I just don't like stand up comedy

I've explained before, but I've never been a fan of stand up comedy of the modern era.   I don't mind Seinfeld, as most of what he does is not intensely about himself.  But comedians who base their shtick on a sort of public self analysis - that's never held much appeal.   Or put it this way - I can enjoy some of that from some comedians in small doses.  For example, I've recently watched parts of Netflix specials by 3 female comedians I quite like:  Kitty Flanergan, Judith Lucy and Chelsea Peretti (the awful Gina in Brooklyn Nine Nine - I didn't know she was a stand up comic as well as an actor until this special)  All of them do a very similar style of self deprecation, with a fair amount of content about how awful a lot of their boyfriends or dates have been.   I find I can take it for a while - maybe 45 minutes, before I start losing interest.   And it's not  because I think their jokes about men are bad.    Kitty Flanergan, in particular, is about as cheery as you can expect a female comedian to be.  And although she makes jokes about men, she's pretty even handed with her attitude towards women too. 

Part of it is that I don't like the crudeness and language of much modern stand up, but even if I come across one with pretty clean language, I still usually can't help but feel a bit bored with the style.

Anyway, why am I talking about this?   It's because of the international praise being heaped upon Hannah Gadsby's "Nanette" on Netflix.    I started watching it, but apparently I stopped before it became more serious.  I had a fair idea where it was going, but still, in fairness I should go back to finish it.

My reaction to the first 30 minutes or so that I did watch:   I thought it was interesting that she, as a high profile lesbian, was complaining about the pressure other lesbians' identity politics has put upon her.   (She says at one point that it's not like she spends much of each day doing things that are specifically lesbian.   But having started with a lot of lesbian content early on, she had the problem of being accused of not being lesbian enough in her later shows.)    I thought this was a refreshing thing to hear from a LGBT comic. 

But the rest of the material - she makes the point early on that she is going to be giving up comedy because of the self deprecation involved, which she realised wasn't healthy.   Again, I think this is pretty refreshing.    But...I still have a bit of a sympathy problem for her taking 10 years to realise this. 

Actually, in the Chelsea Peretti special I watched most of, she does some weird cut away stuff that seems to be about the same point - that's she's aware that the nature of this style of comedy is not great for self esteem.    So it's not as if Gadsby is the first to realise it.

I have to admit, I have never found Gadsby's comic persona, such as on that Adam Hills' show, very likeable.   I don't understand the popularity she has in certain circles.   And yes, I guess while watching her I am often trying to self analyse why I don't like her, wondering how much of it is a reaction to her lesbianism.   (I have to admit, I find difficulty feeling empathy with butch lesbianism at the best of times.)   But I think there is more to it than that.   I think maybe I have always had a bit of sense that she was too sensitive (or smart?) to be doing comedy.

Anyway, I guess I have to go watch the last part of it, but I have my doubts I am going to find it life changing as some people claim.

And besides, I just don't like stand up...

The germs, the germs; and the bags

Does anyone with common sense really believe that people are going to be keeling over with salmonella due to their filthy, filthy re-useable carry bags?

If ever there was a study worth being sceptical about, it's the one Andrew Bolt and a bunch of no common sense Right wing plastic lovers are citing from the US about what happened when San Francisco moved away from disposable plastic bags.  Here's a pretty thorough debunking of that study.   (There are others around the place too.)   Yes, if you thought it sounded suss, it was indeed, very very suss.

You know what this reminds me of?  The ridiculously elaborate instructions that wingnuts used to circulate about how extremely careful to be when cleaning up a shattered compact fluoro bulbs.   The elaborate instructions always read like urban myth material, and was faintly ridiculous when no wingnut used to be in a blind panic about what would happen if a full length fluoro tube broke.  As it happens, the compact fluro was only an interim step to the LED, which are pretty brilliant and save many people lots of money.  

It's obvious what they do - when they don't like an environment protecting law due to the minor inconvenience it causes, they gullibly promote any alleged safety hazard of the law.  

As for the grocery bag issue itself:   I note that those sceptical of its benefits keep citing a Productivity Commission report from 2006 - 12 years ago, and presumably based on information from some years further back.   And I think a guy involved in that still thinks the ban is ridiculous.

But hey, don't Right wing folk even take into account changing circumstances?

There's been a hell of lot of emphasis since 2006 on the problem of plastics in the oceans.   There was even a Senate report about this in 2016, with submissions (which I haven't yet read) by the likes of the CSIRO.*   

I strongly suspect that the decrease in use of super thin grocery bags is justifiable in the interests of ocean and river pollution, but not for land pollution.   And if people start buying more bin liners and thicker plastic bags because of that, well, I suspect they will not end up on beaches and oceans at the same rate as thin grocery bags.   I reckon most people already buy bin liners anyway, and that use of grocery bags for rubbish is just doubling up.

So, yes, I can live with it.

Maybe a few wingnuts will think they've caught the runs from reusing a bag, and that'll be a plus.

* Update:  here's a 2017 report about plastics in the oceans, with some comments from Australian academics.   Yes, we're far from the worst plastic polluting countries, but doing something with little inconvenience helps, I can't see the problem.   

You too can have a body like this

There's a more interesting than I expected article at The Guardian about those Men's  Health "transform your body " covers, where former flabby dudes end up looking, what's the word?, "chung"?    Well, that's how one guy puts it:

After a month spent learning muay thai in Thailand, Tom Usher, 30, felt himself change. “I wasn’t scared of anyone,” he muses. “When you look chung physically, you feel chung – and that confidence translates into how you act around women, but also men.

I think I'll using that word around my kids, and see what reaction I get.

Pancakes and the cosmos

A very short post to note that whenever I am cooking pancakes, as I frequently do on Sunday mornings for breakfast, and flip them and watch it start to puff up, I always think about the expanding universe.  This happens so routinely that perhaps my thoughts are now along the lines of "here we go again, I can't stop myself thinking about the expanding universe." 

That is all.

Update:  no it's not.   Could it be that some novel scientific thought is trying to tunnel its way into my consciousness through this process?   The only thing I can think of is this:  the pancake is expanding due to the heat energy of the frying pan it's sitting on.  Is our universe's expansion similarly powered by a dark energy seeping into it from an adjacent hot universe?  Of course, someone else would already have thought of this:  wait, yes, I see someone asked the question on Quora.    At least I don't think it's been given much attention as a concept.

Tax cuts not paying for themselves

Amidst all the news about the Supreme Court decisions and the civility wars, Jennifer Rubin writes about a more important long term story:

The Congressional Budget Office is out with its 2018 long-term budget outlook, and the bottom line is not pretty. CBO finds:

At 78 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), federal debt held by the public is now at its highest level since shortly after World War II. If current laws generally remained unchanged, CBO projects, growing budget deficits would boost that debt sharply over the next 30 years; it would approach 100 percent of GDP by the end of the next decade and 152 percent by 2048. That amount would be the highest in the nation’s history by far. Moreover, if lawmakers changed current law to maintain certain policies now in place—preventing a significant increase in individual income taxes in 2026, for example—the result would be even larger increases in debt. The prospect of large and growing debt poses substantial risks for the nation and presents policymakers with significant challenges.

 We know why the debt is increasing — Congress is spending more on big entitlement items while slashing revenue. Those Republicans who insisted the tax cuts would pay for themselves should hang their heads in shame. And as “as members of the baby-boom generation (people born between 1946 and 1964) age and as life expectancy continues to rise, the percentage of the population age 65 or older will grow sharply, boosting the number of beneficiaries of those programs,” the CBO says. Rising health-care costs have increased spending on Medicare and other health-care programs. Interest on the ever-growing debt is skyrocketing while revenue is “roughly flat over the next few years relative to GDP,” according to the report. Unless Congress is prepared to see massive tax hikes in 2026, the gap between entitlements and revenue will continue to grow.

 And just a reminder as to how Australia compares, have a look at this from Statista:

I'm not sure if this factors in the recent tax cuts, or not.  (I suspect not)

In any case, it seems we are in a much better overall public debt position that the US.   Which makes you wonder (well, not really - he belongs to a cult and so is beyond reason) how Steve Kates and his Catallaxy homies whine about Australian debt all the time, but aren't in a panic about the forecast US debt.

Selfish Right defined

Spotted at Catallaxy, the same obnoxious ageing writer for Quadrant who came to attention for his bombing the ABC fantasies shows us what a selfish jerk he is:

Is he serious?   Because, um, it's not like the next person to have the misfortune to use his cabin would mind the fact that after two days of illicit smoking it's going to stink like hell.  

Restaurants and civility

I'm of two minds about the matter of the Red Hen rejection of the awful Sarah Sanders' group.

I am sympathetic to the views of David Roberts and others that establishment media like the Washington Post editorialising that this is a unwarranted breakdown of civility is rich hypocrisy when she works for a President who not only trashed civility and the norms of American democracy during the campaign, but continues to encourage his cult base to an authoritarian mindset.   The media has allowed the normalisation of Trump's mindset that is so obviously dangerous to nation's politics that getting uptight about a restaurant's rejection of one of the key Trump enablers is to have a distorted set of priorities.  

Zack Beauchamp runs a similar argument, but based more on Trump's trashing of the very concept of truth as the danger.   Here's his argument:

Incivility in the Trump era isn’t about rude tweets. It’s about lies. 

To understand what Sanders’s defenders are getting wrong about the dinner incident, let’s get straight on the difference between “incivility” in politics and simple rudeness. Our guide here will be John Rawls, by all accounts the greatest American political philosopher of the 20th century.

A major topic of Rawls’s work was the problem of political disagreement: How is it possible to have a democracy, a government allegedly for and by the people, when people disagree so much among themselves? Rawls attempted to answer this question in one of his major works, an extremely long tome titled Political Liberalism. 

The core of his answer, to simplify it dramatically, is that democracy depends on a certain set of principles that almost everyone agrees with. These are principles that only “reasonable” people (not Nazis, for example) can accept — ideas like “all citizens deserve to be treated equally” and “it’s wrong to imprison people on the basis of faith.”

For this system to work, Rawls argued, public debate must be free and open for people to clearly explain how their policy convictions can be justified according to the shared beliefs at the heart of a democratic society. Rawls called the obligation to adhere to these rules of discourse “the duty of civility”: If citizens in general, and politicians especially, hide and obfuscate their arguments, then people’s ability to give their informed consent to the administration disappears.

Our foremost political philosopher, in short, didn’t see “civility” in politics as identical to politeness in everyday conversation. Rather, political civility is about treating members of the opposition like reasonable people. It seems more “civil,” in this view, to honestly state disagreements with individuals, even impolitely, than to try to trick them.

Rawls never really engaged with the possibility that a democratic government might make dishonesty one of its core political principles. But as my colleague Matt Yglesias has argued at length, that is what President Donald Trump has done — using a complete disregard for the truth as a tactic for advancing his agenda and keeping his base loyal. 

The sheer breadth of this assault is jaw-dropping; according to the Toronto Star’s database of Trump lies, since becoming president Trump has made at least 1,726 verifiably false statements, a clip of more than three a day. The New York Times compared Trump’s record to Obama’s, and found a huge discrepancy: “In his first 10 months, Trump told nearly six times as many falsehoods as Obama did during his entire presidency.”

Sarah Sanders’s job as White House press secretary makes her especially complicit in this agenda.

Because the president lies constantly, a major part of her job is defending those lies — either covering for them, deflecting them, or lying herself to cover for them. Merely doing her job makes Sanders (because of her boss’s uniquely hostile approach to the truth) uncivil according to Rawls’s terms. 

The Trump administration is attacking the very heart of a democratic political system. And Sanders, by aggressively repeating and defending Trump’s lies, is a vital part of this machine.

On the other hand:   it seems a given that in private, most Republican politicians know that Trump is an idiot and is terrible for the nation long term, but they are too cowered to argue with his base that they are wrong.

If the hope for the nation is for a Republican revolt against their nominal leader, encouraging a mass uprising of harassment of all Trump administration figures regardless of whether they are engaged in private life or not may well make dealing with the idiot base harder, not easier.

I mean, look - the base already thinks that the Left must be destroyed for the sake of civilisation - and that's just from watching the news, let alone seeing a protest on the street that inconveniences them.

It's a bit of a conundrum really - are Trump supporters so self deluded that telling them in public that they are offensive, self deluded nuts will make their condition worse?    They are dangerous too, what with their love of guns and desire amongst a significant number to see actual civil war as a way of winning the culture war that they have really already lost.

I don't know.    Certainly I don't want to see riots - they routinely play into the hands of the Right.

But I do hate the normalisation of Trump rhetoric too. 

I'll have to think about it some more....

Update:  from David Corn:




 

Noted for the record

For those who follow climate science, you would already know that the dishonest Pat Michaels and Ryan Maue article in Murdoch's Wall Street Journal last week repeated a deception that Michaels had tried before regarding James Hansen's 1988 modelling, which turns out to have been pretty accurate.

A decent enough explanation appears now at The Guardian.  But there are lots of others around, including at Real Climate, although I think The Guardian's article puts it nice and succinctly.  

Once again, it is a case of lazy culture war climate change deniers not realising they are being conned, because they live in an information bubble.  (I wouldn't be surprised if the WSJ does allow a rebuttal to appear in it sometime soon - but deniers won't read it even if it's there.)

There have been some good twitter threads about the topic from climate scientists.  I don't know of this Ryan Maue, but he appears a real piece of work.   One  of the prominent people arguing with him is Jerry Taylor, who is president of the Niskanen Centre, the quasi-libertarians who actually believe in climate change as a serious issue.   (I think I've argued before, they don't sound all that libertarian to me.)  His twitter account is worth following.  It contains entries like this:

Transgender wars, continued

There is nothing, really nothing, like the wrath of transgender people/advocates against reporting or commentary on people who once thought they were the other gender, but later changed their minds.

Last week I  noted an article at The Altantic that reported sensitively on the matter of transgender kids and de-transitioners, and since then it has run not one, but two articles by transgender folk (and even a de-transitioner) unhappy with the original article.

I hate to say it (well, not really - it just seems an appropriately polite thing to say), but it's transparent what's going on here:  it's crucial to most transgender folk's self understanding that they can't be wrong about their self understanding, and so no matter how carefully or sensitively or accurately it's reported, they cannot bear hearing about people who now count a past self understanding on their "true" gender identity as mistaken.  

Yeah, well, sorry, but it happens, and it obviously presents a challenge to parents.   

Men are terrible after all

Well, I can understand a woman thinking that if it turns out that it's actually men who give women the unfortunate disease of bacterial vaginosis (which I've posted about twice before):

A Monash University trial is seeking to prove that, unlike other vaginal infections, bacterial vaginosis is actually a sexually-transmitted disease, which can be carried by men, as well as women.

A 2006 Monash study found 50 per cent of women who undergo treatment – an oral or topical antibiotic – for bacterial vaginosis have a recurrence within six months.

"When we looked at the associated factors with bacterial vaginosis coming back, women who were exposed to an ongoing, regular sexual partner had twice the risk," says Dr Catriona Bradshaw, who has been researching the condition for 15 years.

Subsequent studies by the team also suggest this high recurrence rate could be because the infection is sexually transmitted: the biggest risk factor for developing bacterial vaginosis is exposure to a new sexual partner, and a 2008 study of university students found the infection was unable to be detected in women who had never been sexually active.

Bacterial vaginosis is experienced by roughly one in 10 Australian women. It occurs when the vagina's healthy bacteria, known as lactobacilli, are replaced by a variety of different bacteria, resulting in a watery, white discharge and a fishy odour.

Which makes me wonder - if it's a case of bacteria on the penis being re-introduced and outcompeting a woman's normal  healthy bacteria, might not there be a higher risk of it with an uncircumcised penis?

Well, seems my guess is right.  A 2015 article:

Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is a common vaginal bacterial imbalance associated with risk for HIV and poor gynecologic and obstetric outcomes. Male circumcision reduces BV-associated bacteria on the penis and decreases BV in female partners, but the link between penile microbiota and female partner BV is not well understood. We tested the hypothesis that having a female partner with BV increases BV-associated bacteria in uncircumcised men.

Short answer:  it does.

So, for all of the hyperventilating that goes on about circumcision as a cruel practice on boys, women actually do have an incentive to support it.
 
 In fact, Googling on this topic indicates that some have been saying for years that BV should be considered a sexually transmitted disease.  So I'm not sure that the Monash study is all that innovative.  

Western suburbs

I found myself with 45 minutes to kill on the weekend in one of the bushy Western suburbs of Brisbane.   I went for a walk and found :

A pair of tawny frogmouths:

A swimming hole:

And some houses with really, really big front yards:

All within about 30 min drive to the CBD, at least if it is not rush hour.   Nice.

This is sheer idiocy

Andrew Bolt (and Steve Kates) extract some Mark Latham commentary from The Spectator with approval:

Mark Latham says Donald Trump is now the hope of Western civilisation:

Trump believes in the supremacy of the individual, in judging people on merit, by their work ethic and creativity, rather than race, gender and sexuality. These are the essential elements of civilisational leadership. Trump stands for the freedom of the citizen in the nation state. That is, the right to free speech, to meritocracy, to national pride and a freestanding national culture. The key political divide is no longer between Left and Right; it’s between civilisational and non-civilisational leaders. Trump is on the right side of history, with domestic ascendancy seemingly assured. He now needs to turn his mind to an even greater challenge, promulgating a Trump doctrine: a new brand of American global leadership based on the defence of Western civilisation.

It's getting to the stage of when I hear "Western civilisation" I want to reach for my (imaginary) revolver.  (Now that I mention it, didn't the Nazis come out of the one of the national hearts of "Western Civilisation"?)

Young socialists

There's been much knicker knotting going on from the Right wing commentators about a CIS survey done with millenials to see what they think of socialism vs capitalism.  Quite a lot of young folk (58%) said they view it (socialism) favourably.   Quelle horreur.  

But wait a minute - survey results depend an awful lot on how questions are asked, and in this case, there may be an obvious problem:  did it take any care to explain in any way the meaning of the term "socialism"? 

The need to be careful with the definition comes at a time when it is those on the Right - particularly the American Right - who abuse the term in a rubbery, self serving way.  You know - single payer health care (like our much beloved Medicare) is evil, outright socialism according to many Republicans (and tantamount to setting up hospitals as death camps).    You might say that we don't have quite the same level of wingnutty branding of any government support as socialism in the Australian electorate, despite Catallaxy's ratbags and Pauline Hanson.   But we do still the complication of having someone like Barnaby Joyce musing that maybe it's fair to call him an  "agrarian socialist"!   

Even without having heard Barnaby Joyce's self labelling, if millenials think "socialism" is just government helping when it could or should, and they know National Party politicians spend a lot of time asking for help for drought or flood relief, they're not exactly showing themselves up as wannabe communists for saying they think well of socialism.

Looking at the CIS report, I can see no evidence of an attempt at an explanation of the terminology of "socialism" versus "capitalism", which should set off immediate alarm bells.   

Other parts of the survey might give more grounds for concern, such as the relatively low awareness of the big political leaders of communism in the 20th century.   Yes, school teaching of the history of the 20th century could do with improvement.  It's also clear that millenials don't have sound knowledge of levels of government spending on education or wage growth - but I would say that a large part of that ignorance comes from politician's spin at election time, rather than a fault of the education system.  But for God's sake, the beneficiaries of misleading spin can just as much be the Right as the Left - look no further than Trump for that.

As for the question of whether respondents agreed that "capitalism has failed and the government should exercise more economic control" - well, it's really a broad brush loaded question.  Anyone, save for libertarians with an allergy to government per se, can probably think of an area where private sector involvement doesn't seem to be helping much - the electricity supply, or the multitude of choice for internet or health insurance which makes comparisons of products very complicated, and prices are still increasing despite apparent the competition.   It's easy to slip into hyperbole (politicians lead by example) and go with "capitalism has failed" on the slimmest of gut feelings about a few minor irritants of the current system.   Or it may well be a case that if asked those questions separately, you would get some people disagreeing that "capitalism has failed" but still agreeing that the government should be more involved in some parts of the economy.   The joining of those two statements really stuffs up the interpretation of the results.  

So, long story short:   it's a lousily constructed survey that means very, very little.

CIS can do better than that, surely. 

Update:   John Quiggin wrote something very similar on the weekend:

In ordinary usage, “socialism” means something like “social democracy with a spine”, as I’ve argued here**. That’s primarily due to the fact that any serious social democratic policy is invariably labelled as “socialist” by the political right. In ordinary usage, the term associated with Stalin and Mao is “communist”, and if Switzer & Jacobs wanted to find out how millennials felt about communism they should have asked them.

Que

Transgender wars

I finally got around to looking at the The Atlantic's recent long, long article about children who believe they are transgender, and the vexed issue of treating them for it with puberty blockers and even (in some cases) surgery while still a minor.  It deals with "de-transitioners" who have changed their mind after surgery, and opens with a story of a teenager who was confident of the source of her mental problems (she was a boy in a girl's body) but then pretty snapped out of it (before taking medication or going down the surgery path.)     It's a very nuanced, careful and respectful article. 

But, predictably, the world of identity politics armed with social media, being what it is, has apparently been full of outrage over it.  I only know this because Bernard Kean linked to an article by a pothead Trokskyist lesbian (pretty much her self description, and as such someone I would not generally care to follow) who says this about the article:

The piece, which was written by science reporter Jesse Singal, was thorough, nuanced, impeccably researched and fact-checked, and it caused an immediate firestorm. On Twitter, Roxane Gay said it was a travesty. Lena Dunham called it dangerous. Nicole Cliffe, a woman who has literally never spoken to the author in her life, said that Singal is “obsessed” with trans women. She also called him creepy.

“Mad” doesn’t quite capture my response to these tweets. I was enraged, particularly at Cliffe, a writer who should know better than to smear someone she’d never met to her 81,000 followers. Unlike Cliffe, I’ve actually met Singal, and he is not “obsessed” with trans women. He reports on social science, including the science (or lack thereof) of gender. He was, quite literally, doing his job, and, if you follow Singal on Twitter, you’ll quickly find that if he’s obsessed about anything, it’s basketball, not trans women. The irresponsibility of Cliffe’s tweet, which has more than 4,000 likes and 1,000 retweets, was astounding—but it shouldn’t have been. This is how Twitter works: You repeat something, no one bothers to fact check, and all of a sudden, it’s treated as fact. Jesse Singal is obsessed with trans women. I read it on Twitter, therefore it’s true.

So, yeah, social media is bad for the Left too.  But the effect it's having there is nothing the serious and bizarre rise of the Cult of Trump it has caused on the Right (well, at least by 50%, I would say.)

Alcoholic rats

A good article by Ed Yong about new rat research on alcoholism.  Seems to me it took them long enough to come to up with the experiment in which rodents had the choice of alcohol and something different.

Kates in a Deep State of panic

Look, it's hard to come up with new words to describe the inanity of Steven Kate's world view:  let's just settle on LOL ridiculous for this post today about the "Australian Deep State", inspired by an article written by Gareth Evans. 

Even though Evans (questionably, in my view) in the article gives credit to Trump for at least having the Singapore summit, Kates still finds reason to panic:

And what is his sage advice: to restructure our foreign policy so that it is, “as he has argued for some time”:

“Less America. More Asia. More Self Reliance.”

Moronus maximus duplicitus!!! What a sell-out to our enemies. And he finishes by telling us that there is about to be a meeting at the university that has self-declared itself unwilling to defend Western Civilisation, that there will be an “ANU Leadership Forum” involving the AFR, Business Council, academics and the public service – that is, a meeting of socialists and their crony-capitalist beneficiaries – to discuss our foreign policy future.

Or in other words, it is a meeting of the Australian Deep State, who should not be trusted by so much as an inch. You should, of course, be wary of the Libs, but you should be far far more wary of the ALP. It makes me sick to read such idiocies and fills me with fear as well.

Hey, Sinclair Davidson:  you do know you're hosting a blog for the mentally disturbed Right wing catastrophists of the land, who routinely report breaking contact with former friends and relatives due to whipping themselves into a frenzy of panic based on imagined conspiracies?  

Don't you feel just a little bit guilty hosting a place where they sit around reinforcing each other's increasingly nutty social isolation?  

Sort of a Hindmarsh Island in reverse?

This is one of those cases where groups associated with both sides of the political spectrum come out looking bad - Big Mining and aboriginal politics:

A north Queensland Indigenous organisation kept secret more than $2m in payments by the Adani mining company, federal court documents show.

Guardian Australia has obtained court documents that show the Kyburra Munda Yalga Aboriginal Corporation did not account for payments by Adani, then paid its own directors up to $1,000 a day cash-in-hand to conduct now-invalidated cultural heritage assessments for the Indian mining company.

The federal court last month delivered a ruling that may void the assessments, which are required to protect sacred sites from development.

It ruled that another Indigenous business, Juru Enterprises Limited, was the proper “nominated body” to represent traditional owners on a land-use agreement with Adani.

The impact of the decision could be wide-ranging. Traditional owners from near Bowen say they are “hugely worried” Adani has conducted work at its Abbot Point port based on improper or conflicted advice from the cultural assessment surveys.

Juru Enterprises could now demand Adani “redesign or reconfigure” any plans or works near sacred sites.

The court case has also exposed how Adani funding was central to alleged rorts conducted by Kyburra board members. Guardian Australia has seen letters, minutes of meetings, police reports, auditors reports and sworn affidavits that detail how Kyburra kept money paid by Adani off the books and then funnelled it to directors through “fees” and “loans”.

Kyburra declared only $50,000 total income in consecutive years: 2014/2015 and 2015/16. About $2m was paid to the organisation by Adani in 2014 and 2015, including an estimated $800,000 for cultural assessments. But none of it showed up in Kyburra’s annual financial statements.

In today's appalling Trump and Trump supporter news

First, as David Roberts says:

Second, why isn't this story of the man baby bully making more appearances in the mainstream media?:

President Trump reportedly tossed Starburst candies to German Chancellor Angela Merkel during his tense meeting with Group of Seven (G-7) leaders weeks ago, Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer said Wednesday.

While appearing on CBS News, Bremmer painted a grim picture of Trump and Merkel’s relationship amid heightened conflict between the president and other G-7 members over his steep steel and aluminum tariffs and suggestion that Russia be reinstated into the group.
  Bremmer went on to describe a bizarre incident toward the end of the summit, when Merkel and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined some of other the allies “to press Trump directly to sign the [group] communique that talked about the commitment to a rules-based international order.”

“Trump was sitting there with his arms crossed, clearly not liking the fact that they were ganging up on him,” Bremmer said to the news outlet. “He eventually agreed and said OK, he’ll sign it. And at that point, he stood up, put his hand in his pocket, his suit jacket pocket, and he took two Starburst candies out, threw them on the table and said to Merkel, ‘Here, Angela. Don’t say I never give you anything.’ ”

“The relationship is about as dysfunctional as we’ve seen between America and its major allies since the trans-Atlantic relationship really started after World War II,” Bremmer continued.

Third:   I find it weird how, for conservative pro-Life Catholics, the issue of abortion distorts their moral judgment completely.    Because the Left supports abortion rights, they (pro-Lifers)  act as if this makes all appalling treatment of the living by the any figure on the Right excusable as being relatively minor, in their eyes.    It's always a case of "but you can't complain about that, because you want to see babies killed!"

This dynamic has been clear at Catallaxy for many, many years, most routinely deployed by 1950's blow in CL.  But I see it turns up at Hot Air too:

His point about thinking twice before handing power to a party that would take kids away from their parents with no plan to reunite them and maybe with no ability to reunite them is well taken. His suggestion to replace them with a party that condones abortion on demand at any point during pregnancy — “the only party left in America that stands for what is right and decent,” Schmidt would have you believe — is not. 

What's weird about this is Popes themselves do not take this attitude.    All Popes talk of abortion as appalling evil that they want to see ended - but it never stops them issuing teachings on, and condemning, other immoral behaviour, whether it be about social justice in terms of economics, climate change, use of social media, whatever.  

And so I'll end with a David Roberts tweet on this very topic:

Update:  entirely predictable, but even after this current Pope condemns the child separation policy, those walking ugly advertisements of modern Conservative Catholics as inanely supportive of cruelty and entirely gullible from Catallaxy chime in:

DB sounds like a genuine Catholic proto-fascist these days:  uses "bugmen" all the time, which ties in with Trump's dehumanising terminology for undocumented immigrants.   It's extremely ugly, and dumb.  But that's his brand of modern conservatism for you.    

It can be hard to understand America

The media attention on Trump's children separation policy looks very, very bad:  as does Trump using the quasi Nazi terminology of how illegal migrants are "infesting" the country.

Look, along with the wannabe dictator cry of "lock her up", the other transparently appalling thing of the Trump candidacy was his vilification of undocumented immigrants as a class, Mexicans in particular.   Yet it seemed the media noted it, it was repeated, the media got tired of noting what appallingly dangerous vilification it was, and it became un-newsworthy.   It won't be forgotten by history, however, where this Presidency will clearly be held in contempt.   I mean, come on, when even the present Chief of Staff is saying this (apparently):

He has told at least one person close to him that he may as well let the president do what he wants, even if it leads to impeachment — at least this chapter of American history would come to a close.

..we already know the judgment of history.

So called conservatives who support the Trumpian policy of child separation fill me with disgust.

So called conservatives of Australia who shrug their shoulders about it (look how much time Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair have devoted to the topic on his blogs - precisely nil, I believe, while hyperventilating daily about really important things like what Jonathan Green said next or how much they hate the ABC) are pathetic, lightweight culture warriors who can't see immoral authoritarianism on open display.

Yet the American news reports Trump's popularity is not doing so bad.   Not great, but not in the single digits where in any reasonable country it would deserve to be.   I've said it before, but there seems something peculiar about Presidential popularity polling in that country - if you don't believe me, look at the collection of approval/disapproval graphs at FiveThirtyEight for past presidents.   There are some strange looking results there.

Still, the fact that some Republicans are coming out against the child separation policy is a sign they can tell there is a real problem with the electorate there.  

What's the bet that Trump won't take his own action, which he can at any time, without the need for legislation, until the Foxs News network gives him approval to do so?   He is that pathetic.

Hope they lose in a landside in the mid terms.

And now for some sports commentary

I only do this about twice a year, so you're lucky to catch it.

I'm only half watching some World Cup soccer matches, but my distracted and uninformed opinion is that the style of play in the Japan and Columbia match on while I type this is faster and much better to watch than the turgid, too cautious play during at least the first 20 minutes of the Australia/France match.

So there.  I'm done with sports here for another six months.