September 10, 2017 in 3,552 words

What’s Going to Happen When the Trumpists Realize the America They Yearn for Is Gone?

_{^{The president’s hard-core backers want an America that isn’t coming back. What are we going to do? What are they going to do?}}

The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll—which shows a yawning cultural divide between Trump voters and Republicans on the one hand and everyone else on the other on everything from gay marriage to immigration—doesn’t tell us much that we didn’t know, but it does tell us something we should remember. The United States is not one country but two; and like many Western democracies, our two halves are cleaving apart.

The fault lines will be familiar to anyone who has observed Europe as its rural and urban populations speed to opposite societal poles, and as influxes of non-white immigrants and refugees, driven by war or increasingly by climate change, combine with globalization and a free-moving labor force to alter the social compact. In the recent French presidential election, the divide was described as between the “metropolitans”—the urban, modern France that favored Emmanuel Macron and the “peripherals”—the rural, aging France that clung to the far-right Marine Le Pen.

The U.S. version pits what Stephen Miller and the Bannonites derisively call the “cosmopolitan elites”—but which actually includes both white urbanites and majorities of every non-white and non-Christian ethnic group at all socioeconomic levels—versus the nearly all-white-Christian Trump coterie—rural, suburban and exurban. It’s “high output” America—the fewer than 500 counties Hillary Clinton carried, which account for 64 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product—versus “low output America”—the more than 2,600 Trump counties, which nonetheless contribute just a third of nation’s economic output. And as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out in his blunt and brilliant new essay, it’s a fault line Trump and the Bannonites have also openly cleaved around white identity politics.

Nomenclature aside, the United States and Europe face the same foundational questions: how to reconcile this shrinking population that clings to retrogression but that even in its diminished state wields significant political power, with the needs and preferences of the nation’s majority. Not to mention with reality. …

The Wall Street Journal’s Trump problem

_{Dozens have left the paper in the past year and interviews with current and ex-staffers show outrage over pressure from management to normalize Trump.}

On Monday 13 February, just over three weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief Gerry Baker held a town-hall style meeting in the paper’s midtown Manhattan newsroom amid mounting concern about the WSJ’s coverage of the new president, which many staffers felt was too soft and too quick to downplay controversies.

Poor morale underscored by two rounds of buyouts since September had been exacerbated by the recent departure of one of the paper’s number-two editors for the arch-rival New York Times. But the meeting meant to reassure the newsroom only heightened tensions.

“Instead of clearing the air about the legitimate concerns of editors and reporters about balanced coverage of Trump, Baker led off with a 20-minute scolding about how we were indeed covering Trump correctly, and anybody who disputed that was wrong and wrong-headed,” a recently departed Journal staffer told the Guardian. “That pretty much took the air out of the room. I and most of my colleagues were disgusted by his performance.”

Concerns about the way in which the paper was covering Trump spilled over into public view earlier this year, when newsroom emails began leaking out showing Baker criticizing his staffers for language he deemed unfair. …

Here’s What 2 Big College Systems Think Of The End Of DACA

_{Demonstrators on the campus of Metropolitan State University of Denver protest President Trump’s decision to end the DACA program.}

This week, President Trump finally made good on his campaign promise to end DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. This 2012 administrative program implemented by President Obama, has allowed about 800,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children to remain in the country.

They’re known as “DREAMers,” after a proposed law that never passed. At least a third of them are, or have been, enrolled in college. So when U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions officially announced the end of DACA at a news conference Tuesday, an avalanche of criticism from the higher education community began in news releases, in emails to reporters and on social media. From community colleges to some of the country’s most selective institutions, higher ed leaders were defiant.

“It’s disappointing, and it’s just wrong at many levels,” says Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California system.

Napolitano, former head of the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, says undoing DACA violates the constitutional rights to due process of students covered by DACA, so she is suing the Trump administration in federal court. …

Week 16: Donald Jr. Spins His Trump Tower Tale Again

_{Mind the ‘gaps’ in his story, senators say, as investigators prepare to hit replay.}

The calendar rolled back to June 9, 2016, this week and stuck there.

Testifying in a closed-door session with Senate Judiciary Committee investigators, Donald J. Trump Jr. reprised the now famous day he met in Trump Tower with a gaggle of Russians and his wingmen, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller wore his own June 9, 2016, throwback jersey. He informed the White House his legal team would be interviewing staffers who were on Air Force One the day the president dictated (or helped write) Junior’s original statement about the Russian meeting, which alleged that the subject of the gathering was adoption.

The promised subject of the meeting wasn’t adoption, of course. As we know from the email sent to Junior by his go-between, a Russian government lawyer was supposed to bring him incriminating dirt on Hillary Clinton, an offer that Junior gleefully accepted. “I love it!” he wrote back to his go-between. It was only when lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and her posse visited Trump Tower that she segued to a discussion about adoption, urging Junior and his father to help repeal the sanction-bearing Magnitsky Act so that Vladimir Putin would, in turn, allow Americans once again to adopt Russian orphans.

The June 9, 2016, meeting has become ground zero for the Trump Tower scandal not just for what happened there—a gang of Russian fixers meeting with the top officials of the Trump campaign—but for the damage control measures President Donald Trump took to conceal the meeting’s true nature when the New York Times broke the story a year later. …

Republicans Claim That Their New Plan to Repeal Obamacare Is a Moderate Compromise. LOL.

_{Sen. Bill Cassidy is still throwing health care plans at the wall to see if one sticks.}

On Monday, two plucky Senate Republicans are set to embark on one final madcap effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana have promised to introduce a piece of practical, compromise legislation that will simply let states decide whether to keep the Affordable Care Act or ditch it for something they prefer.

“It would leave in place taxes on the wealthy, taking that money and giving it back to governors to come up with better health care,” Graham has told CNN. “If you like Obamacare, you can keep it. If you want to replace it, you can.”

This modest pitch is wildly misleading. Graham and Cassidy have been shopping versions of their bill for months now, and submitted a detailed version as an amendment in July. As it stands, the legislation would make it virtually impossible for dozens of states to continue operating Obamacare as we know it without kicking in unrealistic amounts of their own money. That’s because, in the short term, the law is designed to penalize states that embraced the ACA while rewarding those that resisted it. Further down the line, the legislation simply zeroes out all of Obamacare’s spending, a de facto repeal of the entire program that doesn’t include a replacement. As policy, it’s a bit like walking into somebody’s house, lighting the whole ground floor on fire, then telling them, “Hey, you can keep living here—if you like it.” …

5 Long Term Frauds That We Should’ve Noticed WAYYY Earlier

Most types of fraud seem like they would be easy to spot. If a man asks you for money, and he is followed by a similar-looking man in a plastic mustache asking you for even more money, there’s a good chance that they might have been the same guy all along. But despite our seemingly impenetrable knowledge of how to catch cheats (and how to recognize artificial facial hair), scams often go undetected. And sometimes they go undetected for a ludicrously long amount of time. You know, like how …

#5. A Family Lived With A Mummy For 30 Years For Petty Pension Fraud

Sogen Kato was the oldest man in Tokyo. This was no mean feat in a city of 13 million people, so some officials thought they’d drop him a visit — you know, the usual flowers and awkward congratulations for having outlived most other people on the planet. However, Kato’s octogenarian daughter was having none of it, saying that Sogen was in a vegetative state and in no condition to see visitors. Technically, only one of those things was a lie.

The officials were rebuffed whenever they contacted the Kato family for an audience, and the excuses grew stranger each time. Before long, they said that Sogen had actually joined an obscure sect of Buddhist monks to turn himself into a living Buddha. Since that seems like the kind of grandpa badassitude you’d normally lead with instead of a hackneyed “vegetative state” excuse, the officials grew suspicious. In 2010, when Sogen supposedly turned 111 and the daughter once again declined an audience, they finally had their fill. So the police turned up at the Kato residence and found the family happily living under the same roof. Well, the remaining family. Sogen was nowhere to be seen … that is, until the officials noticed a locked door. Behind that door was a small room. In that room was a bed. In the bed was the small, mummified corpse of a man who had died in 1978. “Yo, Sogen! Also, everyone else, what the fuck?”

Yep, Sogen had died in the 1970s at the ripe age of 79, but his relatives didn’t feel like telling anyone so they could keep collecting his pension checks. Since he had had the good sense to drop dead in his own bed in a closed room, they’d done the logical thing and just … left him there in his pajamas. For three freaking decades, Sogen’s daughter’s family lived in a house with the goddamned mummy of their patriarch, going about their lives and pretending that nothing was even remotely awry and that there totally wasn’t an old dude turning to dust in their guest bedroom. If that wasn’t enough for Sogen to haunt their asses from this life to the dozen next ones, the fact that they did this for the total financial compensation of a relatively measly $106,000 definitely should be.

But the craziest thing is that there’s no telling how many Japanese families are currently Weekend At Bernie’s-ing with a grandparent’s mummy. Since the country traditionally reveres its elderly, Japan pooped a massive terror brick when Kato’s story hit the news. The government immediately started looking into its database of suspiciously elderly citizens who no one remembered seeing around in a while, and managed to uncover a whopping 230,000 “missing” old folks, at least one of them reaching 186 years old. (Which he obviously isn’t, unless he’s a Highlander. And if that’s the case, well, let’s just say that there are bigger fish to fry than just making sure that someone isn’t collecting his pension.)

Moral of the story: Just when you think Japan can’t get any crazier, the fuckers whip out hundreds upon thousands of households with spare beds that may or may not come with a complimentary ancestor mummy.
…

This is how your world could end

_{In an extract from his book Ends of the World, Peter Brannen examines mass extinction events and the catastrophic outcome of rising temperatures for all the world’s population.}

_{The 2014 El Portal fire burning near Yosemite National Park, California. Scientists have warned that rising global temperatures will lead to more wildfires in Yosemite and elsewhere.}

Many of us share some dim apprehension that the world is flying out of control, that the centre cannot hold. Raging wildfires, once-in-1,000-years storms and lethal heatwaves have become fixtures of the evening news – and all this after the planet has warmed by less than 1C above preindustrial temperatures. But here’s where it gets really scary.

If humanity burns through all its fossil fuel reserves, there is the potential to warm the planet by as much as 18C and raise sea levels by hundreds of feet. This is a warming spike of an even greater magnitude than that so far measured for the end-Permian mass extinction. If the worst-case scenarios come to pass, today’s modestly menacing ocean-climate system will seem quaint. Even warming to one-fourth of that amount would create a planet that would have nothing to do with the one on which humans evolved or on which civilisation has been built. The last time it was 4C warmer there was no ice at either pole and sea level was 80 metres higher than it is today.

I met University of New Hampshire paleoclimatologist Matthew Huber at a diner near his campus in Durham, New Hampshire. Huber has spent a sizable portion of his research career studying the hothouse of the early mammals and he thinks that in the coming centuries we might be heading back to the Eocene climate of 50 million years ago, when there were Alaskan palm trees and alligators splashed in the Arctic Circle.

“The modern world will be much more of a killing field,” he said. “Habitat fragmentation today will make it much more difficult to migrate. But if we limit it below 10C of warming, at least you don’t have widespread heat death.” …

The house I bought for $130,000 in 1983 is now worth a fortune, and that’s a big problem for California

_{San Jose is a ground-zero point in California’s housing crisis.}

Out of curiosity, I looked up the value of a two-story tract house I bought in a middle-class San Jose neighborhood back in 1983, for about $130,000.

The home — which I sold for about $140,000 in 1985 — would now haul in an estimated $1 million or more, based on recent sales in the same neighborhood.

That’s roughly eight times more than I paid for it. But in the 34 years since then, California’s median household income has increased by roughly three times, not eight.

Ordinary house, crazy price

So why an eight-fold price increase for a pretty ordinary three-bedroom, two-bath house?

Because of the explosion of the Silicon Valley economy, and because there isn’t enough housing there or in other job centers in California. Limited supply plus high demand equals insane prices, exhausting commutes from less expensive areas, huge portions of income going toward housing, and poverty rates that lead the nation. …

Viagra’s famously surprising origin story is actually a pretty common way to find new drugs

_{Out Of The Blue Pill}

The little blue pill may not have ever been if not for one dutiful nurse.

Viagra, Pfizer’s blockbuster erectile dysfunction drug hit the market in 1998. In 20 years, it’s become ubiquitous: 62 million men all over the world have bought the drug, according to a Pfizer spokesperson. The US military shells out $41.6 million per year for it, and from 2012 onward, the US, Mexico, and Canada spent about $1.4 billion on it annually (although those numbers are projected to fall in the coming years when Pfizer’s patent on the drug expires in 2020).

Despite the drug’s popularity today, the researchers who discovered it weren’t even looking for it. Sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra, was originally developed to treat cardiovascular problems. It was meant to dilate the heart’s blood vessels by blocking a particular protein called PDE-5. In animal tests, it seemed to work moderately well: researchers could find evidence that it was impeding PDE-5, and the animals weren’t having any obvious negative side effects. So, it was brought into a phase one clinical trial in the early 1990s, to test whether humans can tolerate a new compound.

All seemed to be going well—except for one weird thing the men enrolled in the study did when nurses went to check on them. …

The edge of reason: the world’s boldest climb and the man who conquered it

_{When Alex Honnold climbed El Capitan in Yosemite, solo and without ropes, many hailed it as his sport’s ultimate feat. Tom McCarthy talks to the world’s greatest ‘big wall climber’ and asks if we should glory in such extreme risks.}

Climbers love history. Dates, difficulty ratings, the names of the brave souls who did a route first. Each generation of climbers measures itself against yesterday’s best, with dreams of going one better. Advances in the sport tend to be linear and incremental, like climbing up a rock.

Occasionally, rarely, a big climbing achievement erupts into the general consciousness. A 2015 ascent of the Dawn Wall on California’s El Capitan was celebrated by no less than Barack Obama. But the public, which is busy, quickly moves on. When the Dawn Wall was climbed again last year, few noticed.

Then there are the climbs of Alex Honnold.

Yosemite Valley, where El Capitan is situated, is an epic setting for epic exploits. The valley is a magnet for the strong and bold, who spider up granite walls and leap in wingsuits from the rim. But even in this world headquarters for daredevils, certain feats have for decades remained sealed off as mere ideas, locked away in a realm of challenges too big and too scary to grapple with, almost to speak of.

In the early morning hours of 3 June 2017, Honnold, 32, walked to the base of El Capitan, touched the wall, and made the biggest idea of all a reality. He climbed from the bottom to the top of the cliff at one of its tallest points – 900m – without a harness or rope, along a route called the Freerider, just to the left of the Dawn Wall. …

The complete guide to thriving, compiled by scientists

_{Perennial Blossoms}

If you’re reading this, you’re doing alright and can apparently survive. But do you know what it takes to thrive?

Some people seem to blossom in all conditions. They perform well, rise to challenges, and overcome obstacles. Instead of getting totally stressed out, they appear to enjoy the challenges and even personally evolve. Now you too can be one of those people by using a new, comprehensive definition of human thriving published in the journal European Psychologist.

The first 21st century edition of American Psychologist was dedicated to the burgeoning field of “positive psychology” and predicted that psychology would gravitate away from the study of malaise and toward wellness, figuring out how to thrive rather than just survive. Since then, countless studies on wellness have been published in scientific journals. Yet scientists haven’t reached a consensus on what it actually means to thrive.

To come closer to a unified understanding of this elusive state, researchers from the universities of Bath and Portsmouth in the UK reviewed 13 influential studies on the topic published between 1995 and 2014 to find commonalities in all their definitions of “thriving.” They also attempted to isolate the essential elements of the state of thriving that could apply across all ages and whatever the domain, whether work, school, sports, the military, or the arts. In the end, the team broadly defined thriving as “the joint experience of development and success.” …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

Even with all the technology at the U.S. government’s disposal, the best way to gather data from a hurricane is still the hard way: flying into the storm in a propeller plane.

That’s exactly what the men and women of 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron do. Better known as the “Hurricane Hunters,” this all-reserve Air Force unit is tasked with piloting their WC-130J aircraft directly into the eye of a hurricane.

VICE News secured a ride with the Hurricane Hunters as they flew into the eye of Hurricane Irma, the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic. The Hurricane Hunters don’t fly into storms for fun. During their flight an array of instruments collect and transmit data used to predict how active storms will develop, and move.

Read more: https://news.vice.com/story/hurricane-irma-category-5

THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.

Back when Bruce Willis was the biggest badass on the planet, he wasn’t opposed to subjecting himself to physical (and permanent) bodily harm in the name of acting.

Kitten Care with Nicky

Do you think you know everything about kittens? Watch this video to find out!

Simon’s Cat Care is a series where we speak to a Cat Behaviour Expert Nicky Trevorrow at Cats Protection (http://www.cats.org.uk) about ways to look after your cats and kittens!

SUBTITLES AVAILABLE IN: English, Russian, German, Italian, French, Polish and Brazilian Portuguese.

Simon’s Cat is a black and white animated series featuring the mischievous antics of a fat white cat, a very cute kitten and their tireless owner Simon.

Max and his pet elephant.

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not?}