Martian lifeboat is full of holes

It's worth clearing your cache (if you have visited Wired too often already) to read this article: 

Sorry, Nerds:  Terraforming Might Not Work on Mars

Rainfall intensity increases are not in your (or my) imagination

I've been posting for years about my impression that an increase in rainfall intensity is one of the first obvious, and underrated, disastrous effects of climate change.   [Go on, use my blog search bar at the side for the topic "rainfall intensity".]   I noted in 2015:

My strong, strong hunch is, however, that at least South East Queensland (if not other parts of the country) is now clearly undergoing the type of intensification of rainfall that was always expected under global warming and is suffering badly for it.  

Last Friday's rainfall was deadly, remarkable, and unseasonal across most of the South East, but particularly just to the north of Brisbane.   It reminded me of the intensity of rainfall that led to the Lockyer Valley disasters in the 2011 floods - where all forms of normal drainage (and Brisbane's drainage is built to sub-tropical standards) is so overwhelmed  that the flood is disastrously out of the norm in terms of suddenness of onset.    

But I'm not sure whether we are getting a good analysis of this in a timely fashion.

Well, it took them a while, but we now seem to have a paper which confirms the hunch, and it is getting plenty of publicity.

The SMH writes:

"Unique and alarming": Engineers to be tested as rain events intensify

which ties in neatly with my recent complaint here:  

...sure, in theory, you can argue that flood prone cities can prepare themselves by spending more on higher capacity drainage systems.  But replacing pipes and drains of one diameter that used to be adequate 100 years ago with significantly larger drains to cope with the increased frequency of intense, overwhelming rainfall, is  surely going to be very expensive; and for a regional government it is not going to be clear which particular location is going to face an unexpected downpour first.

Why on earth should I think that the economic modelling of climate change effects could be accurately making estimates of that when tallying up the figures for their estimates of when the benefits of climate change crosses the line of being clearly outweighed by the harm?    I would think they can put a rough estimate of of the cost of increased damage from flooding - they've got some historical guidelines for that - but as flooding increases, governments will be under pressure to pre-empt them by the expensive sorts of capital works that I would think is very, very hard to estimate.

Even the Courier Mail appears to be covering the story with the some headline about "freak superstorms" and making reference to infrastructure too.  Good.

As for a science site that explains a bit about the study, try Science Daily:

Published today in Nature Climate Change, the study shows that in Australia:

• Extreme daily rainfall events are increasing as would be expected from the levels of regional or global warming that we are experiencing
• the amount of water falling in hourly rain storms (for example thunderstorms) is increasing at a rate 2 to 3 times higher than expected, with the most extreme events showing the largest increases.
• this large increase has implications for the frequency and severity of flash floods, particularly if the rate stays the same into the future.

Dr Selma Guerreiro, lead author, explains:
"It was thought there was a limit on how much more rain could fall during these extreme events as a result of rising temperatures.
"Now that upper limit has been broken, and instead we are seeing increases in rainfall, two to three times higher than expected during these short, intense rainstorms.

Papal infallibility has got nothing on this guy

So, Sinclair Davidson posted about an article by the GOP conservative Senator Orrin Hatch in which he called for:

... a détente in partisan hostilities, an easing of tensions that can be realized when both sides adopt certain rules of engagement—norms to rein in the worst excesses of the culture wars.

This led to this response by one of the (likely geriatric) culture war/climate change losers in comments (with support from a few others, including uber 50's Catholic CL):

I used to have to argue with Lefties about this:    it's an obvious mistake to start thinking that Reason gives you only one answer in politics.   They are many ways to "reason" about people, politics and a bunch of other stuff - don't start claiming in politics that your side is the only one that has "reason" on its side, as if it is the equivalent of a message from God telling you that you have the One True (and Self-evident) Answer to complicated  matters.

The times have changed and it is now typically the Wingnut Right who are more likely to claim the mantle of infallibility based on "Reason."

What's worse, my complaint about the overclaims for Reason does not apply to the matter of facts.    Wingnuts, with their climate change denialism, don't even get to first base on the matter of the credible use of reason on that crucial issue, because they do not even accept facts.  

Another view of that building...

I let a weekend slip by without providing another photo of that building made of wood and glass.  Here you go:

The slippery polls

Congratulations are due to Bill Shorten and Labor on the wins in this weekend's by-elections, when most pundits (and, I think, polling - but more on that next) had seemed to prepare us all for the historically rare  scenario of an Opposition losing in at least one of the seats up for grabs.  Instead, Bill got what could be called "a beautiful set of numbers", and with Longman's result in particular, he must be feeling very happy:

Re the polls:  I saw on Twitter just on Friday some 2PP figures from Newspoll which looked better for Labor and made me think they may well be OK in Braddon and Longman after all.   So congratulations to Newspoll for at least predicting the winner accurately, again.  (Actually, they polled both seats as 2PP 51/49 to Labor, so they underestimated the Labor result.) 

The downside for Shorten is that on a national level, recent Newspolls have also shown a narrowing of the 2PP down to 49% to 51% for Liberal/Labor.  Given that I normally would allow the incumbent government to pick up a bit during a full election campaign, I think it's still going to be quite a close Federal election.   But Turnbull now has no incentive to call it early (I bet he would have if he won a seat off Labor this weekend) so a lot in change in the next 6 months.

As for the nutty Right's reaction:   I couldn't be bothered reading the Catallaxy thread about it in any detail - as you would expect, it was all about Turnbull not being right wing enough, with many longing for the destruction of the Liberals under him so that from the ashes a truly conservative force in politics will arise to slash taxes, spending & immigration, sell the ABC to Gina Rinehart, etc.   Yes, they think the rise of Trump tells us something about where politics is heading: because they are his people - white, dumb (or at least, wilfully misinformed) and old. 

Sinclair Davidson, on the other hand, despite being pro-migration and relatively pro-Turnbull, will presumably continue to do his own bit to hurt Liberals if he keeps going on about privatising the ABC.

Seems to me that it doesn't matter whether they are of conservative or libertarian bent over there - they are all clueless about policies that actually are electorally popular.   Good.

Metrosexuals of the 18th Century

Boring, ageing right-wingers of today are always complaining about how so many modern young men are voluntarily emasculated metrosexuals, unlike the grand old days when men were real men, etc, with no appreciation that the very same talk had been around a couple of hundred years ago in Britain (and, I expect, other advanced countries).  Read this rather amusing review of a book about the Macaronis of Britain, around the heyday of Captain Cook.  Here's a taste:

As Peter McNeil’s Pretty Gentlemen efficiently illustrates, masculinity was a muddled business in 18th-century Britain. It masqueraded in different guises, literally: in costume, in print culture and on the stage. McNeil narrows in on the ‘Macaroni men’, those dedicated followers of fashion, deliciously lampooned in literature and yet central to the social, sexual and cultural history of Britain from 1760 to 1780....

The Macaroni, he explains, were the fashion eccentrics of the 18th century, marked by their distinctive sartorial preferences: heeled shoes, black satin bows in their hair, fitted jackets, tiny tricorns, elaborate wigs and eyeglasses. They were too loosely organised to constitute a subculture, but from the composite account that McNeil puts together, it is clear that the Macaroni could be as outré as punks once were and as affected as hipsters still are.

For a period of around twenty years, their style seeped into every aspect of public life. Their image was reproduced in stylish portraits and comic prints; their look was emulated by the leisurely classes and roundly mocked by most others. McNeil helpfully describes their identifying characteristics and then determinedly spots them everywhere – from Julius Soubise, a freed slave petted by the Duchess of Queensberry, and Charles James Fox, that most eminent British statesman, to Richard Cosway, the society portraitist, and Joseph Banks, the butterfly-catching botanist who sailed the South Seas....

I have posted a bit about Joseph Banks before.  I assume his fashion habits must have been a bit dandified when back in England, but I don't think he was considered anything other than enthusiastically heterosexual, given his stories of adventures with the South Pacific islanders.   However, the sexuality of other Macaronis (the name being partly derived from their fondness for visiting Europe) was questioned:

They were, McNeil suggests persuasively, a living embodiment of cosmopolitanism in an age of anxious nationalism. And so it makes sense to locate them in the tradition of carnival, burlesque and carousing, a gleefully festive and subversive upending of received attitudes, manners and hierarchies. 
 

This argument makes most sense in terms of the Macaroni man’s ambiguous relationship to conventions of gender and sexuality. McNeil’s detailed account of Macaroni trends – large floral corsages, chatelaines or hanging watches, finely turned canes, decorative snuff boxes, the use of cosmetics, face whiteners, rouge, breath fresheners, even preferred drinks (asses’ milk!) – suggests a profound challenge to ideas of patrician or military masculinity. Trawling through archives of prints and portraits, McNeil assembles a remarkable vision of the Macaroni: canes dangling insouciantly from wrists, toweringly tall toupees dressed with pomade and powder, arresting colours – ‘pea-green, pink, red and deep orange, garnished with a great deal of gilt’. We are accustomed to critiquing the male gaze that is habitually turned to scrutinise female bodies, but here the Macaroni is such a staggering spectacle that we might reflect on the idea of a male gaze powerfully scrutinising the male form too.

Crucially, in McNeil’s account, the Macaroni is an indeterminate personality, not fixed in gender or sexuality. It isn’t obvious that the apparently effete figure of the Macaroni automatically signalled homosexuality, but it is clear that their uniform, habits and culture provided a different and widely disseminated form of masculinity. The Macaroni presented an alternative model of social conduct, concerned with manners and deportment, keen to make visible the consumption of luxury goods and to engage in acts of self-care rather than displays of machismo and swaggering swordsmanship.

About those Northern summer records

I see that Axios has a handy list of recent broken records:

The big picture: All-time high temperature records, along with heavy rainfall milestones have fallen as a warmer, wetter climate exerts its influence on day-to-day weather. Here are just a few of the records set so far:

• In North America: Los Angeles set an all-time high temperature record of 111°F on July 6. Montreal, Canada also set its all-time high temperature record, during a deadly Quebec heat wave in early July. This week, Death Valley, California, has broken three straight daily records with a high of 127°F.
• In Europe: Unprecedented heat led to a wildfire outbreak in Scandinavia, and record highs have been set all the way above the Arctic Circle this month. According to the U.N., Sodankyla, Finland hit 89.2°F, or 31.8°C, on July 17, which was an all-time record for that location.
• Friday was the hottest temperature on record in Amsterdam, at 34.8°C, or 94.6°F.
• Remarkably, in northern Norway, Makkaur, set a new record high overnight low temperature of 25.2°C, or 77°F, on July 18.
• Heat records have also fallen in the U.K., Ireland and France. In London, high temperatures hit 35°C on Thursday, and were forecast to potentially eclipse that on Friday. The U.K. is suffering through one of its driest years on record.
• In the Middle East: Quriyat, Oman, which likely set the world’s hottest low temperature ever recorded on June 28, when the temperature failed to drop below 109°F, or 42.8°C.
• In Africa: Ouargla, Algeria, may have set Africa's all-time highest temperature on July 5, with a reading of 124.3°F, or 51.3°C.
• In Asia: Japan set a national temperature record of 106°F, or 41.1°C, in a heat wave that followed deadly floods. 

Of course, Southern hemisphere dimwit's think that a colder than usual winter in Australia means there's nothing to worry about.    

In the selfie mirror

It must be testament to my selfie uninterested age that I had not realised until this morning that when using the front facing camera on mobile phones, they flip the image on the screen so that it looks the same as a mirror image.   The photos taken then are also a mirror image, unless you go into settings and tell it to stop doing that.   The mirror image photo is a default on all phones, I gather.

I guess everyone under 50 who has taken a selfie with words on their T shirt has realised this.  But if you are over 50 and take about one selfie every year, it's easy enough to miss this.  

Twitter considered (and a Trumpian piece of stupidity found)

I find it very frustrating when you read a good tweet over breakfast that I'd like to re-post here, and then a couple of hours later you can't find it again.   Twitter search is not as good as it should be, either.

I might keep looking, later...

Update:  here it is:

Not all economists.  There'll be at least one RMIT economist (Kates, of course) who will find a way to process his cult leader's words in some fashion that he thinks makes sense. 

A neat combination

So, UFOs may be time travel machines, and aliens very evolved humans from the future.  I've toyed with that idea in my head for some time, but I don't think I had thought to drag in the Men in Black, too:

Then, there is the matter of the sinister Men in Black. They are perceived by UFO researchers as human-looking alien creatures or government agents, whose secret role it is to silence UFO witnesses, something that history has shown they are very good at. Maybe, though, the MIB are not the bad guys, after all. Perhaps they are “time-cops,” working to ensure that UFO witnesses don’t get too close to the truth – namely, the time-travel angle. After all, just about everything about the MIB is out of time. They almost always wear 1950s-era black suits. Their mode of transport – old-time Cadillac cars – is out of time, too. They have even asked witnesses, on more than a few occasions: “What time is it?”

Maybe they’re actually asking what year they’re in. Or even which century. Perhaps, in the distant future, little is known of our time. Maybe we destroyed ourselves and, as a consequence, the people of the future are tasked with repairing the planet and doing their utmost to save what is left of our species. Possibly, they have limited knowledge of our culture and even our fashions, apart from what they know from the pages of aging, crumbling old magazines from the 1950s. So, they adopt the attire they assume will allow them to blend in with the people of the 21^st century, when, in reality, it’s the exact opposite. The MIB stand out like a sore thumb. Or, like a man out of time.

Paranormal researcher Joshua P. Warren comments on this link between time-travel and the Men in Black: “It could be that the Men in Black follow all this UFO stuff around; that’s their job. Not that they are causing these things to happen, but they’re alerted to it when there’s a dangerous timeline issue that needs to be corrected. They’re not necessarily the bad-guys at all; they might be doing damage control, and maybe that includes warning and silencing witnesses to protect the time-travel secret. They might be weird, and they might look weird, but their overall mission may be just to keep order and protect the timelines.”

A study to believe in

Look, it's probably been debunked somewhere already even as I type this, but if ever there was a study that gets from me a "I want to believe" response, it's this:

Study: Drinking Alcohol More Important Than Exercise to Living Past 90

More idiocy

So Trump, talking today, has confirmed again that he thinks F35s are literally invisible;  has primed his wingnut cult followers to believe that if Democrats do well in the mid terms, it will be because Putin has changed allegiances; and gone completely Orwellian in his attacks on the free media (not that he would have ever read him.)  Jeez, even the imagery, with the silly uniform of the audience, looks Orwellian:

He is also having to offer government to bail out his mid West soy farmers, presumably from the deliberately depleted tax revenue:

Corporate tax receipts in June were 33 percent lower than a year ago, according to data released by the Treasury Department Thursday, as companies made smaller estimated payments due to the reduction in their tax rates. Total receipts were down 7 percent, while payroll taxes were 5 percent lower compared to June 2017....

“More broadly, the federal deficit is swelling as government spending outpaces revenues,” Rubin wrote. “The budget gap totaled $607.1 billion in the first nine months of the 2018 fiscal year, 16% larger than the same point a year earlier.”

But the anti Trump New York Daily News has put off staff, so all Tim Blair can muster is his Nelson Muntz act of "ha ha".   Yeah, 'cos that's what's important at the moment.

What a disgrace

From the Washington Post:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was speaking at an event hosted by the conservative group Turning Point USA on Tuesday when the crowd began to chant, “Lock her up.” The phrase was a common refrain among supporters of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and referred to the desired punishment for his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Sessions, whose position advising that campaign was parlayed into one as the nation’s chief law enforcement official, chuckled.

“Lock her up,” he said.

And this, from another Trump flunky:

Jones, host of “Infowars” and “The Alex Jones Show,” posted the video Monday on his personal YouTube page, making the unsubstantiated claim that Mueller is responsible for child rape. Jones alleges that Mueller, leading the investigation into Russia’s involvement with the 2016 presidential election and the Trump campaign, covered up for billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who spent 13 months in jail for soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14.

“That’s the thing, is like, once it’s Mueller, everyone’s so scared of Mueller, they’d let Mueller rape kids in front of people, which he did. I mean, Mueller covered up for a decade for Epstein kidnapping kids, flying them on sex planes, some kids as young as 7 years old reportedly, with big perverts raping them to frame people. I mean, Mueller is a monster, man,” said Jones.

“God, imagine ― he’s even above the pedophiles, though. The word is he doesn’t have sex with kids, he just controls it all. Can you imagine being a monster like that? God.”

Yeah, but the more serious problem in America is that stupid young Lefties shout down Right wingers at colleges, hey Jason?

Let's talk STDs - again!

I'm a few episodes in to the British series The Frankenstein Chronicles, and it has grown on me.   As I noted in my first post mentioning it, rather unusually for any TV series, the main protagonist is suffering from syphilis at a time (early 19th century) when there was no cure, and it has become  increasingly clear just how important this is to the story.   My long time readers will know that I find it fascinating how people for centuries just took the huge risk of catching a horrible, deadly disease with no cure from illicit sex, and the devastating effects it could have on families.    You would think there must have been men guilt ridden from causing not only their wives to be condemned this way, but also their babies, yet this is the first fictional show or movie that I can remember it ever being incorporated into a story.   

Anyway, after the depressing story of syphilis making a come back in Queensland aboriginal communities, I see from The Guardian that it's making a come back in the UK too:

Last year, almost half a million cases of STIs were recorded in England and Wales, while clinic attendances rose by 13%. The most common diagnosis was chlamydia – easily treated with antibiotics, although it can cause pelvic pain and infertility if left. But what is ringing alarm bells is a rise in cases of gonorrhoea, up tenfold since 2008, and syphilis, an infection that had virtually been wiped out in Britain but is now running at levels not seen since the second world war. The rise is mainly among men who have sex with men, but not entirely. The Victorian spectre of babies born with syphilis is back, with three newborns infected by their pregnant mothers last year.

Much of the article is then about NHS funding cuts to STD clinics and how that has contributed.   I don't quite understand - it makes it sound as if no one in England ever just goes to their GP for a test and diagnosis if they are worried about an STD.   Anyway, I thought this exchange in comment in the thread following the article was pretty funny:

Some serious moral thinking on Trump

I don't visit the Weekly Standard any more - I forget which writers there bothered me too much.

But via Twitter I saw a recommendation for this article:  The Moral Ledger, and it's really good.

It's all about criticising those conservatives who argue that under Trump, some things are going well, so you have to balance that up against the nutty, dysfunctional side of the White House to work out how well his Presidency is doing overall.    It starts:

In recent months, a consensus has emerged among the conservative dissidents of the Trump era: We’ll continue to oppose the president when his policies and practices are counter to our principles, they say, but also be sure to publicly give credit whenever he stakes out an agreeable position on any issue that matters. During the campaign, obdurate opposition served the purpose of challenging his candidacy and elevating his competitors, but now, with Trump sitting in the Oval Office, the thinking goes, it smacks of sour grapes—and, given that he does do things with which we agree, it amounts to cutting off our noses to spite our faces. So, serve as the loyal opposition as necessary but join the cause when possible.

It is a coherent approach. It is the pragmatic one. But it is unsatisfying and unsettling. And with each casual lie, crude insult, attack on the media, slight of the intelligence community, and example of grotesque servility to Russia’s dictator, it increasingly appears morally misguided. 

The first problem with itemizing and compartmentalizing is that actions can’t be treated as discrete. In politics, they are the direct result of a system’s arrangements and a leader’s philosophy. They reflect the larger enterprise. We deceive ourselves by separating quiet streets from the oppressive police state that brought them about. We shouldn’t laud an initiative to aid the impoverished if it’s part of a Rawlsian undertaking that continuously impinges on liberty. Support for modernizing an outdated social convention is irresponsible if the larger agenda aims to replace all traditions with state-controlled institutions. In other words, we have to be mindful of a position’s pedigree and its role in a broader program. If President Trump has a modus operandi, it is the control, manipulation, and distortion of information: hiding his tax returns, meeting with Putin alone, firing the FBI director investigating him, lying habitually, undermining the media, pitting staff against each other. We are being purposely obtuse if we don’t assess his executive actions in this context. Our constant need to cordon off specific Trump actions from others is a red flag waving in the wind.

Almost every leader in history has had some redeeming characteristic or some defensible initiative. Even profoundly objectionable figures and the profoundly objectionable systems they created were often able to persist because they provided some good to some number of people—the making-the-trains-run-on-time argument. But time judges unkindly those who cheered the timely trains. Some of history’s most ghastly arrangements have been defended by relentlessly pointing to some number of their benefits and turning a blind eye to their costs. This does more than debase debate, it does long-term harm: It serves as a conscience-protecting strategy exactly when our consciences shouldn’t be protected. 

 And later this paragraph:

Of course, there’s a certain adolescent glee in deriding and dismissing old, stuffy things like modesty and prudence—in laughing off Trump’s Twitter taunts, congenital dishonesty, and breaches of protocol. Stop being so dramatic, they say: None of that really matters—we got tax cuts! They cry Gorsuch as if it were downright silly to handwring when the plus-side entries are tangible bonanzas and the minus-side entries are intangible norm-breakers like “attacking the media” and “insulting longtime allies.” But we are only able to scoff at the violation of longstanding conventions if we believe standards of behavior are just polite society’s decoration, the moral frippery of prigs. But norms are our community’s load-bearing walls. Undermine them too often, and the edifice will collapse.

 Yes, watching alleged conservatives, especially conservative Catholics, not only laugh at, but applaud things like his constant, authoritarian attacks on the media, or the routine vilification of immigrants, has shown them as being morally un-serious and a disgrace to their alleged beliefs. 

The President who gaslights himself

As noted on Twitter:

I'm not a fan of the term "gaslighting", but with Trump, and his cult following, it seems a very apt description to say they are engaged in the clearest case of people gaslighting themselves - so they no longer know what reality is - that has ever been seen...

Where are the wage rises?

From Noah Smith at Bloomsberg, who notes that while it is still too early to make a final call on the effects of the Trumpian corporate tax cuts, there's no evidence yet that they have led to any wage rises:

Nearly finished

The wood framed office block in Brisbane seems to be nearly completion:

As you were....

Too stupid to work at Disney

I knew nothing of the background of director/writer James Gunn, who has no doubt made millions out of his involvement in the very successful Guardians of the The Galaxy series.    Hence, I didn't know that he made silly low budget comedy horror before getting going up the Hollywood eco-system to the heights of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.   I suppose this background gives some basis for believing he does really like bad taste humour.

But....what I can't comprehend about him is that he would not think until now that, if you're going to work for Disney and Marvel, it might be a good idea to go and delete some offensively un-funny tweets about underage sex and masturbation, made not when he was a stupid teenager or young adult, but in his 40's.  (??)

Cernovich is a moron conspiracist who thinks this proves Pizzagate, but this was like wingnut manna from heaven for him, and honestly, what else could Disney do but sack the guy?   At least Gunn has accepted the sacking as his own fault and a not unreasonable thing for Disney to do.   Maybe he accepts he is just too stupid to work for the company.

And, even for allowing that the tweets are out of context which might show (say) a poor taste string of escalating outrageousness, there are still going to be lots of people really wondering about him and what's going on in his head, 'cos no one gets to do bad taste paedophile jokes more than once or twice without people wondering why you would keep making jokes about it.

* (Readers may recall, I really liked the first movie, but found the second underwhelming.  They were the funniest characters in Infinity War, however.)

Two peas in a pod

A good piece in the Washington Post, talking about why Trump gets on with Putin.  Sounds very convincing:

When they emerged after more than two hours in private Monday at their summit in Helsinki, President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin indulged in some of their favorite conspiracy theories. Trump spoke of “the Pakistani gentleman,” echoing false right-wing media reports about a Democratic IT worker, and reprised the debunked theory that the Democratic National Committee withheld its servers — and critical information — from law enforcement. Putin went down the George-Soros-as-puppet-master rabbit hole and claimed, falsely, that a London-based antagonist of his had given Hillary Clinton $400 million. Predictably, the two agreed that the narrative of Russian meddling in the 2016 election — supported by a body of evidence that seems to swell by the day — could not possibly be true because, as Trump said, “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” (Of course, he insisted the next day that he’d meant to say the exact opposite.) Putin gave Trump a soccer ball commemorating the World Cup, but the two may as well have exchanged tinfoil hats.

The summit had official Washington in shock for days, seeking some explanation for Trump’s refusal yet again to confront, or even criticize, Putin. Whatever it may have shown about Russian kompromat or Trump collusion, at a deeper level the meeting was even more revealing. Putin, it turns out, is no longer alone in the world. After years of churning out fabulist explanations for Russian actions that always exonerate the Russian government, the Kremlin has finally found a willing audience for Putin’s version of reality: the leader of the free world.

“It’s hard for me to imagine their conversation,” says political consultant Gleb Pavlovsky, who served as a Putin adviser during his first decade in power. “They’re both very strange people.”

Putin’s government has long insisted that its actions are not to blame for the sad state of the Russian-American relationship — not Russia’s grant of asylum to Edward Snowden, not its annexation of Crimea, not the war in eastern Ukraine, not the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the deaths of the 298 people on board, not the mix of indiscriminate bombing of Syrian cities and targeted strikes on aid convoys trying to help them, not the support for far-right candidates in Europe. And certainly not the hacking of the U.S. presidential election in order to kneecap Hillary Clinton and boost Trump.

Whenever he is confronted with these allegations, Putin demands proof. When he is given proof, he claims it is fake. Anything that proves him to be at fault is publicly labeled a provocation — Russian for “fake news” — and anything that proves him innocent is truth, no matter how baffling, bizarre or downright impossible.

And now, the Kremlin has a U.S. president whose understanding of truth aligns so well with the Russian one that it’s become increasingly difficult to tell them apart. On his way to meet Putin in Helsinki, Trump tweeted what Russians have long insisted: This state of affairs is all Barack Obama’s fault. “It’s nice to hear that Obama is at fault for everything,” Pavlovsky says of how the tweet went down in Moscow.

Read the rest of it.