A New Scientist article by cognitive scientist Mark Sheskin of Yale University (pay-walled) says we should aspire to ‘fair inequality’ rather than ‘equality’ or ‘unfair inequality’, and most people would be happy with that.
Confused?
He’s saying if you force people to choose between complete equality and high levels of inequality, most choose the latter. Given an open choice, however, people will choose moderate inequality. Continue reading Saturday salon 21/4
The American people have voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, right? Wrong.
On latest figures 59,821,874 or 47.4% of the eligible voting population voted for Trump. Hillary Clinton attracted 60,121.876 votes, or 47.7%. That’s around 300,000 more. In a democratic system where all votes have equal value, we’d be celebrating a win for Secretary Clinton. [See Update 1 below]
Wikipedia shows turnout down from 54.9% to 51.3%. So only 24.4% of the eligible voting population of 245.273 million in fact voted for Trump, or around 30% of registered voters. Continue reading Trump triumphs, but who voted for him?
At around 11pm on 8 November Eastern Standard Time in Australia this is how the polling looked to Nate Silver:
The late trend is to Clinton. Alan Kohler said tonight if Trump wins the sharemarket will drop like a stone. If Clinton wins nothing happens – it’s already priced in. Continue reading Trump victory slipping away
Paul Waldman in The Washington Post warns Republicans are now vowing Total War. And the consequences could be immense. This warning is coming from multiple sources and has to be taken seriously.
Republicans, it seems, will deny the legitimacy of a Hillary Clinton presidency. They have actually been saying that she would have no mandate because people would only vote for her to avoid Trump. They will immediately take steps for Congress to impeach her, will not co-operate on any legislation she might propose and will refuse to endorse any appointments she might seek to make to the Supreme Court.
That is, of course, assuming that she wins. Continue reading Trumpism: bigger than Trump?
Or is it an entirely inappropriate intervention in the political process by a public official?
At the end of the working week we were cruising to a perhaps anticlimactic finish to the presidential campaign when a letter from FBI Director James B. Comey advised Congress that the agency would once again be examining emails related to Clinton’s time as secretary of state. Continue reading FBI bombshell, or storm in a teacup?
It’s generally agreed, I think, that the moderator won the third presidential debate, with Hillary Clinton coming second.
Trump may not have lost, however, because there is talk that Trump may launch himself into the TV business, where no doubt nothing but the truth will be told.
There has been talk about it at Vanity Fair back in June. There was talk at Huffington Post a few days ago. Now it’s in The Economist. Continue reading Saturday salon 22/10
Donald Trump was born in June 1946, and would have turned 17 in 1963, the year Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique was published, which I gather fired up ‘second wave feminism’ in the US.
Back in early August, James Hamblin in The Atlantic identified Donald Trump as the climax of American masculinity.
That referred to his aggressive style. Now Paul McGeough’s article ‘Formal’ vulgarian Donald Trump evokes Mad Men, Playboy and the Rat Pack looks at the origins of his attitude to women. Continue reading Trump an exemplar of American masculinity?
The collapse of the Arctic sea ice volume has been even more dramatic than the extent, as shown in this graph:
It’s down from 16,855 cubic kilometres in 1979 to 4,401 in 2016, that’s an ice loss of about 74%. Continue reading Climate clippings 187
Three days ago Nate Silver published an analysis that broke up the polling along gender lines.
If only the men voted Trump would win 350 votes to 188. But if only women voted Clinton would win an astonishing 458 votes to 80.
That was before the second debate and the 2005 videotape had any impact. Clinton trailed Trump by 11 percentage points among men but led him by 33 points among women. Continue reading Trump isn’t teflon
“Ignorant rubbish” is what Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews called Malcolm Turnbull’s initial comments on the SA electricity blackouts. “It’s the weather, stupid”, is more or less what Bill Shorten said, and he was right. The press has reported two ‘tornadoes’ in the north of SA which made pylons look like this:
The questions to be asked in this case are not about the reliance on renewables, rather on why fractures to the grid 200 km north of Adelaide took the whole state down. Continue reading Saturday salon 30/9
“Swiftboating” entered the American language when the Bush campaign or its associates went out and told outrageous lies about John Kerry’s Vietnam service. It refers to “a harsh attack by a political opponent that is dishonest, personal, and unfair.” Hillary Clinton has been under an even worse attack, dating from well before she nearly fainted from pneumonia at a 9/11 memorial event.
I Googled and came up with some stuff ostensibly Wikileaks, but covered with soft porn click bait. Apart from that there was Infowars claiming secret service leaks, and even worse from Natural News: Continue reading Republicans ‘swiftboat’ Hillary on her health
Warning. There’s nothing about Australian politics in this post!
In 2013, 16-year-old American teenager Ethan Couch
During sentencing his psychologist testified Couch “was suffering from “affluenza” at the time, a condition resulting from the inability of his wealthy parents to instil basic moral principles into him.” Continue reading Saturday salon 28/5
