That’s a hell of a good point (although presumably it’s not a luck that anyone would have wished for).

…while they were obviously unlucky in their disastrous 2016 defeat, in most respects liberalism and the Democratic Party have been very lucky since. So their optimism isn’t just a gritted-teeth pose; it’s an appropriate reaction to a landscape that’s more favorable than it easily might have been.

To understand this good fortune, consider two counterfactuals. In the first, the last 21 months proceeded in exactly the same fashion — with the strongest economy since the 1990s, full employment almost nigh, ISIS defeated, no new overseas wars or major terrorist attacks — except that Donald Trump let his staffers dictate his Twitter feed, avoided the press except to tout good economic news, eschewed cruelties and insults and weird behavior around Vladimir Putin, and found a way to make his White House a no-drama zone.

In this scenario it’s hard to imagine that Trump’s approval ratings wouldn’t have floated up into the high 40s; they float up into the mid-40s as it is whenever he manages to shut up. Even with their threadbare and unpopular policy agenda, Republicans would be favored to keep the House and maintain their state-legislature advantages. All the structural impediments to a Democratic recovery would loom much larger, Trump’s re-election would be more likely than not, and his opposition would be stuck waiting for a recession to have any chance of coming back.

Then consider a second counterfactual. Imagine that instead of just containing himself and behaving like a generic Republican, Trump had actually followed through on the populism that he promised in 2016, dragging his party toward the economic center and ditching the G.O.P.’s most unpopular ideas. Imagine that he followed through on Steve Bannon’s boasts about a big infrastructure bill instead of trying for Obamacare repeal; imagine that he listened to Marco Rubio and his daughter and tilted his tax cut more toward middle-class families; imagine that he spent more time bullying Silicon Valley into inshoring factory jobs than whining about Fake News; imagine that he made lower Medicare drug prices a signature issue rather than a last-minute pre-election gambit.

This strategy could have easily cut the knees out from under the Democrats’ strongest appeal, their more middle-class-friendly economic agenda, and highlighted their biggest liability, which is the way the party’s base is pulling liberalism way left of the middle on issues of race and culture and identity. It would have given Trump a chance to expand his support among minorities while holding working-class whites, and to claim the kind of decisive power that many nationalist leaders around the world enjoy. It would have threatened liberalism not just with more years out of power, but outright irrelevance under long-term right-of-center rule.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/opinion/sunday/midterms-democrats-trump.html

Does what it says on the tin

An unending verion of Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes No. 1

Source: Gnossiennes No. 1 Forever

Startlingly lovely.

Sculptor Noah Deledda transforms everyday aluminum cans into works of art using nothing but his fingertips. Deledda carefully presses and creases intricate geometric patterns into the surface of plain cylindrical cans using carefully placed pressure from his fingers and the edge of his nails. The artist explains in a statement on his site, “Through sculpture I try to create something unique out of an ordinary object. In this case, a common disposable object. The technique itself also embodies this theme of elevation by implementing the incidental gestures of disposal, the ‘scratch, dent and crease.’ Through artistic principles these actions are re-imagined.” Deledda shares process videos on Instagram and his website, where his sculptural vessels are also available for purchase.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/10/pressed-cans/

One part of life where [American] restlessness does not apply is politics. Almost everyone who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 had voted for Mitt Romney four years earlier, just as almost everyone who voted for Hillary Clinton had previously voted for Barack Obama. People who vote tend to settle on a party with which they identify in young adulthood, then stick with it. By contrast, half of American adults have switched religious denomination at some point, according to the Pew Research Centre. The datasets do not line up in a way that makes the conjecture possible to prove, but it is a fair bet that, at least among those most engaged in politics, Americans are more likely to change their religion than to change their party.

Partisanship eats away at the sense that it is possible to think for yourself. Partisanship also obviates the need to take opposing views seriously. Faced with a political decision, such as whether to support Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, or talks between America’s government and North Korea’s, it is far easier to listen to the people you normally agree with and adopt their view. Weighing up evidence is hard, time-consuming work: in this respect, partisan thinking is another shortcut to happiness.

When thinking is so entrenched, those who change their minds have a kind of superpower, for only they can demonstrate independent reasoning. That explains the fascination with the small subgroup of voters who chose Obama in 2012 and then Trump in 2016. Psephologists and journalists treat these creatures as ancient Romans treated birds, studying their flight paths to see what the omens are. Writers who have switched sides, though less numerous, exert a similar fascination.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/10/20/switching-parties-in-trumps-america

Peter Watts’ lucid, grim take on the IPCC report is a must-read.

It’s been a couple of weeks now since the IPCC reportcame out. You know what it says. If the whole damn species pulls together in a concerted effort “without historical precedent”— if we start right now, and never let up on the throttle— we just might be able to swing the needle back from Catastrophe to mere Disaster. If we cut carbon emissions by half over the next decade, eliminate them entirely by 2050; if the species cuts its meat and dairy consumption by 90%; if we invent new unicorn technologies for sucking carbon back out of the atmosphere (or scale up extant prototype tech by a factor of two million in two years) — if we commit to these and other equally Herculean tasks, then we might just barely be able to keep global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C.^[1] We’ll only lose 70-90% of the word’s remaining coral reefs (which are already down by about 50%, let’s not forget). Only 350 million more urban dwellers will be exposed to severe drought and “deadly heat” events. Only 130-140 million will be inundated. Global fire frequency will only increase by 38%. Fish stocks in low latitudes will be irreparably hammered, but it might be possible to save the higher-latitude populations. We’ll only lose a third of the permafrost. You get the idea.

We have twelve years to show results.

If we don’t pull all these things off— if, for example, we only succeed in meeting the flaccid 2°C aspirations of the Paris Accords— then we lose all the coral. We lose the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Shelf (not that it isn’t already circling the bowl, of course). Twice as many people suffer “aggravated water scarcity” than at 1.5°C; 170% more of the population deals with fluvial flooding. The increase in global wildfire frequency passes 60% and keeps going. Marine fisheries crash pole to pole. The number of species that loses at least half their traditional habitat is 2-3 times higher than would have been the case at 1.5°C. It goes on.

There’s no real point in worrying about a measly 2° increase, though, because on our current trajectory we’ll blow past 3° by century’s end (the Trump administration is predicting 4°, which is why they’re so busy dismantling whatever pitiful carbon-emission standards the US had already put into place; what’s the point of reducing profit margins if we’re headed straight for perdition no matter what we do?). We don’t really know what happens then. Methane clathrates released from a melting Arctic could turn the place into Venus, for all I know.

You probably know all this. You’ve had two weeks to internalize it; time to recoil, to internalize the numbers, to face facts.

To shrug, from what I can see.

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8433

When herd immunity drops 🙁

Fewer than 4 out of 10 adults in the United States got flu shots last winter, the lowest rate in seven seasons and one likely reason that the 2017-2018 season was the deadliest in decades.

Reports released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provide new details outlining the severity of the past flu season, during which more people were killed by seasonal influenza than in any other since the 1970s.

Flu vaccination is the main way to prevent sickness and death caused by flu. But last season, vaccination coverage among adults was 37.1 percent, a decrease of 6.2 percentage points from the previous season. That’s the lowest rate for adults 18 and older since 2010-2011. For many years, overall vaccination coverage has remained flat, with less than half of the U.S. population getting vaccinated. But the most recent drop has caused concern among experts.

Drop in adult flu vaccinations may be factor in last season’s record-breaking deaths, illnesses

Via Celene 💜

Tom Waits was born in the back of a boxcar in 1890, the son of a feral dog and a haunted phonograph. He has survived for over a century by splitting fragments of his vagabond spirit into horcruxes, enchanted objects that will keep him immortal unless they are destroyed beyond repair. These are the 5 horcruxes we know of, and here’s their definitive ranking.

https://thehardtimes.net/hardstyle/the-definitive-ranking-of-tom-waits-5-horcruxes/

Good info from a source I respect. Worth reading especially the sections on any of those myths that you believe. You may not ultimately agree on any given topic, but they certainly raise good points.

https://examine.com/nutrition/awful-nutrition-myths/

This really is just the weirdest damn thing. It’s not the least bit clear to me why this would be true.

This morning I was reading Terry Tao’s overview of the work of Yves Meyer and ran across this line:

The powers φ, φ², φ³, … of the golden ratio lie unexpectedly close to integers: for instance, φ¹¹ = 199.005… is unusually close to 199.

I’d never heard that before, so I wrote a little code to see just how close golden powers are to integers.

Here’s a plot of the difference between φⁿ and the nearest integer:

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2017/03/22/golden-powers-are-nearly-integers/

Pickpocketing in America was once a proud criminal tradition, rich with drama, celebrated in the culture, singular enough that its practitioners developed a whole lexicon to describe its intricacies. Those days appear to be over. “Pickpocketing is more or less dead in this country,” says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, whose new book Triumph of the City, deals at length with urban crime trends. “I think these skills have been tragically lost. You’ve got to respect the skill of some pickpocket relative to some thug coming up to you with a knife. A knife takes no skill whatsoever. But to lift someone’s wallet without them knowing …”

Marcus Felson, a criminologist at Texas State University who has spent decades studying low-level crime, calls pickpocketing a “lost art.” Last year, a New York City subway detective told the Daily News that the only pickpockets left working the trains anymore were middle-aged or older, and even those are few and far between. “You don’t find young picks anymore,” the cop told the paper. “It’s going to die out.” A transit detective in the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, which operates the Boston area’s bus, commuter rail, and subway system, concurred via e-mail. “Pickpockets are a dying breed,” he wrote. “The only known pickpockets we encounter are older, middle-aged men; however, they are rarely seen on the system anymore.”

The decline of dipping on the rails is extraordinary. Subways were always the happiest hunting grounds for pickpockets, who would work alone or in teams. There were classic skilled canons—organized pickpocket gangs—at the top, targeting wealthier riders, then “bag workers” who went for purses, and “lush workers” who disreputably targeted unconscious drunks. Richard Sinnott, who worked as a New York City transit cop in the 1970s and ‘80s, also admiringly recalls “fob workers,” a subspecies of pickpocket who worked their way through train cars using just their index and middle fingers to extract coins and pieces of paper money—a quarter here, a buck there—from riders’ pockets. “They weren’t greedy, and they never got caught,” says Sinnott. Bit by bit, fob workers could make up to $400 on a single subway trip; then they’d go to Florida in the winter to work the racetracks. Many of the city’s pickpockets trained elsewhere, “and if they were any good, they came to New York,” Sinnot says, with a touch of pride. “In the subways, we had the best there were.” Pickpocketing remained fairly rampant for years. Glenn Cunningham, who was part of an elite NYPD anti-pickpocketing task force in the 1980s and ‘90s (he currently handles security for Robert De Niro’s hotel and film festival), says that pickpocketing in spots like Times Square was “out of control” at that time. “I made tons of arrests with those guys. We were like cowboys.”

That was then. In a 2001 story, the New York Times reported that there were 23,068 reported pickpocketing incidents in the city in 1990, amounting to nearly $10 million in losses. Five years later, the number of reported incidents had fallen by half, and by the turn of the millennium, there were less than 5,000. Today, the NYPD doesn’t even maintain individual numbers on pickpocketing…

https://slate.com/culture/2011/02/the-lost-art-of-pickpocketing-why-has-the-crime-become-so-rare-in-the-united-states.html