That it's all a fake news fantasy is the fantasy

Hey Jason, I see that you're retweeting apologetics for Donald Trump again.   This is a worry.

It's a very stupid post, containing one element of truth (that at one time Trump could've been thought to be a wannabe Democrat, not Republican, candidate) but overwhelmingly, it's a very stupid argument made.  This part, in particular, saying that until relatively recently:

 No one would have doubted for a second that he was an American patriot, the least likely stooge for Russia or the USSR. I say all this to remind people that the image of Trump promulgated by the media and his other political enemies since he decided to run for President is entirely a creation of the last year or two.

If you consider yourself a smart person, a rational person, an evidence-driven person, you should reconsider whether 30+ years of reporting on Trump is more likely to be accurate (during this time he was a public figure, major celebrity, and tabloid fodder: subject to intense scrutiny), or 1-2 years of heavily motivated fake news.

Hsu even says "There were no accusations of racism", which is rather remarkable claim for a man who actually faced court for having racist policies in the business he ran for his Dad in the 1970's.

I'm not entirely sure of the intention of Hsu's argument here - surely he can't be suggesting that Trump didn't have much negative publicity over the years - he had plenty of that with his business and marriage failures.   Success as a reality TV host hardly wiped that away: some viewers may well have been watching to laugh at Trump's swaggering act, not admire it.

Or is it just that Hsu is taking offence at the idea that Trump could be a Russian stooge, and saying that this argument has only just arisen because of "fake news".  Well, might not the unprecedented (in modern times) refusal of a Presidential candidate to do a proper financial disclosure, and having a son making statements about how much funding his Dad got from Russia raise any question?   As well as Trump's frequently stated admiration for a Russian leader widely believed to have direct involvement in authorising political murders?   And people on his campaign (including, we know now, his son) having meetings with Russians offering dirt on Hilary.  Not to mention the actual intelligence agencies believing that the hacking was authorised from the top.

This is all meant to be "fake news"?   Yeah, sure.

As for the supposed outrageousness of the idea of Trump as Russian stooge - I strongly suspect that few people actually think Trump is an intentional Putin stooge, in the sense of actually planning to deliberately do Putin's direct bidding at the cost of America.  But since when has being a stooge required such intent?   Being dumb and able to be manipulated because you're an ill educated, vain  and psychologically needy man who has shown few business or relationship scruples and who seemingly only ran for the Presidency because it would be good for business, win or lose - perfect stooge material.

That anyone has to point that to someone like Hsu is pretty ridiculous.

Can't both be right

Well, isn't that funny.   Back in May, I questioned Jason Soon's verdict that French President Macron was someone libertarians should be happy with.  

Today, Andrew Bolt is criticising Malcolm Turnbull for calling Macron a "centrist", whereas Bolt knows he's an "old socialist".  (Culture warrior-ing prevents Bolt from seeing otherwise - because Macron is completely on board with climate change.)

Still, Macron truly seems to a be a case of people seeing what they want to see.

I'll stick with my cautious verdict in comments to my May post - he's a relatively mild economic liberal, especially coming off a quite Left base in economics in France, but his overall suite of policy ideas picks from both the Left and Right.  He therefore counts pretty much as a centrist, for lack of a better term, although perhaps one who chooses an unusually wide range of policy ideas.

The culture war means never having to say you were wrong

Tim Blair mocks the recent Lateline episode in which various young scientist types spoke about their fears for the future, including whether they should have children, and where they think they may need to retire to as temperatures rise.  (Tasmania is popular, but the degree to which rainfall pattern changes may affect it seems rather uncertain - which isn't great for a place so reliant on hydro-electric.)

I saw this on Lateline and knew it would get mocking from Right wing culture warriors who have dumbed themselves down sufficiently such that they have not a clue who to listen to on climate change.  Delingpole, with his arts degree, or whatever he has, is apparently a more reliable guide than thousands of scientists who have contributed to climate change research.

That said, I don't think it's a wise thing to talk about not having children for the sake of climate change.  Let's face it, the kids of scientists are quite likely to be smart and rich enough to arrange things for themselves (such as moving to a more temperate climate) so as not to be a direct victim of climate change, much more so than a kid from some poor country in Africa or the Indian subcontinent.   And really, we want smart people to have kids and (hopefully) bring them up to be able to contribute to solutions to the problems climate change may bring.

But as with all culture warriors, Blair's attack (which is all about how Islamic terrorism is a direct and immediate threat and why are stoopid scientists not panicking about that instead of climate change) makes two fundamental mistakes:

a.  it is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time - yes, I know, a hard concept for any culture warrior obsessed with the Islamic and migrant threat to get a grasp on.  (Am I being unfair to Blair here?  I'm not sure he carries on about African immigration or even Islamic immigration as much as Bolt does - they seem to have divided things between them so that Blair will deal with cranky feminism, Waleed Aly and Jonathan Green - man, does he obsess about Jonathan;  Bolt deals with immigration and aborigines; and they both obsess about the ABC generally.)

b.  he lives in a fantasy world where heat seems to never matter.  Take this:

Very well, then. If we’re calculating risk based on the number of dead bodies, let’s consider the toll so far due to climate change.
It’s literally zero.

A big call, given that heatwaves kill off quite a few Indians each year, not to mention floods.   A milder climate in a cool to cold country may well be better for the population's health, but in a country that's already warm to hot for most of the year? 

Of course, what he's relying on is an inability to precisely say which extreme weather event can be ascribed to climate change, given that some extreme weather events would happen even without it.

But that is such a shallow way of considering it, unless you're a culture warrior, which essentially means never having to make yourself better informed on a topic you just know is wrong.

Dumbed down

Trump's speech in Poland did not get rave reviews from anyone other than his fellow culture warriors, who have developed a paranoia about the end of the West at the hands of Islamic extremism.

It was, patently, not a good speech and (at least in transcript) was delivered poorly, with several Trumpian moments where he made it all about him, again.  As for its key paragraph, Peter Beinart covers it well:

The most shocking sentence in Trump’s speech—perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime—was his claim that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” On its face, that’s absurd. Jihadist terrorists can kill people in the West, but unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, they cannot topple even the weakest European government. Jihadists control no great armies. Their ideologies have limited appeal even among the Muslims they target with their propaganda. ISIS has all but lost Mosul and could lose Raqqa later this year.

Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. The “south” and “east” only threaten the West’s “survival” if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West’s “survival” if by “West” you mean white, Christian hegemony. A direct line connects Trump’s assault on Barack Obama’s citizenship to his speech in Poland. In Trump and Bannon’s view, America is at its core Western: meaning white and Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian). The implication is that anyone in the United States who is not white and Christian may not truly be American but rather than an imposter and a threat.

Poland is largely ethnically homogeneous. So when a Polish president says that being Western is the essence of the nation’s identity, he’s mostly defining Poland in opposition to the nations to its east and south. America is racially, ethnically, and religious diverse. So when Trump says being Western is the essence of America’s identity, he’s in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. He’s not speaking as the president of the entire United States. He’s speaking as the head of a tribe.

 Exactly.  Hence it was only members of his own, dumbed down, "tribe" who thought this was a monumental speech.

That Chris Kenny and Andrew Bolt could think this was a great speech just shows what inept and completely unreliable commentators they've become.  I actually find it hard to credit how they could even get so stupid.   I honestly did not previously think culture warrior-ing to be so capable of blinding and dumbing down people's judgement. 

As for Trump's performance at the G20, I have to give credit to Chris Uhlmann, who I don't trust generally for being too soft on the Coalition and unreliable on climate change.  His assessment of Trump, though, rang very true, for the most part.  (I only disagree when he said that there were "interesting" observations in the Poland speech about defending the values of the West.)  But this part, yes:

...it is the unscripted Mr Trump that is real. A man who barks out bile in 140 characters, who wastes his precious days as President at war with the West's institutions — like the judiciary, independent government agencies and the free press.

He was an uneasy, awkward figure at this gathering and you got the strong sense some other leaders were trying to find the best way to work around him.

Mr Trump is a man who craves power because it burnishes his celebrity. To be constantly talking and talked about is all that really matters. And there is no value placed on the meaning of words. So what is said one day can be discarded the next.

So, what did we learn this week?

We learned Mr Trump has pressed fast forward on the decline of the US as a global leader. He managed to diminish his nation and to confuse and alienate his allies.

He will cede that power to China and Russia — two authoritarian states that will forge a very different set of rules for the 21st century.

Some will cheer the decline of America, but I think we'll miss it when it is gone.
And that is the biggest threat to the values of the West which he claims to hold so dear.

Marvel watched

Off we went to see Spider-Man: Homecoming this afternoon.

Yes, it's very good.  I have one quibble:  the climatic fight sequence was not as thrilling as the two other main set pieces in the film.  It was a tad silly, truth be told, even by Marvel's dubious physics standards.

Apart from that:  yes, it has plenty of laughs (key to my enjoyment of any superhero film), a very likeable actor as the lead,  a Ramones song featured prominently that make us older folk feel good about music from our youth, and a great plot twist which I don't think anyone in the audience saw coming.  Even the Stan Lee appearance was better than the one in Guardians 2, I thought.

The movie will make a lot of money, and I don't mind.

Sounding very sensible

John Quiggin's article in The Guardian this week sounded very sensible to me, in a "big picture" kind of way.

Look, it's the understudy

I've always thought that Grace Collier was a lightweight, look-at-me-I-used-to-be-vaguely-Left contrarian with nothing interesting to say,  but with her silly, silly piece in the Spectator, I see she's gone into auditioning for the role of  "Hyperbolic and Somewhat Unhinged Culture Warrior" currently being played by Mark Latham.  It's true, you never know when he may next blow a fuse.

The funniest thing about the piece is one of the comments following:

This is all makes so much sense to one person

False flag in Connecticut

Trumpkins here always suspicious of the Left sometimes doing "false flag" vandalism on Mosques, etc, so they should be interested to read of this:

A supporter of President Trump in Connecticut says he wrote threatening anti-Trump graffiti on elementary school equipment hoping to frame Democrats because he believes they are "disrespectful to our government." 

Stephen Marks, 32, wrote “Kill Trump,” “Left is the best,” "Bernie Sanders 2020" and “Death to Trump” on playground equipment at Hartford's Morley Elementary School last month, according to the Hartford Courant.

Hand avoidance

Pretty hilarious, the look on Trump's face as the Polish First Lady wisely avoids the chance of a handshake with him:

via GIPHY

Update:  I've read since that she shakes Trump's hand after Melania's.  Maybe that made President Manbaby feel better...

About Yassmin

I haven't really paid that much attention to her - just as I find it easy not to read opinion pieces by rude feminists like Clementine Ford, who wingnuts similarly obsess over.  But I did think the reaction to Yassim's ANZAC Day tweet was completely over the top and out of proportion.  However, that Guardian column she wrote about cultural appropriation was extremely self indulgent, and it may well be that her Muslim apologetics re feminism  are semi to fully ludicrous to many ears.

But it's surely the case that it should be possible for someone like her to be both attention seeking, hold annoying opinions, and wrong in much of what she writes, yet still not warrant the vicious obsession of aggro wingnuts in attacking her.  I might be wrong, but I strongly suspect that she probably has received scary death threat type of messages.   And don't say that Andrew Bolt has received them too as if that makes it right.    Neither of them deserve that. 

Boys fighting

A somewhat amusing account here of a famous altercation between Ernest Hemingway and Max Eastman.   Eastman didn't care for Hemingway's romantic fondness of bullfighting:

In a passage that would come to haunt Max later, he likened writing that derived pleasure from such senseless bloodshed—writing like Hemingway’s, in other words—to the “wearing of false hair on the chest.” To Papa Hemingway’s supporters this was blasphemy. “I don’t know when I have written anything that I have heard more about from various sources than that article,” sighed Max. Not bothering to read Max’s review carefully, Hemingway’s defenders engaged in the kind of public posturing and muscle flexing that ironically confirmed Max’s concerns. 

Which led 3 years later to this:

On August 17, 1937, Max was visiting his editor Maxwell Perkins’ office, discussing a new edition of Enjoyment of Poetry, when Hemingway sauntered in. He was not in a particularly generous mood: his marriage with Pauline Pfeiffer was on the rocks, and he was about to return to Spain, where the civil war he had been covering had reinforced his contempt for literary refinement. Opening his shirt, he encouraged Max to assess the authenticity of his chest hair, while he mocked Max’s chest, which was, remarked Perkins, as “bare as a bald man’s head.” Then everything went haywire. Seeing the well-fed, white-clad, good-looking Max, tanned from tennis and hours spent napping on the beach, Hemingway erupted. The way Max remembered it, Hemingway was crude and  aggressive. “What did you say I was sexually impotent for?” he snarled. Conveniently, a copy of Art and the Life of Action was sitting on Perkins’ desk. Max attempted to point out a passage—a positive one, we might imagine—that he thought would clarify that he had never wanted to trash Hemingway. But Hemingway, muttering and swearing, zeroed in on a different passage, and a particularly good one it was, too: “Some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity.” This was Max at his best, the use of the plural “evidences” giving the line a rhythmic lilt: “évi / dénces of / réd-blooded/ máscu / línity.” An altercation ensued, during which Max, as both parties agreed, got “socked” on the nose with his own book. Everything was happening very fast after that. Max charged at Hemingway. Books and other stuff from Perkins’ desk went flying to the ground. Convinced that the much younger Hemingway was going to kill his friend, Perkins rushed in to help. By the time he had reached the two men they were both on the floor. Max was on top, although Perkins felt this was by accident only. But Max would later tell everyone who cared to listen that he had been the winner. Recognizing the disadvantage imposed on him by age and lack of physical fitness (“I would have kissed the carpet in a fistfight with Ernest Hemingway”), he claimed he had used a wrestling move to throw Hemingway on his back over Max Perkins’ desk. Hemingway assured the Times no such thing had taken place, that Max instead had taken his slap “like a woman.” He went on to challenge Max to meet him in a locked room and read to him his review in there, with “all legal rights waived”—the Hemingway equivalent to challenging his adversary to a duel. There is one detail, however, that does make Max’s account credible: he did know how to wrestle.

Very early practice

The title says it all:   Fetal Onanism: A Surprising Scientific Debate.

Ok, well here's the opening paragraph, too:

The medical journal Prenatal Diagnosis recently played host to a vigorous debate over whether a male fetus was spotted engaging in masturbation on ultrasound. 

The whole debate (no "mass debate" puns, please) was about the proper interpretation of anatomy on ultrasound images. 

On your skin - a continuing story

Gee, they are still working out what sorts of things are living on our skin.   Not just bacteria, but archaea:

The researchers conducted both genetic and chemical analyses of samples collected from human volunteers ranging in age from 1 to 75. They found that archaea (pronounced ar-KEY-uh) were most abundant in subjects younger than 12 and older than 60. Their study has been published in Scientific Reports (a Nature journal) in an article titled, "Human age and skin physiology shape diversity and abundance of Archaea on skin."

"The skin microbiome is usually dominated by bacteria," said Hoi-Ying Holman, director of the Berkeley Synchrotron Infrared Structural Biology (BSISB) Program and a senior author on the paper. "Most of the scientific attention has been on bacteria, because it's easier to detect. Based on the literature, six years ago we didn't even know that archaea existed on human skin. Now we've found they're part of the core microbiome and are an important player on human skin."

These are usually tough bugs:

It was not until the 1970s that scientists realized how different archaea were from bacteria, and they became a separate branch on the tree of life -- the three branches being Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya (which includes all plants and animals). Archaea are commonly found in extreme environments, such as hot springs and Antarctic ice. Nowadays it is known that archaea exist in sediments and in Earth's subsurface as well, but they have only recently been found in the human gut and linked with the human microbiome....

This study stemmed from a planetary protection project for NASA and the European Space Agency. "We were checking spacecraft and their clean rooms for the presence of archaea, as they are suspected to be possible critical contaminants during space exploration -- certain methane-producing archaea, the so-called methanogens, could possibly survive on Mars," Moissl-Eichinger said. "We did not find many signatures from methanogens, but we found loads of Thaumarchaeota, a very different type of archaea that survives with oxygen."

At first it was thought the Thaumarchaeota were from the outside, but after finding them in hospitals and other clean rooms, the researchers suspected they were from human skin. So they conducted a pilot study of 13 volunteers and found they all had these archaea on their skin.

As a follow-up, which is the current study, they tested 51 volunteers and decided to get a large range in ages to test the age-dependency of the archaeal signatures. Samples were taken from the chest area. The variations in archaeal abundance among the age groups were statistically significant and unexpected. "It was surprising," Holman said. "There's a five- to eightfold difference between middle-aged people and the elderly -- that's a lot."

Plastic rice - the urban myth

Well, maybe "urban" is not quite the right word, since the BBC explains that the myth that rice sellers are adding plastic fake rice in with their real rice seems to be most popular in some poor African countries now, after starting in China.

The internet is terrific, except when it's not.

One other thing about the baby Gard case...

All of those Right wingers complaining that it's outrageous that a court should be supplanting the parents decision about what's right for their child - where's your outrage when courts intervene to override Jehovah's Witness parents' refusal to allow blood transfusions?   In cases such as this.

As I argued in my previous post, sometimes parents can't be relied on to make reasonable decisions, and it's appropriate the courts intervene.  

And don't think that Catholic thought on this is uniform.  The rather conservative columnist priest Fr Lucie-Smith in the Catholic Herald wrote back in April:

On initial reading of the case, it seems that the court has condemned Charlie to death. But the decision in fact may be the right one to make. It is absolutely true, of course, that we should do our best to preserve life, but not at any cost. There comes a time in all cases where doctors can, and indeed must, tell patients that there is nothing further that medical science can do for them. For there may well come a time when further medical intervention is either useless or counter-productive, and nature must be allowed to take its course.

However, while it may well be the case that families are ready to accept the sad decision that palliative care only is to be offered from now on in the case of a beloved grandparent in her 90s, it is quite understandable that the parents of a very young child may not be willing to accept a similar medical judgment. That presumably explains why this case has ended up in court. Charlie’s doctors and Charlie’s parents found themselves in profound disagreement, of the sort that could only be resolved in the High Court.

Analysing the Republican voter

David Brooks at the New York Times has a go at analysing why it seems that Republican voters seem happy to vote against their own economic interests. 

He takes the "they have a residual sense of independence and dislike of government that came from the American frontier communities" line, which puts a somewhat noble sheen on the matter.  Who can dislike a person who declines a government handout on the grounds that they would rather make their own way in life and fully control their own destiny?

The trouble is, as a very large number of people in comments are saying, lots of Republican voters actually want to hold onto their government benefits (in the form of Medicare, veteran's entitlements, etc) as strongly as they want the right to have an armoury in the basement.   Hence, Trump support comes from his promising everything to his base - less government and more government at the same time.   Also, there's no doubt that Trump played up to resentment of others - countries that have done well with globalisation, migrants (both legal and illegal, when you think about it), blacks and feminists. 

I think Brooks was too generous - he should have been more critical of the urge of Republicans to vote for their emotional interests, especially when they have been conditioned and informed by the grossly misleading echo chamber of the Right wing media - which has to take an enormous amount of blame for the sad state of American politics.    (He could have then spread the same criticism around to argue that for those on the Left for whom identity politics is everything might also sometimes be voting for their emotional interests.   The thing is, though, someone for whom - say - gay marriage is the most important issue is at least not as likely to jeopardise generations of descendants to planet wide problems by denying science on climate change.)  

Movies

July might turn out to have a couple of good movies.   Despite my Nolan skepticism, I still think the trailer for Dunkirk makes it look very realistic and worth seeing (let's see if he can stuff up the dialogue enough to make it a failure); and this new Spiderman has such good reviews, most indicating that it's pretty funny, that I think I need to see it.

Incidentally, I have never seen Memento, by Nolan, and for some reason it is not available on Google Play.  I wonder why. 

More evidence for the sad (angry) sacks

I noted recently that Catallaxy is mentally unhealthy for its commenters, because its misleadingly reassuring echo chamber effect isolates them from reality, increasing their anger at why the media/rest of the world just don't get it.   More evidence:

Turnbull is preferred as Liberal leader to Tony Abbott by 68-32, with Coalition voters favouring Turnbull 73-27. However, One Nation voters prefer Abbott by a massive 77-23. It appears that as Turnbull has become more centrist over the last two months, the hard right has moved towards One Nation.

In ReachTEL’s forced choice better PM question, Turnbull leads by 54-46, a two point gain for Turnbull since the May Channel 7 ReachTEL. Same sex marriage is supported by 62-26, with 59% in favour of a plebiscite to decide the issue, while 41% prefer a parliamentary vote. 64% thought penalty rates should be higher on Sunday than Saturday.

Hey, a new phone

So, I did go and buy myself the Moto G5 Plus.   $350 from Good Guys, on special. 

May I carry on about the amazing abilities of smartphones, again, and how everyone should be in awe every day they use one?

Given this phone apparently has a gyro and accelerometer sensors, I have been telling my kids that if only I could plug it into a rocket, I suspect it could navigate me to the Moon and back.  (I also have a fantasy that it will be stolen by an alien trying to repair its defective flying saucer.) 

Anyway, all looking good so far, but setting up stuff on it reminds me again about what a problem it is keeping track of multiple account passwords these days.   I've not found the best solution for this.  Sure, it's convenient setting everything up to remember passwords, but when you need to type them in again somewhere else a year later...

I do like the way Yahoo mail can be set to log in on a computer by answering a message on your phone confirming that you are trying to log in.  I now occasionally get notification this way of attempted log ins from funny parts of the world (I think it has happened 3 times in the past 6 months.)   That's sort of a worry on the one hand, but on the other, it feels good to know you've defeated an attempt from somewhere.

Advice to a reader

So, JC, you're all taken with your nicotine being delivered through an e-cigarette now, instead of your regular tobacco hit.  (I know, you didn't smoke much.)  Anyway, thought you might be interested in parts of this article from 2016, at Live Science:

But regardless of how the nicotine is delivered — whether through e-cigs or conventional cigarettes — it still has effects on the body. The drug is a cardiovascular stimulant, and can potentially worsen heart disease in people who already have severe heart conditions. However, it's not known whether nicotine alone can cause heart disease in people who don't have heart problems, said Dr. Michael Siegel, a tobacco researcher and professor of community health sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health.

But there's some evidence that e-cigarettes can have a substantial effect on blood vessels, and may increase people's heart attack risk in that way, Glantz said....

Studies evaluating whether e-cigarettes are less harmful than cigarettes have been inconclusive, according to a review of studies published in the journal Tobacco Control in May 2014.

Moreover, the long-term health effects in people who get nicotine in a vaporized form over time are not known, Siegel said. It's also unclear whether propylene glycol, a known irritant to the respiratory tract, could result in lung problems after decades of vaping, he said.

And because e-cigarettes have been on the market for only about 10 years, there have been no long-term studies of people who have used them for 30 to 40 years. Therefore, the full extent of e-cigs' effects on heart and lung health, as well as their cancer-causing potential, over time is not known, Glantz told Live Science.

 And since that article, you might care to read this one:

Electronic cigarettes may increase the risk of heart disease, researchers at UCLA report.
The team found that two risk factors for heart disease were elevated in 16 e-cigarette users compared with 18 nonsmokers.

And this one:  

Our findings indicate that Electronic cigarette use, when adjusted for other risk factors, is associated with a 42 % increased odds of myocardial infarction. This increase in odds is consistent regardless of traditional cigarette smoking history. More studies are needed to further assess this risk.

You can thank me later...