Solar Power Boom Times in Global Economy

 Against all the big bad things happening on the planet (and despite all the best efforts of the Republican-led Congress in recent weeks), this [unprecedented expansion in solar energy production] is a very big and hopeful thing, which a short catalogue of recent numbers demonstrates:

• It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next.

• That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.

• Last year, ninety-six per cent of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewables, and in the United States ninety-three per cent of new generating capacity came from solar, wind, and an ever-increasing variety of batteries to store that power.

• In March, for the first time, fossil fuels generated less than half the electricity in the U.S. In California, at one point on May 25th, renewables were producing a record hundred and fifty-eight per cent of the state’s power demand. Over the course of the entire day, they produced eighty-two per cent of the power in California, which, this spring, surpassed Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.

• Meanwhile, battery-storage capability has increased seventy-six per cent, based on this year’s projected estimates; at night, those batteries are often the main supplier of California’s electricity. As the director of reliability analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation put it, in the CleanTechnica newsletter, “batteries can smooth out some of that variability from those times when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.” As a result, California is so far using forty per cent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did in 2023, which is the single most hopeful statistic I’ve seen in four decades of writing about the climate crisis.

• Texas is now installing renewable energy and batteries faster than California; in a single week in March, it set records for solar and wind production as well as for battery discharge. In May, when the state was hit by a near-record-breaking early-season heat wave, air-conditioners helped create a record demand on the grid, which didn’t blink—more than a quarter of the power came from the sun and wind. Last week’s flooding tragedy was a reminder of how vulnerable the state is to extreme weather, especially as water temperatures rise in the Gulf, producing more moisture in the air; in late June, the director of the state’s utility system said that the chances of emergency outages had dropped from sixteen per cent last summer to less than one per cent this year, mostly because the state had added ten thousand megawatts of solar power and battery storage. That, he said, “puts us in a better position.”

• All this is dwarfed by what’s happening in China, which currently installs more than half the world’s renewable energy and storage within its own borders, and exports most of the solar panels and batteries used by the rest of the world. In May, according to government records, China had installed a record ninety-three gigawatts of solar power—amounting to a gigawatt every eight hours. The pace was apparently paying off—analysts reported that, in the first quarter of the year, total carbon emissions in China had actually decreased; emissions linked to producing electricity fell nearly six per cent, as solar and wind have replaced coal. In 2024, almost half the automobiles sold in China, which is the world’s largest car market, were full or hybrid electric vehicles. And China’s prowess at producing cheap solar panels (and E.V.s) means that nations with which it has strong trading links—in Asia, Africa, South America—are seeing their own surge of renewable power.

• In South America, for example, where a decade ago there were plans to build fifteen new coal-fired power plants, as of this spring there are none. There’s better news yet from India, now the world’s fastest-growing major economy and most populous nation, where data last month showed that from January through April a surge in solar production kept the country’s coal use flat and also cut the amount of natural gas used during the same period in 2024 by a quarter. But even countries far from Beijing are making quick shifts. Poland—long a leading coal-mining nation—saw renewable power outstrip coal for electric generation in May, thanks to a remarkable surge in solar construction. In 2021, the country set a goal for photovoltaic power usage by 2030; it has already tripled that goal.

• Over the past fifteen years, the Chinese became so skilled at building batteries—first for cellphones, then cars, and now for entire electric systems—that the cost of energy storage has dropped ninety-five per cent. On July 7th, a round of bidding between battery companies to provide storage for Chinese utilities showed another thirty per cent drop in price. Grid-scale batteries have become so large that they can power whole cities for hours at a time; in 2025, the world will add eighty gigawatts of grid-scale storage, an eightfold increase from 2021. The U.S. alone put up four gigawatts of storage in the first half of 2024.

Bill McKibben @ NY-er

So astonishingly positive of a story I'm still looking for cracks thinking they got to be there, right? 

What about the Chinese dominated rare earth minerals, lithium, mining elements I really know nothing about but thought I understood were essential to solar panel production? Isn't their scarcity a big obstacle? (Isn't their scarcity why Grump is talking about taking over Greenland and Canada?) Nope. Some think with rapid gains in solar technology all the minerals needed will be mined and circulating in the global economy by 2050. To produce the solar power needed will require transitioning about half the corn fields of the midwest to solar but this would not threaten food security and is quite doable, infers McKibben; depending on how the voters in Iowa feel about this, I cautiously suppose. 

One of the most striking parts of this explosion in solar technology story is how wrong the forecasters have gotten this growth. Fifteen years ago conventional economic wisdom said solar would never be cheap enough to be viable in free markets. McKibben shares that the closest forecasts to the meteoric growth in solar have come not from industry, who have obstructed green energy development at every step, but from environmentalists and even they underestimated the scales of the growth noted above. 

China is obviously leading this boom and transition. Maybe one of the most hopeful aspects of this story is how in the real economy there's all kinds of evidence of open trade and cooperation between China and the US and other parts of the world expanding solar together. 

That's not what we get from the current gov and in a lot of media, which tends to framing the relationship between the US and China as always adversarial, win/lose, zero sum, the new cold war 2.0 battle of world superpowers. 

For instance, the republicans are actually doubling down on drill baby drill, as if in direct opposition to China's green energy boom. But is there any long game to this strategy beyond garish TV/online spectacle fueled by Big Oil? I did semi-recently learn in some Vaclav Smil books that some material production will likely resist or be more difficult to transition off fossil fuels, like heavy metals, steel, military weapons, airplanes. If this still holds, maybe Grump's braintrust figures they've lost the coming green energy economy so they are banking instead on fossil fuels to retain significant power in the coming century, particularly because of their likely long-run importance to military production. 

It would certainly make sense the US would have to maintain a solid position in fossil fuel production until the relevant national security questions are resolved. Still not clear why this strategic position would require hostile attacks on alternative energy production that benefits everyone? 

Except as a crony capitalist gift to Big Oil! 

So much of Grump 2.0 appears so incompetent and destructive, so obviously fueled by hysterical racist panic that it is hard to imagine how it can last or even survive the disasters it only seems to know how to make worse. Like attacks on FEMA?! Why would anyone oppose FEMA helping people in weather disasters?   

I don't know but on the bright side it appears solar energy production is booming in spite of all the opposition and beyond anyone's predictions. And decarbonizing our energy system remarkably quickly. 

Yay for our side: Future humanity!  

Techno-Fascism Comes to America

"Accelerationism emerged from Karl Marx’s idea that, if the contradictions of capitalism become exaggerated enough, they will inspire proletarian revolution and a more egalitarian society will emerge. But [Andrea] Molle [poli-sci prof at Chapman] identifies what he calls Muskian “techno-accelerationism” as having a different end: destroying the existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top. Musk “has to completely break any kind of preëxisting government architecture to impose his own,” Molle said. He added that a government thoroughly overhauled by Musk might run a bit like the wireless system that operates Teslas, enabling the company to theoretically update how your car works at any moment: “You’re allowed some agency, but they are still in control, and they can still intervene if the course is not going in the direction that it is supposed to go to maximize efficiency.”

Kyle Chayka @ NYer

We're taught capitalism and communism are irreconcilable binaries but in an important sense they are not. I remember trying to explain this to colleague once and they shot back with, 'right, we're a mixed economy,' like what I was saying was obvious and of useless value. But I still think it's useful to remind ourselves of this now and then because when we talk about economic issues this way, which is still the way they are almost without exception discussed in politics, as these abstract, hypothetical, antagonistic binaries, we obscure understanding the really existing economy. Bezos harrumphing this past week that the editorial writing in WaPo, from now on, will be restricted to "personal liberties and free markets," as if the subject of "free" and "unfree" markets in the real economy were clear and obvious to everyone, is a perfect case in point.  

My contention is that it isn't clear-- Bezos' "free markets" may protect his freedom to accumulate wealth but do they increase the freedom of workers to find living wage work? or the freedom to live in a healthy environment? Most importantly, thinking about markets in this strict binary fashion muddles public understanding of economic issues, fostering ideas like all taxes and regulations are bad, when really any large scale market over time is absolutely dependent on rules and regulations and taxes to build the infrastructure that make any really existing large-scale market function and work. Still, living in the antagonistic Cold War binary over the economy we get the random destruction of Leon and his hacker gang rampaging through the government right now, immiserating many and, if not stopped before it's too late, probably crashing the economy. And even then, if the Great Recession is any guide, before the government has even finished bailing out the economy and putting it back together, the free market dogmatists will be blaming the crash on the government. 

But let's back up a little and try to explain how I came to this way of thinking.  

Heterodox economic historian Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) argues both free market capitalism and Marxism are post-Enlightenment utopian schemes. Both rationalizing political-economic orders, claiming to be natural orders and universalizing systems, that in theory put an end to political conflict and class struggle, their carrot, by, in the case of the free marketeers, maximizing market freedoms and human productivity, independent of government intervention (Laissez-faire), or politics, and in the case of communism, by transferring the ownership of the means of production from a few super rich capitalists to all labor as a collective body politic, thereby allowing eventually the withering away of  the state, or politics, again, and everyone fishes in the morning and reads in the afternoons and goes out to shows in the evenings. Utopia! The problem, according to Polanyi, is when put into practice by political power, enforced by governments and the rule of law, these utopian schemes, capitalism or communism, become dystopic, corrosive to human society, principally because they are, in the case of market fundamentalists (and neoliberals), hostile to any democratic claims outside the bottom line economic maximizing profit seeking priorities of big capitalists, like taxes or regulations or living wages, and in the case of communists, or Dictatorships of the Proletariat in communist command societies, they are hostile to political dissent of any kind or any human right that threatens communist party authority. 

It doesn't make it any less threatening or potentially destructive but totalitarian technocratic engineering fantasies like the Muskian one above, which is really just another neoliberal market fantasy, are not entirely a new thing, by any stretch. Musk's grandfather was something of an antisemitic technocracy nut back in the 1950s. I'm sure Leon sees himself as a great world builder and he's gifting society with his fully-automated manufacturing surveillance world geared to escaping the earth and colonizing Mars. But what jumps out at me in his "techno-accelerationist" fantasy, not to mention his efficiencies rampage through the federal government right now, is the reckless contempt for workers, for labor, for others, for the human rights or individual freedoms of anybody but himself. He thinks any part of government that doesn't serve him (28 billion in contracts, or something like that, from what I've heard) is government waste; helping the poor, cancer research, social security, all wasteful inefficiencies. So, again, in the Polanyian sense, another utopian ends up a dystopian; and in this case, even a Neo-Nazi. 

There is that saying about how societal collapses develop slowly in dribs and drabs until everything falls apart all at once. We're in this terribly precarious place where it feels like it is the resiliency of the separation of powers in our system, and the democratic will of the people within that system, by definition procedural and lumberingly disorganized forces, respectively, versus a fascist corporate state ("move fast and break things") for billionaires and bigots backed by state and non-state actor violence. Ack! 

Anyway, if it's any comfort there are no lack of wildly rhyming historical precedents to our troubled tabloid times and they keep coming. I've been pounding on the Nazi parallels, because of Ryback's Takeover. And Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction, which I maybe haven't mentioned as much. Lessons from that book I think worth mentioning here: Don't believe the Nazi economic miracle hype; Albert Speer was a propagandist, foremost. The technocracy in Germany was at odds with the Nazis by 1935 and everything after that, economically, was maximizing total war production and extreme austerity for working people. And the Nazi economists knew by 1937, latest, Germany would not be able to develop anything like parity in military productive strength with the collective force of their enemies before 1945-1950 or later. When Hitler launched Barbarossa, his invasion of Russia in 1941, logistics support was provided by horse drawn carts. In other words, fascist Germany was less an economic miracle than an industrializing state war machine; and one of brutally violent consequence to Jews and gays and communists and Gypsies and disabled people and, really, any non-German speaking people in Poland and Ukraine. Fascist Germany is often credited for its technocratic achievements but what stands out in Tooze's account is how Hitler's racist delusions actually catastrophically undermine Germany's modernizing growth and security. 

Historian Janis Mimuru, as reported by Kyle Chayka in the NY-er, thinks, additionally, the techno-fascist takeover in Japan in the 1930s, in part inspired by German fascism, resembles in ways the hostile government takeover going on now by Leon and his hacker Dogers. Led by engineering and industrial elites, high on their own stash of flattering history books, great world builders in their own minds, Japanese engineers in the 1930s and Tech Bros now think they've got all the technocratic solutions, anything in their way, laws, workers, humans, democratic pressures of any kind are waste, inefficiencies, engineering problems and must be suppressed or "fed into the wood chipper," so to speak; enemies of the people, woke mind virus, etc.  

All of which is to say perhaps some healthy skepticism about the AI/crypto, "animals spirits," "vibes shift" boom hype going on these days might be in order. By one admin account, as related by Ezra Klein on a recent podcast about AGI (artificial general intelligence), Leon is stripping the government down to the studs so as to make way for the AI takeover, for efficiencies' sake of course. Please, note again, the lure here is the fantasy of automating away politics or any democratic claims on capital. The coming austerity with which we will pay for this hype, at any rate, will likely result in many excess deaths and considerable loss of wealth and security for anybody that is not a billionaire oligarch. 

What else strikes me about these comparisons, the Nazis and Imperial Japan, as well, and which is kind of obvious but feels right now like worth repeating, and underlining, is how the Nazis and Imperial Japan were both ultimately desperately doomed examples of national planning. They aren't paragons of rationalizing technocratic achievement. In the end they defy technocratic reason, convinced their cultural survival is at stake, their world beating technocratic arrogance crashes their countries in terrible military crackups.   

But no way Grump & Leon go there, right? I said historical comparisons can be comforting but they aren't always. They can also be grave warnings.   

"Why Aren't We In The Streets?"

"Why Aren't We In The Streets?" asks the headline of Susan Glasser's column in the NY-er this past week. The "we" part was particularly striking coming from someone who I can't say I've ever taken to be much of an advocate for street protest. Needless to say, the new republican admin is a concern for a lot of folks on the side of American democracy and rule of law and other old stuffy "woke mind virus" ideas like that. 

But when I saw that Glasser headline something else occurred to me that I haven't seen in any of these discussions so far. If the bulk share of people who typically turnout for street protests first come from the young, the 18 to 34 demographic, maybe they are slow or hesitant to hit the streets because of the way they were treated by the Dem establishment last time they did so, not very long ago, over Israel bombing Gaza into an uninhabitable pile of rubble? Shutting out entirely the street protest voice over Gaza from the DNC last summer, in particular, seems in retrospect inexplicable and poor judgement, at the very least. 

Street protesters had the good sense to not show up for Grump's Jan 6 coup attempt. They could see the setup. Grump already had plans to impose martial law when street protesters clashed with his violent angry mob. But Antifa stayed home. Now, Grump is "commander in chief" again, he's pardoned all his Jan 6 thugs, and the Dems of late haven't shown much interest in backing up street protesters. 

This situation seems to call for local Blue legal institutions, state and city governments, to not just speak up for protecting immigrants, which they do appear to be doing some, but also speak up for First Amendment street protester rights and clarify for the public how they will protect peaceful protest from Grump's brownshirts. 

Other random notes on the rolling disaster: 

James Carville, former Clinton campaign guru, got killed this past week for suggesting Dems not protest but let the destruction of Trump's "malevolent incompetence" play out on its own. Let Repubs own all of the disaster coming, Carville reasons. In his defense, something I've seldom felt like doing as he's another anti-woke bigot from what I've gathered, I will point out that for many of the rightwing base any opposition at all is just another excuse for Grump: 'He wants to fix everything but the damn liberals and Democrats won't let him do the job,' they reason. 

But doing nothing isn't opposition and opposing this rolling disaster, experts are already estimating the consequence of shutting down USAID could result in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, screams out for humanitarian attention. In any way and every way possible: in the courts, yelling at reps at town halls, and/or big numbers of the opposition being counted, all important and necessary. This is an all hands on deck situation; they're selling off the government for parts. Slashing government workers that provide essential services. Sure, there's "waste" in government but reducing waste by contracting a private, unelected, Billionaire to do it, and one who thinks anything that doesn't add to his empire of private wealth is waste, is not the way; and, in fact, not even pro economic growth.  

Another bag of gripes going around is that Dem reps in congress aren't doing enough opposition and reps are whining in return that they're doing all they can and don't have the votes to do anything more. My two cents: Dem reps ought to be going on every media platform available and shouting out alarm bells and explaining as patiently and clearly as possible the lawbreaking and destruction and betrayal going on. 24/7! Pete Buttigieg ought to crash the Joe Rogan show. Meme wars on Instagram and Tik Tok, everything. 

But whether speaking out like this is being maximized I don't know and don't have enough perspective to definitively judge. This is all happening too fast and, as I've gathered it is for many, it's overwhelming. I feel like an old geezer standing in his front yard shaking his fist at speeding cars. But I will say a bazillion fundraising appeals, a financial arms race with corporate elites, and bi-weekly press conferences by well-meaning Dems in congress are unlikely to build an effective opposition. 

Anyway, Grumper's voted for forced deportations and reducing the price of eggs. We know this. Bad and dumb stuff but the democratic will of the people (such as it is); and by only 1.5%, mind you, not a"mandate." But they didn't vote for Musk or Project 2025 or treason with Putin. There are super majorities out there that no way want what these developments will bring, even if they don't realize this yet. So, yeah, how to reach and organize these voters into an opposition is an important question. 

I guess my hot take on this dilemma is that there is no one answer or solution, the courts, calling reps, street protest, online social media and underground organization, everything and anything by any means necessary. It's more an all of the above and more situation, than any one silver bullet solution. And Dem influencers grousing about the lack of street protests in recent weeks feels to me a little churlish. 

The War on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

 “It has taken two hundred and thirty-two years and a hundred and fifteen prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. But we’ve made it. All of us,” she [Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson] said. “Our children are telling me that they see now more than ever that here in America anything is possible.” 

But it is also true that the existence of these highly successful Black people has obscured the harsh fact that tens of millions of ordinary Black people suffer from high rates of poverty, homelessness, hunger, and other measures of deprivation. For example, though the U.S. is currently experiencing historic lows of unemployment, Black workers still face nearly twice the rate of unemployment of white workers. A 2021 study based on an experiment that sent out eighty-three thousand fictitious job applications with random characteristics to the hundred and eight largest employers in the United States found that “distinctively black names” reduced the “probability of employer contact.” According to the study, twenty-three of the employers were “found to discriminate against Black applicants.” In 2022, Wells Fargo was forced to pay eight million dollars to more than thirty thousand Black job applicants to settle a claim based on a Department of Labor lawsuit, which alleged that the bank interviewed Black applicants for jobs that had already been filled in order to fulfill diversity requirements. The United States is awash in racism even as some Black people have risen to the highest ranks within our country—including the Presidency."

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor @ NY-er

If living wage jobs get harder to find, and they have since at least 1980 because of anti-union gov policies, frozen minimum wages, outsourcing and neoliberal globalization, but at the same time government jobs are being filled disproportionately by Black people (as mentioned in the story) what is that going to look like to working class white people finding it increasingly difficult to find living wage work? But the living wage squeeze isn't because of gov DEI policies, Black unemployment still doubles that of whites, Taylor points out; it's because beginning with Reagan the gov gave up on supporting full-employment and working class living wages. And, really, race and ethnic divisions have always been a favorite tool of capital in dividing and conquering labor rights. P.S. Also, adding to the "cutting off your nose to spite your face" list we've been informally compiling about conservatives, turns out white women have been the biggest beneficiaries of DEI policies.  

"Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage," CNN post

"For people who do not have money or social connections at hospitals or the ability to spend weeks at a time on the phone, a denied health-insurance claim can instantly bend the trajectory of a life toward bankruptcy and misery and death. 

Health-care workers [in 2018 study] account for seventy-three per cent of all nonfatal workplace injuries due to violence. Nurses, residents, aides, specialists—they are asked to absorb the rage and panic induced by the American health-care system, whose private insurers generate billions of dollars in profit and pay executives eight figures not despite but because of the fact that they routinely deny care to desperate people in need.

Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity?

He [Thompson, the UHC CEO] had sold more than fifteen million dollars’ worth of company stock in February, shortly before it became public that the Department of Justice was investigating the company for antitrust violations, which caused the stock price to drop.

A new policy from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield also went viral: the company had announced that, in certain states, starting in 2025, it would no longer pay for anesthesia if a surgery passed a pre-allotted time limit. The cost of the “extra” anesthesia would be passed from Anthem—whose year-over-year net income was reported, in June, to have increased by more than twenty-four per cent, to $2.3 billion—to the patient."

Jia Tolentino @ NY-er 

As a friend has pointed out denials of care function like "Death Panels," right?

Still, I'm stuck on the election postmortem angle. There are voters experiencing "the rage and panic induced by the American health-care system" that failed to notice Biden was actually trying to reel in price gouging in the health care industry with Lina Khan's FCC antitrust enforcement, mentioned in the second to last graph above, and implementing price controls on super expensive medicines?! Too abstract, not kitchen table enough? 

Or no one noticed that Grump has promised all along almost the exact opposite: threatening to reduce ACA health insurance coverage and end Biden's antitrust and reforms to the IRS. None of which has a remote chance of making health care more affordable for the working classes. 

Khan, for crying out loud, was probably more than anything else the real reason why billionaires signed on with Grump and are now filling his cabinet. They wanted to stop her and most voters, the working classes, had barely ever heard of her and probably support her anti-monopolist efforts. They know the business people don't like her, maybe. Elizabeth Warren was hazed like this ridiculously in the reform period after the 2008 housing collapse. 

To my point: If what you wanted out of the election was more affordable, humane, and available when you need it health care there was no choice but Harris/Walz. And the popular vote, admittedly razor thin, said nothing to see here. You know these disconnects between the election and what matters, health care, women's rights, living wage jobs, homelessness, climate change, world peace, civil rights, are going to pile up. 

And I can already see one thread of positive spin forming: Maybe some good can come from Grump's radical "disruption." Maybe; vacuums encourage initiative, sure. But I see Grump firing Khan and using antitrust as a way to shakedown monopolists, bringing them to heel and trying to mold them into an oligarchy backing his power. Yeah, I think the rule of Putin and Orban are his models, but Grump is mostly an impulsive blustery windbag of performative dominance in the spirit of professional wrestling on TV. In other words, he's escaped jail and might be satisfied with some splashy revenge TV spectacles. Clearly his personal powers are unstable and waning. 

So a lot of the fascismo revanchist technocratic reaction is going to come down to the energies of the miscreants behind him, Vance, Lusk, Miller, his appointments, who Grump is giving the "initiative" to, make no mistake, and then the resistance and resilience of federalist powers and half the popular vote to stop or reduce their stupidest stuff and worst humanitarian crimes. 

It's not exactly the pacific retirement plan I was contemplating but it will be certainly historic. Hang on and hang in there. 

Did A Billionaire Tech Bro Buy And/Or Hack the Election?

 And scary takes on where the denial of reality leads-- 

From the 1500s: Pieter Bruegel’s famed Tower of Babel, depicting societies driven apart when they lost a shared language to describe reality. In the Biblical version, it was an angered God who left human beings in destructive confusion, as his punishment. Now similarly divisive work is underway, engineered by earthly creatures driven by power, vengeance, and greed. (Getty Images.)

"In essence, “news” is everything you don’t see or experience yourself. And with each passing year, a growing share of the “news” on which people base their sense of reality has come neither from personal experience; nor from “regular” news organizations, flawed as they may be; but instead from the surrounding climate of social media and other sources that have been skewed in a nihilistic, suspicious-and-hostile direction. A large part of that skewing is intentional—a supercharged version of Fox News.... Part of it just comes with the technology. And evidence suggests that in 2024 this mattered more than anything the official news media did." -James Fallows

"Words whose purpose is to portray life as it actually is: That’s a rare and even radical act in a time where so much of the language that’s thrown at us is trying to sell us something--a product, a lifestyle, a political agenda.  Language whose sole purpose is to mislead and distort, to numb us out and dumb us down--or to put it another way, the language of advertising…

What do you suppose our prospects are for living long and happy lives… if our world-view is based on lies, delusions, and fantasies?  Or take it to the macro level: What do you suppose is the life expectancy of a country that’s lost its grip on reality?  Whose national consciousness is based on lies, delusions, and fantasies? ..Without the tools for seeing and describing things as they truly are?" -Ben Fountain 

"After the election, as I started watching the blame game unfold, I received clarity from a despondent Biden staffer. He asked, ‘How do you spend a billion dollars and not win?’ The staffer missed that one of Trump's new supporters spent 44 times that much to buy Twitter and control the narrative. We have to observe that it worked." -Josh Carter 

James Fallows @ Breaking the News

"Why did people persist in thinking that Harris was short on policy; that Trump’s programs would boost the American economy, despite a widely broadcast consensus from sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists to the contrary; or that he would lower taxes for working people, though the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated that he would increase them? Even many of Trump’s critics think his first term marked a high point for border patrol, though more unauthorized migrants have been forced to leave under Biden. (Why was Biden’s Presidency widely dismissed as desultory, when, in fact, as my colleague Nicholas Lemann recently put it, “he has passed more new domestic programs than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson—maybe even since Franklin Roosevelt”?) How did so many perceptions disprovable with ten seconds of Googling become fixed in the voting public’s mind? And why, even as misapprehensions were corrected, did those beliefs prevail?"

Nathan Heller on the Ambience of Information @ NY-er

The claims for hacking remain obscure but sound credible enough to me that you gotta hope some Dem officials are checking this out seriously asap. 

Duty to Warn Letter to VP Harris

"when bad polls drive good polls they’re not so good anymore"

 “And we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob,” Franklin Roosevelt, Madison Square Garden, 1936 

In 2024 Trump/Vance and Musk/Thiel are trying to unite these dangers. 

When polling was started in the Great Depression era the response rate to polls was over 90%. Today, or as recently as 2015 via the linked story in the NY-er, the response rate to polling was in single digits. 

Trying to correct for “non-response bias” by giving greater weight to the answers of people from demographic groups that are less likely to respond-- means putting pollsters thumbs on the scales, invisible hands on democratic representation 

Elmo Roper, another early pollster, called the public-opinion survey “the greatest contribution to democracy since the introduction of the secret ballot.” But as the historian Sarah Igo has pointed out, “Instead of functioning as a tool for democracy, opinion polls were deliberately modeled upon, and compounded, democracy’s flaws.”

The statistician Nate Silver began explaining polls to readers in 2008; the Times ran his blog, FiveThirtyEight, for four years. Silver makes his own predictions by aggregating polls, giving greater weight to those which are more reliable. This is helpful, but it’s a patch, not a fix. The distinction between one kind of poll and another is important, but it is also often exaggerated. Polls drive polls. Good polls drive polls and bad polls drive polls, and when bad polls drive good polls they’re not so good anymore.

Like might be happening right now. That is MAGA flooding the zone, Silver's aggregate polling model, with partisan junk polls, inflating republican prospects, hoping to boost turnout, tip the scales into an inside-straight steal of the electoral college.  

Not everyone uses the Internet, and, at the moment, the people who do, and who complete online surveys, are younger and leftier than people who don’t, while people who have landlines, and who answer the phone, are older and more conservative than people who don’t. 

Donald Trump is a creature of the polls. He is his numbers. But he is only a sign of the times. Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian: frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic.

Politics and the New Machine @ NY-er

Also, another more recent story about the perils of polls: Rick Perlstein @ The American Prospect

As Bad As All That

Or "How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?"

Eloquent rambling in the NY-er's inimitable style, a freelance writer's paradise for long form journalism. But, truth be told, it can try my patience, I can't keep up, and I often don't finish the long meandering essays. Adam Gopnik's wanderings, richly erudite, literary (high and low), and, crucially for me, historical, however, keep me reading further than most. And if pressed for time the short answer to the above question is: Very! 

"The space is that strange, and the stakes that high," concludes Gopnik.  

The subject is the stakes of the current moment, the election, historical comparisons, cultural models, Trump's character, political power. Not a comforting take unless you find bigger historical perspectives comforting, as I do. And likely behind a paywall but if you can get to it it adds curious context to our strange world-historical moment. Some choice excerpts:   

Marrying the American paranoid style to the more recent cult of the image, Trump can draw on the manner of the tabloid star and show that his is a game, a show, not to be taken quite seriously while still being serious in actually inciting violent insurrections and planning to expel millions of helpless immigrants. 

Trump’s ability to be both joking and severe at the same time is what gives him his power and his immunity. This power extends even to something as unprecedented as the assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump demanded violence (“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”) but stuck in three words, “peacefully and patriotically,” that, however hollow, were meant to immunize him, Gotti-style. They were, so to speak, meant for the cops on the wiretap. Trump’s resilience is not, as we would like to tell our children about resilience, a function of his character. It’s a function of his not having one.

Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. 

Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate? Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. 

Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? 

“Weird” Is a Rebuke to Republican Dominance Politics

"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when she had to explain the phenomenon [that Trump/Vance and Maga are "weird"] to Vivek Ramaswamy, is a far cry from the sadism we’ve come to expect from Trumpworld: “Trying to watch what LGBTQ+ people do all the time is abnormal. Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote crisply, as if annoyed to have to spell it out.

Are you weird? According to Democrats—who have made “weird” a new term of art for Republicans—you’re weird if you get overexercised about the genitalia of Olympic athletes, think childless people shouldn’t have the right to vote, and generally fixate on controlling women, families, gender, and sexuality for reasons that seem transparently bound up in your own embattled masculinity and deep shame. You’re weird if you yell in public about sharks, or about “Joe Biden’s border bloodbath,” especially while your hands dance to music only you can hear. You’re weird if you want to track strangers’ menstrual cycles but are mad that people know you Googled “dolphin porn.” You’re weird if you campaign vigorously on issues that fly against common sense, such as getting rid of library books, abolishing the Department of Education, and giving the President dictatorial powers. “Weird” is multipurpose, a catchall designation for extreme or intense things that Republicans do or say. Its capaciousness is part of its appeal."

Go Katy Waldman! (another reason to subscribe to the NY-er)

I can't find this meme/photo that made the rounds in the middle of the pandemic. It's two people sitting next to each other on a public bus. A little old lady in a big overcoat and a nonbinary kid with fuchsia hair. The caption reads: Urban nightmare! I might be adding the exclamation point but I loved that photo. Nothing is more bullshit and nothing riles me up more than Trump and his outer-exurbia Maga country minions hating on cities as "living in hell." I've lived in Seattle since the late 1980s, and lived in Portland and the Bay Area (San Jose) in the early '80s; so I've lived in cities for going on half a century. They've had their problems but their problems are NOT women making reproductive health care decisions for themselves or LGBTQ+ people or immigrants or people of color or minorities or even protesters. Never have been. 

Repuglicans right now are weirdly obsessed with punching down at marginalized groups, women, people in drag, people speaking in a different language or with an accent, people protesting state violence in the streets. They maybe always have been bad but they at least haven't been this bad about it in a long time; since America was "great" in their way of thinking, I guess. Project 2025 really is a Handmaid's Tale dystopian nightmare. And despite Trump's denials Project 2025 is in fact a perfect distillation of Trumpism, with the fingerprints of over 200 former officials of the Trump admin all over it. 

The biggest problems in the city of Seattle, from my humble perch in the peanut gallery, are living wages, homelessness, and the rich do not want to pony up (with taxes) for obvious infrastructural needs like public housing and green sustainability reforms, and the mayor and political establishment are for some inexplicable reason intimidated by the fascist Trump-endorsing police union. 

I'm usually a passive supporter of those "Keep Portland/City X weird" campaigns. So the crucial qualifier here, made by Walz at their Michigan rally, is "creepy" weird. Trump/Vance are creepy weird on steroids. You don't want to hear them talking about your family or anybody else's families. Let's put this creepy weird stuff behind us. We really do have better, more pressing, things to do.

The Battle Over Techno's Origins-- Detroit or Berlin?

"The anemic funding of the arts in America means that the institutions memorializing the country’s cultural exports look like scale models. 

The New Yorker, By T.M. Brown

"Spice," EON: From some TV dance show in Detroit in 1992. 

If We Still Haven't Learned the Lesson of the Nazis What Hope for Learning Lessons From History Can We Have?

 

“His hatred for his opponents was both stronger and less abstract than was his love for his people. That was (and remains) a distinguishing mark of the mind of every extreme nationalist.”-- Historian John Lukacs

“The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction,”-- Nazi Joseph Goebbels

Adam Gopnik on Timothy W. Ryback's Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power in 1932: 

"Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader."