A careless, dumb, gullible President with a gullible, dumb voter base not interested in facts

I'm waiting for some better analysis of the Trump "Obama tapped me, it's like Watergate" tweets before posting about it in too much detail.   But as far as I can tell so far, what's likely to have happened is this:

*  Trump read a Breitbart article by Pollack,  expanding on a Mark Levin call that Congress should investigate "the Obama administration" for "monitoring" Trump Tower.

*  Trump, apparently (or acting) unaware of previous reporting of leaks that FISC approval for a FISA warrant had been sought and granted in October,  tweets about it as if "the Obama administration" means Obama personally, and at least appears to accept, gullibly, everything in the Breitbart report as being true.  (Such as the line "No evidence is found — but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons..")

*  In fact, in previous leaks, it was said that the FBI sought and obtained the FISA warrant.  Other reports say "The Justice Department and the FBI".  In any event:

a.    The Justice Department is not "Obama";

b.    The fact that the FBI - whose Trump friendly announcement of the nothing burger of a further investigation of Clinton emails should surely be compelling evidence of it not being in the pocket of the Obama administration - was asking for it shows that an independent investigative body thought there was serious evidence making it worth getting the warrant.

*  Nonetheless, Trump, either deliberately, or through his dumb, carefree attitude to facts and a willingness to say anything to shore up his base, claims it was all about Obama, personally, wiretapping "his phones".

*  His dumb, gullible, couldn't care about facts, base, swallows this whole, and are about to go on Sunday rallies to support their dangerous cult leader.

Here's why this is dangerous:

This may well blow over as a case of Trump carelessness and his easy manipulation into making claims by the Right wing media.   (Whether it is also a case of him deliberately manipulating his base - who knows?)   He will be challenged to produce the evidence that Obama was personally involved (and that he managed to sway the FBI to join in) and it will not be there.    He and his Right wing conspiracy mongers - they've been doing this for over 20 years - will just go down muttering that they still think he did it.

But the thing is - when he faces a real life crisis in his administration, say, a serious terror attack, who can possibly trust that he will not take the same careless, fact free lines in his response, and encourage the same to his stupid base, and that this will cause real trouble?

 Update:

Comment by nutty Australian Trump conspiracist noted:

 Update 2:   The American Right has brainwashed itself into believing and promoting conspiracy for nearly a couple of decades now - who can forget that as late as 2015, 43% of Republicans still believed Obama was a secret Muslim;  in 2010-2011, polling showed between 31 to 45% believed he had been born outside of America;   in 2016, Gallop showed Republicans hitting a new high in believing that climate change is happening and is caused by humans - but it's still only around 40% holding that view compared to 85% of Democrats.  (Furthermore, only 20% of Republicans think it will be a problem in their lifetime.)  And let's not bother looking at all the cynical use of Benghazi claims and conspiracy by Republicans, that went no where but are doubtless still believed by their base in large numbers.

It is unhealthy for any society or group of people to be so prone to believing nonsense conspiracies - I've complained before about the unusual degree to which it seems the residents of many Muslim countries will accept conspiracy.

So it is with America (and Australia, for that matter) too - but Trump is exactly the wrong person to lead the country out of the corrosive effect of conspiracy belief, with his attitude that he can say anything, regardless of facts.

Update 3:   Here's the succinct version of my post, from The New Yorker News Desk:

It would seem that Trump, in the same spirit of diversion, has conflated the work of the courts, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies with “Obama.”

That article also gives a good summary of a favourite Trump tactic:

One of President Trump’s most consistent rhetorical maneuvers is a fairly basic but often highly effective one—the diversionary reverse accusation. When he is accused of benefitting from “fake news,” he flips the neologism on its head; suddenly CNN, the Times, and the rest are “fake news.” When Democratic politicians such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi call for investigations of his campaign’s contacts with Russian officials, Trump posts pictures of those critics meeting publicly with Vladimir Putin and calls for an investigation. This happened on Saturday. He fogs the language and clouds the issue.

(Those of my readers who are familiar with CL, who has long commented at Catallaxy, will recognize this as his constant tactic over the years, too.   It's always hard to tell, when people use such an obvious tactic repeatedly, whether they have managed to convince themselves that it's really a convincing response, rather than just a transparent debating trick to show "winning".)

Update 4:    Gary Kasparov sounds very accurate in this series of tweets (read from the bottom up):

And for Jason Soon:  I just noticed this in Kasparov's Wiki entry:

Kasparov collaborated with Max Levchin and Peter Thiel on The Blueprint, a book calling for a revival of world innovation, planned to release in March 2013 from W. W. Norton & Company. The book was never released, as the authors disagreed on its contents.

Update 5:    you could almost feel sympathy for the Trump clean up team; except for the fact that if they had any moral and decent judgement, they would never have taken their jobs in the first place:

Certainly took their time...

‘False prophet’: Duterte, the Catholic Church and the fight for the soul of the Philippines

Making cannabis safer

Nearly a year ago, I made the observation here (see the comments to this post) that it seems odd that, if countries are going to legalise cannabis use, they don't also regulate it to make it safer.   I mean, they do it with alcohol (at least within venues where it is served - and I see some places ban the sale of nearly pure ethanol as an alcoholic beverage); why should another legal drug avoid nearly all regulation as to its content?

It's been well recognized for years that THC content has been increasing, for example:  why not legalise strains with a set upper limit?   Also, it seems reasonably well established CBD can be protective of the brain - why not regulate that the sold product has to have a certain balance between it and THC?

Anyway, my very reasonable suggestion has been endorsed by some researchers in the UK.

They do note that not much is known about what a protective does of CBD might be, and the problem might be (I would guess) how many years of research it may take to be more certain about it.

But I thought its protective effects were established enough to at least know you would be doing no harm to take a stab at mandating a certain content for it.

I expect John will be along to comment on this!

Meet the Russians

I have to say, the "Trump campaign and the Russians" keeps looking  worse for Trump.  You know it's bothering him, too, when he issues a series of tweets that's its all a witch hunt, and the leaks are the real story.   (That's silly - if there is no story, there's no reason for anyone to leak.)

I have never written off the possibility of this hurting Trump in a major way, but it is seeming more and more likely that it will.

And man, aren't Trumpkin/wingnuts struggling with their false equivalence stories about Democrats and meetings with Russians?    But they'll convince themselves of anything - they're so ridiculously partisan they'd convince themselves the Moon is made of cheese if it would help their culture warrior dumbo-in-chief.

Obsessions of conservatives and libertarians

I don't have much doubt that the QUT s18C Racial discrimination case was poorly handled all around, and I have sympathy for the students involved.    So some legislative corrections to how these cases are handled procedurally are at least warranted.

I also get the impression (without looking into it in too much detail) that Gillian Triggs has made mistakes in her defence of the handling of the matter.  But at the same time, her treatment by conservatives in the Coalition, and the intense journalistic and editorial support for them in The Australian, has amounted to a nutty jihad that has lasted years now.   Despite her errors, I think the overwhelming impression the public is left with is that conservatives (and the odd libertarian) in the government, and a newspaper, are absolutely obsessed with her, and seem to think there is still nothing better to do than hound the head of a commission because of perceived slights to them and their journalist pal Andrew Bolt.

I can't really recall anything like this in Australian politics - and the sooner the nutty conservatives in the Coalition split from their parties, the better it would be. 

Gene networks and evolution

An article at BBC - Earth explains the idea.

Not as intriguing an idea as morphic resonance - but more likely to be true...

Nice photos

The Atlantic put up some photos from The Smithsonian 2016 photo contest, and they're all great.

The first one, showing a rugged part of the Isle of Skye, really caught my eye for its alien landscape looks:

So that's what "acting Presidential" is meant to sound like?

Trump raises all sort of questions about just how dumb and credulous voters and pundits can be, but fortunately there is enough liberal pushback against some of the ridiculously over-enthusiastic reception given to Trump's teleprompted* speech to re-assure us the nation isn't completely nuts.

David Frum has a very well argued, moderate take in The Atlantic, and I liked this line in particular:

The purpose of these joint-session speeches is not, actually, to reassure the president’s base that the leader of the country is mentally well.

But he doesn't deal with the most outrageous inconsistency (and most queasily quasi fascist element) of the speech:   Trump's starting with a (belated) condemnation of a hate crime against foreigners for daring to be in America (the Kansas shooting), and then spending much of the speech again telling Americans that the nation is under siege from dangerous foreigners who'll kill you or sell your kids drugs if given half the chance.

The idea of creating an agency specifically for highlighting crimes committed by (undocumented?) immigrants has not, as far as I can see, been condemned as widely as it should.  Here's the Washington Post:

… I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American Victims. The office is called VOICE — Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement. We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests.

This proposal, introduced in a memo from Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, has received a lot of negative feedback. (When Trump mentioned it, Democrats groaned.) One issue is that there are negative historical echoes to isolating criminal behavior by one group of people. As the Atlantic notes, the Ministry of Justice in 1930s Germany collected and publicized reports of Jewish criminal activity.

I reckon all the immigrant and "terrorism within our borders" talk has the grubby fingerprints of Bannon all over it.   And ss EJ Dionne Jnr writes in the Washington Post,  in his piece entitled "Trump Still Wants You to be Very, Very Afraid":

And his call to create an office in the Department of Homeland Security called VOICE (“Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement”) was a demagogic propaganda effort to suggest that immigrants are especially prone to committing acts of violence when, in fact, they are not.

No Trump speech is complete without a reference to Chicago’s murder rate, which he mentions constantly because the national crime statistics don’t bear out his implication that the nation is more unsafe than ever.

And Trump wants Americans to be very, very afraid of the threat of terrorism by way of rationalizing his unjustifiable policies barring refugees from a selected group of majority-Muslim countries. “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside of America,” he declared. For good measure, he added: “We cannot allow our nation to become a sanctuary for extremists.” I bet his speechwriters were proud of those scary phrases, “a beachhead of terrorism” and “a sanctuary for extremists.” That’s the way to get people really alarmed.

Update:  Krugman is scathing of the pundit response, as usual:

The big news from last night’s speech is that our pundits is not learning. After all the debacles of 2016, they swooned over the fact that Trump — while still lying time after time and proposing truly vile initiatives — was able to read from a teleprompter without breaking into an insane rant. If American democracy falls, supposed political analysts who are actually just bad theater critics will share part of the blame.

The subsequent point he explains, about how coal jobs left decades ago, and are simply not going to come back, is well made.

Update 2:  William Saletan, at Slate, once again makes the comparison between George W Bush and Trump, and the contrast between the first speeches both gave to Congress is incredibly stark:

“America has never been united by blood or birth or soil,” Bush declared in his 2001 inaugural address. “We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. Every child must be taught these principles. Every citizen must uphold them. And every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American.” In his first speech to Congress—delivered almost exactly 16 years ago on Feb. 27, 2001—Bush told Americans: “We all came here for a reason. … Juntos podemos. Together, we can.” He called on Congress to make America not just wealthy, but “generous and just.”

As president, Bush failed to fulfill those aspirations. But Trump doesn’t even acknowledge them: In his remarks Tuesday night, Trump spoke not of generosity, justice, or ideals but of blood, birth, background, and soil. “We are one people, with one destiny,” he proclaimed. “We all bleed the same blood. We all salute the same great American flag.” A fascist leader could have uttered the same words. In place of Bush’s plea to welcome immigrants, Trump said refugees should “return home.”

*  Apparently, Presidents using teleprompts is OK now in Wingnut land.

 

Ho hum

I'm a bit busy, and the news feels strangely boring today. 

Well, at least you can read more about the tensions within the Catholic Church here.  While the author is on the conservative side, the picture he paints seems relatively accurate.

The Mormons deal with this sort of issue, if I understand them correctly, just by having its leader declare that God's passed on the message to him that the Church has been wrong for the last 100 years.   Easy peasy.  The Catholic Church instead has tied itself into knots about how it has never been truly wrong, making change that much harder.

That's my simplified version of the current problem!

A radiation spike

Well, I didn't know planes were sent to sniff out radiation spikes to see if they can tell where they're from.  Currently one may be sniffing around Europe.

Interesting post at Atlas Obscura...

Yet another "bad father" story

Just when you think you might have heard every gobsmacking story about what a terrible father Evelyn Waugh could be, out comes another book with another one:

In 1958, while on military training in Cyprus, Auberon Waugh accidentally shot himself in the chest with a machine gun. He was nineteen. Over the next ten days he fought for his life, having lost a lung, two ribs, part of his hand and his spleen. His mother Laura flew out immediately to be by his side. His father, Evelyn, preferred to remain at home. “I shall go out to travel home with Laura if he dies”, Waugh wrote detachedly to his friend Lady Diana Cooper. In the event, this was unnecessary; Auberon was brought back to England and installed at the Queen Alexandra Military hospital. Even so, it was a further week before Waugh managed to go and visit his son. By this point, Auberon had developed a chest infection due to a back abscess and again feared that death was near. “Dear Papa”, wrote Auberon on what he thought would be his deathbed. “Just a line to tell you what for some reason I was never able to show you in my lifetime, that I admire, revere and love you more than any man in the world.” The next month, with Auberon still too ill to be operated on, Waugh stopped his allowance of £25 a month. Auberon wept “bitter tears of rage”.

A few minor Oscar observations

*  Jimmy Kimmel was likeable enough as a host.  I'm not sure why they let TV hosts put their same segments from their TV show on the Oscars, though.

*  Meryl Streep seems to have plateaued in the ageing process.  I think she has looked the same for the last 15 years.  Nicole Kidman, on the other hand, seems to be going backwards in age.  Much "work" involved, I suspect.

*  Shirley McLaine, to her credit, seems to spend little or no money on face work;  she's 82 and still pretty funny, if somewhat loopy.

*  Steven Spielberg not spotted in the audience, for once.  :(

 

Corporate tax cuts aren't magic

Found via Axios, Stephen Roach with an argument against the Trumpian take on corporations and tax:

Corporate tax cuts are coming in the United States. While this push pre-dates last November’s presidential election, President Donald Trump’s Make-America-Great-Again mantra has sealed the deal. Beleaguered US businesses, goes the argument, are being squeezed by confiscatory taxes and onerous regulations – strangling corporate earnings and putting unrelenting pressure on capital spending, job creation, and productivity, while sapping America’s competitive vitality. Apparently, the time has come to give businesses a break.

But this argument raises an obvious question: If the problem is so simple, why hasn’t this fix already been tried? The answer is surprising. 

For starters, it is a real stretch to bemoan the state of corporate earnings in the US. Commerce Department statistics show that after-tax corporate profits (technically, after-tax profits from current production, adjusted for inventory and depreciation-accounting distortions) stood at a solid 9.7% of national income in the third quarter of 2016.

While that is down from the 11% peak hit in 2012 – owing to tepid economic growth, which typically puts pressure on profit margins – it hardly attests to a chronic earnings problem. Far from anemic, the current GDP share of after-tax profits is well above the post-1980 average of 7.6%.

Trends in corporate taxes, which stood at just 3.5% of national income in the third quarter of 2016, support a similar verdict. Yes, the figure is higher than the post-2000 level of 3% (which represents the lowest 15-year average tax burden for corporate America since the 2.9% reading in the mid-1990s); but it is well below the 5.2% average share recorded during the boom years of the post-World War II era, from 1950 to 1969. In other words, while there may be reason to criticize the structure and complexities of the US corporate tax burden, there is little to suggest that overall corporate taxes are excessive. 

Conversely, the share of national income going to labor has been declining. In the third quarter of 2016, worker compensation – wages, salaries, fringe benefits, and other so-called supplements such as social security, pension contributions, and medical benefits – stood at 62.6% of national income. While that represents a bit of a rebound from the 61.2% low recorded in the 2012-2014 period, it is two percentage points below the post-1980 average of 64.6%. In other words, the pendulum of economic returns has swung decisively away from labor toward owners of capital – not exactly a compelling argument in favor of relief for purportedly hard-pressed American businesses.

Update:  and on the Australian scene, Greg Jericho sums up the Grattan Institute's report that lowering the corporate tax rate is going to hurt the budget bottom line significantly, with any expected benefits taking too long to arrive to avoid that.  

Sounds quite plausible to me.  

More than neurons

Ed Yong has stopped writing his blog, but here he is at The Atlantic, with a good article about some neuroscientists getting sick of the approach of other neuroscientists.  A sample:

John Krakaeur, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has been asked to BRAIN Initiative meetings before, and describes it like “Maleficent being invited to Sleeping Beauty’s birthday.” That’s because he and four like-minded friends have become increasingly disenchanted by their colleagues’ obsession with their toys. And in a new paper that’s part philosophical treatise and part shot across the bow, they argue that this technological fetish is leading the field astray. “People think technology + big data + machine learning = science,” says Krakauer. “And it’s not.”

He and his fellow curmudgeons argue that brains are special because of the behavior they create—everything from a predator’s pounce to a baby’s cry. But the study of such behavior is being de-prioritized, or studied “almost as an afterthought.” Instead, neuroscientists have been focusing on using their new tools to study individual neurons, or networks of neurons. According to Krakauer, the unspoken assumption is that if we collect enough data about the parts, the workings of the whole will become clear. If we fully understand the molecules that dance across a synapse, or the electrical pulses that zoom along a neuron, or the web of connections formed by many neurons, we will eventually solve the mysteries of learning, memory, emotion, and more. “The fallacy is that more of the same kind of work in the infinitely postponed future will transform into knowing why that mother’s crying or why I’m feeling this way,” says Krakauer. And, as he and his colleagues argue, it will not.That’s because behavior is an emergent property—it arises from large groups of neurons working together, and isn’t apparent from studying any single one.

Oscars for movies barely seen

Given the odd backlash against La La Land, and the hosting by Jimmy Kimmel, I was curious to watch the Oscars this year.  (I think we have last year's show recorded on a hard drive, but I haven't watched it.)

Now that I know the results in the "sorry about that mistake, La La fans" climax, I have to make the observation, as many others no doubt will too, that the Best Picture Oscar for years now seems to go to critical favourites which have next to no appeal to a wide audience.

Moonlight might be fine film, but how much appeal can an episodic  film about an American black man coming to terms with being gay and living in crime affected Miami hold for a wider audience?  I see that the movie has made $22 million in the US - that's good for an arthouse flick, but it's not a lot of tickets.

Seems to me that the last, broadly popular, movie that won Best Picture was The King's Speech in 2010.  (In 2012, Argo did a respectable enough $136 million in the US, but only made $96 million overseas.  King's Speech made $414 million globally.)

Shockingly, I see that the 2009 winner, The Hurt Locker, made only $17 million in the US.  That's tiny.  Even The Artiste from 2011, which I would have guessed was the biggest Best Picture Box Office bomb, made $45 million in the US and $133 million globally. 

Getting an Oscar might be nice, but producers must surely prefer the cash of an actually popular movie...

Depressing stories for a Monday

*  Bill Paxton's unexpected death:  seems that his likeability on screen was matched in his personal life. 

*  Slate has a lengthy article on horrendous, ethics free, medical experiments by US doctors in Guartemala post World War 2. 

*   Did you notice the story from a couple of weeks back that ocean oxygen levels are dropping, due to warming oceans?  No, well, it's all in accordance with predictions, apparently, and is another reason that techno optimists who think everything will be OK if we just make everyone rich enough to get enough airconditioning are wrong. 

Past influences

The Trump presidency is too depressing to watch everything on TV about him, but the one hour doco Meet the Trumps on SBS earlier this week was pretty good.  It's still up on SBS on Demand, I think.

It wasn't overly detailed, but just hit some of the key points of his life.  (One thing I haven't heard, though, is why he is a teetotaller.  Sure, his brother died an alcoholic, but it seems rare to find such an extrovert refraining from even alcohol.)

Anyway, the main thing I wanted to comment on was his early career dealing with Roy Cohn, the infamously unpopular lawyer who I actually didn't know much about until I watched that "Angels in America" play on TV some years ago.  (We all have gaps in our knowledge.)

I'm not sure who it was on Meet the Trumps who was denouncing Cohn, but he had met him and could not stress enough what an absolutely appalling, dislikeable man he found him to be.  Which I thought was interesting - the portrait of him in Angels seems not to have been overblown at all.

Anyway, here's an article in The Guardian about Cohn being a (sort of) mentor to Trump.

Witches -V- Trump

So, a bunch of witches are planning on a Trump attack.   Instructions to join in are available on line.

Well, as much as I'd like it to work, it has been tried before.  I didn't realise Life magazine ran a story on it in 1941, though. 

True, the attempted supernatural attacks didn't cause Hitler to curl up and die.  But he was pretty sick for most of the war.    Even if the witches can only cause Trump to have chronic farting, like Hitler, I think it's worth a go...

Happy anniversary, movable type

A businessman intent on making money in a world dominated by the Catholic Church, Johannes Gutenberg created, instead, a revolution – and sowed the seeds for many more.

February 23, 1455 has been cited as the date Mr. Gutenberg began to print the first edition of his eponymous Bible. The idea for the printing blocks came from Asia, where the Chinese had invented a printing technique almost a millennium before. His ink was a concoction that blended traditional ink with oil, helping it flow and transfer from printing blocks to paper. The press itself, meanwhile, was the type of screw press familiar to farmers across the continent, more commonly used for pressing olives or grapes.

To this motley assortment of preexisting ideas, Gutenberg added an important innovation: movable type, the first in the Western world. He drew on the skills he had acquired growing up in a family of skilled craftsmen to produce letter molds from a metal alloy. The molds were durable, and could withstand hundreds of printings. Arranging and rearranging these letters in a type tray, he produced pages from the Bible and began to run off copies, far faster than previous scribes or publishers could do by hand or using full-page blocks of type.

He died broke, though.  Link.

Nuttier than I thought

I think Steve Bannon sounds nuttier than ever in his "WE WERE VICTORIOUS AND YOU BE WILL CRUSHED UNDER OUR HEEL" (I think that's a fair summary) comments at CPAC.

Yes, makes me so confident to see someone like him with the ear of the President of the USA.

I did find this video amusing, though.