toucana

According to Sky news, Trump has now confirmed the appointment of Elon Musk to his cabinet to co-lead a new 'Department of Government Efficiency' (DOGE for short) with Vivek Ramaswamy. https://news.sky.com/story/donald-trump-confirms-elon-musk-in-his-cabinet-13253406

Inamullah Samangani, head of the information and culture department of the Taliban in Kandahar has formally congratulated Americans for “Not handing leadership of their great country to a woman” - in a post on X. https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/taliban-congratulate-americans-for-not-handing-leadership-of-their-great-country-to-a-woman-385406/

MAGA supporters misunderstand how trade tariffs work so badly that many of them think tariffs are a tax paid by China. This Meidas Touch video includes a clip by YT comedian and activist Walter Masterton in which he explains to a young Trump supporter that trade tariffs are in fact a tax paid by US importers which they will then pass on to US consumers in the form of raised retail prices - which was apparently a Damascene revelation to that young entrepreneur. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI_3aZxvrEk In another clip, a US importer points out there is practically nothing you can buy on shop shelves that doesn’t contain (or rely on) raw materials and precursors imported from abroad. Everything will be affected, everything will cost more. Some of Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters are said to be Gen-Z gamers who will shortly find out that gaming consoles like their beloved PS5 or Nintendo Switches will cost up to 40% more. Mark Cuban (of Shark Tank fame) has some sobering words for those who think that the economic consequences of trade tariffs won’t be happening for some time. In reality they are already happening - right now ! Quite a few business employees will shortly discover that they won’t be receiving any Xmas bonuses this December, as US importers adopt defensive positions:

A BBC News article notes that Trump benefited from a massive 14% bump in support from Latino voters according to exit polls. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cze3yr77j9wo Trump garnered almost 42% of the Latino vote in Pennsylvania - almost 5% of the total vote - compared to 27% when he ran against Joe Biden in 2020. When asked to explain why the Latino vote had shifted so decisively towards Trump, members of that community cited principally the economy and inflation. It will be interesting to see if they still feel the same way in about six months time, once the economy starts to crater and inflation rockets after Trump commences a trade Tariff war with the rest of the world.

Were you asleep during president Trump’s first term in 2017 when he attempted to block all muslims from entering USA, and began ranting to his aides about migrants coming from ‘sh&ithole’ countries’, and demanding to know why America wasn’t prioritising the arrival of blue-eyed blond haired people from Scandinavian countries like Norway ? Were you under a rock on another planet on January 6th 2021 when Trump incited a violent lynch mob to attack the Capitol in an attempt to hang his own VP, after Mike Pence refused to subvert the constitution and throw out the results of the 2020 presidential election ? Did you have your fingers firmly in your ears during the recent final Trump rallies this year when he referred to Kamela Harris as a ‘b*tch’ - or were you perhaps watching another channel when Trump’s rally at the Madison Square Garden NY on October 27 was being broadcast - appropriately enough on the 85th anniversary of the infamous swastika bedecked Nazi mass rally organised by the German American Bund at the same venue in 1939 ? Did you perhaps miss seeing Trump and his allies smirking and clapping along as ‘comedians’ and other surrogates told viciously anti-semitic jokes, made racist comments about Latino-Americans, and referred to Kamala Harris as the ’antichrist’, and characterised her as a “whore “ with ‘pimp handlers’ ? Just curious…

First impressions on the 2024 election result - (As a Brit living over the pond): i. Many Americans pay little attention, and give even less critical thought to the finer details of daily politics and current affairs. They tend to receive and form opinions based on what they hear on hyper-partisan cable media, and are likely to believe whatever they are told about prices, employment and migration. If some shock-jock assures them that jars of Goober cost twice what they did four years ago because Puerto Rican migrants are eating their pets, they are inclined to take that as gospel, and go off and vote for whoever they think is likely to solve the problem ( N.B. Brits are no better - It’s how we wound up with Brexit and a leader like Bojo). ii. Ambrose Bierce once said “War is God’s way of teaching Americans Geography”. You might add that nowadays a US presidential election seems to be God’s way of teaching Americans History, and unfortunately many Americans who have no real first-hand experience of what mainstream fascism really entails seem to be determined to find out the hard way. iii. When Speaker Tip O’Neill said “All politics is local”, he was actually quoting a piece of proverbial wisdom dating back to 1932. But it’s frighteningly true if you ever travel as a Brit to America and live in California or Colorado for a month or two. The USA is huge ! It’s a continent, not a country. Down in Chula Vista on the California-Mexico border, Washington DC and its media political bubble seem as remote as the Vatican in Rome must have seemed to a Roman Catholic monk living in Finland in the Middle Ages. Many Americans are simply not interested in that political world, and their concerns are purely local ones. iv. I do fear that the Kamala Harris campaign was hobbled from the outset by its emollient and inclusive sentiments and instincts. Unfortunately America presidential elections are not often exercises in statesmanship and decorous civility. They have frequently tended to be bloody handed knock-down bar-room brawls, well into living memory - for those who can recall the virulent anti-Catholic rhetoric levelled at JFK in 1960, or the teargas mayhem outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. America has now demonstrated for the second time that it is simply not ready or capable of accepting a female leader - and for the foreseeable future, it probably never will be.

As it seems to be upsetting MAGA Republicans, Fox TV Hosts, and Russian Troll-bots alike - it's probably worth flagging up this mischievous and wittily written 'Go Vote' advert from the 'Vote Harris/Walz' campaign.

Recent polling analysis by the Harvard Institute of Politics suggests that Kamala Harris is leading by up to 30% amongst younger voters - especially women. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4953612-harvard-institute-poll-gender-gap-harris-trump/ Amidst reports of half-empty Trump rallies with audience members leaving after just 5 minutes, the inescapable conclusion seems to be that momentum has shifted towards Kamala Harris in the crucial final week before the election on Tuesday. Critics can point to various factors such as the negative optics of Trump’s October 27 event in Madison Square Gardens which was unpleasantly redolent of the infamous ‘German American Bund’ Nazi rally held there in 1939 - complete with racist insults and overt threats of violence towards their ‘enemies’. Subsequent MAGA attempts to exploit the ‘Garbage’ meme backfired spectacularly when Trump appeared like a senile dustman aboard a garbage truck, and his supporters began dressing in garbage sacks - which prompted one prominent conservative influencer and former ally Nick Fuentes to denounce MAGA as a cult. https://www.newsweek.com/nick-fuentes-slams-donald-trump-supporters-it-cult-1979186 But one thing in particular that stands out, was the profound unwisdom of the Trump campaign in allowing some of his most unsavoury affiliates and surrogates to start spitballing in public about what jobs they would take up in a new Trump administration, and which radical agendas they proposed to ‘follow from day one’. There had already been a certain amount of cautious and reasoned speculation about whom Trump might appoint to his cabinet if he wins - e.g. this well researched article in Politico. https://www.politico.com/interactives/2024/potential-cabinets/trump-second-term-cabinet/ All of this however was completely eclipsed by the following garish media events: - Robert Kennedy Jr announcing that he had been promised control of the Public Health Services, and would begin pulling ‘ineffective’ vaccines from the market. --> https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/rfk-jr-trump-promised-control-public-health-agencies/story?id=115303649 - Elon Musk announcing that he would be put in charge of a ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ - aka DOGE (*wink-wink*), and start firing staff and tearing down Federal Government, just like he did at Twitter.--> https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/22/tech/elon-musk-government-efficiency/index.html - Aileen Cannon, the Florida district judge being touted by Trump as future Attorney General as a quid pro quo for (temporarily) dismissing the Mar-a-Lago Espionage Act charges against him.--> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-aileen-cannon-attorney-general-b2634284.html As US comedian Joey Adams once said - “With friends like these, who needs enemies ?” You could hardly think of anything more likely to focus the minds of voters on the implications and possible consequences of the choices they will make on Tuesday.

The gem here was that the real driver of that garbage truck happened to be a dead-ringer for Terhune - full face, balding head, and a flowing ginger/red beard. Brent said in another podcast that all he had to do was buy a cheap yellow HiViz jacket from a costume store, jam a black WCW forage cap on his head - and then turn the camera on ! I first saw one of Terhune’s videos back in September 2020, when he pretended to be one of the MAGA boat owners who had sunk on Lake Travis in Texas during a Trump boat parade. I had to watch that one twice to be quite sure it was a parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayCLE_ctpYg

Garbage-Force One incoming ! ICYMI - Conservative activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk first posted, then rapidly deleted this video on his X account after discovering it was a complete hoax made by Brent Terhune, a standup comedian who specialises in impersonating southern state MAGA cult members. Watch Brent Terhune on —> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6IzHU849i4

A pair of Australian mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta have published a new paper called A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem which demonstrates that the estimated lifespan of our universe renders it impossible for an infinite number of monkeys to type out the complete works of Shakespeare. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2773186324001014 As a BBC news article explains:

According to the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution (passed in 1803) there is no constitutional requirement upon states to even hold a popular vote at all. US Presidents were to be chosen on the basis of votes cast by nominated state electors, or by contingent elections in Congress if such votes were tied. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution The popular vote wasn’t formally recorded until 1824, and didn’t become the customary basis for selecting electors in all states until the presidential election of 1880. In one of the most contentious presidential elections of US history in 1876, the Democratic party contender Samuel J. Tilden lost to his Republican opponent Rutherford B. Hayes - in spite of the fact that Tilden had won both a plurality of the popular vote (50.9%), *and* a majority of the Electoral College votes (184-165). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election Q. So how on earth did he lose ? A. Twenty of the Electoral College votes were disputed and passed to an Electoral Commission who voted along party lines to award the disputed Electoral votes and the presidency to the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes who became the 19th President serving from 1877-1881. This incidentally was the last US Presidential election in which both candidates were sitting governors.

Duolingo the popular foreign language learning app is famous for offering quite bizarre sentences as exercises. This one turned up at an early stage in the Duolingo Scottish Gaelic course when I was trying to improve my grasp of an ancestral language. I'm still struggling to imagine an appropriate social context for this remark.

An article published yesterday by The New Republic (TNR) discusses at some length the malign influence of so called ‘polls’ released by right leaning US firms in the last few weeks, which in a number of cases appear to be openly partisan attempts to shift the aggregate polls in favour of Trump, and to create a false illusion of momentum trending in favour of MAGA https://newrepublic.com/article/187425/gop-polls-rigging-averages-trump What is happening is that the psephological marketplace is being flooded with new polls from right-wing fly-by-night operators, and this data is then being included into national polling averages by such aggregators as FiveThirtyEight and The New York Times - among others. The latter adamantly deny that GOP polls are seriously harming their averages and forecasts - but a better question would be - Why is this garbage being included by aggregators in the first place ? The aggregators say that they apply negative weightings to polls which are thought to be systematically biased to ensure they have less influence than high-quality polls with better standards of empirical accuracy and more methodological transparency. Critics are sceptical about this - and with reason.They point out that while many of the distortions introduced into the averages by these skewed MAGA leaning polls may be statistically insignificant - e.g. a ‘lead’ of 0.4% - they are being actively exploited for psychological propaganda effect by social media entities such as X/Twitter who will claim that Trump is “Winning the state”, and then even more irresponsibly assign electoral college votes based on such narrow leads to ramp up partisan claims that ’Trump is now winning’ - not just even leading, but winning the election - when the underlying data says nothing of the sort. Earlier today I read a report on Sky News whose headline uncritically claimed that “Trump is now the bookies favourite” https://news.sky.com/story/us-election-donald-trump-kamala-harris-democrat-republican-polls-skynews-live-latest-13209921 The reality (as previously noted) is that these claims derive entirely from online betting markets like Betfair and Polymarket which are being heavily manipulated by conservative MAGA investors who are sinking up to $14 million dollars a time into these forums - precisely to generate headlines of this sort.

To return briefly to the point of the original OP - Two points come to mind: i. One of the reasons why Paul addressed the issue of marriage and offered guidance to Christians in the way that he did was because most of the early Christians were Chiliasts (from the Greek - χιλιαστες ‘a thousand years’) - meaning that they believed as a matter of faith that the Second Coming would occur within their own lifetimes, and that the risen Christ would return to earth and establish a Messianic age of universal peace and brotherhood prior to the Last Judgement. Given that schedule, it was reasonable for Christians to ask - Why get married at all when the Second Coming was just around the corner ? Paul’s advice was primarily aimed at those members of the faithful who really couldn’t control their lustful drives and wait chastely for a decade or so until the eschaton arrived. We know a certain amount about what early Christians believed from the surviving texts of patristic writers like Papias Bishop of Hierapolis (c.60 -130 AD) who visited various parts of the Holy Land and interviewed many other travellers passing through Hierapolis. Papias was said to have heard the apostle John speak, and to have met with Church elders of the first generation of Christians who had received their teaching and baptism directly from the original apostles of Christ. Unfortunately most of his writings (extant until the middle ages) have now been lost apart from some that survive in quotation. According to his principal commentator Eusebius, Papias himself was definitely a Pre-Millenial chiliast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papias_of_Hierapolis ii. Pauls most explicit advice on marriage is found in the epistle 1 Corinthians : There is some debate among contemporary Christians as to whether he was advocating celibacy or simple abstinence, but given the apocalyptic mind-set mentioned above, it is difficult to see his advice as anything other than a form of short-term tactical pragmatism. One further point is the question of quite how many of the epistles attributed to Paul were actually written by him ? There was an interesting stylometric analysis of these texts done a few years ago using Rasch analysis which offers some useful insights: https://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt151k.htm

One of the ‘polling’ sources currently being touted by right-wing MAGA cheerleaders like Elon Musk as showing a decisive advantage for Trump is an online political betting market called Polymarket which gave Trump a 60% chance of winning the election as of Wednesday. https://www.newsweek.com/who-polymarket-mystery-trader-fredi9999-1969646 The problem is that Polymarket (which is partially funded by sometime Trump ally Peter Thiel) is apparently being manipulated by conservative investors. One particular trader known as Fredi9999 has purchased more than 15 milion shares valued at $8.7 million betting that Trump would win the election - according to reports by Newsweek and The Beast (amongst others). The same trader also purchased more than 3 million shares betting that Trump would win the popular vote, and nearly 1.5 million shares that Trump would carry the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania. The total holding of Fredi9999’s position is valued at in excess of $14 million on that one platform - which they only joined in June 2024. When cable news media in the US start uncritically confounding electoral polling stats with manipulable betting trends on forums like Polymarket, then you really are entering LaLa land. https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/10/17/trumps-polymarket-odds-top-60-how-election-betting-markets-differ-from-polls/

Posted on X by David Coverdale (!)

A recent article in The Hill highlights some of the problems US pollsters face nowadays when conducting US Presidential election polls. https://thehill.com/homenews/4894892-if-landline-phones-are-dying-out-how-do-political-polls-work-today/ Up until the early 2000’s, pollsters in the USA regarded telephone landline polling as the ‘Gold Standard’ for obtaining responses from voters (some still do). The problem is that nowadays an estimated 183 million Americans (7 out of 10 US adults) do not even have a landline anymore - they rely solely on their cellphones for day-to-day communication - according to US Chamber of Commerce Statistics: https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/landline-phone-statistics Those who do still use landlines in the US tend to be seniors who are more likely to hold conservative views and favour right-wing candidates. This immediately introduces a significant bias into the responses obtained by such old-fashioned polling methods. Pollsters have belatedly begun switching to combinations of phones, text-to-web and online panel discussions to improve their response rates. But they still face the problem of reaching younger voters and ethnic minorities who are often the least likely targets to answer a call, and then sit there for 15 minutes answering a poll. Basically I don’t have a lot of confidence in the US polls right now, as I suspect their sampling methods are fundamentally flawed - a suspicion borne out by the woefully wrong ‘Red Wave’ predictions offered in the last set of mid-term elections.

Sabine Hossenfelder has just posted a YT video about this paper within the last hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErLHm-1c6I4 And yes, it is the group velocity of wave packets, not the phase velocity of individual packet elements that is under discussion here. The conclusion seems to be that no violation of causality is involved here - so you can stand down your time-machine construction projects 😉

Home solar energy systems have now started exploding in parts of Beirut according to the official Lebanese news agency - (video report) https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/lebanons-official-news-agency-claims-home-solar-energy-systems-exploded-in-several-areas-of-beirut-video-surfaces

According to the BBC, Reuters are now reporting (as of 6 minutes ago) that hand-held Walkie-Talkie radio units have begun exploding in south Beirut, the day after the wave of pager explosions: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cwyl9048gx8t These hand-held radios were apparently acquired by Hezbollah about 5 months ago, at the same time as the pagers.

My father was an anti-aircraft gunner during WW2 who worked with both 3.7” HAA guns, and the fin-stabilised ‘Z-Rocket’ systems. In general AA fire wasn’t particularly accurate. At the start of the war, Air Ministry estimates were that 6,000 shells were fired for every enemy aircraft brought down. This improved during the war to a ratio of about 1,830 shells per aircraft with the help of better fire-control, new searchlights with radar detection, and the introduction of shells with radio proximity fuzes . https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5c9lyr/in_ww2_how_often_did_aa_guns_actually_hit_their/ The real point of AA fire in WW2 was to force enemy bombers to fly higher than they really wanted to, and avoid flying straight-line approaches on their bombing runs. If an enemy plane was flying at 200mph at 20,000 feet, it could take nearly 20 seconds for a shell to reach that height, in which time the plane would have flown another mile. AA crews had predictor machines that could help the gun-layers calculate how far ahead of the target to aim; and the longer the enemy flew in a straight line, the easier it became for the predictor. Hence the necessity for enemy pilots to fly jinking runs which made the job of their bomb aimer much harder.

Gold Apollo, the Taiwanese firm who manufacture these AR-924 pagers say that they licensed the technology and trademark to a Hungarian firm in Budapest called BAC Consulting. The latter deny actually building the pagers, which probably means they sub-contracted the job to another local electronics firm. https://news.sky.com/story/middle-east-latest-eight-dead-in-pager-explosions-include-hezbollah-fighters-militant-group-says-12978800 As noted in iNow’s clip from Axios, various sources suggest that Israel planned to trigger these explosions as the prelude to an all-out attack on Hezbollah, but were forced to activate the plan prematurely because they feared that its secrecy had been compromised - i.e. it was a ‘use it or lose it’ scenario.

New reporting from the NYT says this was a joint Mossad/IDF operation in which explosive material was planted in a batch of new Taiwanese-made pagers recently imported into Lebanon by Hezbollah. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-pagers-explosives.html The explosives were concealed next to the battery, with an embedded detonation switch that could be remotely triggered by a text message.