Wow. Was Labor polling this well in Victoria before the COVID crisis?:
How heartwarming this must be for the IPA, Sinclair Davidson, and his whole ship of old fools. And let's not forget Adam Creighton, too.
...if Obama had been 30 minutes late to a military commemoration ceremony which has been happening at 11am for a century or so?:
The president and his entourage – including first lady Melania Trump, Vice President Pence and second lady Karen Pence – did not arrive at the tomb until well after the scheduled start time of 11 a.m. ET. The president's motorcade was still driving toward the tomb as a gun salute to veterans rang out, according to the White House pool report.
It wasn't until nearly 11:25 that the president appeared on a walkway in front of the tomb, where he stood alongside Pence in a steady rain. Trump walked toward the wreath, laid a hand on it, paused and then returned to his spot. The ceremony was over soon afterwards. It was the only event listed on the president's public schedule for Wednesday.
* Nature has an interesting article updating us on the research into the question of whether infections cause Alzheimers:
Are infections seeding some cases of Alzheimer’s disease?
* I've been watching many Youtube videos on physics lately, mainly regarding quantum theory and relativity, and one of them talked about how most of the mass of the proton comes not from the Higgs Boson, but via the interactions between the quarks which make up the proton. Individually, those quarks only have a small percent of the total mass of a proton:
Protons are made up of even smaller particles known as quarks. It might seem reasonable that simply adding up the quarks’ masses would give you a proton’s mass. Yet it doesn’t. That sum is far too small to explain the proton’s bulk. New, detailed calculations show that only 9 percent of a proton’s heft comes from the mass of its quarks. The rest comes from complicated effects occurring inside the particle.
I had probably read that before, but sometimes just being told via video sticks more in the mind than reading it quickly.
This fairly recent article in Quanta gives a pretty good idea of how complicated the physics of quarks inside protons really is. Mind you, it's pretty incredible, when you think about it, that we have the technology to be able to conduct experiments at this level of tininess at all.
* While watching the videos on physics, I have also thought again about how it seems that Einstein's complicated theories have sort of made us loose appreciation for the innovation and complexity of Maxwell's electromagnetism equations. I seem to recall that when doing senior high school physics, I didn't like how there was no attempt to put how Maxwell came up with his formulae in proper context, so you got the impression that they sprang out of no where. Interestingly, when I Google the topic now, I see that Freeman Dyson wrote an article (or gave a talk?) entitled "Why is Maxwell's Theory so Hard to Understand" - which makes me feel better about my life long gut feeling about it! I didn't know this:
For more than twenty years, his theory of electromagnetism was largely ignored. Physicists found it hard to understand because the equations were complicated. Mathematicians found it hard to understand because Maxwell used physical language to explain it. It was regarded as an obscure speculation without much experimental evidence to support it. The physicist Michael Pupin in his autobiography “From Immigrant to Inventor” describes how he travelled from America to Europe in 1883 in search of somebody who understood Maxwell. He set out to learn the Maxwell theory like a knight in quest of the Holy Grail.
Pupin went first to Cambridge and enrolled as a student, hoping to learn the theory from Maxwell himself. He did not know that Maxwell had died four years earlier. After learning that Maxwell was dead, he stayed on in Cambridge and was assigned to a college tutor. But his tutor knew less about the Maxwell theory than he did, and was only interested in training him to solve mathematical tripos problems. He was amazed to discover, as he says, “how few were the physicists who had caught the meaning of the theory, even twenty years after it was stated by Maxwell in 1865”.
So, the electrification of cities, which seems to have only got going in the 1880's, was proceeding before Maxwell's ideas were thoroughly or widely understood by scientists? Huh.
He could encourage confidence in democracy and a rational rejection of ideologically motivated conspiracy theory, or prioritise making money by trying to not lose too much market share to even more extreme Right wing outlets .
Pretty clear which choice he is making.
...Andrew Bolt appears to be more right than wrong in his opinion on the issue of denying the US election outcome:
He must know that this is Rupert Murdoch's opinion too; but if he is reading the Right wing social media (including Catallaxy, which he surely follows closely), he would have to know that the Conservative base is far from agreeing with both of them. (And, amusingly, they are apparently swearing off Fox News and cancelling subscriptions to The Australian because they are not adequately endorsing the Trumpian denial of reality.)
Bolt & Rupert deserve no great credit for seemingly acknowledging reality on this one issue, when they have spent a couple of decades priming the Conservative base to live in a world of denial of expert evidence, and to prefer a self serving information cocoon that leads them to think they are the smart insiders who can see what's really going on. You know I'm talking climate change...
Once again we're in the murky media ethical question of when it is newsworthy that a married politician is having an affair.
I find it hard to get upset with the ABC running a story on it where the only figures examined were current Liberal/National Party heavyweights - they're the ones in power, it's obviously more significant than what might be going in the Opposition in the same period. Go back 45 years and it was a Labor government's turn with Jim Cairns; 22 years ago it was that party's turn again with Gareth Evans.
Overall, I think 4 Corners did good justification for the relevance of the reporting: especially for the deep foolishness of Christian Porter, who I have never paid any attention to before. How stupid to be carrying on with a woman in a public bar frequented by journalists and political staff from all sides.
Malcolm Turnbull sounded pretty reasonable to me in his explanation of why he found the behaviour so galling and inappropriate. Sure, there is an element of revenge in talking about it now: but he is right on the principles.
I used to think that you could generalise that there was a difference between the Left and Right in the nature of their sex scandals, with Labor politicians being more promiscuous (hello, Bob Hawke), while Conservatives had fewer orgasms but in seedier circumstances (using prostitutes, into S&M, soliciting anonymous interactions in toilets, etc). But perhaps that was too influenced by the impression given by British sex scandals. Anyway, after last night's reporting, I should probably revise those presumptions.
Graeme Bird is busy burbling away in comments in moderation that Trump won the election "in a landslide", but "the oligarchy", which has Rupert Murdoch on side - because they lent him money, or something - is busy trying to usurp the will of the people by installing Biden. He allows that it might work, but we won't know for a few months.
As I do not believe in being an open forum for the repetition of absurd conspiracy claims, even via the little read comments of my blog, very few of Graeme's comments are going to be allowed through for quite a while. (For which he will call me a Jewish c..., again, no doubt.)
I never trusted Adam Creighton's opinions, but his credibility this year has really been in a nosedive:
a. tariffs and relationship with China;
b. climate change; and
c. a general retreat from multilateral co-operation in other areas
is meant to have no effect on Australians at all? When China has just last week been sabre rattling on stopping or winding back a huge range of imports?
Who knew you could make a horror/witchcraft/ghost movie an effective political one? I kept feeling I wanted Peter Dutton to watch it.
I'm talking about the new, and apparently popular, Netflix film His House. It's pretty good - well acted, well directed, and very sympathetic to the plight of African refugees in (in this case) England. I think it is most effectively disturbing in the last third, when you get to see what that main characters went through.
I do think that the malevolent supernatural forces (if they exist at all) are left with ill defined motivation, though. Why it would want the husband and wife to react that way is unclear. (This is hard to talk about without talking complete spoilers.) But overall, a pretty very fine effort.
This is from last week, I think, and it made me laugh a lot:
As much as I thought Biden's speech on the weekend was pretty great for what was needed at the time, I do hope he, at some point, makes this clear: the Right in America needs to stop living in the world of conspiracy belief. Denying climate change was their entry drug; Qanon is the ridiculous end. But things like believing a widespread organised system of election fraud is plausible is still, at heart, a belief in a conspiracy, and they to stop being so gullible.
People need to be told when they are being ridiculous.
This is, to borrow Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar’s framework, “an autocratic attempt.” That’s the stage in the transition toward autocracy in which the would-be autocrat is trying to sever his power from electoral check. If he’s successful, autocratic breakthrough follows, and then autocratic consolidation occurs. In this case, the would-be autocrat stands little chance of being successful. But he will not entirely fail, either. What Trump is trying to form is something akin to an autocracy-in-exile, an alternative America in which he is the rightful leader, and he — and the public he claims to represent — has been robbed of power by corrupt elites.
“Democracy works only when losers recognize that they have lost,” writes political scientist Henry Farrell. That will not happen here.
For goodness sake. The Christian participation in the Trump Cult has tarnished the reputation of the religion irreparably:
How many other Australians have been reading Twitter in bed up to midnight, and going to sleep thinking "with any luck, when I wake up in the morning, the Biden win will be confirmed" only to be disappointed at 5.45am?
Seems to me the numbers are moving in the right direction still.
I was surprised to see Andrew Bolt, of all people, saying that Trump shouldn't be promoting voter fraud claims that are not well founded because it's harmful for democracy. My message to Andrew: TELL THAT TO YOUR OTHER SKY NEWS HOSTS AND THEN GET ON THE PHONE TO RUPERT MURDOCH AND TELL HIM HE'S LETTING FOX NEWS RUIN DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. Yeah, I know: as if. And by today Andrew will be back to spewing something in support of Trump anyway - he does these occasional swings into momentary centrist positions before coming back to his Pauline Hanson friendly attitudes.
As I have complained before - anyone with any decency should not be playing the game of "I'm an independent thinker and working for the Murdoch media empire to provide much needed balance to the extreme right wing bias that is 90% of the rest of the commentary here". No. You're working for or with a company that runs a propaganda network working in the cynical interests of a money and power hungry billionaire family that is using you as a fig leaf cover to say they really provide diverse opinion. The media empire that is the single biggest cause of the "epistemic crisis" in American (and to an extent, Australian) Right wing politics. No one decent should do anything other than leave them and rubbish the corporate line endlessly - like the amusing Twitter feed of Tony Koch.
Anyway, back to count watch....
Interestingly, Vanity Fair claimed (although I really don't put much faith in this) that "a source" told them that Trump rang Rupert Murdoch directly to angrily complain when Fox News put Arizona down as a Biden win yesterday, but Rupert declined to do a Packer and ring the network to tell them to change it.
But Fox News' evening opinion line up - surely the most influential part of the network - is apparently running hard on the "unfair election/fraudulent vote counts" claims.
I put Murdoch into the category of rich men who consider Trump a useful idiot - but doesn't he care at all about democracy? He would know that spreading purely partisan rumour and conspiracy about election counts is bad for respect for democracy.
Is it really worth the money and the feeling of power, Rupert?
Update: look at this, for example -
