Birthdays

Hey, it was my birthday a couple of days ago, and now I see that it was apparently David Roberts' birthday yesterday.   It's a bit funny, isn't it, how we tend to think a shared or close birth date might partly account for why we like someone?   Feels like a hangover from astrology even though it overall has much less hold on the public imagination than it did (say) 40 years ago.*

Speaking of people getting older, Youtube yesterday popped up this new Dial-a-Song from They Might be Giants:  two guys who are my age - late 50's - who just keep pumping out songs which are witty, dark, eccentric and upbeat - all at the same time, in most cases:



[Look, I know there is a case to be made that their sound and song construction hasn't changed much since 1986 - but for me it's a case of "if I liked it then, why wouldn't I like it now?"]

*  Checking who else is born on my day:  Harry Connick Jr, TV vet Chris Brown - check, check - both nice enough guys.   Moby - don't know enough about him.  Oh wait:  Bashar al-Assad.   Hmm...

The hypocrisy is off the scale

From WAPO: 

House Republicans bracing for November's midterm elections unveiled a second round of tax cuts on Monday that could add more than $2 trillion to the federal deficit over a decade, aiming to cement the steep cuts they passed last fall despite criticisms of fiscal profligacy and tailoring their policies to help the rich.

Yeah, but wingnuts trust his instincts...

I read this in the AFR yesterday.   Remarkable:

The exchange is one of several detailed in the book showing how many of Mr Trump's now-former staffers spent the first year of the administration attempting to deflect the President on trade, with him quoted repeatedly saying he didn't want to "hear that" and that "it's all bullshit".

Mr Woodward describes an episode in which Mr Cohn enlists the help of Defence Secretary Jim Mattis to conduct a kind of "off-site corporate retreat" for the President, at a venue known as "The Tank" within the Pentagon.

They hoped to draw links between a healthy economy, and the strength of intelligence partnerships with foreign allies, writes Mr Woodward.

"Together they would fight Trump on this. Trade wars or disruptions in the global markets could savage and undermine the precarious stability in the world.

"Mattis and Cohn organised the presentations as part history lesson and part geo-strategic showdown.

"Maps depicting American commitments around the world – military deployments, troops, nuclear weapons, diplomatic posts, ports, intelligence assets, treaties and even trade deals – filled two large wall screens, telling the story of the United States in the world."

"The great gift of the greatest generation to us," Mr Mattis opened, according to Mr Woodward, "is the rules-based, international democratic order."

Mr Woodward observed: "This global architecture brought security, stability and prosperity to the world."

The book describes how the pitch fell on deaf ears, as Trump pressed his cabinet, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, to declare China a currency manipulator.

"Mnuchin explained that China had, years ago, been a currency manipulator, but it no longer was.

"What do you mean?" Mr Trump asked. "Make the case. Just do it. Declare it."

Next Mr Trump railed against the cost of maintaining troops in South Korea, dismissing their role in guaranteeing security in the region.

"So, Mr President," Mr Cohn said, "what would you need in the region to sleep well at night," Mr Woodward writes.

"I wouldn't need a f---ing thing," the President said. "And I'd sleep like a baby."

The meeting ended, after the President walked out of the room, with former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson saying: "He's a f---ing moron."

Hurricanes in the news

With all of the attention on the American East coast, it's easily overlooked that a big typhoon is off the Philippines too:

Superstorm expected to make landfall with speeds of up to 260km/h; 1.2m hectares of rice farms could face severe damage.

(Typhoons seem so routine to that country, they seem to only make the international news if they are a mega disaster, not just an average disaster.) 

So, how's that Brexit going?

Well, it's certainly not helping with the remarkable understaffing of the NHS:

The NHS was short of 41,722 nurses – 11.8% of the entire nursing workforce. That is the highest number yet and a big rise on the 35,794 vacancies seen at the end of March.

Similarly, there were 11,576 vacancies for doctors across all types of NHS services inside and outside of hospitals. That was again a record and a significant increase on the 9,982 posts that were vacant three months before. Across England, 9.3% of posts were vacant.

Experts warned that NHS understaffing was so widespread that it was becoming a “national emergency”.

Siva Anandaciva, the chief analyst at the King’s Fund thinktank, said: “After a punishing summer of heatwaves and ever-increasing demands on services, today’s report shows that the NHS is heading for another tough winter.

‘Widespread and growing nursing shortages now risk becoming a national emergency and are symptomatic of a long-term failure in workforce planning, which has been exacerbated by the impact of Brexit and short-sighted immigration policies.”

Bit of an irony going on there if some anti-immigration pro Brexit voter has to wait months longer for their operation because foreign doctors and nurses are reluctant to go there now...

A bit of a twit after all

English philosopher John Gray has got a mention here a couple of times over the years, including recently where I noted an "interesting" article he wrote, but I don't know much about him. 

I think the evidence of this latest piece of his is that he is a bit of twit after all.   Obviously, he hates "illiberal liberalism", but if you're going to start calling out liberals as being the paranoid ones when it comes to comparisons with the state of the American Right at the moment, you need your head read:

Visiting New York a few weeks after Trump’s victory in the presidential election, I found myself immersed in a mass psychosis. The city’s intelligentsia was possessed by visions of conspiracy. No one showed any interest in the reasons Trump supporters may have had for voting as they did. Quite a few cited the low intelligence, poor education and retrograde values of the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for him. What was most striking was how many of those with whom I talked flatly rejected the result. The election, they were convinced, had been engineered by a hostile power. It was this malignant influence, not any default of American society, that had upended the political order.

Conspiracy theory has long been associated with the irrational extremes of politics. The notion that political events can be explained by the workings of hidden forces has always been seen by liberals as a sign of delusional thinking. A celebrated study by the political scientist Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), linked the idea with the far Right. Yet in New York in December 2016, many of the brightest liberal minds exhibited the same derangement. Nearly two years later, they continue to reach to conspiracy theory as an explanation for their defeat....

For those who embrace it, a paranoid style of liberalism has some advantages. Relieved from any responsibility for the debacles they have presided over, the liberal elites that have been in power in many western countries for much of the past 30 years can enjoy the sensation of being victims of forces beyond their control. Conspiracy theory implies there is nothing fundamentally wrong with liberal societies, and places the causes of their disorder outside them. No one can reasonably doubt that the Russian state has been intervening in western politics. Yet only minds unhinged from reality can imagine that the decline of liberalism is being masterminded by Vladimir Putin. The principal causes of disorder in liberal societies are in those societies themselves.

There are problems on the Left, but seriously, the greatest and most dangerous paranoid conspiracy belief in the world is that held almost exclusively by the American Right - that climate change is a UN hatched socialist plan to bankrupt Western civilisation with no basis at all in science.

Call out the identitarian Left  as illiberal and annoying by all means - and even somewhat "post truth" in its revisionism -  but I can't take anyone seriously if they pretend it represents the same level of real, physical, humanitarian and environmental danger as the American Right's desire to ignore climate change with their myriad excuses for not believing that it either doesn't exist, or that it is worth addressing. 

Recent movies considered

I've been thinking lately that this year seems to be a pretty underwhelming one as far as enjoyable movies go.

It's not that I strongly disliked any of the big blockbusters I've seen, but to be honest, all of these felt somewhat underwhelming in one way or another.   Last Jedi, Antman and the Wasp, Ready Player One, Incredibles 2, and even (I have to admit) I wasn't quite as happy with Mission Impossible 6 as I should have been.   (On reflection, I think it needed more humour.  I have re-watched much of MI:4 since seeing 6, and its lighter touch was one reason I found it so pleasing.)   

Surprisingly, the main movie which surpassed my expectations was Infinity War - perhaps because I have not followed the Avengers movies before, only to find that it did combine humour with final gravitas in a satisfying way. 

I didn't even go to see the new Jurassic World movie, as it had so-so reviews, nor Solo. 

As for anything new or unexpected - no sign of that.  Perhaps that's why I enjoyed a weird movie like A Cure for Wellness when I saw it recently. 

He really dislikes the Murdoch tabloid press

As I said last week, I know little about Imre except that he presumably used to be pals with Tim Blair.

Given Imre's dislike of the tabloids Blair works for, are they still friendly?

Honestly, has the barracking for one side this far out from an election ever been as crudely blatant as this?:

How to explain without an undercurrent of racism?

Andrew Bolt, who doesn't spend much time critiquing Trump (because that's what culture warriors do - spend all their time on How Bad is the Enemy, Hey?)  does a short post on Obama's criticism of Trump, and gets 300 comments, nearly all, of course, agreeing that Obama was just the worst.  

Ben Shapiro the other day tweeted that it was all Obama's fault - for "lecturing us" - that the US ended up with Trump.   As Ezra Klein wrote:

You see this on the right a lot, and I’ve come to think it the most revealing argument in conservative politics right now. It shows how desperate conservatives are to absolve their movement of responsibility for Trump, but it’s also, in an important sense, true — it’s just a truth the right (and sometimes the left) refuses to follow to its obvious conclusions.

Let’s state the obvious, and state it neutrally: A critical mass of Republican voters responded to the eight years of Obama’s presidency by turning to Trump. The question is why.

Obama’s answer blames demographic and technological shifts that scrambled our economic, social, religious, and civic institutions. Shapiro’s blames an emotional reaction to the first black president.

It's extremely hard to understand why conservatives reacted so strongly against the moderate and reasoned approach to rhetoric that Obama deployed.   (And I say that while fully acknowledging that  the "now the oceans will start to drop" was a very unwise bit of hyperbole - but not one that indicated that there was something wrong in his head,  like Trump looking at photos of his inauguration and insisting that they told a story that everyone else's eye could see wasn't true.)   

But Klein goes on to note that it's not as if conservatives were ever listening directly to Obama anyway:

For all Shapiro’s focus on Obama’s “lecturing,” the reality is that the right experienced Obama less through listening to his full speeches and more through hearing his presidency refracted through Fox News and conservative talk radio. And in those spaces, Obama’s presidency was framed in the most threatening possible terms. In 2009, Rush Limbaugh, whom Shapiro has honored as “one of the founders of the modern conservative movement,” told his millions of listeners:

How do you get promoted in a Barack Obama administration? By hating white people, or even saying you do, or that they’re not good, or whatever. Make white people the new oppressed minority, and they are going along with it, because they’re shutting up. They’re moving to the back of the bus. They’re saying I can’t use that drinking fountain, okay. I can’t use that restroom, okay. That’s the modern day Republican Party, the equivalent of the Old South, the new oppressed minority.

On its face, this is laughable. But Limbaugh’s audience wasn’t laughing. They were listening.

True.  

While Klein doesn't use the word "racism", he does refer to "white fragility":

The term “white fragility” is overused in politics right now, but it is relevant here: The unwillingness to state the obvious — a critical proportion of Republican primary voters enthusiastically supported the candidate who promised to turn back the demographic clock — might be politically wise, but it’s analytically disastrous. Black voters who supported Louis Farrakhan would never be treated with such delicacy.

Personally, from years of reading Catallaxy comments, I think it's hard to deny that an undercurrent of simple racism helps explain the unreasonableness of extreme reaction to Obama too:    this black president thought he was better than us.  For Australians, a useful comparison may be made with Kevin Rudd - sure, he was disliked for being a "I know better than you", plum voiced lecturer;  but the intensity of hatred for him I  think was still significantly less than that which his Australian haters still hold towards Obama (and even his wife.)     And I find it hard to believe that the comparative race backgrounds doesn't have something to do with that.

A germ theory for Alzheimers?

Gee:  I don't recall reading some of the reasons given in this NPR article as to why there are some grounds for suspecting that Alzheimer's Disease is caused by an infection:

Norins is quick to cite sources and studies supporting his claim, among them a 2010 study published in the Journal of Neurosurgery showing that neurosurgeons die from Alzheimer's at a seven-fold higher rate than they do from other disorders.

Another study from that same year, published in The Journal of the American Geriatric Society found that people whose spouses have dementia are at a six-times greater risk for the condition themselves.

Contagion does come to mind. And Norins isn't alone in his thinking.

In 2016, 32 researchers from universities around the world signed an editorial in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease calling for "further research on the role of infectious agents in [Alzheimer's] causation." Based on much of the same evidence Norins encountered, the authors concluded that clinical trials with antimicrobial drugs in Alzheimer's are now justified.

Another dream jumble

Last night, Jason Soon invited me to his country house where he was having Bob Dylan attend to give a private concert.  I was having trouble getting there on time.   There was also something about a very large sort of accommodation place I was staying at, downhill from the concert venue, with really creepy looking vast toilets which weren't working (unusually, a dream not inspired by waking up needing to go to the toilet.)    There seemed to be some morphing then into a completely separate story about working in a hospital where a heart patient was waiting for a donor heart for transplantation - from a dog.  I visited the potential dog donors too, but the one we were hoping to use was not well.   [I have yet to work out the source material for that one.  Can't think of any transplant stories have I read in the last few weeks, but something will probably come to me soon.]

White House Cluedo continues...

Allahpundit at Hot Air summarises the theories floating around about who wrote the Anonymous op-ed.  

I think it seems reasonably clear that it's not going to turn out to be someone at the very bottom of  the range of people who could be called a "senior official"  - which was one way I thought it might pan out.

Quiggin on Creighton

Back on 29 August I noted that it seemed rich (ha, a pun) of Adam Creighton, given his history of trying to make out that it is obviously wrong that the well off pay so much tax and the lower income don't, to be talking positively about inequality not having increased when the report he was citing said it was due to our well targetted tax and welfare policy.

I see now that John Quiggin made the same point last week:

Shorter Carling and Creighton:  High income earners pay more tax than everyone else and that’s bad.

All this contrasts strikingly with last week’s rightwing talking points, making much of the relatively limited growth of inequality in Australia due, almost entirely, to the redistributive policies introduced under Hawke and Keating. The Oz was all over this, and one of their sources was none other than Robert Carling

If you thought I was sounding cranky...

...you should read David Roberts twitter thread (handily put together here) for his similar despair.

Meanwhile, I thought Politico had a good article about the 25th Amendment (and the author's certainty that it could not - yet - be used against Trump, even though apparently some White House insiders have discussed it.)

Politico also has an article criticising many liberal historians' takes on the history of conservatives.     
Finally, although I don't pay much attention to Andrew Sullivan any more, I think he has a neat analogy here:

Sometimes I think it’s useful to think of this presidency as a hostage-taking situation. We have a president holding liberal democracy hostage, empowered by a cult following. The goal is to get through this without killing any hostages, i.e., without irreparable breaches in our democratic system. Come at him too directly and you might provoke the very thing you are trying to avoid. Somehow, we have to get the nut job to put the gun down and let the hostages go, without giving in to any of his demands. From the moment Trump took office, we were in this emergency. All that we now know, in a way we didn’t, say, a year ago, is that the chances of a successful resolution are close to zero.

My big gay wedding

No, it's no self outing, it's just that the King Street area where I often am on a Saturday afternoon is set up today for some late afternoon gay weddings:

If you can read the sign, it says Bob Downe will be there.  His camp act still in demand, I assume. 

The sign also notes an after party at a nearby venue, which appears to be this:

Yes.  All weddings should be followed by parties featuring disembodied splayed legs. 

Look, while I know we don't police the solemnity of straight weddings or receptions, I still have an issue with gay ones when they go out of their way to appear as unserious and profane parodies of, dare I say it, the real thing.

Disclaimer: of course gay relationships can be loving and respected.  They don't need weddings for that. 

Is time the only answer?

Everyone with a brain can see the problem:   a significant chunk of the Right has constructed its own reality:  self-propagandised itself into thinking cultural warrioring is all that matters, and that a few simplistic ideas are all that count in economics, or any field, really. Trump is the pinnacle of such self delusion:  look at his absurd self puffery in talking about how his speeches will be highly regarded in future, just like the Gettysburg address got better press over time.   In the same speech, I think, he was unable to pronounce "anonymous". 

It's become kind of distressing to see it repeated day after day after day:  and you can't even see how they think that they are being internally consistent.    It takes some pretty strong self brainwashing for pro-Trump conservatives to applaud tax cuts and increased military spending that all objective forecasts say will turn what was an improving deficit situation into a much worse one.  But they do.   

There seems to be growing concern that economic problems from Turkey, Argentina and (perhaps) China will grow into the next global economic contagion, and who could possibly think that Trump would have any idea who to listen to with respect to a response?  Well, of course, pro-Trump conservatives think that a many who has used bankruptcy several times to swing past business mistakes does.  Again:  the guy has shown repeatedly he doesn't understand the very basics of economics and repeatedly, insiders have explained he is impossible to teach.   Yet they think he will save them.

Anyway this is just a bit of a bleg to complain that I get tired of mainstream analysis understanding the problem, but not really having a clue as to how it is going to be overcome.  Does anyone have ideas about how it will change?

Sure, the GOP losing control of Congress would help, but will that solve the more the fundamental problem that David Roberts called the tribal epistemology problem?

Because, at the moment, it seems that time is the only answer.  
 

Finding the happy medium

Isn't it sort of frustrating to hear, on the one hand, if reported accurately:

* that carpenters in the new Brisbane Queen's Wharf hotel/casino development will get a base annual salary of $288,000 - indicating some pretty ridiculous salaries negotiated by a building union with a bullying reputation;

and on the hand:

*  Amazon operating its sales warehouses on completely casual, outsourced staff, at low rates of pay, with workers being  permanently in fear of losing position because of tough "performance targets".   All for a company run by a multi-billionaire.

Both things are not right, but from opposite sides of the spectrum.   

On a related matter:  I'm deeply sceptical of the "gig economy", and am very reluctant to ever engage with it - I haven't even tried a Uber yet.

On the other hand, it is too hard for small businesses to deal with difficult employees who take unfair advantage of the Fair Work rules.

On the third hand:  it is pretty ridiculous when some businesses - often franchises - will operate on clear underpayment of staff for years before it is corrected.   You know for some of them it is no error made in good faith:  the business model itself means it could not survive with full pay.

And often that model is as result of it being a franchise:   man, hasn't this model taken a battering in credibility in recent years?   Does anyone go to "Franchise Expos" anymore to find the franchisors selling their "product" as a safe way to get into business?    Greed seems to overtake all common sense - with franchisors imposing competition that hurts all franchisees, and supply deals that just kill profitability, all as a way of the franchisor maximising profit.

In short, as in politics, where it seems the "happy medium" is harder to find these days, our business economy seems to have been hit by extremities too.  

I miss the middle ground.

Another observation

You know, I have looked through the long, long list of the late Burt Reynolds film appearances, and I am pretty sure that I have seen none - not one - in which he was the headline star.  It's almost uncanny, but if he was the star, I had no interest in it.  Not that I ever felt a particularly strong dislike of him  - I pretty much considered him harmless - just he chose material which had no appeal to me.  

I am a bit embarrassed to admit I did see Boogie Nights, for which he did get fairly prominent billing, but I don't recall that he had all that much screen time.  I thought it greatly overrated.  I should have continued using my rule of thumb and not seen it.

It's funny how many of us can find some actors who become a pretty reliable guide to whether a film will be enjoyed or not, regardless of box office success.    

Trump madness update

Jonathan Swan at Axios (who I don't entirely trust, given his apparent disdain of the Left) noted yesterday that it's not just one renegade within the White House administration:

The big picture: He should be paranoid. In the hours after the New York Times published the anonymous Op-Ed from "a senior official in the Trump administration" trashing the president ("I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration"), two senior administration officials reached out to Axios to say the author stole the words right out of their mouths.

• "I find the reaction to the NYT op-ed fascinating — that people seem so shocked that there is a resistance from the inside," one senior official said. "A lot of us [were] wishing we’d been the writer, I suspect ... I hope he [Trump] knows — maybe he does? — that there are dozens and dozens of us."

He then got a threatening email which he showed on Twitter in full, including the guy's email address.

I note that the letter writer calls the Trump election the Flight 93 election - exactly the same way Peter Thiel was describing it in a recent interview.  This must be quite the meme on the wingnut Right - seeing electing Trump as a civilisation saving necessity. 

More later....

Update:    So the White House reaction is to try and call their wingnut base to harass the NYT to reveal their anonymous source:

Many on twitter have pointed out that it breaches some online harassment law - but whether it does or not, it's a ridiculous thing to do that will only be supported by the wingnut base.

The Trump madness

A few observations:

*   If Trump's staff are so readily disclosing embarrassing behaviour they have seen during the term of his presidency while they are still working for him, can you imagine what is going to come out when he has actually left the White House?   I'm pretty much expecting another 20 Omarosa  books with the theme "Of course I was lying that everything was great - I had a job to keep.  But let me tell you some stories."

*  The "soft coup" of an administration which simply sidesteps Trump because he's an idiot is an incredible situation.    Any normal person in the Oval Office faced with the deluge of savage, highly personally insulting, leaking against him would already have resigned - if you can't find staff that actually support you in private as well as public, it's humiliating.   But the GOP have decided it's best to keep Trump and his tribal, dumb, conspiracy believing base just ticking along, thinking he's actually doing a great job, so they can just work around him.  Or does this NYT piece signal a rebellion from within?   Because surely the author would know it would increase the paranoia in Trump's head - with any luck, sending him over some sort of edge.   David Frum's piece, This is a Constitutional Crisis, puts it well: 

If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no “riskiness” exemptions in the text of that oath.

 *  We actually know what will hasten the end of the Trump Presidency - Fox News turning on him.   But is it a case of Rupert doesn't know how to do that without shedding a huge slab of his brainwashed audience?  

Update:  sounds about right: