Just asking questions, Lindsay will say

Allahpundit at Hot Air talks about the ridiculous corrupt stink around Lindsay Graham ringing his fellow Republican to chat about what he do with the Georgia re-count:

Raffensperger told WaPo this afternoon that he and his wife are getting death threats from some of Trump’s more fanatic followers because he insists on claiming that this was a fair election. He also dropped a bombshell, claiming that Lindsey Graham dialed him up and … inquired about excluding some perfectly valid ballots:

In their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching signatures, Raffensperger said.

Raffspenger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested, as counties administer elections in Georgia.

“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” he said.

Graham has also publicly entertained the idea of state legislatures declaring their elections void and awarding their electors to Trump. This cretin really does seem willing to condone a coup against the elected incoming government on the thinnest possible pretenses, from excluding legal ballots to just ignoring the result of a state election on the theory that fraud must have occurred to taint it. There’d be nothing left of the country’s civic culture if he succeeded, but so long as Lindsey Graham gets to remain a senator and his party remains in power, that’s a detail. A question to ask yourself: Why did he call up Raffensperger in first place, especially now instead of waiting until the recount is over and speaking to him then? If he was speaking in his role as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, because the committee is investigating election procedures, there’s no reason why that can’t wait until the more important work of counting the votes is finished. The obvious suspicion is that Graham called Raffensperger this week because he really was trying to lean on him on Trump’s behalf to start throwing out ballots in hopes of changing the outcome illicitly, before the result is certified. In a better world, the DOJ would open a corruption case on him tonight.

In normal times, this would be an incredible scandal.  Now, given the bottom of the barrel standards Trump has caused the GOP to sink to, it will just be a shoulder shrug.

Oh, now that I see your jihad against ABC is based on a reasonable critique of the organisation, I see your point [sarcasm]

Sinclair Davidson, having a tantrum about the ABC for the millionth time at his blog for fools today:

We need to get away from this notion of judging the ABC by small-l liberal values. The ABC does not practice small-l liberalism. The ABC is infested by extremist left-wing progressives who use small-l liberalism as camouflage to destroy our way of life and civilisation.

Of course, allowing ageing twits like Steve Kates and Rafe Champion, and conservatives like CL, to use his blog promote all of the Right Wingnut conspiracy theorising about the Trump election is just fine, though.  No harming democracy in the US at all, those beliefs.  Not to mention his blog's promotion of climate change denialism and inaction.  That won't hurt "our way of life" at all. 

 

This seems correct

 

How's the "let's humour him, and he'll go quietly" strategy of some of the GOP politicians going?

Appallingly:

Just what a country needs:  a President yelling to his (often religiously fundamentalist) cult-like base that the side which won an election by a substantially larger popular vote is genuinely evil.

The chances that there will be a shooting by one of delusional followers, to defeat "evil", seems to be increasing daily.

Update:   the latest -

The biggest Trump suck up tries to convince Trump he can leave and come back

So, even Hugh Hewitt thinks Trump should leave "gracefully".  Fat chance.

The final volume of his memoirs can only be imagined now. When Trump leaves D.C. for Mar-a-Lago, he will launch a super PAC, build his presidential library and, yes, begin planning campaigns 2022 and 2024. Trump doesn’t need to own a cable-news network, but he should control a block of prime-time programming. He could effortlessly host his own show, probably with one or more of the Trump children, so he doesn’t have to be on set five days a week. This would allow him time for maintaining and expanding his coalition of at least 72 million.

Trump will likely oversee not just a shadow government but also a robust, ongoing campaign.

Trump and Trump loyalists will work to maintain a hold on the GOP, which is best accomplished by his proceeding smoothly toward a peaceful, graceful transition of power. Then for Trump, a period of consolidation and celebration of his achievements. Then ...

I can't help but giggle at the idea of what is going to be inside a Trump Presidential Library.  Comic books?  Remainders of all the self promotion books to come from his kids?  

I don't think Trump actually has any chance of retaining power over the Republican Party.   His cult members seem to continually project their assessment of Trump onto the GOP politicians who have had to actually deal with him.   I reckon the great majority treat him as a useful idiot.

Update: I agree with this: 

 

While we're speaking physics...

...I also liked this video from a French Youtube channel ScienceClic (of which there is also an English version), which has a different way of visualising General Relativity:

Also - this article at The Guardian last year recommends a variety of science and math Youtube channels, some of which I have already checked out.  The PBS ones are certainly all pretty good.

Update:  actually, that was the wrong video.  I meant to post this one:

Back to Maxwell's equations

A few days ago, I was musing about the complexity of Maxwell's equations, and the lack of historical context in most attempts at explaining them.

Behold, via stumbling around Youtube, I have found the Science Asylum channel and if you don't mind his cheesey sense of humour (it's harmless, and a little charming in the way it's adolescent friendly), his videos are really good.

Here is the one having a go at explaining electromagnetism:

He's like a poster child for government warnings against marijuana use

Actually, I still reckon his hyped up comments read more (what I think) cocaine users are like, but he only admits to marijuana.

And you might recall that he bet $45,000 on a Trump win.

So how is this Catallaxy tradie, who I wouldn't let do so much as change a lightbulb, dealing with the election result? These are from yesterday: 

And the cherry on top: 

She was smiling about how big of an idiot he was. 

On the upside, at least COVID 19 has killed libertarianism

This question... 

was about this... 

and out of the many tweeted suggestions that follow, this: 

Heh. 

What?

Hey, have a read of this abstract for this recent arXiv paper entitled Kant & Hegel in Physics, which has a very surprising last line:

Kant and Hegel are among the philosophers who are guiding the way in which we reason these days. It is thus of interest to see how physical theories have been developed along the line of Kant and Hegel. Einstein became interested in how things appear to moving observers. Quantum mechanics is also an observer-dependent science. The question then is whether quantum mechanics and relativity can be synthesized into one science. The present form of quantum field theory is a case in point. This theory however is based on the algorithm of the scattering matrix where all participating particles are free in the remote past and in the remote future. We thus need, in addition, a Lorentz-covariant theory of bound state which will address the question of how the hydrogen atom would look to moving observers. The question is then whether this Lorentz-covariant theory of bound states can be synthesized with the field theory into a Lorentz-covariant quantum mechanics. This article reviews the progress made along this line. This integrated Kant-Hegel process is illustrated in terms of the way in which Americans practice their democracy.

I haven't read it yet, but it seems to be by a rather old former professor.   (Got  his PhD in 1961.) 

 

Wannabe dictator and his cult base working each other into a conspiracy frenzy

Members of cults are - pretty much by definition, I guess - incredibly gullible.   And cult leaders, if not from the start, but eventually, live in a fantasy world whereby they have convinced themselves of their greatness.

And hence we have the Orange One in the White House encouraging his disturbingly large number of cult followers to believe he has been the victim of a massive conspiracy with this tweet, which I reckon has a good chance of going down in history as the most insanely damaging thing Trump has done to his country:

Of course, Steve Kates is all on board - as are the great majority of people who comment at Catallaxy.   It's hard to credit how incredibly gullible they are - and the extent to which they Dunning-Kruger their way into thinking they understand everything from voting laws in any State in the US, or arcane statistical tests, all by relying solely on what a rabidly pro-Trump numbnut has postulated.

Anyway, Allahpundit at Hot Air has a good post about this pushback:

Joint statement from DHS agency, local officials: There’s no evidence that any voting system was in any way compromised

As he writes:

Here’s the statement from the “Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee,” which includes an alphabet soup of agencies at the federal and local level. The most noteworthy is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of DHS created by Trump in 2018 and charged with protecting critical infrastructure like elections from cyberattacks. CISA has been debunking voter fraud claims on its official webpage and on social media for the past week; its director, Chris Krebs, has amplified those debunkings on social media as well, sometimes with his own comments. Earlier today, Reuters reported that the White House was pressuring CISA to remove a critique it posted of the Dominion “Hammer and Scorecard” conspiracy theory that Trump screamed about in a tweet this morning. Krebs refused, and told people around him that he expected to be fired because of it....

And what is it all for?   Just for the Orange Oaf to be able to pretend to himself and his cult base that he has to leave the White House, but it's not his fault:

The Washington Examiner is reporting that Trump’s advisors “believe he has accepted that he is unlikely to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory and will begin to plot life after the White House, including a 2024 run, once his campaign had exhausted all its lawsuits.” According to one, “I suspect that once those cases are heard and adjudicated, and once we get through the Georgia recount, that the president will begin the public off-ramp.” Okay, but I’m not sure how he takes that off-ramp after he tweeted to 80 million people this morning that “Dominion deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.” His fans are going to cling to that. What’s he supposed to say, “It totally happened but literally no one can prove it but somehow I know it’s true”? For cripes sake.

Anyway, I hope Biden hires Krebs back. We need more people with integrity in government. A lot, lot, lot more.

Just incredible - as is the lack of Republican big hitters who are refusing to call him out. 

      

Tough on COVID pays off politically

Wow.  Was Labor polling this well in Victoria before the COVID crisis?:

Well I just checked Roy Morgan's website:   Labor was riding high at the last election - and they are above that level:

How heartwarming this must be for the IPA, Sinclair Davidson, and his whole ship of old fools.  And let's not forget Adam Creighton, too.

Former IMF head really goes rogue

One the most absurd claims of Right wing nuttery has long been how it's the Left  that has gone insane with unreasonable and nasty demonisation of Republicans/Trump supporters, while in fact it is their side that is home to those who believe that Democrats are literally in league with Satan and the outcome of the election is a supernatural struggle for Good to conquer Evil. 

Can you imagine the outcry from the wingnut media...

...if Obama had been 30 minutes late to a military commemoration ceremony which has been happening at 11am for a century or so?:

The president and his entourage – including first lady Melania Trump, Vice President Pence and second lady Karen Pence – did not arrive at the tomb until well after the scheduled start time of 11 a.m. ET. The president's motorcade was still driving toward the tomb as a gun salute to veterans rang out, according to the White House pool report.

It wasn't until nearly 11:25 that the president appeared on a walkway in front of the tomb, where he stood alongside Pence in a steady rain. Trump walked toward the wreath, laid a hand on it, paused and then returned to his spot. The ceremony was over soon afterwards. It was the only event listed on the president's public schedule for Wednesday.

Back to politics

A witty use of Twitter:

 

Some science (for relief from politics)

*  Nature has an interesting article updating us on the research into the question of whether infections cause Alzheimers:

Are infections seeding some cases of Alzheimer’s disease?

A fringe theory links microbes in the brain with the onset of dementia. Now, researchers are taking it seriously.

*   I've been watching many Youtube videos on physics lately, mainly regarding quantum theory and relativity, and one of them talked about how most of the mass of the proton comes not from the Higgs Boson, but via the interactions between the quarks which make up the proton.  Individually, those quarks only have a small percent of the total mass of a proton:

Protons are made up of even smaller particles known as quarks. It might seem reasonable that simply adding up the quarks’ masses would give you a proton’s mass. Yet it doesn’t. That sum is far too small to explain the proton’s bulk. New, detailed calculations show that only 9 percent of a proton’s heft comes from the mass of its quarks. The rest comes from complicated effects occurring inside the particle.

I had probably read that before, but sometimes just being told via video sticks more in the mind than reading it quickly.

This fairly recent article in Quanta gives a pretty good idea of how complicated the physics of quarks inside protons really is.   Mind you, it's pretty incredible, when you think about it, that we have the technology to be able to conduct experiments at this level of tininess at all.

*  While watching the videos on physics, I have also thought again about how it seems that Einstein's complicated theories have sort of made us loose appreciation for the innovation and complexity of Maxwell's electromagnetism equations.   I seem to recall that when doing senior high school physics, I didn't like how there was no attempt to put how Maxwell came up with his formulae in proper context, so you got the impression that they sprang out of no where.   Interestingly, when I Google the topic now, I see that Freeman Dyson  wrote an article (or gave a talk?) entitled "Why is Maxwell's Theory so Hard to Understand" - which makes me feel better about my life long gut feeling about it!   I didn't know this:

For more than twenty years, his theory of electromagnetism was largely ignored. Physicists found it hard to understand because the equations were complicated. Mathematicians found it hard to understand because Maxwell used physical language to explain it. It was regarded as an obscure speculation without much experimental evidence to support it. The physicist Michael Pupin in his autobiography “From Immigrant to Inventor” describes how he travelled from America to Europe in 1883 in search of somebody who understood Maxwell. He set out to learn the Maxwell theory like a knight in quest of the Holy Grail. 

Pupin went first to Cambridge and enrolled as a student, hoping to learn the theory from Maxwell himself. He did not know that Maxwell had died four years earlier. After learning that Maxwell was dead, he stayed on in Cambridge and was assigned to a college tutor. But his tutor knew less about the Maxwell theory than he did, and was only interested in training him to solve mathematical tripos problems. He was amazed to discover, as he says, “how few were the physicists who had caught the meaning of the theory, even twenty years after it was stated by Maxwell in 1865”.

So, the electrification of cities, which seems to have only got going in the 1880's, was proceeding before Maxwell's ideas were thoroughly or widely understood by scientists?  Huh.

Correct

 And, as far as I can tell, Rupert Murdoch knows this, but is letting a large part of his media outlets run with it anyway.  

He could encourage confidence in democracy and a rational rejection of ideologically motivated conspiracy theory, or prioritise making money by trying to not lose too much market share to even more extreme Right wing outlets .   

Pretty clear which choice he is making.  

As much as it pains me to say, but...

...Andrew Bolt appears to be more right than wrong in his opinion on the issue of denying the US election outcome:

 

He must know that this is Rupert Murdoch's opinion too;  but if he is reading the Right wing social media (including Catallaxy, which he surely follows closely), he would have to know that the Conservative base is far from agreeing with both of them.  (And, amusingly, they are apparently swearing off  Fox News and cancelling subscriptions to The Australian because they are not adequately endorsing the Trumpian denial of reality.)    

Bolt & Rupert deserve no great credit for seemingly acknowledging reality on this one issue, when they have spent a couple of decades priming the Conservative base to live in a world of denial of expert evidence, and to prefer a self serving information cocoon that leads them to think they are the smart insiders who can see what's really going on.  You know I'm talking climate change...

Sex and politics

Once again we're in the murky media ethical question of when it is newsworthy that a married politician is having an affair.   

I find it hard to get upset with the ABC running a story on it where the only figures examined were current Liberal/National Party heavyweights - they're the ones in power, it's obviously more significant than what might be going in the Opposition in the same period.   Go back 45 years and it was a Labor government's turn with Jim Cairns; 22 years ago it was that party's turn again with Gareth Evans. 

Overall, I think 4 Corners did good justification for the relevance of the reporting:  especially for the deep foolishness of Christian Porter, who I have never paid any attention to before.   How stupid to be carrying on with a woman in a public bar frequented by journalists and political staff from all sides.

Malcolm Turnbull sounded pretty reasonable to me in his explanation of why he found the behaviour so galling and inappropriate.   Sure, there is an element of revenge in talking about it now:  but he is right on the principles.  

I used to think that you could generalise that there was a difference between the Left and Right in the nature of their sex scandals, with Labor politicians being more promiscuous (hello, Bob Hawke), while Conservatives had fewer orgasms but in seedier circumstances (using prostitutes, into S&M, soliciting anonymous interactions in toilets, etc).   But perhaps that was too influenced by the impression given by British sex scandals.   Anyway, after last night's reporting, I should probably revise those presumptions.  

Just in case you were wondering ...

Graeme Bird is busy burbling away in comments in moderation that Trump won the election "in a landslide", but "the oligarchy", which has Rupert Murdoch on side - because they lent him money, or something - is busy trying to usurp the will of the people by installing Biden.  He allows that it might work, but we won't know for a few months.  

As I do not believe in being an open forum for the repetition of absurd conspiracy claims, even via the little read comments of my blog,  very few of Graeme's comments are going to be allowed through for quite a while.  (For which he will call me a Jewish c..., again, no doubt.)