Confusion on what US National Intelligence is for

So many MAGA people are so completely in thrall to Trump that they seem not able to think for themselves, or at least daren't voice any kind of dissent because their jobs are on the line. 

Take, for example, the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who maintained under questioning by a congressional committee that: "The only person that can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the President". Er, no, that's exactly what National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Centre (and a bunch of other similar-sounding agencies) are for. They are supposed to advise the President, because the President is not an expert in these matters (and this President in particular needs more guidance than most).

Ms. Gabbard even doubled down: "It is not the intelligence community's responsibility to determmine what is and is not an imminent threat." She seems a little confused about her job mandate. Her (Democrat) questioner shot back: "It is PRECISELY your responsibility to determine what constitutes a threat to the United States".

If the President then ignores that advice, then that's on him. Frustrations, even within Trump's so-called supporters, are building; hence the high-profile resignation of National Counterterrorism Center boss Joe Kent yesterday.

I get it that some of these people are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, and many of them are completely out of their depths, unqualified and inexperienced in the fields they have been dumped in. But that's hardly an excuse.

Doug Ford hits the controversy button yet again

Not one to be shy of making his opinions known, Doug Ford has been throwing his controversial views around again. It does seem like, just recently, pretty everything he says is contentious or dubious.

After a Vaughan home-owner foiled a home invasion attempt by shooting and injuring one of the would-be burglers, Ford couldn't stop himself from congratulating the trigger-happy home-owner: "W1ell, you know, these guys, they need to be shot. Congratulations for shooting this guy - should have shot him a couple more times as far as I'm concerned". He went on to attack the federal government for "going after legal, law-abiding gun owners" and berated "weak-kneed judges" for letting people out on bail.

The home invader who was shot was actually injured, not killed, but he could easily have been killed, and presumably Ford would have been fine with that too. The injured man was seen in security video footage to be holding a gun, but did not use it. He is now facing charges of robbery with a firearm and "disguise with intent". No charges are being laid against the resident doing the shooting.

Predictably, many people took issue with Ford's outburst. NDP opposition leader Marit Styles called it "very irresponsible nonsense", and Green Party leader Mike Schreiner called it "irresponsible of the Premier to be making comments encouraging violence or celebrating the loss of life". A Liberal critic pointed out that "no-one should be congratulated for shooting another person". 

More than one commentator has observed that this kind of vigilante justice should be discouraged, not praised. Under Canadian law, the use of force is only allowed when "reasonable and proportionate in the circumstances". 

Our ethical decisions may depend on the language they are couched in

Here's an interesting thing. You've probably heard of what's usually referred to as the "trolley problem" of ethics and philosophy. So, people have to decide whether to sacrifice one person in order to save five others who are about to be killed by a hypothetical runaway trolley bus (or tram, or train). There are various formulations and variations, like what if it was a fat person or an old person, or what if you had to actually push a person off a bridge in order to save the five rather than just pull a track switch. 

Generally speaking, a sizeable majority think that it is morally permissible to make the utilitarian choice and pull the lever to save the five at the cost of the one. However, much fewer people would push someone off the bridge to save the five, reflecting the increased "emotional resonance" of such an action. 

More recent studies have looked at what difference the language in which the problem is posed makes to people's moral decison-making. The problem was put to people who spoke more than one language, both in their native language and in their second language. By a substantial margin, more people chose to pull the switch to kill the one person inorder to save the five if the problem was put to them in their second language, rather than in their native language. The difference was even starker for the more emotive problem of having to push someone off a bridge rather than just pull a rail switch at a distance. Furthermore, the poorer people's mastery of the second language, the more marked the effect.

This suggests that a native language holds much more emotional resonance, while a second language maintains more psychological distance for most people. This makes some intuitive sense, I guess, but it's interesting to see it demonstrated in quite such a stark manner.

Joe Kent resignation is a blow for Trump

Trump shrugged it off and (very quickly) moved on to a new question in a media scrum yesterday, but the resignation of Joe Kent - the director of the US National Counterterrorism Center - is a big deal.

Not just because Kent was a Trump appointee and a high-profile MAGA guy (albeit on the non-interventionist wing of the movement). But because he didn't just disappear quietly into the background, but rather defected very publicly, with an open letter explaining his reasons for resigning and the many reasons why Trump's war in Iran is wrong.

"I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby." 

Ouch.

Don't get me wrong, Kent is a loose cannon himself and deep into conspiracy theories. But kudos to him for standing up to Trump and telling it like it is. The rift between the interventionist and non-interventionist wings of the MAGA base is becoming deeper and wider every day. Bring it on, I say.

Trump tries to bribe companies to abandon renewable energy projects

It's no secret that Donald Trump hates wind turbines, especially offshore ones. He has tried (and largely failed so far) to cancel a bunch of wind farms off the eastern US seaboard that were already in progress.

Now, though, he is setting his sights on cancelling offshore wind farms that are permitted but not yet begun. And this time, there's a twist.

Trump wants to cancel two large wind farms permitted by the Biden administration to the French oil/energy company TotalEnergies SE, one off the coast of New York, and one off North Carolina. His ploy now - or at least that of the Interior and Justice Departments, which just seem to follow Trump's every whim, no matter how random, foolish or financially imprudent - is to basically bribe the developers. 

The New York Times has viewed contracts drawn up with TotalEnergies that would see the company abandon the two wind farms (which would, between them, have powered over a million homes and businesses) and commit unspecified sums of money to investing in natural gas infrastructure in Texas instead. To make TotalEnergies happy with this intervention and their loss of income, the Justice Department would pay them $795 million to abandon the New York project and a further $133 million for the North Carolina development. 

So, that's nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money that Trump is making the government shell out just because ... well, we're not really sure why. There are no actual national security reasons or economic imperatives, whatever Trump may bluster. He has just decided that he doesn't like wind power, and his feckless administration humours him in it. And this, remember, in a so-called "energy emergency" that Trump himself declared last year.

You can't buy veggie chicken in Europe any more

The EU comes in for a lot of stick from a lot of folks and for various different reasons. But, for all that, it remains one of the most sensible and civilized blocs in today's world. Yes, it has its problems (Hungary, anyone?) but, for the most part, it does a good job of providing a voice of sobriety and reason in today's increasingly weird and dysfunctional global politics.

Occasionally, though, it missteps. One such misstep is the latest policy decision to ban the use of words like "chicken", "bacon" and "steak" by vegetarian and vegan food producers, even if it is clearly qualified on the label as being vegetarian or vegan. Mysteriously, words like "burger", "nuggets" and "sausage" ARE still allowed, because ... well, I'm really not sure why. Where they stand on the use of "chick'un", "chick'n", etc, I'm also not sure. Incidentally, this ruling also applies to the UK, which - also mysteriously - is still subject to such EU commercial edicts.

Now, it seems pretty unlikely to me that anyone has ever picked up a pack of veggie bacon in a supermarket and been traumatized to find that it contains absolutely no dead animal. The "veggie" part is usually front and centre of their packaging and advertising - it's a positive selling point, after all. (A British survey suggests that 92% of shoppers say they have NEVER mistaken "fake" meat for the "real thing".)

Either way, I think the EU overstepped their brief on this this one. Do they really have nothing better to discuss at the moment, like maybe global security, recession-spawning tariffs, existential changes in the climate?

No-one wants to help dig Trump out of his latest quagmire

Unsurprisingly, Trump's "demand" that other countries (like China, Japan, South Korea, France and the UK) help police the Strait of Hormuz is falling on deaf ears.

"I'm demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their own territory", quoth he. Well, no it's not, actually. The Strait, which is as narrow as 20 miles (32km) at one point, is technically an "international strait" within the meaning of Article 37 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). It is bordered by Iran on one side and Oman on the other. Iran does not legally own the Strait, but it can effectively control it based on its physical proximity. However, it definitely does not belong to the USA, China or any other country that may happen to use it or want it.

Trump, whose "most powerful military in the world" seems to be struggling to assert control in the region, wants to drag other countries into his unilateral war. But, wisely, no-one is biting. Just because Trump has bitten off more than he can chew doesn't mean that everyone else should come flocking to his aid - quite the contrary. He needs to learn not to go around imperilling world trade and security based on little more than a whim and delusions of grandeur. 

After Trump warned - in his usual tone of veiled, or not-so-veiled, threat - that not doing as he "demands" would be "very bad for the future of NATA", one former British Chief of Defence Staff laid it out clearly: "NATO was created as a ... defensive alliance. It was not an alliance that was designed for one of the allies to go on a war of choice and then oblige everybody else to follow." Thus far, there have been few firm commitments (none confirmed publicly, despite Trump's claims). Canada, as always is playing it cagey, insisting that "there has been no formal ask of Canada". More bluntly, the UK's Keir Starmer asserts that the UK "will not be drawn into the wider war". German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius was even blunter: "This is not our war. We haven't started it."

UPDATE

Stung by the deafening silence from the US's "allies", Trump launched into another bewildering speech in which he flip-flopped back and forth but eventually concluded (I think) with the rather tired line that America doesn't actually NEED anyone else's help - they're the most powerful country on earth, don't you know, with the strongest military anybody has ever seen, ever - and that he was only asking for help in the Strait of Hormuz to see who would respond, to see who his real friends are.

Unbearable man! I think he can safely say, after this little exercise, that he HAS no friends, and that he has managed to alienate pretty much the whole world in just one year.

Even teabags are full of microplastics

By now, we have pretty much come to understand that microplastics and nanoplastics.(collectively, MNPs) are everywhere, in the food we eat, the water we drink, the very air we breathe. Our bodies are therefore just full of them.

A recent meta-study shows just how many are entering our system through as innocent an activity as drinking a cup of tea. Setting aside MNPs in the water, MNPs leaching from the cup/mug/teapot, and MNPs from the packaging and processing operations, the studies show that the teabags themselves are a significant source of micro- and nano- plastics.

I try to avoid those fancy pyramid-shaped "silk" teabags, which are essentially made of nylon (i.e. plastic). Pour boiling water over them and you have to expect a flood of plastic bits to be released. But traditional "paper" teabags (which are actually primarily made of bleached wood pulp and abaca, a banana plant derivative) are also a source, made worse by the fact that many such paper teabags are treated with polypropylene, epichlorohydrin, etc, to help strengthen and seal them. Not even "biodegradable", "compostable" and PLA "bioplastic" teabags are exempt.

A single teabag, it seems, can release between 1.3 and 14.7 billion MNPs, depending on the study and the methodology. Those are huge and scary numbers, but they do not mean that teabags are killing us, merely that they are contributing to the plastic load in our bodies and the environment, which over time will degrade our health in subtle and opaque ways.

Makes you feel like throwing your hands up in despair and having a cup of tea, doesn't it? Oh, wait...