He's got an excuse and he's sticking to it

Seems pretty clear that someone around Trump has said "It's easy - whenever you make a silly mistake or want to walk back from something you said, just say you were being 'sarcastic'", and he is sticking to that for all it's worth.   (Which is, nothing.)

 

Excess deaths noted

This is important:

And here is the link to the story:  

According to the FT analysis, overall deaths rose 60 per cent in Belgium, 51 per cent in Spain, 42 per cent in the Netherlands and 34 per cent in France during the pandemic compared with the same period in previous years. Some of these deaths may be the result of causes other than Covid-19, as people avoid hospitals for other ailments. But excess mortality has risen most steeply in places suffering the worst Covid-19 outbreaks, suggesting most of these deaths are directly related to the virus rather than simply side-effects of lockdowns.

Track me

I have downloaded the government's COVID 19 tracking app, with my only concern being how much battery use it takes when you leave Bluetooth on all day every day.   

However, given that I am itching for a new phone amyway, this may be the perfect excuse.  JB Hi Fi should be running some ads along those lines...

A perfect cartoon

I see that in lieu of Trump getting his face on TV at his useless briefings, he has been rage tweeting about the media overnight.  Which led to someone re-tweeting this cartoon.  It is a near perfect summation of why Covid-19 is politically hurting him:

And what about this:

Confirmation of another thing we already knew

It appears from this article that John Roskam, long standing IPA head who can't get a Lib nomination to Parliament when younger twerps in his organisation have, has long been personally invested in attacking the COVID-19 semi lockdown.

He is a wanker, and a dangerous one at that.

I would still like to know, though, whether he is being prodded by a wealthy donor into aggressively campaigning on this.   Or is it just his own very bad idea?

COVID and graphs

If the COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated anything convincingly, it's that analysing information, in particular with graphs, is rife with potential to mislead.  I guess we all knew that, but still.

I thought this thread on the issue was pretty interesting.  (Link is to a threadreader compilation.)

A brief interlude from other topics...

I have an urge to write about Android and mobile phones.

Every 6 to 12 months I post about how astounded I am about the improvements in mobile phones, especially in low to mid level range where my buying choices have always been.   (Carry an easily breakable $1300 computer in my pocket every day?   No thanks.)

I remain pretty happy with my Moto G5 Plus, but I am a bit puzzled about Android and the way apps seem to rapidly accumulate memory.   My phone has 16GB internal memory, and after my last phone had, what, 4 or 8GB?, this sounded like a luxurious amount which would take a long time to use up. 

However Android apps seem to take up quite ridiculous amounts of memory for what they do.  Photos and video go to the sd card, so they can't be blamed, but my internal memory is now always hovering at about 15 to 15.5GB, meaning I am forever being urged by my phone to delete files and apps I haven't used for a while.

When I check on my phone as to the size of certain apps, I just don't understand why they can take up so much space.   A couple of hundred MB used to be considered an enormous size for a program of any description.  Now, to take an example, the Flipboard app, which I quite like as a sort of news and magazine aggregator, takes up 42 MB plus 179 MB of user data, and 51MB of cache.   I can delete the cache, but I presume I lose my topic preferences if I delete the user data. 

Line, a chat and call app that I sometimes use, but not that often, takes up 220 MB in the app itself, plus has 342MB in user data!  That's huge.   But even the internet browser I like to use now - Brave - takes up 112MB and shows 70MB of user data.   Why so much?

Anyway, this has made me consider a new phone, just for the internal memory increase.   I see that I can now get $399 phones with 128MB of internal memory - again, a huge leap forward in the space of a couple of years. 

I do love Android, and would never consider going to Apple.

But as I say, I still would like to know how Android Apps have become the incredible memory bloat software that they are.

One other thing:   it's really weird what sensors various phone companies choose to put in their phones, and how they can be completely inconsistent across their range.    There are two Moto phones I was considering buying, which until one went on sale recently, were both $399 and both in the same series.  Yet one has NFC capability, and one doesn't.  My current Moto, which is getting up to 2 years old now, had one and I don't think it cost more than $400.

OPPO phones, which are very popular in Asia and my son loves his, at the cheaper end at least, do not seem generally to have NFC (needed to use your phone in lieu of your credit card), and a lot of other cheaper Chinese phones don't have it either.  Yet when I checked the specs on a cheaper OPPO model currently on sale at JB Hi Fi, it does have it. 

Then the other day I wanted to put a compass app on my phone, only to discover it doesn't have the magnetic sensor to allow that.  Websites written years ago say that nearly all phones have it, but not Moto in their midrange.   It seems all OPPO phones in the mid range have it, but even the new Moto with 128GB I am considering buying - a 2019 model - does not.

It is really odd the way companies seem to play around with what they can provide.   All part of the fun of buying Android, though, I guess.  


   

We live in extraordinary times

He also went on about sunlight and heat killing the virus quickly, which led to this (via Hotair):

The really funny part was when he circled back to it later and put Birx on the spot. What do you think, doctor? Think we can scrap the vaccine and hit this virus with a little internal heat and light instead?

I am half expecting Trump to endorse nudism, at least for women, as a protective measure.

Update:  there are going to be many funny tweets about this.  Here's one:

As noted before...

Update:   David Serwer has this right:

A genuine QAnon nutcase on the Gold Coast

I was looking at a Twitter thread about Tom Hanks giving a typewriter to a boy when I saw this:

Unusually, for a nutter, he appears to put his face to his account, which is good in that it gives all of us who live close enough to the Gold Coast to step to the other side of the street if we think we spot him.

Here's his twitter account.  He appears to be as big an un-ironic believer in the most lurid, religiously tinged, American based conspiracy theories as it is possible to be.   I wonder if he is American? 

Jerks worried about bias against uber jerk

Honestly, the cesspit for obnoxious commentators, ageing crank climate change denialists and Trump cult membership has become the most risible joke on the Australian internet.   I offer as proof a post by uber Catholic CL in which he expresses concern about bias in The Australian for the biggest and most obnoxious jerk to come to the nation's attention in at least a decade.  And nearly every comment following agrees with him.   Many are willing to suggest blame on the police, even though the full details of how the deaths happened are not yet 100% clear.  (As far as I can tell, though, the police and stopped vehicle were in the emergency lane, and the truck that killed then did veer from a normal lane into the emergency lane, suggesting the "medical episode" of the driver may well be behind his actions.)

The Daily Mail, from which CL routinely gets his news, gives a lengthy history of Richard Pusey's history of awful, sometimes criminal, behaviour; yet this is the guy they decide to go all "hey, let's be fair" about?

I think there are two threads of motivation here:   first, lots of people at that place, from Sinclair Davidson down, hate the Victorian Police in particular with a passion, so of course they are inclined to look for a way to blame the police themselves.     Second, just as it has long been clear that a lot of wingnut enthusiasm for Trump is because he gives jerks a thrill when they hear someone at the top of political power talk openly like they wish they could, jerks just feel drawn to defend other jerks.

Update:  there's a comment in the thread by a guy who's avatar is a MAGA cap, who claims to be ex police, which includes this line:

At best, they had a guy in a Porsche turbo doing 140 which isn’t that fast on a quiet freeway

The accident happened late afternoon, not at freaking 3 am.  There's more from MAGA man:

Sure: morally he’s bereft. But legally, and barrister worth his salt will have this guy walking and he will get bail. What threat to the community does he represent?

I note on the ABC, after Pusey's court appearance this morning:

Mr Pusey has been remanded in custody and is expected to reappear in July.

The cap is the label of an idiot.

Tweets worth noting

Making an exception

I'm not generally one to suggest that an opinion writer warrants being dragged out of his office and beaten up on the street by a mob of Leftists, but a tweet like this motivates me strongly to make an exception:

The argument put by this IPA wanker is not new - it's the routine, conspiracy heavy, argument that has been deployed against climate change action and environment protecting regulation generally.  Namely, that you can't believe warnings of danger and harm to human life and nature - because it's really just all a front for enforcing socialism.   

And I am also curious about this paragraph from the article:

It is not surprising then that, far from recommending revolution, the pandemic has reinforced the value of traditional goods. Stay-at-home orders, for example, might not be quite so harsh were more people homeowners than renters of small apartments. The alienation of social distancing might not be so severe were more adults married with children. Expert rule might be more effective had the academy and media class not been engaged in generations-long ideological mission creep. Perhaps borders and self-sufficiency might also have renewed credibility now that globalism has gone viral.

This seems quaintly dogmatically conservative for someone from the IPA:  he seems to be against relaxing planning laws to build whatever developers want;  thinks more people should be married with children; and is dubious about globalism?    Has he run this past Gina Rinehart, given that she doesn't have much of a business left if she can't ship away gigantic chunks of Australian dirt to other parts of the globe.

John Oliver is right

Lots of sites are noting John Oliver's critique of the appalling Fox News/conservative media - Trump feedback loop.   It's particularly sickening to see the patent money-hungry hypocrisy of running one line on the screen and a completely different one within the corporation:

Fox News underestimated the danger of the coronavirus early on but as the death toll mounted, they were behind the scenes suspending non-essential business travel and had their employees cancel in-person meetings and summits. They also encouraged them to conduct business via Skype. According to Oliver, they did this because “they only tend to believe these things on television for money.”

This is what happens under cult authoritarian leadership

And this:

Update:  more Fox News back-pedalling,before the law suits come in, I presume:

Parisian poo points the way forward

I refer to this, from Science:

By sampling sewage across greater Paris for more than 1 month, researchers have detected a rise and fall in novel coronavirus concentrations that correspond to the shape of the COVID-19 outbreak in the region, where a lockdown is now suppressing spread of the disease. Although several research groups have reported detecting coronavirus in wastewater, the researchers say the new study is the first to show that the technique can pick up a sharp rise in viral concentrations in sewage before cases explode in the clinic. That points to its potential as a cheap, noninvasive tool to warn against outbreaks, they say.

I wonder if it is sensitive enough a test if there is a flu catching on as well?  This method of testing for community spread of illness is better established than I knew, however:

 Another advantage of wastewater sampling is that it picks up virus associated with the vast number of people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 but do not present symptoms for the disease, says Paul Bertsch, science director of land and water at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia. Although viral shedding varies among individuals and over the course of their infection, he says, a sewage system blends these variations into an average that represents the wider community. And depending on the sewage system, the warnings can come quickly. He points out that wastewater monitoring in Israel, for example, picked up a polio outbreak before any clinical cases appeared at all, according to a 2018 study.

Brisbane gets a mention in the next paragraph:

Building on similar studies in the Netherlands and the United States, Bertsch’s group last week reported the first detection of coronavirus in Australian sewage. He and his colleagues sampled wastewater in Brisbane representing 600,000 people, in March and April. In contrast to the study in Paris, they found a peak of viral shedding that corresponded to the peak detected through direct human testing. The difference might be explained by more prevalent human testing in Australia, he says.

Bertsch says he hopes to “tap into” Australia’s existing systems for monitoring wastewater for illegal drugs to develop a national COVID-19 monitoring system that could be in place within 1 month. Later, it might even be feasible to “go up-pipe” with specialized sampling portals allowing finer-scale community sampling. “We could test by postal code, for example,” he says.

Fascinating...

Things that are attracting little attention due to COVID-19

*  that Canadian mass shooting, which sounds to have some pretty unusual details:

Police say the hunt for the gunman was hampered by the fact he was driving a vehicle that looked like a police cruiser and was wearing a police uniform. How he procured both is part of the investigation.

The search ended around midday on Sunday when the suspected shooter was located by police at a service station in Enfield, north of the provincial capital of Halifax. He was shot and later died.

Police have faced criticism for failing to issue a province-wide emergency alert to warn residents of the danger during the rampage.

*  the US Senate Intelligence Committee, in a bi-partisan report, acknowledges that Trump won with the help of Russia's "unprecedented interference", which was approved by Putin.   Trump wingnut denialism will continue, regardless.  The Axios summary:

The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday released the fourth volume of its report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, which focused on a December 2016 intelligence community assessment provided to President Obama.

Why it matters: The bipartisan report affirms the intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the election to help President Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, noting that the assessment "reflects proper analytic tradecraft despite being tasked and completed within a compressed timeframe."

The big picture: The highly redacted report breaks with an investigation by the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee in 2018, which disagreed with the intelligence agencies' assessment and concluded that the Russian government did not explicitly intend to help Trump win the election.

• The Senate committee found "specific intelligence reporting to support the assessment that Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump," and that Putin "approved and directed" aspects of the interference.
• The Senate committee also disagreed with the House's claim that the intelligence agencies did not comply with analytical standards, noting: "The Committee found the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election."
• "The Committee did not discover any significant analytic tradecraft issues in the preparation or final presentation of the ICA."

Worth noting: The report finds that U.S. intelligence agencies did not use information from the infamous Steele dossier to support its findings. The dossier was included in a highly classified annex to the assessment, which was in line with President Obama's directive.

*  There has been news about ocean temperatures being high around the globe, with the Gulf of Mexico causing Florida to have a very warm spring.   Indicates some big, wet hurricanes to come, which is just what the US needs after an economic slow down.   And the whole planet is still hot:

This year is on track to be Earth’s warmest on record, beating 2016, NOAA says

 

On Malcolm (and Peta and Tony)

I don't have much sympathy for Malcolm Turnbull, but this quote about Abbott and Credlin is pretty amusing:

“Peta has always strongly denied that she and Tony were lovers. But if they were, that would have been the most unremarkable aspect of their friendship.”

For a couple not having an affair, it is pretty hilarious that so many people - on their own side of politics - found it hard to believe that they were not lovers.  Remember this?:

According to an extract published in The Australian, Senator Fierravanti-Wells went to Mr Abbott the night before the failed first attempt to unseat him last February.

She told the then-prime minister he had to remove Ms Credlin, arguing colleagues considered her responsible for many of the government's problems, and they were prepared to take out their frustrations on him.

Senator Fierravanti-Wells is quoted in the book as telling Mr Abbott "politics is about perceptions".

"Rightly or wrongly, the perception is that you are sleeping with your chief of staff. That's the perception, and you need to deal with it.

"I am here because I care about you, and I care about your family, and I feel I need to tell you the truth, the brutal truth. This is what your colleagues really think."

According to the book, Mr Abbott responded calmly and said the rumours were not true.

This must make Credlin's list of Liberal politicians she dislikes pretty long.

Even other people within the party hated her style:

Tony Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, has been described as a “horsewoman of the apocalypse” as further leaks emerge from within the Liberal party executive.

ABC’s Four Corners program has obtained a text message sent from federal Liberal party treasurer Philip Higginson to a senior party figure, in which he describes Credlin as the “horsewoman of the apocalypse” with “black robes flowing”.

The text message continues: “I do hope you can negotiate the removal of Credlin. That would be a huge win in itself,” the ABC reports.

Everyone can see that there have been, shall we say, less than laudatory aspects of Turnbull's personality over the years; but the condemnation of Peta's has many more vouching for it.   And poor old Tony ended up its political victim.   Funny old world...

Pretty sure this is a lesson called " How to 'shade' "

Didn't see this coming

So, it appears that a liberal trying to stop Right wing astroturfing was mistaken for a Right wing astroturfer?   And he was an old guy prepared to spend $4,000 doing that?   What a strange story.

It should be said that people, Left or Right, who do social media doxing and pile ons really need to stop.