Bernie Sanders reviews Donald Trump’s infrastructure plans, and finds them lacking, noting that it is a plan to use taxpayer funds to create private gains.
Your mouth to God’s ear.
Year: 2016
Just the Thing to Fix Education: Pyramid Schemes, Mercenaries, and a Hatred of Public Education
Donald Trump has selected Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education.
For those of you are unaware of her background, she is married to the Amway heir (Pyramid scheme, check), is the brother of Blackwater founder Erik Prince (Mercenaries, check), and she has been at the forefront of replacing public schools with charter schools and vouchers to religious schools (Hates public education, check).
I am not surprised, but I am a bit disappointed.
Trump has made a number of pro-Charter statements.
Still, Betsy DeVos is a pretty heady mix of wing-nuttery, corruption, and evil.
Thanksgiving.
Turkey.
Tryptophan.
Zzzzzzzzzzz……
Posted via mobile.
The Answer Should be, “No”.
While I am not a big fan of Nancy Pelosi, she learned the lesson of the Social Security fight with George W. Bush in 2005, when her response was simply “no.”
No counter proposals, no deals, just, “No”.
It worked, and it did a lot of damage to the both Bush and the Republican Party.
Paul Ryan, the “zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin” is proposing to privatize Medicare.
Nancy Pelosi gets it, and once again, her strategy will be “No”, no counter proposals, no deals, just, “No”:
Democrats are wandering around in the wilderness once again, shut out of power in Washington after losing a close, hard-fought presidential battle. The last time this happened, after the 2004 elections, the newly reelected president, George W. Bush, over-read his mandate and launched an ill-fated effort to partially privatize Social Security, providing a rallying point for Democrats to begin turning things around.
In an interview with me, House Dem leader Nancy Pelosi argued that history might repeat itself, if House Speaker Paul Ryan — with Donald Trump’s blessing — makes good on his hints to press forward with his plans to privatize Medicare. Pelosi vowed that Democrats would remain united in the battle to stop Ryan’s plan, a goal she described as crucial to defeating it, just as unity enabled Dems to block Bush’s Social Security plan.
“At that time, we committed to each other that we would be unified and disciplined,” Pelosi said. “Bush had just been elected. He gave us an opportunity by saying he would partially privatize Social Security. Everybody stuck together. The opportunity that we have now is the equivalent of the opportunity we had in ’05.”
In that 2005 fight, Pelosi recalled, Democrats actively avoided developing an alternative plan to Bush’s. Instead, Democrats said their plan was to defend Social Security, a very popular government program. At the time, some Democratic strategists warned against uncompromising opposition. But the gamble paid off. Observers noted that Bush’s plan sank in popularity as Dems remained unified behind a refusal to budge in defense of Social Security, a move that was widely credited with helping to put Dems on track to winning back Congress in the 2006 elections.
Now is not the time to listen to the the professional political consulting class of the Democratic Party, who will advise a counter-offer, and compromise, and bipartisanship.
Their advice is horrific policy, and even worse politics, and Pelosi is right to eschew the inevitable calls to capitulation.
These consultants are, with the possible exception of Dick Cheney, the most excessively overemployed people on the eastern seaboard, and they should be fired ……… Out of a cannon ……… and into the sun.
The Term is Idiot Savant
It appears that people are trying to find a method to the Trump madness, and so theyu are throwing around terms like, “Demagogic genius.
I think that the term political idiot savant is more accurate, if somewhat politically incorrect.
Then again, politically incorrect is the new black for the next few years.
Your Tax Dollars at Work
It doesn’t float, it’s just so ugly that it repels the water
2 weeks ago, I noted that the extended range munition which was a large part of the justification for the new Zumwalt class destroyers was too expensive to procure, and now we discover that the latest whiz bang ship broke down because it leaks:
The Navy’s newest and most technologically advanced guided missile destroyer had to be towed from the Panama Canal after experiencing “engineering issues,” a spokesman for the service said Tuesday in a statement.
The USS Zumwalt, which cost $4.4 billion, will remain at Naval Station Rodman, a former U.S. base in Panama, to repair problems that surfaced this week while the ship cruised to its new homeport in San Diego, said Cmdr. Ryan Perry, a spokesman for the Navy’s Third Fleet. He said it was unclear how long the ship would remain in Panama.
“The schedule for the ship will remain flexible to enable testing and evaluation in order to ensure the ship’s safe transit to her new homeport,” Perry said in a statement.
USNI News, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute, reported the ship was in the canal when it lost propulsion. Crew members also saw water intrusion in bearings that connect electrical motors to drive shafts, it reported.
The 610-foot-long Zumwalt was billed as the most capable surface combat ship in the world when it was commissioned last month in Baltimore. But the most recent issues were not the first it has faced since it left shipbuilder General Dynamics Bath Iron Works in Maine in September.
The Zumwalt suffered a similar seawater leak in September and another unspecified engineering problem in October, according to USNI News.
This is becoming a bit of a theme in US defense procurement, and if it continues, it’s going to get very ugly.
A Bright Side to Brexit
While there is a lot of talk about wealth being lost, for the overwhelming majority of the British public, there is very little wealth to be lost, and Theresa May’s plans to deal with the fallout involving the end of the stupid and self destructive austerity program:
When the initiative to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union was being debated, many people, including many economists, predicted the country would be hit with a severe recession. It didn’t happen. The economy seems to be moving along fine, with no recession in sight, although the London real estate market is not looking very good. Of course the UK has not left the European Union yet, or even developed a plan to do so, but it is unlikely that many would want to place much money on that recession bet today.
Apparently, the conservative government has now abandoned its plans for further austerity and a balanced budget. It is expected to spend an additional $187 billion over the next five years (roughly 1.0 percent of GDP) to boost the economy and create jobs. According to the NYT, this spending is a direct response to concerns over the plight of working class people who voted for Brexit in large numbers.
This outcome is worth noting, because the boost to the economy from additional spending is likely to be larger than any drag on growth as a result of leaving the European Union. This would mean that the net effect of Brexit on growth would be positive. Of course the UK government could have abandoned its austerity path without Brexit, but probably would not have done so. Given the political context, working class voters who wanted to see more jobs and a stronger welfare state likely made the right vote by supporting Brexit. This doesn’t excuse the racist sentiments that motivated many Brexit supporters, but it is important to recognize the economic story here.
If this continues, the wealthy may take a hit, but the bottom 99% might do quite a bit better.
OK, I am Now Mildly Excited
I’ve been hearing about the EM drive for some time.
It’s a space propulsion system which requires no reaction mass or fuel.
I’ve been dubious, but NASA has published a favorable report in a peer reviewed journal, which means that the concept is credible on a mainstream level.
I look forward to the tests:
NASA scientists have been daydreaming about a new kind of engine that could carry astronauts to Mars in 70 days without burning any fuel. Now, in a new paper published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Propulsion and Power, they say that it might really work.
The paper, written by astrophysicists at NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories, tested a electromagnetic propulsion system, or “EM drive,” that generates a small amount of thrust simply by bouncing microwaves around a cone-shaped copper chamber. No propellant goes in, no exhaust comes out, and yet, somehow, the engine can make things move.
If you think that news sounds too good to be true, you’ve got good instincts — it just might be. This “impossible” fuel-less engine appears to violate one of the fundamental laws of physics.
………
That’s Newton’s third law of motion. It’s the principle that explains why pushing against a wall will send an ice skater zooming in the opposite direction. It also explains how jet engines work: As hot gases are expelled out the back of the plane, they produce a thrusting force that moves the plane forward.
But the EM drive doesn’t work that way. Its thrust seems to come from the impact of photons on the walls of the copper cavity. That would be like moving a car forward by just banging against the windshield.
………
According to the new paper, yes. The Eagleworks scientists report that their machine generated 1.2 millinewtons of thrust per kilowatt of electricity pumped in. (That electricity could come from solar panels in a hypothetical spaceship.) That’s a fraction of thrust produced by the lightweight ion drives now used in many NASA spacecraft, National Geographic noted, but it’s a lot more than the few micronewtons per kilowatt produced by light sails, a proven technology that generates thrust using radiation from the sun.
I’d like to see some orbital testing, and a theoretical model explaining how it works, but I am now officially intrigued.
Tweet of the Day
Like IM tired of hearing these pundits and washed up Clinton era folks STILL trying to pimp race for their gain… Thats whats happening.— officialERICA GARNER (@es_snipes) November 22, 2016
As an reminder, Erica Garner is the daughter of Eric Garner, who was murdered as a result of an illegal police choke hold.
Oh, yeah, this tweet too:
An intersectional, Black “progressive” CEO outsourced your job & now you’re homeless. Do you think:— Benjamin Dixon (@TheBpDShow) November 22, 2016
H/t naked capitalism
Oh, Your Poor Delicate Snowflakes
Well, Donald Trump has disavowed the NeoNazis supporting him, though he continues to support bigot in chief Steve Bannon, and these ill-conceived sons of wombats throw some major butt hurt.
Do you all want some whine with that cheese?
You Ever Have One of Those Days?
As pilots say, “Any landing that you can walk away from is a good one.”
I will be so glad when today is over.
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Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, Would You Please Go Now!
Seriously, George W. Bush’s poodle needs to drink a big glass of shut the f%$# up.
Your time has passed, and 3rd way neoconservative foreign policy/neoliberal economic policy was a bad idea when you went into Iraq, and it’s a worse idea now:
Tony Blair is positioning himself to return to British politics, it has been reported.
The controversial former Prime Minister is engineering a comeback because he feels he can fill a political vacuum caused by Theresa May being a “light weight” and Jeremy Corbyn being a “nutter”, The Sunday Times reports. A source said Mr Blair is sourcing premises near Westminster in order to relocate 130 staff to the UK’s political hub.
A source allegedly told the newspaper: “He’s not impressed with Theresa May. He thinks she’s a total lightweight. He thinks Jeremy Corbyn’s a nutter and the Tories are screwing up Brexit. He thinks there’s a massive hole in British politics that he can fill.”
In response, a representative or Mr Blair reportedly said he has not made a decision to relocate the company there.
New Labour may have been necessary to defeat the Tories in the 1990s (I would argue that Thatcher fatigue paved the way for the that victory), but today, all this is going to do is get more votes for the right wing racist UKIP and ensure that Scotland remains terra incognita for Labout.
The Blairites are a spent force. Ed Millibrand’s drubbing following his efforts to be just a little bit less awful than the Tories is proof of this.
Tony Blair is loathed by everyone who isn’t a dead-ender member of parliament.
A bit of doggerel on this after the break (Apologies to Dr. Seuss and Art Buchwald):
“Anthony Charles Lynton Blair will you please go now!
The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don’t care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair will you please go now!
You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But
Please go.
Please!
I don’t care.
You can go
By bike.
You can go
On a Zike-Bike
If you like.
If you like
You can go
In an old blue shoe.
Just go, go, GO!
Please do, do, do, DO!
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair
I don’t care how.
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair
Will you please
GO NOW!
You can go on stilts.
You can go by fish.
You can go in a Crunk-Car
If you wish.
If you wish
You may go
By lion’s tale.
Or stamp yourself
And go by mail.
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair
Don’t you know
The time has come
To go, go, GO!
Get on your way!
Please Tony B.!
You might like going in a Zumble-Zay.
You can go by balloon . . .
Or broomstick.
Or
You can go by camel
In a bureau drawer.
You can go by bumble-boat
. . . or jet.
I don’t care how you go.
Just get!
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair!
I don’t care how.
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair
Will you please
GO NOW!
I said
GO
And
GO
I meant . . .
The time had come
So . . .
Anthony WENT.”
Meritocracy, My Ass
It appears that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and his brother got into Harvard because their father donated $2½ million.
When one considers the obvious influence that we wields with the President-elect, this does not bode well for the rest of us:
I would like to express my gratitude to Jared Kushner for reviving interest in my 2006 book, “The Price of Admission.” I have never met or spoken with him, and it’s rare in this life to find such a selfless benefactor. Of course, I doubt he became Donald Trump’s son-in-law and consigliere merely to boost my lagging sales, but still, I’m thankful.
My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations. It reported that New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University in 1998, not long before his son Jared was admitted to the prestigious Ivy League school. At the time, Harvard accepted about one of every nine applicants. (Nowadays, it only takes one out of twenty.)
I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision.“There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me. “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”
………
I began working through the list, poring over “Who’s Who in America” and Harvard class reunion reports for family information. Charles and Seryl Kushner were both on the committee. I had never heard of them, but their joint presence struck me as a sign that Harvard’s fundraising machine held the couple in especially fond regard.
The clips showed that Charles Kushner’s empire encompassed 25,000 New Jersey apartments, along with extensive office, industrial and retail space and undeveloped land. Unlike most of his fellow committee members, though, Kushner was not a Harvard man. He had graduated from New York University. This eliminated the sentimental tug of the alma mater as a reason for him to give to Harvard, leaving another likely explanation: his children.
Sure enough, his sons Jared and Joshua had both enrolled there.
This raises an obvious question: Why did their father, who went to NYU, a highly respected school, drop millions of dollars to get his kids into Harvard?
Because going to Harvard is like become a made man for the mob.
The undergraduate experience at Harvard, according to a alumni (a relative who is in academe and former Clinton economist Brad Delong), is simply not that special.
That does not matter: it is an entrée into American nobility.
It’s why the banksters who blew up the world never faced the possibility of jail time: It was inconceivable that the Ivy League educated prosecutors would frog march the Ivy League educated banksters out of their offices in handcuffs.
It’s a twisted satire of noblesse oblige.
I Expect Trump’s Supreme Court to Overturn This on Appeal
A federal court has just ruled that Wisconsin’s state house district are an unconstitutional Gerrymander:
A panel of federal judges on Monday ruled that Wisconsin’s 2011 legislative redistricting plan, created by Republican leaders virtually in secret, is an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
The map “was intended to burden the representational rights of Democratic voters … by impeding their ability to translate their votes into legislative seats,” wrote federal appeals court Judge Kenneth Ripple, the senior judge on the three-judge panel, adding that “the discriminatory effect is not explained by the political geography of Wisconsin nor is it justified by a legitimate state interest.
“Consequently, Act 43 constitutes an unconstitutional political gerrymander,” Ripple wrote.
The 116-page decision, with a 40-page dissent from U.S. District Judge William Griesbach, was issued several months after the panel heard testimony in federal court in Madison. U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb, the third judge on the panel, joined Ripple in the court’s 2-1 decision.
………
The Democrats contend they have found a way to measure unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders designed to give a “large and durable” advantage in elections to one party — a measure the U.S. Supreme Court said was lacking in previous redistricting cases. The measure, called the efficiency gap, shows how cracking (breaking up blocs of Democratic voters) and packing (concentrating Democrats within certain districts) results in wasted votes — excess votes for the winners in safe districts and perpetually inadequate votes for the losers.
Lawyers for the Democrats said the 2011 plan, which changed boundaries for all of the state’s Congressional and state Senate and Assembly districts, was drawn specifically to disenfranchise Democratic voters.
Republicans have countered that as the majority party, they can draw the maps any way they choose, short of creating districts that disenfranchise racial minorities.
I really hope that the ruling sticks, but I expect that whatever partisan hack that Trump appoints to be on the prevailing side of a 5-4 decision saying that the voters can go Cheney themselves.
Quote of the Day
There is, however, a more intelligent form of class politics. This starts from the fact that class isn’t a state of mind but an objective fact: if you’re in a position of subordination to an employer, you’re working class whatever you feel. This means that being working class unites otherwise disparate people. The immigrant chambermaid, the skilled coder whose boss is a tw@#, and the academic facing the neoliberalization of the university are all working class. This means they have some common interests. All would benefit from increased control in the workplace and increased bargaining power
—Lambert Strether on Naked Capitalism
@# mine
Correction:
It wasn’t Mr. Strether wot said this, it was Chris Dillow.
Linkage
- ‘Reply-all’ email chain sent to all 1.2 million NHS employees (Business Insider) Remember folks, BCC, not CC.
- The New Nobility Uses Political Correctness to Fragment the Precariats (Of Two Minds) Highlights the real problem of identity politics, that it crowds out social and economic class by its very nature.
- Student loans and why Clinton lost the Election (TheHill) A bit too narrow a focus, but Clinton’s unwillingness to confront ballooning student debt is symptomatic with her lockstep actions with regards to the rentier class.
- The Simpsons: University of Glasgow launches course on philosophy of Homer Simpson (The Independent)
- D’oh!!!
- How CalSTRS Investments Influenced Workers to Vote for Donald Trump (East Bay Express) They put lots of money in with private equity looters like Mitt Rmoney, and so invested with the effect that good jobs were eliminated.
- Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs (Evonomics) Posits that the creation of necessary and soul crushing pseudo-professional jobs in our economy was a way to eliminate leisure time, because leisure time leads to thought, and thought leads to revolution.
- Trumponomics: It’s Not All Crazy (Counterpunch) Infrastructure spending and deficits are both good things in a sluggish economy, though as a counterpoint, the “infrastructure spending” appears to be primarily public-private partnerships which are largely an avenue for private actors to extract taxpayer dollars.
- How Economists Duped Us into Attacking Capitalism Instead of Parasitic Rent-Seeking (Evonomics) Our economy, and our “free trade” deals are set up to maximize these activities, with horrible results.
- P.E.I. farmer assists in near-eradication of methane from cow farts (CBC News) Adding the right seaweed to the diet drastically reduces methane emissions.
- Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) (Jacobin) Our future Senate minority leader is whoring for the banks and banksters, which is what got us Trump.
- The Kind of Car Insurer That Gives Consumers the Best Value (New York Times) Cooperative companies (mutual insurance) provides more bang for the buck.
Have Monty Python’s silly olympics:
The Human Cost of the Wild Blue Yonder Crowd
If you look at activities in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the overwhelming majority of the missions could be accomplished by low cost low performance Turboprop aircraft, and the reduced logistical tail would have eliminated many of the casualties from the huge number of convoys that fast jets required:
The U.S. Air Force has been continuously at war for more than 25 years. From the opening minutes of Desert Storm to the present, there has not been a time when the Air Force was not flying combat missions in support of national security objectives, often simultaneously in widely separated locations. The vast majority of that burden has been borne by the fighter/attack force, which has been continuously employed for over two decades without a break. The effectiveness of that force and its versatility remain undisputed. Yet these operations have not been without their challenges, particularly of the logistical sort. Combat operations in the 1990s were easy to support logistically, flown from NATO, Saudi, and Kuwaiti airbases under permissive conditions. But from the early days of Enduring Freedom when A-10s moved into Afghanistan, the logistical burden of supporting our legacy fighters jumped precipitously because the supply routes into Iraq and Afghanistan were never free from hostile threat. The high fuel consumption of legacy fighters necessitated a very intensive logistical effort conducted at significant cost in blood and treasure.
Today in Syria and northern Iraq, the Air Force avoids this problem by flying from distant bases, a concept of operations that adds excessive flying hours to its aging jets at exorbitant cost. If there was no alternative to fast jets, this would largely be an unavoidable burden. But modern turboprop-powered light attack aircraft offer a capable, viable alternative for providing air support in irregular conflicts. Light attack aircraft, operating in place of some legacy fighter/attack aircraft in current or future irregular conflicts, offer an opportunity to greatly reduce the fuel burden imposed by air operations, offset the high cost of employing airpower, and expand our definition of “global reach.” Had the Air Force done this a decade ago, we might also have reduced the number of Purple Hearts awarded to servicemen and their families.
………
Combat operations drive high fuel consumption. In 2006, as Central Command argued for a surge in Iraq, the majority of the U.S. military’s fuel use (58 percent) was jet fuel, dwarfing the next largest category (marine diesel) at 13 percent. In 2008, total fuel deliveries to Iraq and Afghanistan exceeded 90 million gallons per month — 20 percent of the entire Defense Department consumption. Because of the poor in-ground petroleum transport infrastructure in Iraq and especially in Afghanistan, the heavy use of fuel in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom can be directly tied to casualties incurred by ground operations required to get the fuel to U.S. bases, particularly airbases. Overall, roughly half of the total tonnage hauled overland was fuel, with the Army bearing the lion’s share of the ground transportation burden for all of the services. Air Force airpower supported the Army’s wider campaign, but the Army itself moved and protected the fuel needed to make that happen.
………
The same document also quotes the British Ministry of Defence in assessing that between 2001 and 2010 a whopping 39 percent of the total killed in action of U.K. uniformed personnel and contractors (over 190) was related to resupply efforts.
………
The direct link between fuel and casualties is not news. However, the impact of high fuel consumption by Air Force fighter/attack aircraft remains poorly understood and rarely discussed. If there were no alternative to the current jet fleet, the discussion would be moot. But for the kind of challenges faced in Iraq, Syria, Africa, the Philippines, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, there is a viable alternative: a turboprop-powered light attack aircraft. Air Combat Command has a designation for its proposed light attack aircraft: the OA-X. Among its other capabilities, the fuel consumption of OA-X is known to be a fraction of the consumption of fast jets. [A note here, technically, not all of the aircraft here are turboprops, the turbofan powered Textron Scorpion gives similar advantages.]
………
OA-X can be operated from austere airstrips, providing true tanker independence and the ability to operate effectively with substantially less fuel support than legacy fighters. The PT6A engine is extremely resistant to foreign object damage, always possible on unimproved strips. The fuel burned in an hour by a cruising OA-X will be burned by an F-15E in eight minutes of ground taxi. In March 2010, the AT-6B and T-6C flew 24 sorties in 2010’S Joint Force Experiment (JEFX) at Nellis Air Force Base. In total, the two aircraft flew 46 flight hours and burned 15,640 pounds of fuel, averaging 340 pounds per hour. That’s around the amount that it takes to fuel a two-tank F-15E to half capacity. On a per-hour basis, OA-X will use between 3 to 5 percent the fuel of an F-15E and 6 to 10 percent of an F-16C. A single 5,000-gallon fuel truck, sufficient to top off an F-15E for a two-hour sortie, will supply OA-X for over 90 hours of flight.
The US Air Force will not do this unless it is forced to, because tactical air is dominated by white scarf guys on both the bomber and the fighter sides of the coin, and the idea of aircraft being selected through this sort of holistic process is an anathema to them.
More Professional Class Arrogance
It turns out that Hillary Clinton’s vaunted ground game was complete garbage obscured under mounds of big-data jargon driven bullsh%$:
It is now becoming clear that Clinton’s ground game — the watchword for defenders of her alleged competence — was actually under-resourced and poorly executed. Like so much else in this election, her field strategy was hostage to the colossal arrogance and consequent incompetence of the liberal establishment.
At the heart of the failure was the notion of the “new emerging majority.” According to this argument — pushed by, among others, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira — women, Latinos, blacks, and skilled professionals who support the Democrats were becoming the demographic majority. Thus the traditional white working-class base of the Democratic Party could be sidelined.
Back in July Chuck Schumer summed it up: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
From this theory and strategy flowed a deeply flawed set of tactics, and a badly fumbled get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort.
A labor organizer in Ohio, who wished to remain anonymous, reports that Clinton’s early GOTV effort there focused on Republicans in the mistaken belief a significant number of them could be peeled away. This play largely failed. And it also involved serious opportunity costs: traditional Democratic constituencies like African Americans and the white working class were neglected, and Clinton ended up badly under-performing Obama among both groups, especially in the Rust Belt.
Only in the last two weeks, according to this labor source, did the Democratic Party outreach effort really switch back to traditional Democratic voters. By then, it was too late. Due to lack of preparation, the voter lists guiding the effort had not been updated. Because poorer voters tend to relocate more frequently than home-owning suburbanites, many addresses were wrong. And for lack of more frequent contact the campaign was often unsure about the voters’ current political attitudes.
………
The Clinton campaign’s assumption seems to have been that actual people living on the ground in actual places knew less about the population around them than did the data-savvy professionals at campaign headquarters in Brooklyn.
………
The computer-obsessed Clinton campaign — having lost touch with people but not big data — seems to have inadvertently turned out Trump voters!
………
A point for the Left in all this: the DNC’s ideas are not only bad because they don’t advocate the social-democratic redistribution we would like to see — they are also bad because they don’t work at a purely technical level.
Their arrogance and contempt for the working class produced a flawed political theory, which in turn produced a bad strategy, which in turn produced a tactically inept ground game.
Too busy congratulating themselves and concurring with each other, the Clintonites couldn’t even get the rudiments of the campaign correct.
The larger point here is that smug self-satisfied professionals are neither the basis for governing electorate nor are they a basis for a campaign.
This was shown by the debacles in 1994, 2004, 2010, 2104, and 2016.
It is only when the Republicans step on their own dicks (impeachment, Iraq, financial crisis, Mitt Rmoney) that this strategy, and this class, manages to win elections.
Deep Thought
I just realized why Mike Pence agreed to be Trump’s running mate.
It was the only way that he could get tickets to Hamilton.
We Are Completely F%$#ed
And not in a good way. First, the North Pole is 36° F (20° C) degrees above normal:
Political people in the United States are watching the chaos in Washington in the moment. But some people in the science community are watching the chaos somewhere else — the Arctic.
It’s polar night there now — the sun isn’t rising in much of the Arctic. That’s when the Arctic is supposed to get super-cold, when the sea ice that covers the vast Arctic Ocean is supposed to grow and thicken.
But in fall of 2016 — which has been a zany year for the region, with multiple records set for low levels of monthly sea ice — something is totally off. The Arctic is super-hot, even as a vast area of cold polar air has been displaced over Siberia.
………
Twitter’s expert Arctic watchers also are stunned. Zack Labe, a PhD student at the University of California at Irvine who studies the Arctic, tweeted out an image on Wednesday from the Danish Meteorological Institute showing Arctic temperatures about 20 degrees Celsius higher than normal above 80 degrees North Latitude.
Also, we now have indications that Antarctica’s Southern Ocean may no longer be able to absorb excess CO2, which means that levels of greenhouse gasses make increase even more rapidly:
………
Already, initial data from an array of ocean floats suggest that upwelling waters could be limiting how much CO2 the Southern Ocean absorbs each year. This raises new questions about how effective these waters will be as a brake on global warming in decades to come.
“The Southern Ocean is doing us a big climate favour at the moment, but it’s not necessarily the case that it will continue doing so in the future,” says Michael Meredith, an oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. Meredith is heading a series of expeditions over the next five years to help document the uptake of heat and carbon. “It really is the key place for studying these things.”
………
Hints of something similar have been seen before. In 2007, a team led by Corinne Le Quéré, now director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, UK, published a study in Science indicating that the rate of carbon uptake by the Southern Ocean decreased between 1981 and 2004. The authors blamed the changes on the winds that encircle the Antarctic continent. The speed of those winds had increased during that time, probably as a result of the hole in the stratospheric ozone layer over Antarctica and possibly because of global warming. Stronger winds are better able to pull up deep, ancient water, which releases CO2 when it reaches the surface. That would have caused a net weakening of the carbon sink.
This is real end or the world stuff, and in a few weeks, we will have a global warming denier in chief.
Lovely.