Circular phobia

Never heard of this before:

Some people experience intense aversion and anxiety when they see clusters of roughly circular shapes, such as the bubbles in a cup of coffee or the holes in a sponge.

Now psychologists at the University of Kent have found that the condition -- known as trypophobia -- may be an exaggerated response linked to deep-seated anxiety about parasites and infectious disease.

Previous explanations for the condition include the suggestion that people are evolutionarily predisposed to respond to clusters of round shapes because these shapes are also found on poisonous animals, like some snakes and the blue-ringed octopus.

Now new research, led by Tom Kupfer of the University's School of Psychology, suggests that the condition may instead be related to an evolutionary history of infectious disease and parasitism that leads to an exaggerated sensitivity to round shapes.

Update:  I mentioned it to my kids, and my daughter said she has a friend who doesn't like sponges because of the holes.  How odd.

She's a lightweight

I've never trusted Deirdre McCloskey on economics:  for one thing, Sinclair Davidson and Steve Kates think she's pretty good, so there's a warning sign there.

But I reckon this piece in Reason, about how economists who have started to worry a lot about automation and unemployment are wrong, pretty much confirms she's a lightweight.  There's really no serious argument put forward, and she just falls back on her general theme about how free market capitalism and technological advance has been historically great, and (by implication) nothing's ever going to change.  Oh, and unionists are bad.

Count me as unconvinced.

When you try to be polite, and regret it

U.S. President Donald Trump is traveling to France Wednesday evening to meet new French President Emmanuel Macron and to celebrate Bastille Day. 

Apparently, Macron invited him during a phone call before the G20 summit.  I wonder if he's kicking himself because it was accepted.

It's hard to imagine two world leaders with greater difference in image, let alone policy:  one with that of French sophistication; one eats KFC because "you know what's in it".  

Douthat is about right

Douthat's pretty reasonable take on the Trump Jr meeting:

As the hapless Don Jr. — the Gob Bluth or Fredo Corleone of a family conspicuously short on Michaels — protested in his own defense, the Russian rendezvous we know about came before (though only slightly before) the WikiLeaks haul was announced. So the Trump team presumably assumed that it involved some other Hillary-related dirt — some of the missing Clinton server emails that Trump himself jokingly (“jokingly”?) urged Russian hackers to conjure and release, or direct evidence of Clinton Foundation corruption in its Russian relationships.

With that semi-exculpatory explanation in hand, you can grope your way to the current anti-anti-Trump talking point — that Don Jr. and company were just hoping to “gather oppo” to which a foreign government might happen to be privy, much as Democratic operatives looked to Ukraine for evidence of the Trump campaign’s shady ties.

But even if accepting oppo from a foreign government is technically legal — it probably is, but I leave that question to campaign finance lawyers to work out — this talking point takes you only so far. I am not a particularly fierce Russia hawk, but the Russians are still a more-hostile-than-not power these days, with stronger incentives to subvert American democracy than the average foreign government. So taking their oppo has a gravity that should have stopped a more upright and patriotic campaign short.

Second, if the Russians had been dangling some of Hillary’s missing 30,000 emails, those, too, would had to have been hacked — that is, stolen — to end up in Moscow’s hands. So Don Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner should have known going in that if the offer was genuine, the oppo useful, it might involve stolen goods.

But on the basis of the emails, the younger Trump went in not skeptically but eagerly (“if it’s what you say I love it”), ignoring or simply accepting the weird formulation about Russian support for Trump’s campaign.

Lies and consequences

Matthew Yglesias makes an obvious point:   one of the key problems with the Trump administration has been the willingness of many in it to lie about Russian contacts, when the Russians know they are lying, setting up potential blackmail material.

The only counter to that argument is that Trump is virtually un-blackmailable to his rusted on supporters - they're too stupid and uninterested in ethics to care about Putin.   Conservatives both in America and here think he's cool because he's down on Muslims and gays - he's a tough man who get things done -  they're not going to dump Trump even if they knew Trump personally had secret contact with Putin and was lying about it.   They would just say "Obama and Hillary did just as bad." 

As for Jason Soon's (hi there) cavalier attitude to Russia, Putin and (apparently) political murder - here's a couple of things for him to consider (apart from psychoanalysis to make sure there really is no subconscious Putin man-crush going on there)

*  a couple of articles, such as this one, have noted that for a few years now,  RT has developed a very friendly attitude to American libertarians.  Not hard to see the Kremlin's interest there, if libertarians are true to their American isolationist views.

*   Reason, on the other hand,  has a recent article "Russia's Global Anti-Libertarian Crusade" making the very reasonable argument that Putin's geo-political interests and philosophy are certainly against libertarian, liberal, principles on how governments should conduct themselves, and gives recent examples of Russian interference in the Balkans, etc.  

Here are two key paragraphs:

One of the surreal twists of the past year in American politics has been the rapid realignment in attitudes toward Russia. Democrats, many of whom believe that Russian interference was key to Donald Trump's unexpected victory last November, are now the ones sounding the alarm about the Russian threat. Meanwhile, quite a few Republicans—previously the keepers of the anti-Kremlin Cold War flame—have taken to praising President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader and Moscow as an ally against radical Islam. A CNN/ORC poll in late April found that 56 percent of Republicans see Russia as either "friendly" or "an ally," up from 14 percent in 2014. Over the same period, Putin's favorable rating from Republicans in the Economist/YouGov poll went from 10 percent to a startling 37 percent.

 and:

Nonetheless, there is a real Russian effort to counter American—plus NATO and E.U.—influence by supporting authoritarian nationalist movements and groups, such as Le Pen's National Front, Hungary's quasi-fascist Jobbik Party, and Greece's neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. Today's Russia is no longer just a moderately authoritarian corrupt regime trying to maintain its regional influence. Cloaked in the mantle of religious and nationalist values, the Kremlin positions itself as a defender of tradition and sovereignty against the godless progressivism and the migrant hordes overtaking the West. It has a global propaganda machine and a network of political operatives dedicated to cultivating far-right and sometimes far-left groups in Europe and elsewhere.

Assume the position

I presume the fallback position for the Trumpkins is going to be "No, no, there's still no proof the Trump campaign actually colluded with the Russian government.   They only tried to collude with the Russian government.  What's the big deal with that?"

Update:  Gee, aren't the Blair and Bolt blogs showing a lack of curiosity about this story?   Yeah, for Blair it's all "frightbats" and Lefty Turnbull is going down, and (any minute now) "Jonathan Green was wrong 10 years ago, ahahahaha".   With Bolt - Lefty Turnbull is going down; immigration, grrr; Muslims, and climate change, ha!

Update 2:  Over at the Catallaxy open thread:  "What story about 3 key members on Trump's campaign going to a meeting hoping to be fed damaging intelligence on Hillary Clinton from the Kremlin?  I must have missed that.  Oh look - someone is talking about a car tax.  Ahhhagggg, Turnbull is evil."

Update 3:  Vox notes that John Oliver got it right a few months ago:

On March 5, the host of the HBO comedy show Last Week Tonight started a segment called “Stupid Watergate,” which he described as “a scandal with all the potential ramifications of Watergate, but where everyone involved is stupid and bad at everything.” 

Update 4:  Yes, as expected, the Self Inflicted Culture War Blindness (incurable) has made an appearance at Catallaxy.

Sad what stupidity and hypocrisy being a Culture Warrior brings, hey?

Update 5:  And here's my sometimes visitor, apparently suggesting that if Trump responded like a third world dictator and organised a distracting show trial, it would all be Hillary's (or "the Left's") own fault.  What a weird comment:

A tasty medicine?

Strawberries!  They are now so cheap for so much of the year that I'm starting to worry how farmers can possibly be making money out of it without exploiting poor backpackers.

But a compound in them may be good for Alzheimers:

Salk scientists have found further evidence that a natural compound in strawberries reduces cognitive deficits and inflammation associated with aging in mice. The work, which appeared in the Journals of Gerontology Series A in June 2017, builds on the team's previous research into the antioxidant fisetin, finding it could help treat age-related mental decline and conditions like Alzheimer's or stroke.

The Salk team fed the 3-month-old prematurely aging mice a daily dose of fisetin with their food for 7 months. Another group of the prematurely aging mice was fed the same food without fisetin. During the study period, mice took various activity and memory tests. The team also examined levels of specific proteins in the mice related to brain function, responses to stress and inflammation.

"At 10 months, the differences between these two groups were striking," says Maher. Mice not treated with fisetin had difficulties with all the cognitive tests as well as elevated markers of stress and inflammation. Brain cells called astrocytes and microglia, which are normally anti-inflammatory, were now driving rampant inflammation. Mice treated with fisetin, on the other hand, were not noticeably different in behavior, cognitive ability or inflammatory markers at 10 months than a group of untreated 3-month-old mice with the same condition. Additionally, the team found no evidence of acute toxicity in the fisetin-treated mice, even at high doses of the compound.

Speaking of Alzheimers, last night's Four Corners was a sad case study of a few examples of people living with it in Australia.  It is a terrible disease, especially with the early onset variety.

The White House shambolic intrigue

Allahpundit at Hot Air goes through all the curious questions the latest Russian connection stories carry:  such as why some in the White House are going to the media to dob in Trump Jnr regarding his meeting with a Russian lawyer who was claiming to have dirt on Hilary.

In short - what more evidence of an absolutely shambolic state of affairs within the administration can people want?

But some will just shrug their shoulders, as if this isn't anything of concern.

Update:  Vox notes that Trump Jnr may have broken the law, and pretty much provided the evidence against himself.    Maybe helps explain explain why Jared or others would be going to the media to say "hey, it was all his idea"?

Vaccination in history

I didn't know about the controversy over smallpox vaccination in its earliest days in England.   Mind you, it sounds like the anti compulsory vaxxers had something to worry about, given the technique:

In 19th century Britain, the only vaccine widely available to the public was against smallpox. Vaccination involved making a series of deep cuts to the arm of the child into which the doctor would insert matter from the wound of a previously vaccinated child.
These open wounds left many children vulnerable to infections, blood poisoning and gangrene. Parents and anti-vaccination campaigners alike described the gruesome scenes that often accompanied the procedure, like this example from the Royal Cornwall Gazette from December 1886:

Some of these poor infants have been borne of pillows for weeks, decaying alive before death ended their sufferings.

That it's all a fake news fantasy is the fantasy

Hey Jason, I see that you're retweeting apologetics for Donald Trump again.   This is a worry.

It's a very stupid post, containing one element of truth (that at one time Trump could've been thought to be a wannabe Democrat, not Republican, candidate) but overwhelmingly, it's a very stupid argument made.  This part, in particular, saying that until relatively recently:

 No one would have doubted for a second that he was an American patriot, the least likely stooge for Russia or the USSR. I say all this to remind people that the image of Trump promulgated by the media and his other political enemies since he decided to run for President is entirely a creation of the last year or two.

If you consider yourself a smart person, a rational person, an evidence-driven person, you should reconsider whether 30+ years of reporting on Trump is more likely to be accurate (during this time he was a public figure, major celebrity, and tabloid fodder: subject to intense scrutiny), or 1-2 years of heavily motivated fake news.

Hsu even says "There were no accusations of racism", which is rather remarkable claim for a man who actually faced court for having racist policies in the business he ran for his Dad in the 1970's.

I'm not entirely sure of the intention of Hsu's argument here - surely he can't be suggesting that Trump didn't have much negative publicity over the years - he had plenty of that with his business and marriage failures.   Success as a reality TV host hardly wiped that away: some viewers may well have been watching to laugh at Trump's swaggering act, not admire it.

Or is it just that Hsu is taking offence at the idea that Trump could be a Russian stooge, and saying that this argument has only just arisen because of "fake news".  Well, might not the unprecedented (in modern times) refusal of a Presidential candidate to do a proper financial disclosure, and having a son making statements about how much funding his Dad got from Russia raise any question?   As well as Trump's frequently stated admiration for a Russian leader widely believed to have direct involvement in authorising political murders?   And people on his campaign (including, we know now, his son) having meetings with Russians offering dirt on Hilary.  Not to mention the actual intelligence agencies believing that the hacking was authorised from the top.

This is all meant to be "fake news"?   Yeah, sure.

As for the supposed outrageousness of the idea of Trump as Russian stooge - I strongly suspect that few people actually think Trump is an intentional Putin stooge, in the sense of actually planning to deliberately do Putin's direct bidding at the cost of America.  But since when has being a stooge required such intent?   Being dumb and able to be manipulated because you're an ill educated, vain  and psychologically needy man who has shown few business or relationship scruples and who seemingly only ran for the Presidency because it would be good for business, win or lose - perfect stooge material.

That anyone has to point that to someone like Hsu is pretty ridiculous.

Can't both be right

Well, isn't that funny.   Back in May, I questioned Jason Soon's verdict that French President Macron was someone libertarians should be happy with.  

Today, Andrew Bolt is criticising Malcolm Turnbull for calling Macron a "centrist", whereas Bolt knows he's an "old socialist".  (Culture warrior-ing prevents Bolt from seeing otherwise - because Macron is completely on board with climate change.)

Still, Macron truly seems to a be a case of people seeing what they want to see.

I'll stick with my cautious verdict in comments to my May post - he's a relatively mild economic liberal, especially coming off a quite Left base in economics in France, but his overall suite of policy ideas picks from both the Left and Right.  He therefore counts pretty much as a centrist, for lack of a better term, although perhaps one who chooses an unusually wide range of policy ideas.

The culture war means never having to say you were wrong

Tim Blair mocks the recent Lateline episode in which various young scientist types spoke about their fears for the future, including whether they should have children, and where they think they may need to retire to as temperatures rise.  (Tasmania is popular, but the degree to which rainfall pattern changes may affect it seems rather uncertain - which isn't great for a place so reliant on hydro-electric.)

I saw this on Lateline and knew it would get mocking from Right wing culture warriors who have dumbed themselves down sufficiently such that they have not a clue who to listen to on climate change.  Delingpole, with his arts degree, or whatever he has, is apparently a more reliable guide than thousands of scientists who have contributed to climate change research.

That said, I don't think it's a wise thing to talk about not having children for the sake of climate change.  Let's face it, the kids of scientists are quite likely to be smart and rich enough to arrange things for themselves (such as moving to a more temperate climate) so as not to be a direct victim of climate change, much more so than a kid from some poor country in Africa or the Indian subcontinent.   And really, we want smart people to have kids and (hopefully) bring them up to be able to contribute to solutions to the problems climate change may bring.

But as with all culture warriors, Blair's attack (which is all about how Islamic terrorism is a direct and immediate threat and why are stoopid scientists not panicking about that instead of climate change) makes two fundamental mistakes:

a.  it is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time - yes, I know, a hard concept for any culture warrior obsessed with the Islamic and migrant threat to get a grasp on.  (Am I being unfair to Blair here?  I'm not sure he carries on about African immigration or even Islamic immigration as much as Bolt does - they seem to have divided things between them so that Blair will deal with cranky feminism, Waleed Aly and Jonathan Green - man, does he obsess about Jonathan;  Bolt deals with immigration and aborigines; and they both obsess about the ABC generally.)

b.  he lives in a fantasy world where heat seems to never matter.  Take this:

Very well, then. If we’re calculating risk based on the number of dead bodies, let’s consider the toll so far due to climate change.
It’s literally zero.

A big call, given that heatwaves kill off quite a few Indians each year, not to mention floods.   A milder climate in a cool to cold country may well be better for the population's health, but in a country that's already warm to hot for most of the year? 

Of course, what he's relying on is an inability to precisely say which extreme weather event can be ascribed to climate change, given that some extreme weather events would happen even without it.

But that is such a shallow way of considering it, unless you're a culture warrior, which essentially means never having to make yourself better informed on a topic you just know is wrong.

Dumbed down

Trump's speech in Poland did not get rave reviews from anyone other than his fellow culture warriors, who have developed a paranoia about the end of the West at the hands of Islamic extremism.

It was, patently, not a good speech and (at least in transcript) was delivered poorly, with several Trumpian moments where he made it all about him, again.  As for its key paragraph, Peter Beinart covers it well:

The most shocking sentence in Trump’s speech—perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime—was his claim that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” On its face, that’s absurd. Jihadist terrorists can kill people in the West, but unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, they cannot topple even the weakest European government. Jihadists control no great armies. Their ideologies have limited appeal even among the Muslims they target with their propaganda. ISIS has all but lost Mosul and could lose Raqqa later this year.

Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. The “south” and “east” only threaten the West’s “survival” if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West’s “survival” if by “West” you mean white, Christian hegemony. A direct line connects Trump’s assault on Barack Obama’s citizenship to his speech in Poland. In Trump and Bannon’s view, America is at its core Western: meaning white and Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian). The implication is that anyone in the United States who is not white and Christian may not truly be American but rather than an imposter and a threat.

Poland is largely ethnically homogeneous. So when a Polish president says that being Western is the essence of the nation’s identity, he’s mostly defining Poland in opposition to the nations to its east and south. America is racially, ethnically, and religious diverse. So when Trump says being Western is the essence of America’s identity, he’s in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. He’s not speaking as the president of the entire United States. He’s speaking as the head of a tribe.

 Exactly.  Hence it was only members of his own, dumbed down, "tribe" who thought this was a monumental speech.

That Chris Kenny and Andrew Bolt could think this was a great speech just shows what inept and completely unreliable commentators they've become.  I actually find it hard to credit how they could even get so stupid.   I honestly did not previously think culture warrior-ing to be so capable of blinding and dumbing down people's judgement. 

As for Trump's performance at the G20, I have to give credit to Chris Uhlmann, who I don't trust generally for being too soft on the Coalition and unreliable on climate change.  His assessment of Trump, though, rang very true, for the most part.  (I only disagree when he said that there were "interesting" observations in the Poland speech about defending the values of the West.)  But this part, yes:

...it is the unscripted Mr Trump that is real. A man who barks out bile in 140 characters, who wastes his precious days as President at war with the West's institutions — like the judiciary, independent government agencies and the free press.

He was an uneasy, awkward figure at this gathering and you got the strong sense some other leaders were trying to find the best way to work around him.

Mr Trump is a man who craves power because it burnishes his celebrity. To be constantly talking and talked about is all that really matters. And there is no value placed on the meaning of words. So what is said one day can be discarded the next.

So, what did we learn this week?

We learned Mr Trump has pressed fast forward on the decline of the US as a global leader. He managed to diminish his nation and to confuse and alienate his allies.

He will cede that power to China and Russia — two authoritarian states that will forge a very different set of rules for the 21st century.

Some will cheer the decline of America, but I think we'll miss it when it is gone.
And that is the biggest threat to the values of the West which he claims to hold so dear.

Marvel watched

Off we went to see Spider-Man: Homecoming this afternoon.

Yes, it's very good.  I have one quibble:  the climatic fight sequence was not as thrilling as the two other main set pieces in the film.  It was a tad silly, truth be told, even by Marvel's dubious physics standards.

Apart from that:  yes, it has plenty of laughs (key to my enjoyment of any superhero film), a very likeable actor as the lead,  a Ramones song featured prominently that make us older folk feel good about music from our youth, and a great plot twist which I don't think anyone in the audience saw coming.  Even the Stan Lee appearance was better than the one in Guardians 2, I thought.

The movie will make a lot of money, and I don't mind.

Sounding very sensible

John Quiggin's article in The Guardian this week sounded very sensible to me, in a "big picture" kind of way.

Look, it's the understudy

I've always thought that Grace Collier was a lightweight, look-at-me-I-used-to-be-vaguely-Left contrarian with nothing interesting to say,  but with her silly, silly piece in the Spectator, I see she's gone into auditioning for the role of  "Hyperbolic and Somewhat Unhinged Culture Warrior" currently being played by Mark Latham.  It's true, you never know when he may next blow a fuse.

The funniest thing about the piece is one of the comments following:

This is all makes so much sense to one person

False flag in Connecticut

Trumpkins here always suspicious of the Left sometimes doing "false flag" vandalism on Mosques, etc, so they should be interested to read of this:

A supporter of President Trump in Connecticut says he wrote threatening anti-Trump graffiti on elementary school equipment hoping to frame Democrats because he believes they are "disrespectful to our government." 

Stephen Marks, 32, wrote “Kill Trump,” “Left is the best,” "Bernie Sanders 2020" and “Death to Trump” on playground equipment at Hartford's Morley Elementary School last month, according to the Hartford Courant.

Hand avoidance

Pretty hilarious, the look on Trump's face as the Polish First Lady wisely avoids the chance of a handshake with him:

via GIPHY

Update:  I've read since that she shakes Trump's hand after Melania's.  Maybe that made President Manbaby feel better...

About Yassmin

I haven't really paid that much attention to her - just as I find it easy not to read opinion pieces by rude feminists like Clementine Ford, who wingnuts similarly obsess over.  But I did think the reaction to Yassim's ANZAC Day tweet was completely over the top and out of proportion.  However, that Guardian column she wrote about cultural appropriation was extremely self indulgent, and it may well be that her Muslim apologetics re feminism  are semi to fully ludicrous to many ears.

But it's surely the case that it should be possible for someone like her to be both attention seeking, hold annoying opinions, and wrong in much of what she writes, yet still not warrant the vicious obsession of aggro wingnuts in attacking her.  I might be wrong, but I strongly suspect that she probably has received scary death threat type of messages.   And don't say that Andrew Bolt has received them too as if that makes it right.    Neither of them deserve that. 

Boys fighting

A somewhat amusing account here of a famous altercation between Ernest Hemingway and Max Eastman.   Eastman didn't care for Hemingway's romantic fondness of bullfighting:

In a passage that would come to haunt Max later, he likened writing that derived pleasure from such senseless bloodshed—writing like Hemingway’s, in other words—to the “wearing of false hair on the chest.” To Papa Hemingway’s supporters this was blasphemy. “I don’t know when I have written anything that I have heard more about from various sources than that article,” sighed Max. Not bothering to read Max’s review carefully, Hemingway’s defenders engaged in the kind of public posturing and muscle flexing that ironically confirmed Max’s concerns. 

Which led 3 years later to this:

On August 17, 1937, Max was visiting his editor Maxwell Perkins’ office, discussing a new edition of Enjoyment of Poetry, when Hemingway sauntered in. He was not in a particularly generous mood: his marriage with Pauline Pfeiffer was on the rocks, and he was about to return to Spain, where the civil war he had been covering had reinforced his contempt for literary refinement. Opening his shirt, he encouraged Max to assess the authenticity of his chest hair, while he mocked Max’s chest, which was, remarked Perkins, as “bare as a bald man’s head.” Then everything went haywire. Seeing the well-fed, white-clad, good-looking Max, tanned from tennis and hours spent napping on the beach, Hemingway erupted. The way Max remembered it, Hemingway was crude and  aggressive. “What did you say I was sexually impotent for?” he snarled. Conveniently, a copy of Art and the Life of Action was sitting on Perkins’ desk. Max attempted to point out a passage—a positive one, we might imagine—that he thought would clarify that he had never wanted to trash Hemingway. But Hemingway, muttering and swearing, zeroed in on a different passage, and a particularly good one it was, too: “Some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity.” This was Max at his best, the use of the plural “evidences” giving the line a rhythmic lilt: “évi / dénces of / réd-blooded/ máscu / línity.” An altercation ensued, during which Max, as both parties agreed, got “socked” on the nose with his own book. Everything was happening very fast after that. Max charged at Hemingway. Books and other stuff from Perkins’ desk went flying to the ground. Convinced that the much younger Hemingway was going to kill his friend, Perkins rushed in to help. By the time he had reached the two men they were both on the floor. Max was on top, although Perkins felt this was by accident only. But Max would later tell everyone who cared to listen that he had been the winner. Recognizing the disadvantage imposed on him by age and lack of physical fitness (“I would have kissed the carpet in a fistfight with Ernest Hemingway”), he claimed he had used a wrestling move to throw Hemingway on his back over Max Perkins’ desk. Hemingway assured the Times no such thing had taken place, that Max instead had taken his slap “like a woman.” He went on to challenge Max to meet him in a locked room and read to him his review in there, with “all legal rights waived”—the Hemingway equivalent to challenging his adversary to a duel. There is one detail, however, that does make Max’s account credible: he did know how to wrestle.