Here’s a neat idea — an online petition opposing the idea of a State Visit to the UK for Trump as pathetically proffered by Theresa May. Note that it doesn’t rule out the idea of Trump coming on an ordinary visit (for example for a NATO meeting) — just that the Queen shouldn’t be involved. As I write 1,438,415 people – plus me — have signed it. It’ll be 1.5m by the time you read this. The Petition site also has a nice ‘heat map’ showing the geolocation of the signatories.

Oh — and wouldn’t it be interesting to see if this heat map inversely correlates with the equivalent map for Brexit support? I’m sure some talented data-wrangler is already at work on this.

LATER They were! The Economist has published this correlation chart:

It also summarises the inferences one can draw from it.

This tells us several things. First, geographical patterns of opposition to Mr Trump in America may well be reflected in other countries too. Second, the demographics of his support and support for Brexit speak to similarities between the two phenomena (their “pull up the drawbridge” character in particular). Third, Britain’s divide over Brexit was not a one-off: the political behaviour of cosmopolitan places and nativist ones remains quite distinct. And fourth: there are many thousands of British people, many of them living in or near the capital, who may be minded to line the streets, protest and generally cause disruption when Mr Trump comes to London. He should not expect a warm welcome.

Many thanks to Philip Cunningham for spotting the chart.

And while we’re on the subject, there’s a terrific piece by Eliot Cohen in The Atlantic.

“I am not surprised by President Donald Trump’s antics this week’, he writes.

Not by the big splashy pronouncements such as announcing a wall that he would force Mexico to pay for, even as the Mexican foreign minister held talks with American officials in Washington. Not by the quiet, but no less dangerous bureaucratic orders, such as kicking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of meetings of the Principals’ Committee, the senior foreign-policy decision-making group below the president, while inserting his chief ideologist, Steve Bannon, into them. Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character.

Yep: temperament and character. Or, to use a technical term, sociopathic.

In an epic week beginning with a dark and divisive inaugural speech, extraordinary attacks on a free press, a visit to the CIA that dishonored a monument to anonymous heroes who paid the ultimate price, and now an attempt to ban selected groups of Muslims (including interpreters who served with our forces in Iraq and those with green cards, though not those from countries with Trump hotels, or from really indispensable states like Saudi Arabia), he has lived down to expectations.

And because it’s caused by temperament and character, it’s not going to get better. Au contraire we ain’t seen nothing yet.

It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity—substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. The sooner Americans get used to these likelihoods, the better.

Theresa May, please copy.

Well, well. Looks like the Silicon Valley crowd are having to wise up about the threat of Trump to their interests. The New York Times claims in a headline that “Silicon Valley’s Ambivalence Toward Trump Turns to Anger”.

On Friday morning, Silicon Valley was largely ambivalent about President Trump. The software programmers, marketing experts and chief executives might not have voted for him, but they were hopeful about finding common ground with the new administration.

By Saturday night, much of that optimism had yielded to anger and determination.

Mr. Trump’s executive order late on Friday temporarily blocked all refugees while also denying entry to citizens of Iran, Iraq and five other predominantly Muslim countries. The directives struck at the heart of Silicon Valley’s cherished values, its fabled history and, not least, its embrace-the-world approach to customers. Two worldviews collided: the mantra of globalization that underpins the advance of technology and the nationalistic agenda of the new administration.

In response, a significant part of the tech community went to the barricades.

All of which is good news. But what’s this? Another piece in the same issue with the headline “Google, in Post-Obama Era, Aggressively Woos Republicans”.

Few companies have been as intimately tied to the Democratic Party in recent years as Google. So now that Donald J. Trump is president, the giant company, in Silicon Valley parlance, is having to pivot.

The shift was evident a day after Congress began its new session this month. That evening, about 70 lawmakers, a majority of them Republicans, were feted at the stately Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, where they clinked champagne and bourbon glasses and posed for selfies with the 600 guests assembled in their honor.

The event’s main host was not from the Republican establishment. Instead, the party was primarily financed and anchored by Google.

“We’ve partnered with Google on events before, but nothing like this party,” said Alex Skatell, founder of The Independent Journal Review, a news start-up with a right-leaning millennial audience, which also helped host the event. “I’ve never heard of an event as big.”

The chief schmoozer, naturally, is none other than Google’s Executive Chairmam, Eric Schmidt. He’s decided that the thing to do is to adopt the Theresa May strategy — cozy up to the monster in the hope that he won’t be nasty to you.

What’s astonishing in both pieces is now naive the Silicon Valley crowd are about power. What they’ve been trying to do is what is technically called appeasement. Britain tried it with Hitler in the 1930s. And guess what?

So here’s a helpful suggestion for them. Print out Winston Churchill’s famous definition of appeasement as “Being nice to a crocodile in the hope that he will eat you last” in 95-point Helvetica Bold and hang it over your desk.