny scales, billions and billions times smaller even than an electron,” Wang said.

The abstract to the paper is here, and it puts it rather more technically:

We investigate the gravitational property of the quantum vacuum by treating its large energy density predicted by quantum field theory seriously and assuming that it does gravitate to obey the equivalence principle of general relativity. We find that the quantum vacuum would gravitate differently from what people previously thought. The consequence of this difference is an accelerating universe with a small Hubble expansion rate $H\propto \Lambda e^{-\beta \sqrt{G}\Lambda }\to 0$ instead of the previous prediction $H=\sqrt{8\pi G{\rho }^{\mathrm{vac}}/3}\propto \sqrt{G}{\Lambda }^2\to \infty$ which was unbounded, as the high energy cutoff $\Lambda$ is taken to infinity. In this sense, at least the “old” cosmological constant problem would be resolved. Moreover, it gives the observed slow rate of the accelerating expansion as $\Lambda$ is taken to be some large value of the order of Planck energy or higher. This result suggests that there is no necessity to introduce the cosmological constant, which is required to be fine tuned to an accuracy of ${10}^{-120}$, or other forms of dark energy, which are required to have peculiar negative pressure, to explain the observed accelerating expansion of the Universe.

Would not be surprising

Given his boastful character and inept regard for details, it would not be very surprising at all if Trump did disclose details he shouldn't have to Russians (or anyone he is trying to impress).   The only surprise would be that he had paid enough attention to recall the detail he shouldn't be sharing.  From Axios:

President Trump revealed highly classified information in an Oval Office meeting with Russian Foreign Secretary Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, potentially damaging relations with a key source of intelligence on ISIS, according to the Washington Post.

• A source told the Post Trump discussed material with the highest level of classification, and "revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies."
• Trump seemed to be "boasting about his inside knowledge of the looming threat" before describing a specific ISIS plot and where it was detected, per the report. The intelligence-sharing system through which the U.S. learned of the plot is incredibly sensitive.

Update:  despite McMaster trying to throw cold water on the story, this detail at the end of the Wapo report seems to indicate there's something to it:

Senior White House officials appeared to recognize quickly that Trump had overstepped and moved to contain the potential fallout. Thomas P. Bossert, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, placed calls to the directors of the CIA and the NSA, the services most directly involved in the intelligence-sharing arrangement with the partner.

Update 2:   just another shouty evening in the White House:

7:24PM: Chief strategist Steve Bannon and top communications officials Mike Dubke, Sarah Sanders, and Sean Spicer walk into cabinet room, per reporters on Twitter who then hear yelling from the meeting.

 Update 3:  more on the shouting:

Twitter (and much of the media) is going berserk over this:   Trump is going to be very, very upset about it all....

XP rules the waves?

Would be hard to believe, if true:

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has refused to deny that Britain’s nuclear submarines use the outdated Windows XP program amid the ongoing WannaCry ransomware attack.

Instead he simply insisted the subs were “safe”, adding that they operated “in isolation” when out on patrol, which possibly suggests the vessels at sea were unaffected only because they were not connected to the internet.

Japanese thoughtfulness

Nice story at the BBC saying that the Japanese started "mindfulness", as part of Zen Bhuddism.  The opening paragraphs: 

As the sleek shinkansen bullet train glided noiselessly into the station, I watched a strange ritual begin. During the brief stop, the conductor in the last carriage began talking to himself. He proceeded to perform a series of tasks, commenting aloud on each one and vigorously gesticulating at various bits of the train all the while.

So what was he up to? You could say he’s practicing mindfulness. The Japanese call it shisa kanko (literally ‘checking and calling’), an error-prevention drill that railway employees here have been using for more than 100 years. Conductors point at the things they need to check and then name them out loud as they do them, a dialogue with themselves to ensure nothing gets overlooked.

And it seems to work. A 1994 study by Japan’s Railway Technical Research Institute, cited in The Japan Times, showed that when asked to perform a simple task workers typically make 2.38 mistakes per 100 actions. When using shisa kanko, this number reduced to just 0.38% – a massive 85% drop.

Backing up

Am I the only person who finds computer data backup a confusing issue?   I mean, I never quite seem to understand what exactly the software is doing, and whether, once I used one company's particular software, it means I'm dependent on that particular software still working in future if I were to do a recovery.  I know there's a Windows back up built in as well, but it seems particularly unclear as to what it is doing (and I think all tech people recommend using other software.)

I've had some improvement on my understanding of how back ups can be set up from this site, but after trying a freeware version of one company's software, I still feel a bit confused...

Straight to the point

It's hard to imagine a more damning take on Trump's personality than this article by David Roberts at Vox.  The key paragraph:

In short, what if Trump is exactly as he appears: a hopeless narcissist with the attention span of a fruit fly, unable to maintain consistent beliefs or commitments from moment to moment, acting on base instinct, entirely situationally, to bolster his terrifyingly fragile ego.

We’re not really prepared to deal with that.

Also at Vox, Matther Yglesias notes that Trump is still avoiding the key question about his connection with Russian money, and the lawyer's letter last week does not answer it.

At Axios, Mike Allen says there is talk of Trump sweeping a huge broom through his White House and Cabinet - but whether he will or not remains unclear.

And yet, despite the obvious turmoil of last week (a President openly taunting a sacked FBI director that he might have been taped being the ultimate low-light), it is stunning that the culture war grip remains as tight as ever on the judgement of those on the Right who supported him, so that they still cannot find significant fault with this patently awful and hopeless President. 

Look, Trump is no Hitler - but the wilful blindness and excuse making with which a scarily significant slab of people treat him gives at least a taste of how many Germans could engage in a similar exercise in self delusion.

Cary and LSD

It's not news that Cary Grant tried using LSD therapeutically to overcome some ongoing psychological issues that pursued him throughout his life, but still there are some details in this Guardian article that are surprising.   This for one:

Turned on to the treatment by his third wife, Betsy Drake, Grant submitted himself to weekly sessions with Dr Mortimer Hartman at the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills. The effects were startling. “In one LSD dream I imagined myself as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship.”

Well, hard to know what to say about that without any impropriety.

Yet, despite the silliness of that hallucination, Grant was terribly enthusiastic about the drug as a psychological elixir, at least initially:

“He claimed he was saved by LSD,” explains Mark Kidel, the film’s director. “You have to remember that Cary was a private man. He rarely gave interviews. And yet, after taking acid, he personally contacted Good Housekeeping magazine and said: ‘I want to tell the world about this. It has changed my life. Everyone’s got to take it.’ I’ve also heard that Timothy Leary read this interview, or was told about it, and that his own interest in acid was essentially sparked by Cary Grant.”

The article says that his enthusiasm later dampened (after perhaps 100 sessions!), but that early reaction does sound typical of the false promise of mind altering drugs generally,  doesn't it?  Specifically, it reminds me of the enthusiasm for tripping on mescaline that was the basis of Huxley's The Doors of Perception.  (As I have explained before, I actually read that book as a teenager - I think from the high school library, of all places - and found it quite an exciting idea, that a drug could let you see a numinous world as it really is.  I was never tempted to actually seek out any hallucinogen, however, realising soon enough that the theory the book promoted was itself a hallucination.)

Anyway, it does seem that Grant was relatively happier late in life, which is pleasing to know for a person who gave so much enjoyment to the world.

Movie upgraded

I watched Inception with my son last night, the first time I have viewed it since seeing it at the cinema in 2010. I enjoyed rewatching it more than I expected, then decided to go back to read what I had said about it first time around.

Boy, I feel I was a bit harsh, in retrospect.   The film still looks great - really great, actually; and I found myself  enjoying its level of complexity and generally "cool" vibe.   I felt more admiration for DiCaprio's acting this time around, too.  In my earlier review, was I reacting a bit too much against some very high praise it received?   Possibly - I see it got 86% on Rottentomatoes - it's good but not that good. 

Furthermore, I still think it is indisputable that the final level of dream "inception" - the meant-to-be climatic snowy fortress sequence - was a really major mistake.   The movie just starts looking  like a complete James Bond rip off, and despite the (I still say rather poorly directed or edited) action happening around the mountains, it actually loses narrative momentum within a few minutes of them popping up in that location.    

A good, basically clever, movie, but one that could have been great, with some modifications.

Does this mean I would like Interstellar if I watch it again in 6 years time?

Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. No.


PS:  my son - now 17 - liked it a lot; but then again, he knew it was by Christopher Nolan, and he knows he can annoy me by overpraising his work.  Especially Interstellar.

Maybe I am a Russian pawn

Hey this is a bit of a surprise.  Based on a computer tech's recommendation, I use Kaspersky anti virus on my computers, but NPR reports that the US government won't.   Not only that, it apparently paid money to sacked Flynn!  Read this:

The Kaspersky Conundrum

The cyber-frustrations of members of Congress and their witnesses are a frequent feature of Intelligence and Armed Services Committee hearings and other national security hearings on the Hill. They seldom, however, get more specific than broad statements and almost never involve the name of a specific problem or company. On Thursday, however, two senators mentioned one in particular: Kaspersky Labs.
The Russian company — which supports NPR and is a provider of security services for its IT systems — has been linked to work for Russia's intelligence agencies. The leaders of the House Oversight Committee released documents showing payments by Kaspersky to Flynn. Even so, millions of Americans use Kaspersky software, as Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., pointed out to the witnesses — but, he asked, would they run it on their systems?
Here's how they answered:
McCabe, of the FBI: "A resounding no from me."
Pompeo, of the CIA: "No."
Coats, the director of national intelligence: "No, senator."
Rogers, of the NSA: "No, sir."
Stewart, of the Pentagon's DIA: "No, senator."
Cardillo, of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency: "No, sir."
Later, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., asked the intelligence bosses about Kaspersky again. They repeated their own government systems were safe from any danger, but the DIA's Stewart said he couldn't be sure about all of his contractors. Intelligence and defense contractors have been the sources for huge leaks of secrets from the NSA, CIA and other agencies.

Update:   one of the reasons I wonder about this is because of the mysterious level of activity from Russia (or, sometimes other odd countries) that can appear when you check "stats" on Blogger.   The hits Blogger shows must include heaps of 'bot hits, or something, because if you have a separate company's hit counter embedded on the blog, you  get a much more realistic number.  For example, today Blogger stats says I got 2,800 hits yesterday, and by far mostly from Russia!:

My embedded statcounter shows a much more realistic 96 hits.

It makes me feel my blog is somehow being used, but I don't know how...

The inflation fight (cosmology, not economics)

I've always been a bit leery of post Big Bang inflation as an explanation - because the mechanism of how it happened had just been left hanging for decades, but everyone seemed to just accept it must have happened, anyway.   (Here I was, commenting briefly on it back in 2006.)

Well, I see from The Altantic that there has been a bit of a recent skirmish going on between cosmologists about whether it is really good science if it is not really testable:

In January, Steinhardt, and fellow Princeton physicist Anna Ijjas, and Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb published a feature in Scientific American criticizing inflation. They concluded by characterizing it as an idea outside of empirical science altogether. The myriad ways inflation could have played out would lead to so many possible outcomes that no astronomical observation can ever rule the general idea out, they say—and moreover, some advocates for inflation know it. This would go against a basic, popular framing of science suggested by philosopher Karl Popper, in which a theory becomes scientific when it takes the risk of making predictions that nature could then uphold or disprove.

“They really made the accusation that the inflationary community understands that the theory is not testable,” Guth, one of the idea’s founding fathers, says. “Those words angered me.” In response, Guth and his colleagues have taken the unusual step of replying with their own letter in Scientific American that insists they are doing science. They even went to the trouble of circulating their response, in order to collect signatures from many of the world’s most prominent cosmologists. “What’s the point of just making it look like it’s three people disagreeing with three people?” says David Kaiser, another author of the letter.

The 29-person list of other experts who signed on includes four Nobel Prize winners, a Fields Medal winner, Steven Hawking, and leading figures from the  cosmology experiments COBE, WMAP, and Planck. (Also, twenty-five members of the list are men.) In turn, Ijjas, Steinhardt, and Loeb have published their own response-to-the-response.

For both sides, the core of the issue is whether inflation as a general approach makes specific predictions that can be checked against the sky, and the extent to which these comparisons count as empirical tests. If the universe did inflate, some kind of mysterious, short-lived field must have pushed everything apart. But theorists have wiggle room as to how exactly that field behaved, with a wide array of consequences that can both match and contradict reality, the critics note.

I still feel more-or-less vindicated in my suspicions about inflation being accepted too quickly.

Governors creeped out

The Govenor's Mansion in New York apparently creeps out governors who stay there.  (They worry it is haunted.)

Worth noting

It would seem that the ignorance highlighting interview that Trump gave with The Economist has been swamped for media attention somewhat by the Comey sacking.  But it really was a doozy.

Just to show I'm not a complete "lefty"...

...I will link with approval (it rarely happens these days) to a post at Tim Blair's, about a truly ridiculous case of "cultural appropriation" hysteria from Canada.

Is there possibly any more humilitating job than being "White House Spokesperson for PresidentTrump"?

Vox headline:

Trump himself just confirmed his White House’s story about Comey’s firing was a lie; 
It took less than 48 hours.

Update:   I like this last paragraph in a Slate article about Trump's anger problem:

The problem with a doctrine of wrath—in the presidency as in other walks of life—is that the rationale so clear to the boiling brain can appear ridiculous to the outside observer. The administration’s babbling excuses have a knee-jerk quality; it’s as if the president so desired to disappear his Putin problem that he was willing to embrace whatever absurd explanation came to hand (and then became surprised—and angry all over again—when we didn’t fall for it). Don’t look at Russia! our commander in chief shouts in fury, and of course our gaze stays fixed on Moscow. Such transparent terror is contagious: Republican senators this week tried to make the Trump–Russia hearings about the travel ban, leaks, and Clinton’s emails—anything but Trump and Russia. After a certain point, this is no longer strategy. It is reflex. It is a child covering his eyes to make the loathsome object in front of him vanish. Trump may be a politician, but he is also a man consumed with desperate, narcissistic rage. Easing that pain will always be his primary goal. 

Too stupid to understand how it would look

From the Washington Post, there's a recurring theme of "anger" in this story.  (These are various extracts from the report):

Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped. Trump was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists....

In his Tuesday letter dismissing Comey, Trump wrote: “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” People familiar with the matter said that statement is not accurate, although they would not say how it was inaccurate. FBI officials declined to comment on the statement, and a White House official refused to discuss conversations between Trump and Comey....

The media explosion was immediate and the political backlash was swift, with criticism pouring in not only from Democrats, but also from some Republicans. Trump and some of his advisers did not fully anticipate the ferocious reaction — in fact, some wrongly assumed many Democrats would support the move because they had been critical of Comey in the past — and were unprepared to contain the fallout.  ...

Trump’s team did not have a full-fledged communications strategy for how to announce and then explain the decision. As Trump, who had retired to the residence to eat dinner, sat in front of a television watching cable news coverage of Comey’s firing, he noticed another flaw: Nobody was defending him.

The president was irate, according to White House officials. Trump pinned much of the blame on Spicer and Dubke’s communications operation, wondering how there could be so many press staffers yet such negative coverage on cable news — although he, Priebus and others had afforded them almost no time to prepare.

 And yes, I see there is a twitterstorm coming from Trump, which confirms that he is indeed indignant that he is copping so much criticism.

Am I missing something here?

I'm no medical researcher, but I've previously questioned how these studies of how long HIV positive patients can expect to live if they are being treated can be all that accurate.  Don't you have to wait 'til the (say) 20 year olds who have started on antiviral treatments in the last decade have lived on the drugs for 40 years before you can know of any long term consequences of such intense medication?

Here's news of another such statistical study, saying that if they get onto treatment early, they can expect to live near normal life expectancy.  The article says:

The researchers looked at 88,500 people with HIV from Europe and North America who had been involved in 18 studies.

They based their life-expectancy predictions on death rates during the first three years of follow-up after drug treatment was started.

They found that fewer people who started treatment between 2008 and 2010 died during this period compared with those who began treatment between 1996 and 2007.

The expected age at death of a 20-year-old patient starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) after 2008, with a low viral load and after the first year of treatment, was 78 years - similar to the general population.

Furthermore, publicity about this type of finding surely is (the major?) part of the reason for complacency in the at risk community about catching it in the first place.?