The ever non-reliable Tucker

The Washington Post has a profile of Tucker Carlson (one he did not co-operate with), and its take on him is best summarised (accurately in my opinion):

“He has positioned himself as the presentable face of White grievance,” said Joseph M. Azam, who resigned in late 2017 as a senior vice president of News Corp., which, like Fox, was controlled by the Murdoch family, because he objected to the company’s tolerance for what he felt were Carlson’s hateful views and other commentary. “He’s on mainstream media, he’s dressed in a suit, he speaks in a way that people see as eloquent and informed, and he’s super confident in what he’s saying.”

But the one anecdote which I have notice people tweeting about is his lies about his first grade teacher:

His mother had left the family. He was raised in La Jolla, in San Diego, by his wealthy father, Richard Carlson, a prominent Republican who worked in the Reagan administration, oversaw Voice of America and married an heiress to the Swanson frozen food family. From the door of his childhood home, Tucker Carlson overlooked La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club, in one of the country’s most expensive communities.

He attended the elite La Jolla Country Day School, where a woman entered his life whom he grew to detest. It was his first-grade teacher, whom he referred to in his book as Mrs. Raymond. He caricatured her as “a parody of earth-mother liberalism” who “wore long Indian-print skirts. . . . She had little interest in conventional academic topics, like reading and penmanship.” He recalled her sobbing theatrically at her desk, saying, “The world is so unfair! You don’t know that yet. But you’ll find out!”

Carlson said he just wanted liberals to “stop blubbering and teach us to read. . . . Mrs. Raymond never did teach us; my father had to hire a tutor to get me through phonics.” Thus, Carlson says, he began his sojourn as a conservative thinker, questioning the liberals who he said were all around him, exemplified by his first-grade teacher.

Which is all rather shocking to Marianna Raymond, 77, who remembers Carlson as “very precious and very, very polite and sweet,” and said she had no idea, until contacted recently by a Washington Post reporter, that her former student had ridiculed her as a key to understanding him.

Raymond said in an interview that she never sobbed at her desk, didn’t wear an Indian skirt and didn’t advocate her political views. She said that not only did she teach Carlson reading at La Jolla Country Day School — with a student body that was “very affluent and White” — but that she also was then hired to tutor him at his home.

“Oh my God,” she said, when informed of Carlson’s attack against her. “That is the most embellished, crazy thing I ever heard.”

No wonder Fox News lawyers argued in a court case that no one should believe what he says - he's just a blowhard.

Carlson is very popular with the white grievance folk over at Catallaxy, by the way.

 Update:  an interesting thread on this on Twitter:

 

Some memeing been done

 

More on fascist friendly approaches to democracy

So, there are a few books coming out about the Trump election loss, and WAPO has run extracts from one on of them in which we learn:

Finally, Election Day had arrived. The morning of Nov. 3, 2020, President Trump was upbeat. The mood in the West Wing was good. Some aides talked giddily of a landslide. Several women who worked in the White House arrived wearing red sweaters in a show of optimism, while some Secret Service agents on the president’s detail sported red ties for the occasion. Trump’s voice was hoarse from his mad dash of rallies, but he thought his exhausting final sprint had sealed the deal. He considered Joe Biden to be a lot of things, but a winner most definitely was not one of them. “I can’t lose to this f------ guy,” Trump told aides. 

Tick off the narcissism box.   Next:

Around noon, his detail whisked Trump across the Potomac River to visit his campaign headquarters in Arlington, where campaign manager Bill Stepien and the senior leadership briefed Trump in the conference room. Stepien outlined what to expect that night — when polls closed in each battleground state, how quickly votes should be tallied and which states would probably have the first projected winners. He explained that because of the huge number of mail-in ballots in many states, it might take long into the night for votes to be counted. Patience was in order.

Stepien explained to Trump that in many battleground states, the first votes to be recorded were expected to be in-person Election Day votes, which could lean Trump, while mail-in votes, which were likely to heavily favor Biden, would be added to the tally later as those ballots were processed. This meant that the early vote totals could well show Trump ahead by solid margins.

“It’s going to be good early,” Stepien told the boss. But, as he cautioned the president, those numbers would be incomplete and the margins probably would tighten later in the evening.

So, he had full warning of what would happen with the count.   

We get an account of how he went off his brain when Fox News called Arizona for Biden:

“They’re calling it way too early,” Oczkowski told Trump. “This thing is close. We still think we’ll win narrowly — and not just us. Doug Ducey’s modeling people show us winning.” Ducey, Arizona’s Republican governor, and his political team had kept in close contact with Trump’s aides.

That hardly reassured the president. “What the f--- is Fox doing?” Trump screamed. Then he barked orders to Kushner: “Call Rupert! Call James and Lachlan!” And to Jason Miller: “Get Sammon. Get Hemmer. They’ve got to reverse this.” The president was referring to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch and his sons, James and Lachlan, as well as Bill Sammon, a top news executive at Fox.

Trump’s tirade continued. “What the f---?” he bellowed. “What the f--- are these guys doing? How could they call this this early?”

Oczkowski again tried to soothe the president. “They’re calling this way too early,” he said. “This is unbelievable.”

Giuliani pushed the president to forget about the Arizona call and just say he won — to step into the East Room and deliver a victory speech. Never mind that Meadows had earlier snapped at Giuliani and said the president couldn’t just declare himself the winner.

Talk about your fascist entitlement to power frame of mind - both from Trump and Giuliani.

Does Trump's reaction make any sense, apart from showing how fragile his narcissism makes him?   Getting Fox to reverse the call would obviously make no difference in the long run - either they were right, or would be proved wrong, and Trump could have gloated later.

I laugh at the image of Trump's dimwitted, entitled, sons losing it:

Eric Trump, who the night before had predicted to friends that his father would win with 322 electoral college votes, flipped out in the Map Room.

“The election is being stolen,” the president’s 36-year-old son said. “Where are these votes coming from? How is this legit?”

He yelled at the campaign’s data analysts, as if it were their fault that his father’s early leads over Biden were shrinking. ”We pay you to do this,” he said. “How can this be happening?"

Eric Trump, through a spokesperson, insisted that he did not berate campaign staff, as described by witnesses.

Donald Trump Jr. said, “There’s no way we lose to this guy,” referring to Biden.

 And then Trump went out and immediately declared it a fraud on national TV.   

Nancy Pelosi's reaction is so accurate:

Pelosi watched Trump’s speech in horror. “It was just a complete, total manifestation [of] insanity,” she recalled in the interview.

“It was clear over that four-year period that this was not a person who was on the level — on the level intellectually, on the level mentally, on the level emotionally and certainly not on the level patriotically,” she said. “So for him to say what he said, I wouldn’t say was [as] surprising as it might have been if we hadn’t seen the instability all along.”

David Frum on post election Trump fascism

I think this is an important and well argued article by David Frum that Trump and his supporters are going down a clear fascist path, and it's time to call it that.

Some extracts:

The Trump movement was always authoritarian and illiberal. It indulged periodically in the rhetoric of violence. Trump himself chafed against the restraints of law. But what the United States did not have before 2020 was a large national movement willing to justify mob violence to claim political power. Now it does.

Is there a precedent? Not in recent years. Since the era of Redemption after Reconstruction, anti-government violence in the United States has been the work of marginal sects and individual extremists. American Islamic State supporters were never going to seize the state, and neither were the Weather Underground, the Ku Klux Klan killers of the 1950s and ’60s, Puerto Rican nationalists, the German American Bund, nor the Communist Party USA.

But the post-election Trump movement is not tiny. It’s not anything like a national majority, but it’s a majority in some states—a plurality in more—and everywhere a significant minority, empowered by the inability of pro-legality Republicans to stand up to them.  

I like this paragraph:

Two traits have historically marked off European-style fascism from more homegrown American traditions of illiberalism: contempt for legality and the cult of violence. Presidential-era Trumpism operated through at least the forms of law. Presidential-era Trumpism glorified military power, not mob attacks on government institutions. Post-presidentially, those past inhibitions are fast dissolving. The conversion of Ashli Babbitt into a martyr, a sort of American Horst Wessel, expresses the transformation. Through 2020, Trump had endorsed deadly force against lawbreakers: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted on May 29, 2020. Babbitt broke the law too, but not to steal a TV. She was killed as she tried to disrupt the constitutional order, to prevent the formalization of the results of a democratic election.

 And towards the end:

In his interview on July 11—as in the ever more explicit talk of his followers—the new line about the attack on the Capitol is guilty but justified. The election of 2020 was a fraud, and so those who lost it are entitled to overturn it.

I do not consider myself guilty. I admit all the factual aspects of the charge. But I cannot plead that I am guilty of high treason; for there can be no high treason against that treason committed in 1918.

Maybe you recognize those words. They come from Adolf Hitler’s plea of self-defense at his trial for his 1923 Munich putsch. He argued: You are not entitled to the power you hold, so I committed no crime when I tried to grab it back. You blame me for what I did; I blame you for who you are.

 Trump’s no Hitler, obviously. But they share some ways of thinking. The past never repeats itself. But it offers warnings. It’s time to start using the F-word again, not to defame—but to diagnose.

Peter Doherty getting cranky

He makes good points:

 

A town I don't understand

It's been decades since I have visited Townsville, but I always felt it was a bit of an underappreciated place.    I made my first visit there backpacking as a university student, and thought Magnetic Island was a lovely backwater that might do well in future development.  Yet I get the impression it has never really "taken off" - although perhaps I should just go there and have a look.

Anyway, my impression from recent years of reporting about Townsville was that it was suffering economically and had large social problems with some pretty poor unemployed and indigenous families in particular.

Yet today, I read this on the ABC:

A North Queensland family of six has been forced to live in a tent for almost two months as rental shortages reach crisis point in Townsville.....

The Kennison family is among a growing number of residents in Townsville finding themselves homeless for the first time.

With the rental vacancy rate in the city at 1.2 per cent — largely driven by interstate migration and the return of ex-pats to the community — Townsville is not alone.

Across the state, the majority of rental vacancies remain under 2.5 per cent, according to the Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ)

The Red Cross in Townsville is supporting more than 200 people every month who are experiencing problems with securing affordable accommodation.

Maybe because it hasn't been doing so well in recent years it hasn't had more housing built?   But you usually associate lack of enough housing with boom towns, not economic struggle towns.

 

As seen on Twitter

Hey there. I have had some internet (NBN) problems at work - and let me say, Optus clearly seems to have bigger issues with their NBN to business service than Telstra.   I have suffered outages at much higher rate than that suffered by the office right next to me on Telstra.   Most of what Optus does seems pretty good to me - but the NBN service I have had from them is, shall we say, problematic.

Anyway, I've been saving some screenshots on my phone, and will dump some here today: 

 

I'm pleased to see today Biden calling out strongly the Big Lie.   The Big Problem, of course, is senior Republicans failing to do so for fear of Trump's brainwashed cult base.

In some rare, obesity positive, news...

Obese patients with a form of advanced prostate cancer survive longer than overweight and normal weight patients, new research has found.  ...

They looked at survival rates in 1,577 patients involved in three different clinical trials, with an average age of 69 and average BMI of 28. They found that BMI was a protective factor in both overall and cancer-specific survival, with 4% higher overall survival probability and 29% cancer-specific survival probability. Even when they adjusted for higher doses of chemotherapy given to larger patients, the team found the protective effect remained. Over 36 months, around 30% of obese patients survived compared to 20% of overweight and normal weight individuals.

Dr. Nicola Fossati, a urologist at San Raffaele University says: "Looking at patients with metastasis of prostate cancer, we found that obese patients are living longer. This means that BMI could be used to predict survival in these patients.

"This obesity paradox has been seen in some other cancers, possibly due to the relationship between tissue fat and cancer genomes, and more research is needed in this area. It's also possible that improved survival may be due to the interaction of chemotherapy with other drugs. Obese patients in this older age group tend to be taking medication for other conditions and we do not fully understand how these medicines interconnect.

Here's a link to the full story.

Expats for China

The BBC has a story up about something interesting I have mentioned before - how China's pro-government (to put it mildly) media network CGTN features pro-China ex pats a lot.  

Question with an obvious answer

 

Nice, low key humour spotted

 

Poor Japan

It's sort of been Japan week here, and to top it off, we now have what was long suspected might happen - an Olympics without spectators.

To make it a good television spectacle in any event, maybe they should be covering all stadium seating with plastic so they can green screen in a full audience?   Do you even need to do that with modern video techniques?  

I guess in 100 years time, the audience could just be robots.  

The new superpower tech war

As usual, the ABC's Foreign Correspondent has done a terrific job at looking at China's decision (prompted by Western bans) to accelerate its own tech infrastructure:

While the US has long had the edge in tech, China is catching up fast, investing heavily in AI, robotics, 5G and 6G, microchips and surveillance technology.

US President Joe Biden is planning a $330 billion package to rev up the US's investment in R&D, having noted its strategic competition with China is nothing less than a battle to "win the 21st century".

I have to say that I am being pretty impressed with China's rapid advances in space technology - although as I have noted before, they don't seem to have been able to replicate it in the aviation industry, generally speaking.   Still not 100% sure why that is...

It will be fascinating to see how this plays out in future.   I find the idea of a government controlling a digital currency by setting an expiry date on its use to be the most fascinating control proposal - and I doubt anyone has a good idea how it would play out in real life economics.

Yet more Japan content

So sue me, I happen to be watching a lot of Japanese content on Youtube at the moment.   

This one is a couple of years old, and is from one of several channels The Guardian has (I didn't know until Google suggested it), and it's a pretty fascinating explanation of how you can get cheaper rent there if you are the first person to live in an apartment or house after someone has died in it.   I hadn't heard of that before, although I did know that housing is treated as more "disposable" in that country than in most of the West. 

 

Who knows - maybe it's easier for Westerners to rent one of these apartments too:   I have seen several  Youtubers explaining that Japanese landlords and letting agents really are not welcoming of foreign renters.   They consider them a high risk of skipping the country with rent arrears, and unreliable tenants generally speaking.   (Japan is a fantastic place, but there are some residual, slightly problematic, cultural issues like that.)

 And speaking of abandoned Japanese residences, Chris Broad and his friends visited a Japanese island which has a population dwindle to (I think he said) 150, but it has scores of apartment blocks from when 10,000 people lived there, now being slowly taken over by plants in a very post-apocalyptic look.  Because people do actually still live there, anyone can go visit on the ferry.   It's apparently near the more famous "battleship island", but you can't go to that one alone.  Fascinating:

Trouble for Pikachu

I stumbled across this on Al Jazeera, and am rather surprised it hasn't gone viral.  Or maybe it has?  Poor old Pikachu in Chile gets roughed up:

 

Stories from Japan

I've been extraordinarily busy at work again, so I've been posting less frequently.  But let me record some stories, all about Japan, as it happens:

*   Sperm cells must be a lot tougher than I would have guessed. This is surely a very surprising story:

A Japanese team of researchers has succeeded in the reproduction of mice using freeze-dried sperm preserved in space for nearly six years, developing what could be a “Noah’s Ark” type of technology to save plants and animals from extinction in the future.

The study published last month in the Science Advances journal said a total of 168 mice were born in 2019 and 2020 after the sperm was brought back from the International Space Station despite exposure to space radiation.

The preservation period of five years and 10 months is the world’s “longest duration that samples have been preserved in the ISS in biological research,” the study said.

The experiment was conducted by a team including researchers from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the University of Yamanashi.

The freeze-drying technique, developed by Teruhiko Wakayama, a professor at the University of Yamanashi, allowed the sperm to be preserved at room temperature for more than one year. It also meant there was no need to install a freezer on the rocket launched to the ISS.

The technique is also expected to be adopted in modern reproductive medicine and livestock breeding.

I guess it makes the panspermia idea of how life spread through the universe a bit more plausible, too;  even though, yes I know, panspermia did not refer to actual sperm.  Turns out maybe it could have?

 *  I feel very sorry for the country and what's happened to the Olympics.  Like, no one cares, do they?   They are now talking about a lot of events having no spectators.

I think they could just turn the opening ceremony into a World Order reunion concert, and I would be just as happy.

 *  Every year, I note how Japan has record rains and disasters resulting from it.  Climate change.  And sure enough, the urban landslide on the news this weekend does seem to have involved record rain, according to NHK:

The active seasonal rain front has brought record rain to Shizuoka Prefecture and the southern part of the Kanto region, which includes Tokyo and its surrounding prefectures.

Weather officials are warning of the heightening risk of mudslides in Atami and elsewhere in Shizuoka, where ground is saturated after the downpour. Landslide alerts are in place in parts of the prefecture.

Atami City, where fatal mudslides occurred on Saturday, received 321 millimeters of rain in the 48 hours through Saturday evening. That is more than the average rainfall for the entire month of July.

*  One of the Japan based Youtubers I sometimes watch put up a video of her visiting the top tourist spots in Kyoto recently, and wow:  it is spectacularly devoid of tourists at the moment:

I also have been meaning for some time to note a couple of interesting Youtube videos, by another Western video creator who lives there, explaining a lot about Shinto. Here they are: 

 

The (formerly) British guy who is the expert in the videos has his own blog on Shinto here.  Seems a little "dry" to me, but some interesting stuff.

 

On the upside, that wall was probably made from Australian iron ore...

Update:   Hey, the exact same joke was made on Mad as Hell last night.  I demand royalties!

A show in decline

I recently finished watching the Netflix cartoon show Disenchantment in its 3rd season, and I have to say, the quality of the writing and humour has dwindled away terribly.  

This was quite an enjoyable show for the first two seasons, although some episodes have always been better than others.  But the overall storyline of this season - it's just meandering and terrible.   

I see that I am not alone:

‘Disenchantment’ season three review: Matt Groening’s swords-and-swigging sitcom loses the plot

Disenchantment gets bogged down in plot and loses sight of jokes in “Part 3”

Disappointing.

What if they said "UFOs are real" and everyone just shrugged

That is, after all, pretty what has happened with the brief Pentagon UFO report.

Jazz Shaw, the right wing columnist who has been (for want of a better term) pro-UFO (and is just one of the Right wing figures who has been talking up this issue for the last couple of years) takes the "glass half full" view:

None of this should be taken to mean that the report was a dud. There were important admissions made by the ODNI on Friday. One of the first was that the vast majority of “UAP” incidents they studied “probably do represent physical objects.” They draw this conclusion from the fact that most were picked up using multiple avenues of sensory data, in addition to testimony from pilots and technicians who watch the skies for a living. So it’s not just swamp gas, “ball lightning,” or birds. And if you’ve seen one, you may not be crazy. (Or if you are, it’s not because of this.)

The next thing the ODNI conceded was that the vast majority of interesting cases they have been studying are truly “unidentified.” Out of 144 incident reports, they were able to conclusively attribute precisely one of them to a mundane event, specifically the downing of a deflating weather balloon. They don’t know what the rest of them are, and they’ve really been hunting for an explanation. Prior to the release of the report, the Pentagon had already stated that what people have been witnessing is not an example of secret United States government technology. (How much faith one places in their claims at this point is entirely up to the reader.) In the report, they went one step further, saying that they “currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary.”

While some dedicated, skeptical journalists might latch onto the phrase “currently lack,” interpreting that to mean that the UFOs could still turn out to be Chinese or Russian, this reading seems dubious. As the report also notes, most of the reported sightings took place in controlled airspace, in the midst of our naval battle groups and even over military facilities in the middle of mainland North America. If there were the slightest indication that those things came from Russia or China and were showing up over our testing range in Nevada (it’s happened), there wouldn’t be a “concern over possible national security concerns.” We would already have the real-world, military equivalent of Will Smith up there in an F/A-18E Super Hornet shooting them down.

And on the Left - which includes most scientists eager to pooh-pooh the "aliens are watching us" theory - we have David Corn writing an interesting column in which he explains that even though he saw (with others) something that pretty convincingly fits a "true UFO" description as a 12 year old boy, he just can't buy into "aliens are visiting us" any more.    

David Corn's background (as it is with some others I have seen downplaying the Pentagon report) is that, as a child, he was seriously gullible on all UFO stuff - believing Erich Von Daniken's ancient astronaut guff, for example.  (I soon learned the truth about that, even though, like most other kids seeing it the first time, I initially found it a bit spookily credible.)

He's a good example of something I have long felt:  if someone has swung wildly from one side to another in the matter of politics, religion or (as it turns out) belief in UFO's, there's actually good reason to doubt their judgement.    It's not really a matter of saying that people shouldn't ever believe anything  firmly;  but all belief should be tempered by some scepticism of your own certainty.   Those who have swung wildly from one set of beliefs to the opposite - they don't fill me with confidence that they have an appropriate way of assessing their own thinking.   

So, what do I think of the report?    Of course, it is hard to know how to judge some of the cases when the material for them is still classified. And, as I have repeatedly said - I don't find the 3 videos alone all that convincing;  although I am also open to the suggestion that some of the debunking of them is more speculative than concrete.  (I understand that there are some pilots who have disputed some of the Michael West debunking, for example.)

I remain satisfied that the "tic tac" incident is one that is truly mysterious  and "real", and (to my mind) unlikely to explained by earthly technology.  It's been too long since it happened for the technology not to be revealed.  But sure, the "alien drone" theory is a stretch.  

That said, lately I get the feeling that, oddly, there may be collectively much more evidence for "alien drone" than we realise; it's just that when people face a weird incident, if it is only of short duration, they soon put it out of mind and don't press for anyone else to investigate, either.

David Corn's story, for example.   (I have also been impressed by stories I have read over the years of guys who woke up while camping to find their tent or cabin flooded with light from above, but with complete and unearthly silence - which of course means it was not likely to be a chopper or pranksters.  The light stays on for a length of time - making a meteor flash unlikely - and then blinks out in an instant.)   But these sort of incidents are not collected by anyone central.  There is no real  life Mulder.   The stories just turn up years later in magazines or on line when people want to tell of a mysterious life event that they never understood. 

So yeah, it's funny, but probably the government never needed to cover up what it knew in terms of sensor evidence for UFOs, or sightings by military people - it could just rely on people seeing something weird, shrugging, and getting on with life.

It's a theory, anyway.

So, so stupid