Public transport and land value

There's an article up at The Conversation looking at the question of what effect the Gold Coast light rail had on land values.   It seems it's a tricky issue to work out and there could be quite a lot of "rubbery figures" involved.

The idea that public transport could be part paid for by greater taxes on surrounding land that benefits from it just strikes me as an idea too difficult to implement with enough certainty and fairness.  

As for whether people actually like the Gold Coast light rail system or not - some of the comments indicate that some are still dead set against it for more-or-less aesthetic reasons.   I find that rather odd.  I thought it looked modern and efficient last I saw it:  public transport just annoys some people, I reckon. 

Lab meat delayed

I've always been a skeptic of lab grown meat, and this update from Discover indicates that the idea of growing muscle cells into something resembling meat is in fact making slow progress.

I say that the enthusiastic reception of the (apparently) very meat like "impossible burger" (because it contains a blood taste resembling compound, but derived from plants) is going to do away with the interest in lab grown mince anyway.  And as for slabs of fake steak grown in a lab - I don't think they have any idea how to get it texturally like meat, yet.

The Lindt Cafe seige

I watched some of the Four Corners report on the outcome of the Lindt seige inquest last night, and have a few observations:

*  it is clear that there were some inexcusable mistakes made by the police in terms of lines of communication.  I found it gobsmacking that a hostage could ring the negotiator direct number and have it ring out 4 times, because of  a slow changeover happening, for example, or that a text message passed on by a relative did not make it to the upper level of the police operation.

*  the police inability to get things done quickly - getting lights turned out in the mall, which was agitating Monis - seemed kind of incompetent of either the police, or the Council.

* the reason Manis executed the manager remained unclear.  It seemed Manis was reassuring the remaining hostages that they would be OK if they just co-operated, but he made Troy kneel in an "execution" position anyway, then waited and shot him anyway.  Did he want to precipitate the police finally storming the cafe?

*  that said, and not taking away any of the grief of the families of the victims, it is still surely the case that a very early police storming of the cafe would probably have resulted in more accidental deaths from stray bullet fragments than what occurred (one.)   In a broad sense, waiting was responsible.  Once he fired a shot towards escaping hostages, it probably wasn't, and the police seem to accept that now.   But it remains quite on the cards that even entry then might have accidentally killed more.  

Australian Right wing civility crisis, continues

Now that Roger Franklin's long term incivility problem in his job at Quadrant has been opened up for wider public scrutiny by not only the ABC, but also (apparently) The Australian, and Right wing commentators (Paul Murray, Chris Kenny, Nick Cater) are putting a lot of distance between themselves and him, that long term exemplar of Right wing incivility, the Catallaxy blog, continues to be in uproar in defence of Franklin, save for about 1% of commenters.  

Sinclair Davidson, who seems to be a close friend of Franklin (and people at Catallaxy sometimes comment on the incestuous world of Labor politics!) is making a (pretty typical for him) hash of the defence of Franklin's comment:

Roger asked, what I thought, a perfectly good question:

What if that blast had detonated in an Ultimo TV studio? Unlike those young girls in Manchester, their lives snuffed out before they could begin, none of the panel’s likely casualties would have represented the slightest reduction in humanity’s intelligence, decency, empathy or honesty.

True – an early version, quickly retracted, was a bit more intemperate but the question remains valid.

This is just an inane line to take on the matter:   there was no "valid question" - it was a rhetorical device which Franklin answers himself - by saying explicitly that the world would have been better for it. 

Look, the simple fact of the matter is that Davidson is just about the last person to show sensible judgement when it comes to matters of civility, as he has been at the very forefront of providing for Australian Right wing reactionary "conservatives" a outlet for their voice, and he doesn't care what offence they cause, even on a blog in which he can delete offensiveness.

He rarely exercises that power, plays favourites, and is willing to continually ignore plainly defamatory or offensive material - with the Left being its main target.   

I complained about this here, back in early 2013, and stopped my commenting there because of his ridiculous and partisan tolerance of incivility, defamation*, and outright plagiarism (for which he accepted the poster's apology, and then left the patently plagiarised post - from an American site - up on the blog.)

In the current kerfuffle, he has noted that people have (I don't know how recently) tried to get him into trouble at RMIT because of the blog.   That wasn't me, but I do find it pretty remarkable that RMIT would not be concerned about their reputation when one of its key staff has the power to police defamation and offensiveness on a blog, and routinely chooses not to exercise it. 

It would not concern me at all if there were media exposure to the blog and its threads - he used to get his head on the ABC as an economic and quasi political commentator quite often, I think viewers deserve to know that he runs a blog that positively hurts the cause of civil political debate in the country.

It's an echo chamber of the worst kind, reinforcing culture warriors and climate change deniers that they are not alone and can be as obnoxious as they like, thus coarsening public political discourse.   You can actually see the place dumbing down and coarsening thread participants over the years, as those who expect civility in argument and would put up counter views have all abandoned the place.   

Franklin deserves to lose his job at Quadrant;  I reckon more might be achieved if Catallaxy enforced civility on its own pages, but that would require a change of its hopeless leadership.

* unless it's a friend

Blasphemy and Islam

Hey, if you can get past the "please register to read" pester screen (I did, eventually), there's a really good article up at Foreign Policy "The Islamic World Has a Blasphemy Problem". 

As the article notes (various extracts follow):

Blasphemy charges have steadily risen in the last decade in Indonesia and have a near 100 percent conviction rate. Meanwhile, across the Muslim world, there has been an uptick in blasphemy charges and prosecutions in recent years. Blasphemy has been spiritedly revived in Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011. In 2001, there was only one blasphemy trial in Pakistan, but now there are dozens each year. There has been a steady drip of attacks and murders of bloggers and writers in Bangladesh in the last five years, along with a deadly mass protest in 2013 demanding the death penalty for blasphemy....

The use of the charge ranges from the nominal to the horrifying. Since 2016, the Egyptian poet Fatima Naoot has been serving a three-year prison sentence for criticizing the slaughter of animals during Eid al-Fitr on Facebook. A Malaysian man was charged with blasphemy for posing questions to his religion teachers. Even the mere accusation of blasphemy poses the threat of violence: In 2015, an Afghan woman was beaten and murdered by a mob in Kabul after arguing with a mullah, and last month, a Pakistani university student was killed by a mob over allegations, later discredited, of posting blasphemous content on social media....

“As far back as the 1750s, the Saudi polity really was based on religion and specifically Wahhabism [the puritanical, literalist strain of Islam founded in 18th-century Arabia],” said Kamran Bokhari, a senior analyst at Geopolitical Futures. Due to a pact between the Saudi royal family and the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in 1744, Wahhabism is effectively the state religion of Saudi Arabia. “Wahhabism is, truly, all about blasphemy. What is true Islam and what is not,” Bokhari said. “Really, to them, most Muslims who don’t subscribe to their exacting views are committing blasphemy in some way or another.”

Modern Islamic countries, meanwhile, have accrued their blasphemy laws not as a medieval inheritance but through one of two major routes: as leftovers of European colonialism or as products of the 20th-century “Arabization” of the Muslim world in the model of the Gulf states.

It goes on to point out that, ironically, British colonialism introduced blasphemy laws in India and Malaysia to help with interfaith stability. 

Anyway, it's a good read, if somewhat depressing for the lack of any grounds for optimism that its political use will not stop in Muslim countries any time soon.

Weekend update

*  Watched the recent M Night Shyamalan written and directed movie Split.   Like nearly every review said, James McAvoy is very good in his multiple personality role, and the movie is pretty pleasingly directed for the first 2/3 at least.   Not much of it feels very real, though.   (The psychiatrist/psychologist acts well, but the way her character behaves seemed sort of naive for a smart woman.)

But the main conceit of the film that comes to the fore in the last third is pretty silly and vaguely explained - probably because it is impossible to make it highly plausible.   (It seems a bit X Men, a bit Altered States.)   I'm not convinced it's really a return to form for this much criticised director - perhaps because I wasn't actually that impressed with his first couple of hits anyway.

For a more terrifying experience of claustrophobia and characters going mad, I would recommend 10 Cloverfield Lane over this.

*  Cooked a recipe for Indian Butter Prawns that I found on the net.   It involves a lot of butter and cream, and has probably taken 6 months off my life, but it was pretty tasty and basically quick (once you finish de-heading and de-veining 800 g of prawns, anyway.)

*  Had a family issue to deal with - may make posting slow for a day...

All perfectly normal, in Bizzaro World

Come on, Trump supporters, or even quasi apologists.   How does this sound in any way, well, not weird?   Was it because they were already worried that the authorities were investigating links and communications between the Trump campaign and the Russians?   Maybe - but then what did they want to discuss with the Russians in such secrecy that they didn't want any other part of the US government to possibly learn about it?  And Kushner is supposed to be one of the liberal advisers around Trump:

Jared Kushner and Russia's ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Donald Trump's transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring, according to US officials briefed on intelligence reports.

Ambassador Sergei Kislyak reported to his superiors in Moscow that Kushner, son-in-law and confidant to then-President-elect Trump, made the proposal during a meeting on December 1 or 2 at Trump Tower, according to intercepts of Russian communications that were reviewed by US officials.

 Kislyak said Kushner suggested using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States for the communications.

The meeting also was attended by Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser.

OK, so is this a lie from the Russians to try to hurt Trump?   Seems unlikely, given the White House is declining to comment.  Is it just unbridled paranoia about the "deep state" trying to stop Trump getting on better with the Russians?  There might be something to that if it were just Flynn asking the Russians to do it - he's as mad as a cut snake.  But again, Kushner is tied up with the proposal? 

It's just very, very strange...

And as for pathetic attempts at false equivalence go, there's a spectacularly silly one from poor old perpetual hand waver CL at Catallaxy:

Last I knew, the US was not supposed to be under permanent threat of full out nuclear attack by a crazy Russian leader who had promised that he would bury capitalism...

I tried to have a Trump free Friday, but I give up...

I can't resist posting these GIFs which are doing the rounds.  What a great impression Donald has been making:

So Macron actually had to try to fight off the Trump handshake?  Talk about Trump making himself look like a weird, old bully.     

Arab science, again

 I'm sure I've said here before that Saudi Arabia, which should have had squillions to spend on good science or technology research, seems to have universities which instead spend an inordinate amount of time investigating arcane matters such as the wonders of camel milk, all because"Islam". 

Here's a story in a similar vein -  an article from Arab News commending the use of sticks for cleaning your teeth:

RIYADH: Using miswak, the twig used by a majority of people in Muslim countries to brush their teeth, is alien to most people in the West. Although it might sound outdated to use twigs from different trees to clean one’s mouth and teeth, studies conducted on miswak have proved otherwise, inferring that the miswak is better than toothpaste for preventing mouth and dental diseases.

The miswak, referred to at times as a chewing stick, is also an alternative form of medicine, according to some research findings. The twig’s usage has been highly recommended in Islam, and Muslims across the world practice it. In Saudi Arabia, the use of sticks or twigs from the Salvadora persica trees, known as arak in Arabic, are common....

 According to research conducted by the Riyadh-based King Saud University (KSU), a total of 19 natural substances were found in miswak that benefit dental health. According to research, the miswak contains a number of natural antiseptics that kill harmful micro-organisms in the mouth, tannic acids that protect gums from disease, and aromatic oils that increase salivation.

I don't know if Mo ever mentioned teeth cleaning, but the religion has specific views on all sort of hygiene matters, so who knows.   Mind you, they were ahead of the trend when it comes to hair shaving in regions Westerners never used to worry about.

Not a happy thought, but useful

This article about what people can expect to experience when with a dying person makes not for the happiest reading, but it is worth knowing anyway.

A couple of points:  have I told this story before?  My late mother used to say she had her own experience of the dying still hearing conversations, even if they seem unconscious.  Her first husband was killed in a military accident (crushed under an aircraft's wheels, I believe.)   She was with him in hospital, when he was apparently unconscious, and a doctor in the room told her he thought her husband was not going to make it.   Her poor husband then opened his eyes, looked shocked, and went downhill from there pretty fast. 

Secondly;  the article refers to the "death bed lucidity" stories about those who have dementia.  I have read about this before, and it is, surely, a rather odd thing to explain....

Mind beyond physics?

Here's some physics for your Friday:

Scientists Are About to Perform an Experiment to See if The Human Mind Is Bound by Physics

This is a bit hard to follow, and it involves quantum nonlocality and a Bell's Test - the exact implications of which are still being hotly contested, when you read arXiv.  Anyway, this is the key part:

Now, Lucien Hardy, a theoretical physicist from the Perimeter Institute in Canada, is suggesting that the measurements between A and B could be controlled by something that may potentially be separate from the material world: the human mind.

His idea is derived from what French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes called the mind-matter duality, "[where] the mind is outside of regular physics and intervenes on the physical world," as Hardy explained.

To do this, Hardy proposed a version of the Bell test involving 100 humans, each hooked up to EEG headsets that would read their brain activity. These devices would be used to switch the settings on the measuring devices for A and B, set at 100 kilometres apart.
"The radical possibility we wish to investigate is that, when humans are used to decide the settings (rather than various types of random number generators), we might then expect to see a violation of quantum theory in agreement with the relevant Bell inequality," Hardy wrote in a paper published online earlier this month.

If the correlation between the measurements don't match previous Bell tests, then there could be a violation of quantum theory that suggests A and B are being controlled by factors outside the realm of standard physics.

"[If] you only saw a violation of quantum theory when you had systems that might be regarded as conscious, humans or other animals, that would certainly be exciting. I can't imagine a more striking experimental result in physics than that," Hardy said.

While we're on a theme

I seem to be having a very "gay" Friday, so here's another homosexual snippet.

Turns out that Peter Ackroyd, the prolific British author who I don't think I've ever got around to reading, is gay and has written a gay history of London.   He claims it has always been a queer city:

I don't think I learned that much new from reading an article about it in The Guardian, but I do note this:

Unlike many chroniclers of gay culture, Ackroyd doesn’t neglect lesbianism: we are gleefully taken on a tour of the dildo shops of the Georgian city – it’s said that one establishment in Leicester Fields sold nothing else – and behind the closed doors of cigarillo smoke-filled Edwardian clubs such as the Cave of Harmony and the Orange Tree.

In 2017, 50 years after some forms of homosexuality were tentatively legalised, it’s hard to think of anything that has undergone greater upheavals than gay culture. But in Ackroyd’s view, things haven’t really changed that much.

“The manifestations alter, but the essence remains the same. There are still drag bars, there are still travesti acts, there are still pick-up places in parks, there are still men-only clubs. As a percentage of the population, there were as many gay bars in 18th-century London as there are today.”

Policing homosexuality in Indonesia

This article, in the Jakarta Post, notes that there is a lot more going on in regional parts of Indonesia regarding policing of homosexuality than we hear about here:

Behind the protests and actions and debate on blasphemy law, the wars on homosexuality and/or LGBT still continues. Indonesian police raided a “gay sex party” in Surabaya, East Java, arrested 14 men, and forced them to undergo HIV tests, which violated their rights to privacy. They face charges of infringing the 2008 Pornography Law and the 2008 Electronic Information and Transaction Law (ITE), prohibiting the distribution of pornographic and/or indecent material. The police found and confiscated condoms, mobile phones, and a flash drive containing porn videos, reports said....

While homosexuality remains illegal here, the loose, malleable, and subjective definition of pornography of the 2008 Pornography Law so far has been a powerful weapon to outlaw homosexuality practices and interfere in individual private spaces. Last year a male couple in Manado, North Sulawesi, was arrested after a photo of them kissing was uploaded on Facebook and went viral. Similar with the recent gay arrests in Surabaya, this couple was at risk of being charged under the Pornography Law and the cyberlaw.

The writer notes that the problem is how too much decentralised democracy has played out in the nation with patches of fundamentalist Islam:

Daily power dynamics and contestations among political actors mark constant ideological struggles to define the contours of the regime. Indonesia’s transition to democracy has also led the previously suppressed fundamentalist Islamic political groups to flourish openly and exert their power, with many cities and regencies adopting “moral-based regulations” or sharia-inspired bylaws.

The scholar Kathryn Robinson in Masculinity, Sexuality, and Islam ( 2015 ) asserts that political Islam actors exploit decentralization to enact sharia-based regulations. With their greater political   power, politicians of any hue see them as potential supporters and constituents for their own interests. Hence, this shift has also changed the way of regulating and policing people, particularly those who do not conform to the formal norms of the state and of the majority. If in the previous regime, state-centered power and surveillance was inevitable, the current regime of controls are deployed and reverberates throughout dispersed policies, creating new modes of policing.

Damn...

It's increasingly looking like direct-current stimulation isn't all that it's early proponents thought it would be:

Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) -- a non-invasive technique for applying electric current to areas of the brain -- may be growing in popularity, but new research suggests that it probably does not add any meaningful benefit to cognitive training.

It does sound like a fairly limited experiment, though...

Same sex marriage in Asia

The Japan Times has an article about the unexpected court ruling from Taiwan regarding same sex marriage.    In looking at how it may affect other Asian nations, I was surprised to read this:

In Vietnam, which is seen as socially progressive on LGBT issues and where a vibrant gay scene flourishes online and in some big cities, hopes for marriage reform have stalled.

Why would Vietnam be "socially progressive" on this?

As far as mainland China is concerned, the report notes: 

Homosexuality was officially decriminalised in 1997 but only taken off the list of psychiatric disorders four years later.

“Taiwan and mainland China have the same roots and culture so it suggests that Chinese society could also accept the idea of gay marriage,” said Li Yinhe, a renowned Chinese sexologist who has pressed Beijing policymakers on the issue.

There have been small signs of progress. While a Chinese court last year ruled against two men seeking to marry, the fact the case even made it into the judicial system was seen by many as an achievement.

I still say that the gender imbalance in China is likely to influence attitudes, in the long term, towards gay relationships. 

Update:  here's a 2015 article from the ABC noting the surprising tolerance to gay rights activities being shown by the government in Vietnam.  I hadn't noticed this at the time. 

Magic poop

Amused to read this in the Japan Times:

Learning more than 1,000 kanji during six years of grade school isn’t an easy task. But it can be fun if all the characters are associated with a word they love — poop.

A workbook series that features a heavy dose of the word “unko,” poop in Japanese, has quickly sold over a million copies since its release in March. The series’ main selling point is that it engages children by using the word “poop” in every single example on how a kanji is used in a sentence.

“Adults would raise their eyebrows, but for children, the word ‘poop’ is magical and makes things fun,” said Yusaku Furuya, 40, the author of the books.

You need to see the picture to understand more:

Looking for signs of cognitive decline in Trump

Here's a lengthy article from STAT, which examines changes in Trump's speaking style as an indicator of cognitive decline.

Let's just say, it doesn't look good....

Ironing the ocean in the news again

Nature notes that there is talk again from a somewhat oddly secretive Canadian foundation of conducting an iron fertilising experiment in the ocean - but this time, the justification being to boost fisheries.

The situation with these experiments is summed up as follows:

Researchers worldwide have conducted 13 major iron-fertilization experiments in the open ocean since 1990. All have sought to test whether stimulating phytoplankton growth can increase the amount of carbon dioxide that the organisms pull out of the atmosphere and deposit in the deep ocean when they die. Determining how much carbon is sequestered during such experiments has proved difficult, however, and scientists have raised concerns about potential adverse effects, such as toxic algal blooms. In 2008, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity put in place a moratorium on all ocean-fertilization projects apart from small ones in coastal waters. Five years later, the London Convention on ocean pollution adopted rules for evaluating such studies.

Because Oceaneos’s planned experiment would take place in Chilean waters, it is allowed under those rules. Riedijk says that the foundation will voluntarily follow international protocols for such studies; it is unclear whether that will allay fears that the group is promoting an unproven technology, rather than conducting basic research....

Whether it would help fisheries is a very moot point:

In the meantime, scientists say that it will be difficult to get solid data from the Oceaneos foundation’s planned experiment. The geology off the Chilean coast, and the patterns of currents there, create a mosaic of low- and high-iron waters. Anchovies, horse mackerel and other fish move freely between these areas.

And adding iron could shift the location and timing of phytoplankton blooms to favour fast-growing species, says Adrian Marchetti, a biological oceanographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One of those, the diatom Pseudo-nitzschia, produces domoic acid, a neurotoxin that can kill mammals and birds. Oceaneos’s experiment will probably increase plankton growth in low-iron waters, Marchetti says, “but it’s not to say that that is actually good for the higher levels of the food chain”.

Turmoil in Wingnut land

The Australian conservative/Right commentariat did find themselves in somewhat of a quandary yesterday when one of their members was so annoyed with a Q&A panel that he openly, implicitly, wished (it was hard to read it any other way) that they had been the ones killed by Muslim terrorists, not the people at Manchester.

Wishing death on people you disagree with in Australia is not considered by sensible folk to be within acceptable political commentary or discourse.   But Roger Franklin was attacking the ABC and all who sail within her, so it was too much of a temptation for the likes of Bolt, Blair and Sinclair Davidson to not endorse it, or go "ha, ha, that was witty satire, wasn't it."   

Yet, another group of the Right side commentariat had their misgivings from the start - Chris Kenny, to his credit, was (I think) first off the ranks.   But even Franklin, or someone at Quadrant, had a rethink and had edited it (with no acknowledgement) to remove the "if there was any justice" part aspect of it, so as to make sound less of a lament that Q&A wasn't bombed.  

By late in the day, and following universal condemnation from real journalists and commentators across the land,  there were more breaks in the ranks, so we ended up with Nick Cater criticising it, and Keith Windschuttle apologising "without reservation" to the ABC and saying that the article would be removed from the Quadrant website.  Paul Murray on Sky apparently attacked it too.   IBy the evening, Bolt had semi recanted, and today, he has even (again, silently) removed all reference to the Quadrant comment piece from his post. 

And despite Windschuttle's apology  and promise it would go from the site, some were saying that this morning it was still there.   Hey, Quadrant, who's running the place, anyway?  (Well, checking just now, I think it has gone.  Took their time.  Were Franklin and Windschuttle having fisticuffs in whose ever basement it operates from?)

And so here is my final wrap up of how it panned out:

*  kudos to the one old Catallaxy regular (well, apart from monty) who came out with a straight condemnation that it was a stupid thing for Franklin to have said - CL.    But any praise for a rare outburst of common sense has to tempered by the fact that he is one of the worst with hyperbole about how to deal with Islamic terrorism, as I am sure he has wished for the nuking of Mecca more than once.

*  I had been meaning to note yesterday that Franklin had made it very clear that he hates Krauss with a passion partly because he was a "warmist" who "dares call himself a man of science" (I think that were the exact words:  I can't check any more.)  As I ended my piece yesterday, wingnuts have no perspective of risk because they cannot conceive that they are wrong on the matter of the biggest environmental risk the entire planet faces.  Hence, any terrorist attack, no matter the number of victims and whether it was by a lone (Islamic inspired) mutter or not will be cause for saying that Western civilisation is about to collapse, yet the actual threat to long term civilisation is laughed at.   Is the problem with their anger that, at some level, they can perceive that they are wrong on climate change, as their movement is diminishing as their handful of ageing contrarian scientists die off and the world does, indeed, continue to warm? 

* Sinclair Davidson's rapidly diminishing circle of Right wingers he can trust diminished further when he complained that he probably wouldn't watch Paul Murray again after he also jumped ship and condemned Franklin.   I'm not sure - hasn't he mentioned avoiding watching the ABC before?  If this continues, he'll soon be down to just watching Bolt and reading comics the rest of the night. 

* For all of that, the fact that the ABC called in security to advise about it was a bit over the top in its own way.   Regardless of that, their hot anger at someone saying something as stupid and offensive as Franklin's original post was entirely justified.

Update:   now Catallaxy readers (average age - 85 - mentally if not chronologically) are perturbed that Andrew Bolt said this on the radio:

“I think a lot of people are making mileage out of this in order to get the ABC off the hook. I think the reaction, the ABC posting extra security. I mean, give me a break. As if the Quadrant audience would get their zimmer frames out of the cupboard and shuffle off and go and do … come on, give me a break.” – Andrew Bolt

 Ha ha.

Oh Look - The Addams Family meets the Pope

OK, the glowing Orb of Destiny, or whatever it was, was pretty hilarious, but at least it wasn't of Trump's own doing.

But isn't this just the weirdest photo ever of a political family meeting a Pontiff?

I mean, who the heck advised Ivanka that it was a good idea to look like she was going to her belated first communion, except in black?   What are she and Melania mourning?   The death of credibility of Donald?  (Actually, it died decades ago.)

And I also see that Melania again declined Donald's hand.   If this goes on, I'm half expecting her to give him a big shove in the back at the top of some staircase or other any day now.

The optics (and reality) of American politics has never been weirder....

Update:  it's being said that Melania, at least, is complying with Vatican protocol:

“Per Vatican protocol, women who have an audience with the Pope are required to wear long sleeves, formal black clothing, and a veil to cover the head,” Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s spokeswomen told CNN.

However, the Associated Press said it wasn’t necessarily a rule that was hard and fast and many women have met the Pope without a veil. But as a practising Catholic, Melania chose to wear one.

Some have also noted the striking similarity in her choice of garb at the Vatican to another first lady — style icon Jackie Kennedy.

 I still say Ivanka looks ridiculous.