Something cheerful

I need cheerful news.  I'm struggling to find it.

Let's see:  * I thought the Mission Impossible 6 trailer looked pretty good - although you realise that Cruise has set ridiculous tough standards for topping the last movie's stunt sequences when you see him dangling off a helicopter and think "meh, hanging onto the outside of the military transport looked scarier."    But don't worry, I'm in the cinema in the first week of release.

*  Chris Hemsworth was being interviewed on Sunrise this morning.  He does seem to be a ridiculously nice guy.   Of course, he's an actor and spends months away at a time - you would have to fear that one marriage for him will not be enough.   No, no, I'm trying to be cheerful, I forgot.

*  Yes, I have started to worry that I have spent years drinking my hot drinks while they are too hot:

Very hot tea can raise risk of oesophageal cancer, suggests studyCombined with excess alcohol consumption, scaldingly hot tea raises relative risk fivefold, says Chinese researchers

Wait - that's not cheerful at all.

The search for cheerful will continue...

Update:  again, not cheerful - how that Cloverfield 3 movie that I had hopes for (Chris O'Dowd as an astronaut notwithstanding) has appeared on Netflix and is getting uniformly bad reviews.  Dang.

Update 2:  this does make me happier - when a female who used to like Tarantino films finally realises something and downgrades her opinion:

When I watched, white knuckles gripping my laptop, the footage of Uma Thurman's car crash on the set of Kill Bill, it struck me that Quentin Tarantino has been revealing himself to us through his art all these years.

It was only a day or so before Thurman's revelations that I had been discussing the writer/director's work with a filmmaker friend and we both realised we'd cooled on his shtick considerably, for two main reasons: his obsession with the N-word, and his obsession with sexualised violence.

While chatting to my friend, I copped to enjoying Tarantino's latest film, The Hateful Eight, largely for the spectacle of its 70mm cinematography, but that I also agreed with New York Times critic A. O. Scott's description of the film as "an orgy of elaborately justified misogyny". On reflection, it really did seem like Tarantino had designed the chamber piece specifically to explore one woman's abuse at the hands of seven men.

Then, I remembered how Harvey Weinstein himself had waved off accusations of Hateful Eight's misogyny, calling it "fishing for stupidity". ...

....no matter how Tarantino might defend his blood-spattered back catalogue as pro-woman or true cinematic equality, violence in the QT pantheon so often seems to be, with a few exceptions, something done by men to women. ...

Now, I'm not about to accuse QT of dreaming of cracking a gun butt over a woman's head (The Hateful Eight), scalping her (Kill Bill), murdering her in his muscle car (Death Proof) or branding and whipping her (Django Unchained). Indeed, plenty of people have called Tarantino a feminist director specifically because of his plethora of female characters and willingness to treat them just as badly as their male counterparts.

But a theme, as it were, has emerged: Tarantino loves to put his female characters through hell. We know now, from Thurman's account of his on-set behaviour, that he also likes to do the same to at least one of his actresses in the name of authenticity in performance.

Fox News misinformation continues

Devin Nunes: Trump never met with Papadopoulos. Reality: here’s a photo.

As to how the American Right learned to embrace its paranoid/conspiracist/facts!-who-cares-about-facts? element, Slate has been running this article, adapted from Kurt Anderson's book Fnatasyland:  How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History. I think it's pretty good at putting it all in perspective. 

Can't the stupid Right see there's a problem here?

You start to feel a loss for words at the idiocy and conspiratorial thinking that passes for Right wing commentary these days, but how on earth do they not see a problem with their views when even Republicans on the Intelligence committee disagree with Trump's sweeping statements about vindication?:

Calling on Trump not to interfere in Mueller’s investigation, four Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee dismissed on Sunday the idea that the memo’s criticism of how the FBI handled certain surveillance applications undermines the special counsel’s work. Reps. Trey Gowdy (S.C.), Chris Stewart (Utah), Will Hurd (Tex.) and Brad Wenstrup (Ohio) represented the committee on the morning political talk shows.

A fast food complaint

I don't get why Guzman Y Gomez seems to be successful.   Seemed to me to be pretty low quality, sloppily made, not particularly good value for money, and not especially tasty (even if asking for the spicy choice.)    Yet it seems to be a growing chain.   Can someone explain why?

(By the way, I like to eat Mexican food made at home with the various kits.   Tastes better to me than what I can get at this takeaway.)

Moving lights

Have I said this before?   One of the things I usually find a bit unclear when watching nature documentaries  about the Northern Lights is whether the video of the shimmering light curtains is being shown in real time, or is somewhat sped up.   This gif, although not of great quality, which I saw on Reddit today, nonetheless makes it clear that the shimmering is in real time, by virtue of the camera moving a lot while filming the lights.

Something for future astronauts to look forward to

NPR has a story:

Making Space Food With Space Poop 

and the process is perhaps not quite as bad as it sounds, as long as don't mind eating bacterial goo that has grown on the methane other bacteria has made from feeding on your poo.

Elon Musk has this to look forward to on the way to Mars.

Not sure how sorry to feel for Uma

So Uma Thurman has finally detailed being the victim of a Harvey Weinstein attempt at seduction (leading her to a steam room in his bathrobe) and what sounds like an attempted rape which he pulled back from.

Yeah, I feel sorry for her for having to face that.

But she also throws in her bitterness about Quentin Tarantino forcing her to drive a car which she didn't want to, which led to a crash (as she feared) and permanent injuries.

Well, that adds ammo to my pre-existing great dislike of Tarantino based on the content of his movies.  

But I had already also started to distrust and dislike Uma when QT made it clear that she was his "muse" in many respects.   She obviously liked and influenced the trashy, violent content of his movies, dressed up sometimes as female empowerment, but always heavy on bloody revenge.   Her judgement was off, as far as I was concerned, for working on his material in the first place.  No, that doesn't mean she deserved to be forced to drive a car in a dangerous situation when stunt double could have done it;  but it does temper my sympathy somewhat.

In his own world of ignorance and stupidity

This is just unforgivably stupid (underlining by me) - I mean, there are plenty of Right wing media sources (Wall Street Journal, Hot Air, RedState) , dealing with the problems within the Nune memo.   Poor old CL (has he hit 50 yet? - doesn't matter, he has the set, impossible-to-shift convictions of atrophied 95 year old brain):

Kimmel on the memo

I'm quite admiring Jimmy Kimmel's quite sincere outrage about Trump.  Here he is, summing up Trumpian tactics:

So much for another conspiracy

Axios reports that the WSJ (probably taken over by the Deep State, according to Steve Kates and CL)  has read all of the FBI texts, and it's a "no conspiracy" call from them:

The Wall Street Journal read through 7,000 text messages from FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who have been intensely criticized after it emerged they had exchanged anti-Trump texts while Strzok was investigating Hillary Clinton and later Donald Trump. WSJ concluded that the "texts critical of Mr. Trump represent a fraction of the roughly 7,000 messages, which stretch across 384 pages and show no evidence of a conspiracy against Mr. Trump."

Why it matters: President Trump has gone so far as to accuse the pair of "treason," heightening the tension between the White House and the FBI. This WSJ's findings follow the release of the controversial Nunes memo, which the White House claims shows wrongful action against Trump on the part of the FBI.

Sensible people, people who are not idiots, would recognize the way Republicans are throwing around claims of  "treason" as a sign of clear authoritarian impulses.   

A shorter memo summary

From Walter Shapiro, in The Guardian:

To summarize: in a document that the FBI called inaccurate, House Republicans claim that the Democrats had some shadowy role in a pre-election Fisa warrant against a “very low-level” Trump adviser who had already left the campaign. Compared with the Nunes memo, the never-ending, dry-hole Republican Benghazi investigations look like textbook examples of prudent congressional oversight.

To Trumpian true believers, the Nunes memo proves that the FBI and the rest of the Deep State were conspiring to throw the election to Hillary. Of course, this omits the pesky detail that on 28 October 2016, the FBI director, James Comey, announced that he was reopening the Clinton email investigation based on what had been found on Anthony Weiner’s computer.

Guess which late October event had more effect on wavering 2016 voters: Comey’s dramatic public statement raising fresh doubts about the Democratic nominee or a secret warrant against a peripheral Trump adviser?

And this: 

All this raises the question of why Nunes, the Republican majority on the House intelligence committee, Paul Ryan and Trump were so willing to go to war with the FBI over a cap-gun memo. We even have hyper-ventilating Republican congressmen shouting “treason”.

The glib answer is that this a pretext for Trump to fire Mueller and the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. But Mueller is never mentioned in the Nunes memo and Rosenstein makes only a cameo appearance. More attention is devoted to articles by journalists David Corn (Mother Jones) and Mike Isikoff (Yahoo News).

Perhaps a more convincing answer is that we have reached that alarming moment when right-wing Republicans actually believe the conspiracy theories peddled by the likes of Sean Hannity on Fox News, who claims the memo reveals an “attempted coup” against Donald Trump plotted by the “Deep State”.

 And for more Australian Right wingnut stupidity, here's Mark Lithium Latham:

About the memo, and the sad, big conspiracy poisoning of the Right

There are quite a few pieces of analysis around about how the Nunes memo is, as some White House staffers knew it would be, a misfire.  Perhaps the editorial in the WAPO sums up some key points best:

...even on its own terms, the memo does more to refute than to support the FBI corruption narrative that the president is spinning. Consider these four damning admissions: 

First, the memo states that separate information on a different Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos, “triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence operation.” In other words, it was not the Democratic-funded dossier or the warrant against Mr. Page that led to the Russia probe. Instead, the memo reveals that there were preexisting grounds to investigate, based on information about a different Trump associate. So the president cannot construe this memo as offering evidence that the Russia probe began corruptly.

Second, the memo indicates that the Justice Department sought its warrant against Mr. Page in October 2016 — after Mr. Page had left the Trump campaign. So the president’s campaign was not the intended target.

Third, the memo notes that “the FBI and DOJ obtained one initial FISA warrant targeting Carter Page and three FISA renewals,” and that “each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause.” The court would not have made those separate findings or granted renewals without evidence that the surveillance was producing valuable information that Mr. Page may have been acting as an agent of a foreign power.

Fourth, the memo states that among those who signed renewal applications were Dana Boente, whom Mr. Trump tapped to temporarily lead the Justice Department after firing acting attorney general Sally Yates, and Rod J. Rosenstein, whom Mr. Trump chose to be the deputy attorney general. For the conspiracy narrative to hold any water, one would have to believe that officials appointed by a Republican president, including one confirmed by a Republican Senate, were part of a plot to bring down that same Republican president, and that they successfully hoodwinked FISA judges selected by the Republican-appointed chief justice of the United States. This hoodwinking would have continued after the nature of the dossier had been widely publicized and Mr. Page’s Russian connections publicly scrutinized. This is beyond improbable.

The memo offers no evidence that the dossier’s allegations about Mr. Page were wrong. In fact, Mr. Page himself confirmed a great deal of the dossier’s material about himself in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, admitting to extensive contact with Russian officials during a July 2016 trip to Moscow.

The memo also omits a great deal of the other information that bolstered the case against Mr. Page. He has been on the government’s radar screen since at least 2013, when investigators scrutinized a Russian spy’s apparent attempt to recruit him.

 Did the FISA court fail to receive all relevant information about the dossier? That’s a legitimate question, but it’s impossible to know the answer, especially because House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and other Republican leaders let the Nunes document go public without the simultaneous disclosure of a Democratic memo that is still restricted from public view. The New York Times reported Friday that the Democratic memo claims the FBI in fact informed the court that the dossier was politically motivated. And it’s worth noting that the Nunes memo contains no serious discussion of whether failing to disclose the dossier’s full provenance — if that is what occurred — should have put the warrant against Mr. Page in legal jeopardy. In fact, as University of Southern California law professor Orin Kerr points out, judges generally assume that informants provide slanted accounts and build that into their review of warrant applications. Consequently, when bias on the part of informants is exposed after a warrant is issued, judges still generally uphold the warrant.

I see quite a few people saying that the memo is designed to mislead people who are unfamiliar with the FISA process, and that sounds right.

The malevolent misleading of the American Right wing continues apace on Fox News, the appalling propaganda network:

Hannity summarized the Nunes memo for his 4 million viewers. Every word is a lie.

Sure, that's from Think Progress, but how can you argue with these examples?:

“It proves that the entire basis for the Russia investigation was based on lies that were bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton”

The memo actually explicitly states the opposite. According to the memo, the FBI counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s connection was based on information the FBI received about George Papadapolous in July 2016.

“…all to help one candidate out — all to mislead the American people.”

The surveillance of Carter Page was not made public during the campaign and, therefore, did not benefit Hillary Clinton. The American people did not know anything about it on election day.

But the deliberate political misinformation works on many on the Right, who (as I said recently) have become stupidly obsessed with conspiracies, pretty much the same as those Europeans 100 years ago who were obsessed with a grand Jewish conspiracy.   (That's the deep irony of the current state of Right wing politics - who all pledge allegiance to Israel).  Here's CL, from Catallaxy, whose brain is simply unable to comprehend when it is being conned by political propaganda, and has become a conspiracy fantascist of the highest order:

JC, if you are reading this - why don't you ever tell CL he has to get a grip on reality?   Mind you, you're a completely unreliable judge of scientific and political information yourself, but you're not as far gone as 90% of Catallaxy.

Those were the days

I just stumbled across reference to one Jane Humphries (a professor of economic history at Oxford) and her work on child labor in Victorian England.

It was the subject of a BBC doco back in 2011, and I'm pretty sure I have not seen it.   However, it is available in full on Youtube.  Sounds worth watching.

Brave

I've found a good quality version of the video released last week showing in painful detail how Tom Cruise broke his ankle while filming MI:6 last year.  Of course, the main reason for watching is to (once again) be amazed at the guy's physical bravery and complete disregard for heights, regardless of the fact that he is on a safety harness:

The conspiracy party

Hardly surprising to read this:

Inside the Trump administration, sources who've been briefed on the Nunes memo expect it will be underwhelming and not the “slam dunk” document it's been hyped up to be.

What we're hearing: There is much more skepticism inside the administration than has been previously reported about the value of releasing the memo, according to sources familiar with the administration discussions.

Be smart: Trump still wants to release the memo. But there are a number of people in the White House who are fairly underwhelmed, and there's internal anxiety about whether it's worth angering the FBI director and intelligence community by releasing this information.

All aligns with a now obvious fact:  the American (and the stupider parts of the Australian) Right has become consumed by conspiracy ideation, whipping itself into a frenzy via its bubble universe of Right wing media, and then failing to learn the lessons of simply being wrong.

The big examples:   climate change (the prime, overarching, example); Benghazi; Hillary about to die; Obama re his birth and religion; uranium deal with Russia; and now the FBI.  

It's poisoning the Right, and they don't realise it.

That didn't take long

From Axios:

Because the tax bill reduced government revenues, Congress must act to raise the debt limit by early March, instead of as late as April, the Congressional Budget Office said today, according to Bloomberg.

Still suspicious of Swan

Jonathan Swan tweeted this yesterday about the "pro-life" adoption bit from Trump's speech:

Quite a few people have challenged him about this.  Adoption over abortion may well be something that many people favour (in principle, I like the idea too), but in telling the story this way, with the fate of the addicted birth mother left completely unmentioned, seems a dubious way of selling the message.  (Many people feel an even "more beautiful" outcome would have been for the mother to get the addiction treatment she needed via a properly government funded option,  keep her child and go on to lead a productive life as an ex-user.   Successes of that kind do happen.   But no, that doesn't suit the conservative, small government message.)

One other thing - the adoptive father already had 4 kids at age 27?   I know Americans still marry young compared to international figures, but such a reproductive record even in the 1950's would have been on the high side.

Look, almost certainly this indicates a very religious, possibly Catholic background, and I don't wish them ill.  But it would not be at all surprising if this family, under pressure from its reproductive rate and marrying at a young age, later breaks up.   It just has those sort of "danger" hints to me, making it unwise to give it large prominence as an example to the nation.

But young Jonathan Swan seems to recognize nothing of these reasons to not embrace the story as a PR, conservative triumph,  which again really makes me wonder about his background.   Is he a conservative Catholic himself?  NTTAWWT, but I just like to understand reporters and where they are coming from.   Especially if they are reporting on Trump and are not cynical about his pandering to Conservative sentiments.

Update:   Slate makes the same points here.

More on Brexit

Simon Wren-Lewis writes against Brexit again, following the leak of government forecasts which all predict a negative effect on the economy.  But this aspect, regarding the effect on immigration and services in the NHS, is something I hadn't heard of before:

There is even a large fantasy element when it comes to immigration. Yes, there are a few Leavers who would pay a large amount to avoid hearing a foreign language spoken in their town, but they do not represent most Leave voters. Instead there is the belief, carefully cultivated by the Conservative party, that immigration has reduced real wages and our access to public services. Large numbers voted Leave because they thought less EU immigrants would mitigate the NHS crisis. Now those EU immigrants who also happened to be doctors or nurses are leaving, and the NHS cannot fill vacancies. And, of course, those lower growth numbers mean less money to spend on the NHS: the Brexit dividend is negative.

Trouble in the White House?

It's hard to believe that there isn't some trouble going on in the Trump marriage.  Might take public news of just one more affair since the marriage to end up with a walk out, one suspects.

The only person I feel a bit sorry for in the situation is Barron.  Many kids might have a lousy, philandering Dad, but not many have one who is the subject of intense media interest in publicising his infidelities.  However, as adults, I do tend to find the Trump kids' strong allegiance to their Dad a bit surprising.    So maybe it'll be all money off a duck's back to Barron in the long run too...

Jesus and curry

It was interesting to read at the TLS about the origin of the popular 1970's New Age story that Jesus had spent his young adulthood in India.

I would have guessed that someone had dreamt it up in the 1950's or 60's (like the fraudulent Lobsang Rampa books that were popular in the period); but it dates backs to an odd Russian living in Paris in the 1890's.  It's an interesting story about an unreliable character, whose heart may have been sort of in the right place.

Speaking of the 1970's and its odd penchant with all things paranormal and pop-mystical - I reckon astrology has taken a very big hit in popularity since those days.   I'm not even sure my teenage kids would know their star sign, whereas in the 1970's virtually everyone did, and reading newspaper predications for the day was a bit of jokey habit for many people.