As I mentioned yesterday: Trump supporters are the dumbest people on the planet

And this:

And this:

And this:

That Lahren person is a Fox News host, apparently.   I find it absolutely hilarious when blond conservative women act as if they find Don Trump's version of masculinity attractive, and even funnier when misogynistic men make it clear they admire Trump for having had sex with lots of women, while sympathising with his whiny "everyone is mean to me in the Fake News and Deep State" act.   

In little noticed climate change news...

A rather unlikely allegation

Sinclair Davidson seems very excited by the prospect that a claim by an Italian newspaper that a (now) ex-Cardinal transferred more than a million dollars to Australia for the purposes of paying off witnesses (or just one witness?) to give evidence against his internal enemy Pell might be true.

Yet even some of his culture war brainwashed and dumbed down by "conservative" media followers are wondering how it would be done, exactly.  

Because, yeah - bribing witnesses from afar is more than likely going to involve quite a few people in a chain, with all of them aware of how sensationally corrupt and damaging to them and the Church such a bribe would be.  And we're not talking, say, life-long mafia members who have always lived off corruption, either.  There would, it would be virtually guaranteed, be people involved who were formerly at no risk of ever being convicted of a crime who would have to have decided that it was worth the risk because they really, really dislike Pell.  (Or who were willing to take a piece of the money along the way - but again, if you're not routinely corrupt, you don't usually turn corrupt overnight.)

I therefore strongly suspect the allegation will come to nothing (or nothing serious.)   As I have said before, Sinclair's excitability factor over dubious claims means any barrister should always reject him during jury selection.   

PS:  it is true that a Cardinal getting sacked is a rare event; but there has been suspicion of financial corruption around this one for years, it seems.

Just your average personality based death cult

You know what I'm talking about:

There is much speculation that this (and his series of ALL CAPITALS tweets yesterday) are due to a steroid high - but of course, there is no way Trump will ever admit that, even if true.

The other obvious things out of this whole episode:

*   how do so many dishonest, dubious quality doctors find their way into being his personal physician, or in important roles?   Do they find him, or he find them, so to speak?

*   there is a strong and not unreasonable suspicion that Trump may have had a positive test before the debate [update:  perhaps more likely, was already infected and contagious, even if he didn't have a positive test].  Surely the exact timing of his testing regime last week will leak soon if it is indeed true.

*   Trump's reaction is readily explained by chronic narcissistic personality disorder:   because he might be over the worst, and because he had it, he thinks he is now the most knowledgeable person around on the topic, and that if he can beat it, people shouldn't fear it.    Watching such poisonous and policy dangerous narcissism should, by any normal person's standards, be stomach churning.  But American is suffering from an evidence free personality cult by the dumbest cult leader who has ever ended up heading a cult.   So there is no reasoning with his base.

* It is tempting every day to just do post after post with the title 

TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE THE DUMBEST PEOPLE ON THE PLANET

because the evidence for it is just so overwhelming.

The secret service will enjoy dragging him out of the White House

This is, of course, in reference to his pathetic decision to get his daily narcissism fix by making his guardians drive him past his cult tragics.

Update:

Ha! 

That's some delay

Googling Steven Spielberg news:

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, fans will have to wait to see Steven Spielberg's new West Side Story film. Originally scheduled to hit theaters on December 18, Variety reports that the movie musical will now be released on December 10, 2021.

This is my least anticipated Spielberg film for many a year.  I'll still see it, though.

Trump and theology

My daughter made the claim the other day that Donald Trump's failure to come down with COVID strikes her as proof that God can't exist.  With news like this, her case is getting stronger, I'm afraid:

 Update:  as God says:

Update 2:   The plausibility of God is re-established with news that the Orange One has it.   But if he is one of these politicians that suffers barely a sniffle, God's credibility will take another hit.   

Meanwhile, in Australian alternative reality land...

As I said yesterday, and has been further cemented in commentary from a string of Trump sympathetic, gormless, Australian Sky News personalities overnight, no one thinks Trump "debated" well yesterday, and all agree that the interruptions were self defeating.   (It's also unquestioned that Trump interrupted more than Biden by a wide margin,)   

But what do the ageing "it's all a socialist plot!" brainiacs at Catallaxy think, especially the embarrassingly cultic Steve Kates?   Obviously, this:

 

 

Honestly, there is not a wingnut trope that Kates will not swallow when it comes to Trump;  he is truly, obliviously, brainwashed by the Right wing information bubble world of Fox News, Breitbart, and the other propaganda outlets of the GOP.   Has he always been this embarrassing, I wonder?  

 

Facebook is a disgrace

As noted in Mother Jones:

“Report: Joe Biden Has Been Given Tonight’s Debate Questions In Advance” reads a headline on arch-paranoiac Alex Jones’ site, Infowars, a notorious peddler of right-wing disinformation. The “report” Infowars cited was from former Fox host Todd Starnes, who was just citing Jerome Corsi, a right-wing conspiracy theorist with a history of spreading outright lies. Corsi offered no proof that Biden had been given the questions, but Starnes’ story on the baseless allegation reached over 1 million followers on Facebook and another million on Twitter, according to CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool owned by Facebook.

Infowars published its story around noon. By later that afternoon, more Biden disinformation was hurtling out of control on Facebook. A New York Post story with a single anonymous source from the Trump campaign claimed Biden had agreed to be inspected for an earpiece before the debate, which the Biden campaign denied. Regardless the story spread across Facebook, amplified by right-wing sites and posters.

NBC’s Ben Collins noticed that the claim predated the New York Post story; it had been floating around online for weeks before the online poster at the center of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a user claiming to be Q, posted the theory on 8kun, the successor website to the 8chan forum.

Breitbart‘s story on the claim reached 5 million accounts on Facebook and 3 million on Twitter.

The massive spread of disinformation about Biden came just hours after Facebook essentially blew off Biden’s concerns about disinformation being spread about him.

On Monday, the Biden campaign sent a letter to Facebook calling it “the nation’s foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process,” and saying that “Rather than seeing progress, we have seen regression,” according to a copy of the letter published by Axios.

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone responded vaguely, saying that the company has received criticism from both Republicans and Democrats and added that “we have rules in place to protect the integrity of the election and free expression, and we will continue to apply them impartially.”

 

A presidential debate, noted

I happened to see about that last 15 minutes, which was perhaps not quite as full of interruptions as was the first part?   (Certainly, even at the end, it was clear that Trump was the prime interrupter, refusing to follow the rules regarding a two minute statement that was had been agreed to be without interruption.)

Looking at the comments of the Australian based Trump supporters, it seems an uncontroversial opinion that their dumb ass orange hero interrupted too much and was too aggressive.  Many theorised that he wasn't letting Biden hang himself by not allowing him to talk long enough.  

I thought that, in the parts I saw, Biden was doing fine in his language, especially if you make allowances for an old issue with stuttering, which I think does still show itself in occasional vocal hesitations.

It is quite unbelievable that some "two sides" commentators think that neither side won because Biden also cut loose with some personal insults.   I mean, seriously?   Do they think contenders just have to "rise above" the rambling personal aggression of Trump in that context?   

The correct view is that Trump's performance could only possibly have appealed to his already rusted on, beyond all reasoning, culture war fighting, base.    And anyone who claims they were fence sitting and decided to side with Trump after that performance are, with 99% certainty, not being truthful about there ever being a chance that they were going to vote for Biden.

There is no point in saying that Trump won because he "dominated" and would have impressed his base.  His base is not really like rusted on party members of old - they are (in large part) genuine deplorables given permission by their cult leader to finally be open about their worst instincts, and if Trump had gone over and punched Wallace and slapped Biden in the face, they would say they deserved it and still vote for him.   He's their projected revenge figure against, basically, a modern world over which they are losing control.

Biden performed well enough to dispel any genuine concern about his mental acuity, and reinforced his basic humanity, serious approach to issues, and genuine move towards at least trying to not further divide Americans and promote self serving conspiracy based theories damaging to confidence in democracy in the way Trump clearly seeks to.     

So yeah, obviously, Biden was the winner.   It seems most on line polling and the betting market agrees.

10 meters of water!

Science magazine has an interesting article:

Moon safe for long-term human exploration, first surface radiation measurements show

 But I am not sure the details are as encouraging as the headline.  It's about how some recent dosimeters on recent moonlanders have given a more accurate idea as to the amount of radiation astronauts would be exposed to while staying there:

The device measured hourly radiation rates and found that astronauts would be exposed to roughly 200 times the radiation levels as people on Earth, they report today in Science Advances. The dosimeter’s placement inside the Chang’e 4 probe provides partial shielding, much as an astronaut’s spacesuit would to their body, so the findings are quite applicable to human explorers, Wimmer-Schweingruber says.

The measured dose is about five to 10 times what passengers on an intercontinental flight from New York City to Frankfurt, Germany, receive when the plane is above parts of the protective atmosphere, Wimmer-Schweingruber says. Though high for Earth-based standards, radiation is one of the known dangers of spaceflight. NASA is legally prohibited from increasing the risk of its astronauts dying from cancer by more than 3%, and these levels remain below that.

What’s more, the researchers calculated that Moon bases covered with at least 50 centimeters of lunar soil would be sufficient to protect them. A deeper chamber shielded with about 10 meters of water would be enough to protect against occasional solar storms, which can cause radiation levels to spike dramatically. (Between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions, the Sun flared up in a way that could have caused radiation sickness, vomiting, and possibly death had astronauts been unprotected in space at the time.) Such a chamber would need to be reachable within 30 minutes, the amount of advanced warning time that is now possible with monitoring satellites.

Why the heck are they talking about 10 m of water on the moon, as if that's what would be readily available to use for your emergency shelter?   It's going to be a long, long time before there's that much of it available for colonists.

If I recall correctly, Gerard O'Neill's work on L5 colonies used to argue that your would need about 2 to 3 meters of moon dirt packed around one of his gigantic space colonies to provide adequate radiation protection.   Is that the same effect as 10 m of water?  I don't know.   I want to know how much dirt moon stations are going to need to bury their shelters under for an emergency shelter.

Oh - and let's not forget - this need for radiation shielding is one of the key reasons why they may as well be looking at old lava tubes as a place to building a station.   Although, the other thing is, I don't know that there are any near the South pole, which I think is where they think the ice may be?

 

 

More than a hint of hypocrisy

Re the Victorian situation with the decision to use private security for COVID hotel quarantine:  am I the only person who detects strong hypocrisy whenever a Liberal opposition goes nuts about a Labor government using private contractors who turn out to be of dubious quality?   Wasn't the "the public service is coddled and inefficient and we should privatise services for greater efficiency and value for money" political party always keener to use private contractors for the last, um, four decades or so?  

It was the exact same thing with the Rudd insulation program.   The crap, profiteering private sector was the one that caused some deaths, and the true lesson should have been "if you want a job done properly, don't rush it out into the private sector".   (Mind you, I know the insulation job could not have been done by public servants.  But still.)

More about Victoria, Adam Creighton continues his hyperventilation:

Ooh, I like the "evil eyes of Dan" photo the AFR is running with.  I bet Adam wished it was being used in The Australian.  But maybe it is?

Adam presumably is still dismissing entirely the reports of long term effects of the virus.  This report from the BBC explains why India should be worried:

Mr Ketkar is not alone in this - tens of thousands of people have been reporting post-Covid health complications from across the world. Thrombosis is common - it has been found in 30% of seriously ill coronavirus patients, according to experts. 

 

These problems have been generally described as "long Covid" or "long-haul Covid". 

 

Awareness around post-Covid care is crucial, but it is not the focus in India, which is still struggling to control the spread of the virus. It has the world's second-highest caseload and has been averaging 90,000 cases daily in recent weeks.

 Lots of experts warning about the long term effects of Covid are quoted.   

But no, Adam hates the idea of people being told to wear masks outside, so that's what's important.

Things seem not to be going so well for the Trump campaign...

There's the NYT story about his tax fiddling, which apparently includes this:

Between 2010 and 2018, Trump wrote off about $26 million in mysterious "consulting fees," helping to reduce his family's tax bill. At least some of those fees appear to have been paid to his daughter Ivanka Trump, despite her being a top Trump Organization executive, according to the Times.

And this:

President Donald Trump spent more than $US70,000 to style his hair when he was on “The Apprentice,” and he wrote off the costs as a business expense, The New York Times reported Sunday. 

and this:

Additionally, nine Trump entities paid nearly $US100,000 to Ivanka Trump’s hair and makeup artist, according to The Times report. 

And the NYT promises more stories to come.

Trump is sounding desperate with "Biden should be drug tested before the debate".   

Polling seems to be sticking pretty solidly in Biden's favour.

And meanwhile, his recently sacked campaign manager is suicidal.   

I find it hard to imagine Biden doing so badly in the first debate so as to undo all of this bad PR.

But I guess you never know...

Okra recipe (and a beef curry)

Just for future reference:   cooked okra this way on Saturday, to go with a basic beef curry* (using the easy homemade mix of curry powder I referenced before) and it was nice.    

*  onion, three fresh tomatoes, 500g of cubed beef, that curry powder (couple of tablespoons it makes), some water, some curry leaves, a little bit of cream at the end.  (Yoghurt's probably better, but had none.)

Mexican movies and sense of place

I really liked the much praised Mexican movie Roma from a couple of years ago, and in my comments about it here, I noted the very distinctive and convincing (for want of a better phrase) sense of place it achieved (in its case, Mexico City in 1971.)  

Last night I watched another Mexican movie on Netflix I'm No Longer Here, and again I was blown away by the direction and sense of place it gave.   

Set only a decade or so ago, it cuts between the poor parts of the Mexican city Monterrey and a pretty seedy  looking Queens area in New York.  I had never heard of Monterrey before, but it's a distintive looking city because of the mountains surrounding it, and here it is on the map:

 

 

It is an arthouse-ish flim, which as I described in my Roma post, means you should expect more a "slice of life" story than much of a narrative arc. 

But it's so interesting.  I had not heard of cumbia music as such, but it is a key feature of the film, which indicates that there are youthful dance gangs in Monterrey who do not do much more than hassle their fellow school students for money to buy cumbia music and get into weirdly distinctive fashion.  For a kind of gang, the one in the film seems quite innocent.  But gang related conflict and violence still happens in the movie, and our hero has to move out of country and try and find his way living in Queens.  

 Here, the background to the setting is better explained at the start of this review:

With flashy dance moves and even flashier hairstyles, the Cholombiano street culture of Monterrey, Mexico exists at a cultural crossroads. Patterns of migration and commerce have brought together this subculture’s preferred genre of Colombian cumbia, the laggy mixes of Mexico City’s sonidero DJ style and the oversized garments of West Coast cholo fashion into this northeastern Mexican city.

It is in Monterrey where sounds and culture which have captivated the rest of Latin America have risen up from. The Avanzada Regia movement which took over Monterrey during the mid 90s laid out a blueprint for electronica, alternative rock and hip hop in Spanish to spread into the Spanish-speaking mainstream, at home and abroad. The corrido tumbado movement, currently setting Mexican regional stations ablaze, might riff closer to Sinaloa and Sonora-style folk ballads, but draws its core from German polka and Texano influence hailing from Monterrey over a century ago.

But unlike the many popular sounds and trends which spawned in this city, the cholombiano way of life remained contained in the city’s marginalized communities. In Ya No Estoy Aquí (I’m No Longer Here) we are treated to an exploration of place and belonging through the experience of Ulises Samperio (Juan Daniel Garcia), a cholombiano displaced from the his home in the middle of an intensifying turf war triggered by the Mexican war on drugs of the 2010s.

Monterrey as a centre of cumbia music in Mexico is was also discussed in this Vice article from 2018 (which also gives the impression that the city as a whole is pretty seedy.)  As for the style of dancing to it, my son perceptively noted that its sort of similar to what Cab Calloway does on stage sometimes.     

Anyway, I think the most remarkable thing about the film is the direction - there is not a lot of camera movement, but instead it's nearly all exquisitely composed shots in which the action happens (sometimes with the actors or objects moving in and out of the framing.)    I love a fancy moving camera as much as anyone, but this shows how fantastic a movie can look with a stationary camera most to the time, but with great care for composition of every single shot.  

Once again, a movie set in Mexico has made me strongly wish that I could visit there - if only it felt safe enough.  I'm drawn to Asia enough that I like to joke that it's probably because I must have been East Asian in a past life; but if that's true, I am starting to assume there must be a Mexican re-incarnation in there as well.

 

On a personal, dental note

I think I should probably be embarrassed to admit this, but it seems I took the risk and it worked out OK.

Today I had my first dental check up in, I am pretty sure, about 20-something years.

I don't know why - I had some older amalgam filings replaced in the last bit of dental work around my mid 30's.  And that was replaced with the white stuff instead of the old amalgam.  

Since then, I got married and had kids and am pretty sure never got around to going back to the dentist.  Maybe 7 or so years ago I bought a cheap dental pick from (I think) Daiso and use it occasionally to held remove the tartar (stupid word that) which can build up behind my lower front teeth, regardless of morning and evening brushing and evening flossing.  (I asked a dentist what that was about - why do I only get it there - and was told it is because it is near salivary glands that produce a lot of calcium ions to repair enamel.  That made me stop worrying that I was a failure at brushing, and perhaps my saliva is just particularly calcium rich.)   

Anyway, I had a couple of minor issues I wanted to get checked and finally went back to a "new" dentist today.  I didn't like the old one much.  He got very cranky with me once when I was late for an appointment.

The result - I made a full confession to the dentist, but she didn't find any cavities or problems.  X rays show no hidden problem.   She did take a long time to give my teeth a proper clean though, and I sort of promised not to leave it another 20 years so that the next clean could be quicker.   

But I do feel somewhat vindicated that my 20 year hunch that my teeth were, by and large, not getting any problems, seems to have been correct.

[Actually, I seem to recall that my father had an enormously long gap in seeking dentistry too, and when he finally did there was not much wrong.    I think flossing had been "in" for a good couple of decades but he never did it.   Is there something about the middle aged mouth that means more youthful propensity to decay stops or slows down?   In my father's case, it could have been pretty regular evening alcohol consumption, perhaps.   He was very big on drinking port (or sherry) nearly every evening.  Does that work like a bacteria killing mouthwash?]

  

Allahpundit is worried

He's always been against Trump, but he's really starting to panic about the state of the nation post election.  He's making this comment following Trump refusing to give a commitment to a "peaceful" transfer of power yesterday:

My earnest advice to anyone who’s not bound to stay put here in the U.S. because of family or employment ties from which they simply can’t extricate themselves is to think seriously about leaving. And I don’t mean “think seriously of leaving if Trump wins.” I mean think seriously of leaving, period. Because even if he loses by 250 electoral votes, more than 60 million people will have watched him say stuff like this for months, insisting repeatedly that any defeat can only be explained by cheating, and will vote. for. him. anyway.

There’s no coming all the way back from that, even though Trump will eventually leave the political scene one way or another. Anyone who’s willing to look the other way at what he says here is willing to look the other way at much worse, and that’s an enormous population. That’s the reason to leave.

By tomorrow, the right’s anti-anti-Trump faction will have long forgotten this clip, assuming they noted it at all. They’ll be right back to the task of confirming Amy Coney Barrett followed by a glorious November victory in which Trump will once again get millions fewer votes than his opponent and then govern as if his approval rating is 80 percent.

Speaking of which, he explained earlier today why it’s so important for him to have a ninth justice on the Court before November. Interestingly, this wasn’t a concern for the GOP in 2016, when they preferred an eight-person Court to one with Merrick Garland in Scalia’s seat. Trump wants a full house this time, though, for a specific reason:  [clip of Trump]

He wants his nominee to be the fifth vote for him in invalidating contested ballots that might give Biden the presidency. He made the same point yesterday in another gaggle with reporters. Why any fan of Amy Coney Barrett would want her placed in that horrendous situation, knowing what it would do to public perceptions of her and of the Supreme Court if she cast that vote — or if she refused to cast it — I can’t imagine.

If it does happen, with Trump’s eleventh-hour bizarro-Garland appointee becoming the deciding vote that assures him a second term, we’ll be in a new era in American history. I’m not trying to be dramatic in saying that. It just is what it is. The country will be ungovernable.

 

 

Dumb, dishonest, or just unable to process information due to - whatever?

That's the puzzle about Trump supporters, isn't it?   And still not resolved after 4 years.

For example, here's the headlines to Wall Street Journal reporting on the Republican's failed "gotcha" report on Joe Biden:

 

Hunter Biden’s Ukraine Work Raised Concerns With Obama Officials, GOP-Led Probe Confirms

Findings don’t support Trump’s accusation that Joe Biden sought to remove a prosecutor to protect a gas firm whose board Hunter Biden served on

Um, yes:  every "fake news" liberal commentator on the matter had already acknowledged years ago that it wasn't a great look for Hunter Biden to be on the board.    But obviously, the mere potential for family related conflict of interest doesn't mean there was actually one, and as the press had reported umpteen times before, there was no evidence that Biden's actions were motivated at protecting his son, and in fact, put the company in question at greater risk of actual investigation.   This is confirmed in the second part of the headline.

But at Sinclair Davidson's Home for Ageing Fools:

It's like (well, it's the fact that) there is no point in trying to reason with them.  They can't process information if it doesn't fit a preconceived conclusion.

Dumber though

 

An extraordinary fool