Still would have been 10 times better than this president, even if he napped 3 hours each day

I note that the headline on an NPR article about a new book on the last Presidential election has this headline:

Biden's closest advisers were in 'denial' about his decline, 'Uncharted' author says

But in the body of the interview, the author seems to make the case that the decline was in stamina only, and nothing to do with mental ability when sufficiently rested: 

As the 2024 campaign kicked into gear, the president couldn't hide from public scrutiny, Whipple says. He notes that in the days leading up to his disastrous debate with President Trump, Biden "was in a terrible state."

"He was absolutely exhausted. He was unable really to follow what was happening in the campaign. He was tuned out," Whipple says. "Early on, he walked out of a [debate preparation] session in the Aspen Lodge, the president's cabin, went over to the pool, sank into a lounge chair, and just fell sound asleep." 

OK, but then further down:

        On why Biden's staffers believed he could still govern

I think that this is much more interesting and not nearly as simple as the notion of a cover-up. In other words, I am convinced that Joe Biden's inner circle was convinced that Joe Biden was capable of governing, and they believed that he could do it for another four years. And we can't dismiss the fact that Biden on the very last day, July 21st, that Sunday when his aides came to hammer out his abdication statement, Joe Biden was on the phone parsing the details of a complex multi-nation prisoner swap. He was on top of every detail.  

People who visited Biden in the Oval Office to talk about the Middle East said he was on top of every nuance of Middle Eastern policy. ... Joe Biden, behind closed doors, was governing, capably, whether you liked his policies or not. So there's no question that he was a shadow of the campaigner that he once was, and that was true from 2020 all the way to the end. But, you can't dismiss the fact — it's an inconvenient fact for people who say it was a cover-up — that Biden was capable.

In mildly encouraging and distracting news

*  I still think, after viewing the extended sneak peek on Youtube, that the new Superman film does look good.  It's weird, but so many people in comments on Youtube agree that it literally "looks great" - meaning the colours and CGI and cinematography overall.    And there's a dog, of course.  It's funny how some trailers can really still hit the spot and make a film look like it will definitely be a hit - I felt the same about the one for Everything Everywhere All at Once.  

*  I see that Spielberg is now actually directing his first film in years, and it's a science fiction one something to do with UFOs.   Cool.   

*  There is also a new Wes Anderson film coming out.  And again, it is in his highly, highly idiocentric and stylised, um, style, which makes the recent films play more like dryly and ironically amusing comic books than anything reflecting the real world.   In fact, I reckon people now feel that his refusal to back down from this signature style has become something of a meta-joke in itself.   As for me:  I do think his "miss" rate has been getting higher (I didn't think much of Asteroid City, although I was watching on an jet and had interruptions), but I still am happy to try out each new one to see just how amused I am.  I don't know why, but there is something pleasing about his persistent self indulgence, perhaps because you have a sense of how much he likely enjoys creating it?  

*  On politics:   I am encouraged about the Labor policy to subsidise more home battery power.  As I said a while ago - why aren't they (and solar panels, and solar hot water) a requirement on all new house builds under State construction codes?  Maybe not worth it in Tasmania, but definitely for most of the country.

Can you ever really trust rich people?

Sure, there are some around who tread carefully, sound socially responsible and don't go nuts.  

But - Elon Musk, obviously.

And now, I'm wondering about this Scott Bessent, (worth about half a billion, apparently) who I knew nothing about until this tariff meltdown.

I mean, Wikipedia indicates that he used to have decent Democrat supporting credentials (originally worked for Soros, supported by donations Gore, Hilary Clinton and Obama.)  Now he works for Trump.

Despite rumours (JC at New Catallaxy referenced them, but I think I have seen it said online too) that he's privately freaking out about how Trump has dealt with his tariff scheme, there is no indication of that at all in his public appearances - he went on Tucker Carlson to defend the whole scheme, talking about the need for a complete recreation of American trade, etc.   And look at the reference to him in this article from WAPO, about how the MAGA Right has gone all Maoist:

Recently, a viral meme in MAGA circles captured the moment, featuring a cartoon Trump addressing a faceless American: “Your great grandfather worked the mines, your grandfather worked in a steel plant, and you thought you could be a ‘product manager’ ???” It’s a joke, but it’s also a worldview — one where white-collar ambition is seen not as a step forward, but as a fall into decadence. The meme doesn’t just mock digital work; it exalts physical labor as the only authentic form of contribution. 

What we’re seeing is a kind of MAGA Maoism, remixed for the algorithm age. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed “wokeness” of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, “Men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.”

This style, what some might call online pastoralism, is no longer fringe. It is a governing strategy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently hinted to Tucker Carlson that the administration plans to restock America’s factories with recently fired federal workers. It’s a sharp evolution of the old MAGA line, which claimed elites abandoned the working class by offshoring jobs and hoarding the degrees that powered the new economy. Now, those same college-educated liberals once seen as the future of work are being recast as its obstacle.

This new turn is also punitive: It challenges the idea drilled into millennial and Gen Z brains — especially immigrant families, like my own — that education and meritocracy are the path to the American Dream. It says not only that you were left behind, but that you were wrong to try to get ahead. Populists used to share memes about miners who were condescendingly told to “learn to code” while their towns struggled. The coders, in this updated version, need to be thrown back in the mines.

I don't trust him in the slightest.  

Quite a few stories of note here...

Today's New York Times:

 

A ridiculous situation

More reason to never use Tik Tok

‘Profiting from misery’: how TikTok makes money from child begging livestreams

Exploitation fears as people in extreme poverty perform stunts and beg for virtual gifts

My daughter has said that she is very close to deleting Tik Tok off her phone because she fully recognises the way it saps attention span and wastes time.  I must ask her if she has done it yet...

 

Yay, Krugman talks

Paul Krugman is back in a de facto way at the New York Times, talking to Ezra Klein about tariffs and Trump and national security and all sorts of good things.  

The whole thing is worth reading, but I will extract some of it:

I think most people thought it was going to be some kind of across-the-board tariff — same on everybody. Or maybe two or three different types of tariffs.

Instead, he announced this whole complicated, different tariff for every country, at levels much higher than the smart money — or the money that thought it was smart — was betting. Something like a 23 percent average tariff now, which is huge. It’s higher than U.S. tariffs were after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was passed. And trade is a much bigger part of the economy now than it was in 1930. So this is the biggest trade shock in history.

And:

There’s a funny thing here, which is that ordinarily I would say that while tariffs are bad, they don’t cause recessions. It makes the economy less efficient. You turn to higher-cost domestic sources for stuff, instead of lower-cost foreign sources, and foreigners turn away from the stuff you can produce cheaply. But that’s a reduction in the economy’s efficiency, not a shortfall in demand.

What’s unique about this situation is that the protectionism is unpredictable and unstable. And it’s that uncertainty that is the recessionary force.

If you were a manufacturing company in the United States and your next investment is going to be, let’s say, a components plant or something — well, should you put that components plant in Mexico, where it’s cheaper? Not if there’s a 25 percent tariff. But should you put it in the United States, where it’s more expensive? What if the tariff comes off?

So either way, you run substantial risk of just having stranded investments. And that’s happening across the board. So this is the instability of policy. The fact that nobody knows what’s coming next makes a recession certainly a whole lot more likely.

And:

If you were asking what a national security oriented industrial policy that tries to keep production of strategically important stuff in the United States looks like, it looks like the CHIPS Act. It looks like what the Biden people were trying to do. Probably bigger than that — in an ideal world, we’d be doing substantially more. But that’s how you do it.

Putting high tariffs on imports of clothing from Bangladesh is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing. That’s the kind of thing that is disruptive, raises the cost of living for American consumers, does nothing to make us more secure.

There is a national security rationale for domestic production, but also for friendshoring and for nearshoring, because the stuff that’s close by is a lot easier to secure. If that’s what we were wanting to do, then we would not be levying tariffs on Vietnam and Bangladesh, and we would certainly not be putting tariffs on Canada and Mexico.

And this bit by Klein makes a lot of sense to me (it's in bold because that is how Klein's voice appears in the transcript):

 When I try to dive into MAGA world’s thinking here, something that I tend to hear is a somewhat contradictory or troubled relationship to American power.

On the one hand, they want America to be stronger, more feared, more dominant. And on the other hand, there’s a broad view that we have overextended ourselves.

Financially, we’ve made the dollar the reserve currency. We’ve allowed all these other countries to buy our assets and buy our money even as our industrial base flowed out.

And then on the military side, we have these bases all over the world, we have all these troops in Europe, we’re part of NATO, we’re spending more as a percentage of gross national product than some of these other countries. But this is part of why we can no longer take care of our people.

And so there’s this feeling: Well, for America to be stronger, it can’t be operating this global umbrella of financial and military protection.

But then you ask: Well, do you want the dollar to not be the reserve currency? And they say: No, no, no, no. We definitely want to keep it the reserve currency.

If you ask: Do you want America’s military to be weak? Do you want people to not be tied to us in the way they are now? They say: No, we actually want more leverage over them.

There’s something here that I think is very strange and very unresolved in this movement that wants both more dominance and somehow, at the same time, to pull back from the actual architecture of that dominance and leverage.

Krugman's reply was something that I was recently saying to an overseas friend who is generally very anti-American: 

We have been a kind of imperial power. Some people say more than kind of — we’ve been an imperial power, in many ways, since the end of World War II.

But it’s not like any previous empire. The Pax Americana starts with the Marshall Plan.

Instead of plundering our defeated enemies, we rebuilt them. And then we built a system of alliances: We have NATO. We have international economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund, which do actually kind of reflect U.S. interests, but at least on paper, we’re at most first among equals. So we are a polite, low-key, relatively generous imperial power.

That is a very hard role for many people to understand.

I'm sure that Krugman would, if asked, agree that there has also been a lot of awful direct foreign interference in the post war period; but America's role in re-building defeated countries after their destruction is no doubt the explanation for its continuing popularity (until now!) with much of the free world. 

 

Re the "accord"

When I first heard the "Mar a Lago accord" I thought it might be another conspiracy theory, perhaps this time of the Left.   But now I know it is a pet theory of someone in Trump's ear, and it looks like we have to put up with the chaos that happens when you have a dumb narcissist as leader who other people want to manipulate.  

Here are two articles on the idea that are worth reading:

Unpacking the Mar-a-Lago Accord 

After tariff shock, Trump may weaponise finance against allies

As any commentary points out - the idea that countries will trust the US under Trump so much that they will co-operate in devaluing their own currency seems wildly implausible when everything he has done and said indicates that he is completely untrustworthy.

A bit late, but some of the best BlueSky content this week...

Better take more ketamine...

I never actually understood why getting a conservative state Supreme Court in Wisconsin entrenched for some years was supposed to be so important anyway, but if Elon doesn't get the message that his personal brand is poison at the moment after spending millions on this pointless exercise, he'll never learn.

MADISON, Wis. — A liberal candidate for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court glided to victory Tuesday, overcoming a flood of political cash from tech billionaire Elon Musk in a race seen as a referendum on him and President Donald Trump.

The Associated Press called the race a little over an hour after the polls closed.

Musk and groups affiliated with him invested more than $20 million in the race. The top Trump adviser and leader of Tesla and SpaceX handed out cash prizes to generate interest in the race. At a rally Sunday in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he cast the election as one that could chart the course of Western civilization because of what it could mean for Trump’s agenda.

But Musk’s spending and hyperbolic framing weren’t enough to win the most expensive court race in U.S. history. The contest cost more than $100 million, nearly doubling the past record and putting it in line with top Senate races.

 

The "authentic self" discussed

I've only recently found Joe Folley's philosophy Youtube channel, but I'm liking what I've watched so far.

This video, about the modern idea prevalent in self help advice, of the importance of "finding" and living in accordance with your "authentic self" is pretty good and expresses scepticism I have long had with the whole approach:

 

I would have liked it to reference Aristotelian virtue ethics more, and also perhaps make more of a connection to the whole free will debate as well, but it's a good start!

It also reminded me about how long "acting authentically" has been in the psychological parlance.  I remember a snippet of a conversation with a priest in my teenage years who was leaving the priesthood, and I am sure that he said that the reason was that he found too many people in the church were not living "authentically."   I think he was into a particular series of Catholic pop psychology books at the time, the name and author of which I now forget, because I never found them very convincing or helpful.   And, who knows?, given that we are talking of the 1970's and the post sexual revolution period, he may have been making a coded reference to either him or other priests being gay (or straight) and living out a secret sex life.   Anyway, I didn't quite know what the term was meant to cover then, and didn't care for the looseness of meaning, and haven't shaken that feeling for 50 odd years!

Update:  I also am often reminded of CS Lewis's book Til We Have Faces whenever this issue comes to my attention.  

 

Unhappy with algorithms

I've noticed that the Youtube algorithm seems to refuse to notify me in the "recommended" category about lots of new videos by people I follow.

Also, it's very hard, it seems, to get Bluesky to show me all new posts by people I follow, even if I am using the "following" tab/feed.

I mean, I did manage to get Bluesky to recognise I was not interested in digital art and amateur anime drawing.   But in the Discover tab, it insists of showing every single post by a handful of people who I do follow, instead of just some of them, meaning that there is not that much space to "discover" anything.

I guess, in other words, the issue I have with Bluesky is the opposite of that with Youtube.

I only just realised that by making this post.  See - writing things down helps.

Why have I lost interest in Australian politics?

Yeah, ever since the Albanese election win I just haven't found Australian politics all that interesting.  Sure, I thought the controversy around the Voice referendum was worth commenting on, and worried that Labor was losing support due to the priority it gave that as an issue;  but since then, federal politics has seemed a bit of a bore to me.

It is interesting, though, that now that everything about indigenous policy has gone quiet, I get the feeling that a combination of the complete charmlessness of Peter Dutton and the malevolent craziness of Right wing politics on full display in the USA have enhanced Albanese's chances quite strongly. 

Everyone seems to think that the moderate independents are going to do well, and the Greens should go backwards.   I would be happy with the latter result - I just find that the people the Greens seems to attract as politicians here are also unappealing and way too ideological to know how to get the things they want done.

Today's trivia post - I have a problem with ravioli

Of course I couldn't be bothered making my own ravioli, and I imagine that like the majority of the population, my main exposure to it is via the pre-made stuff from the refrigerator in the supermarket, which can make for a quick meal.

But my beef (ha, a slight pun):  the filling never lives up to the description.  It doesn't matter what it's alleged to be on the packet, the filling is always a disappointment:  pasty, and with the slightest of flavour.  The only reason to eat ravioli at all is if there is a decent sauce on the outside.

I've also been unimpressed with the filling at a restaurant.   

It's just the least impressive way to eat pasta, and I think someone enterprising should do a lab test on things like alleged beef filling, because I would not be at all surprised if the protein content is hard to discern.   Then sue them.

Ravioli justice for all...

Appropriate

Dad is almost certainly your Dad (although results may vary)

Interesting free article up at Science:

How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers? 

Tackling a touchy subject, genetic detective finds only 1% of European children have unexpected paternity 

It notes that earlier, much higher, estimates for Western societies were just guesswork:

In the absence of reliable numbers, scientists speculated. In his 1991 book The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, biologist Jared Diamond claimed the adultery rate among humans was between 5% and 30%. In a widely cited 1997 paper, University of Reading evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel argued EPP was so common in humans that babies evolved to be indistinguishable at birth, concealing their true paternity as a protective mechanism.

Eventually, a consensus emerged, based mostly on back-of-the-envelope calculations from early genetic paternity testing. In an article in The Lancet published the same year as Diamond’s book, researchers reported the idea that 10% of children were the product of a clandestine affair, but complained there were no solid data to either confirm or disprove the figure. Nonetheless, it continued to be repeated by journalists and researchers. Eventually it took on a life of its own. 

But the new type of research seems to confirm that this was an overestimate:

Subsequent studies elsewhere in Europe by Larmuseau and others came up with essentially the same results: In European societies since at least the Middle Ages, the likelihood a child’s recorded father wasn’t the genetic father was vanishingly small—typically 1%, or less.

But, there are those societies still where things are very different:

The obsession with genetic paternity isn’t universal. South American tribes such as the Yanomami believe multiple men can contribute to a child’s paternity by having sex with the same woman. Among the Nyimba of Nepal, women traditionally have multiple husbands—all of whom are expected to act as fathers to all of their spouse’s children. “There are lots of examples that counter this stereotype of wily women versus bamboozled men,” says Brooke Scelza, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

One of the best documented is found among the Himba people of Namibia. When Scelza first visited Himba villages 15 years ago, she was surprised by how openly women discussed children fathered with partners outside of marriage. “It ran against so much of what we as evolutionary biologists think,” she says. “This looked really different from what Maarten Larmuseau and other people were finding in Europe.”

Intrigued, Scelza worked with the community to conduct anonymized paternity testing. The results showed the EPP rate among the Himba was 48%. Fathers were usually aware of which children were theirs biologically, while simultaneously considering themselves the social and legal fathers of all their wives’ children. “It’s not that they’re being duped—these men still really consider themselves the social fathers, even if they’re not the biological fathers,” Scelza says. “It really shows the importance of getting this kind of data from other regions.”

Another busy, busy week

I wish I could get back to posting more often here, but many distractions continue.

I am dropping in to make a couple of not very important comments:

*    I am finding the situation in the US so obviously dangerously dire that I am starting to have a bit of a  problem with satire and comedy based on it.   I still watch clips of the Daily Show, and some of Colbert, but it is starting to make me uncomfortable that the use of comedy underplays the seriousness in an inappropriate way.

I also feel this about Planet America, which is primarily serious commentary and criticism, but the side comedy bits now feel too trite for what was just discussed.  (I did criticise them in the lead up to the election too, for not emphasising how nuts and ridiculous Trump's campaign claims were - pretty much "normalising" that a politician could now say anything regardless of connection to reality and not be called out for it.  Of course, the whole MSM had the same issue.)   

Maybe you could argue that late night comedy, and even ridiculous shows like Laugh In,  survived the turbulent 60's and 70's, so I shouldn't expect comedy TV to stop now.   But I think the show of those decades got through by largely ignoring the national politics and dire situations as the Vietnam War.  That is, of course, not what topical comedy in the US does any more.

*   Even though I think 1984 was a well intentioned but poorly executed book, and would love to find an online connection with someone I consider smart who shares this opinion, I continue to have a vague interest in George Orwell because he was a pretty odd character, and (who knows?) his essays and other books of reportage might convince he could write well, if ever I get around to reading them.

Hence I was interested to read an interview with his adopted son, now 80, who is happy to say plenty of nice things about his late Dad, yet it takes quite a long way into the article to get to the somewhat significant point that Richard (the son) was only 5 years old when his Dad passed away.

I mean - really - how seriously am I meant to take his memories of the period on the remote island of Jura where he Dad went to write 1984?    

And on a happier note - I see that Reddit does have threads by people arguing that 1984 is not a good book.  I wonder if I had looked there before?

*  Speaking of books - here's a decent article at The Guardian about the way self publishing has allowed for a ridiculous number of books to be available each year:

The complaint that there are too many books is not a new one. “My son, be warned by them: of making many books there is no end,” reads one line in Ecclesiastes, written at least 2,000 years before the invention of the printing press.

Now the bestselling author Bill Bryson has added his voice to the millennia-old chorus. There are 200,000 books published annually in the UK alone, “more books than you could possibly read,” the writer of Notes from a Small Island told the Times. He is not sure that the growth in self-publishing, in particular, is “a healthy development”. He said he gets sent “a lot of self-published books, and most of the time it is just some anonymous person’s life, and it is of no interest.”

Bryson is not wrong that self-publishing has contributed significantly to book slop mountain. More than 2.6 million books were self-published in 2023 – many of which are uploaded to the dominant platform, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing – and they can’t all be masterpieces.

The article goes on to explain that self publishing has worked for some - but the success rate is extremely small, of course.   Still, I am not immune from the idea that I might have one story in me that could work as a novel - or more likely, film - it's just that I don't have the confidence that I could execute it.

Saudi Arabia stays high on my list of countries best avoided

The New York Times will no doubt be displeasing the Saudi royal family, and via that route, Donald Trump, with this detailed story about the remarkable number of East African workers who keep dying there:

Lured by company recruiters and encouraged by Kenya’s government, the women have reason for optimism. Spend two years in Saudi Arabia as a housekeeper or nanny, the pitch goes, and you can earn enough to build a house, educate your children and save for the future.

While the departure terminal hums with anticipation, the arrivals area is where hope meets grim reality. Hollow-cheeked women return, often ground down by unpaid wages, beatings, starvation and sexual assault. Some are broke. Others are in coffins.

At least 274 Kenyan workers, mostly women, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years — an extraordinary figure for a young work force doing jobs that, in most countries, are considered extremely safe. At least 55 Kenyan workers died last year, twice as many as the previous year.

 

That's interesting...

Sometimes, you end up watching new stuff on Youtube and learn things that are good to know, even if they might never affect you.

For example, I've never been particularly drawn to reading Dostoevsky, and The Brothers Karamazov in particular, but now I know (from watching a guy talking about one star online reviews of classic books) that the very common reaction for modern readers of Karamazov is that nothing happens for the first 300 or so pages.    (It's a lot of talking, setting up the different brothers' views and philosophies, apparently.)

I also didn't realise that no one accuses him of writing particularly realistic characters - they are all somewhat over-the-top in a theatrical kind of way.  Again, apparently. 

I also enjoyed a video from Business Insider making the case that I always suspected was true:  that 5G networking was massively oversold and may never be as significant as they claimed.

Meanwhile, what's the latest stupid thing Musk did:

Early on Friday, Elon Musk shared a post written by an X user about the actions of three 20th century dictators — then quickly deleted it after it sparked a backlash.

The post falsely claimed that Joseph Stalin, the communist leader of the Soviet Union until 1953; Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party in Germany; and Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, didn’t cause the deaths of millions of people under their watch. Instead, the post said, their public sector workers did.

Mr. Musk shared the post without any other comment. He removed it soon after users on X criticized the post, saying it was antisemitic and dismissive of genocide. Historians have widely chronicled that millions of people died under Stalin, that millions of Jews were massacred under Hitler during the Holocaust, and that millions of Chinese were displaced or killed during Mao’s cultural revolution.

 Bizarrely, that post that he deleted sounds like an argument for the exact opposite of what Trump wants - an independent public service that won't follow the appalling orders of the leader if they are immoral and/or illegal.

The state of US politics, part 2