According to a new meta analysis:
Convincing or converging evidence supports avoidance of cannabis during adolescence and early adulthood, in people prone to or with mental health disorders, in pregnancy and before and while driving.
Cannabidiol is effective in people with epilepsy. Cannabis based medicines are effective in people with multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, inflammatory bowel disease, and in palliative medicine but not without adverse events.
Details at the Washington Post.
This plays out against the ongoing "Sahel War" between Islamists from historically herding societies who are being forced south as the Sahara aridifies who have come into conflict with Christians and animists from historically farming societies to the south of them. In short, it is a cluster of African wars ultimately driven by climate change.
After operating much like a commuter service through South Florida, the Orlando station will be the nation’s first non-Amtrak passenger train connection between two metro areas in four decades — a project with nearly $6 billion in private investment. Although not a true high-speed operation, the Brightline Florida service will surpass speeds of 125 mph in some areas — the nation’s fastest train outside the D.C.-Boston region.Five years after Brightline opened its 67-mile service between Miami and West Palm Beach, passengers fill the five-car trains for sporting events and festivals while commuters use it to get to jobs. Students receive discounted passes for educational excursions.
a $12 billion high-speed railway from Las Vegas to Southern California, a massive undertaking that could put trains traveling at 186 mph on America’s tracks by 2028. . . .
The 218-mile Las Vegas-to-suburban-Los Angeles route, dubbed Brightline West, has land, federal reviews and labor agreements in place, and company leaders say it could be built in four years. Its prospects are good, industry leaders and transportation officials say, amid renewed attention to rail in Washington and historic levels of federal funding for a national rail network that has lagged on the global stage.Brightline West, expected to be funded primarily through private investment, like the Florida project, is also aiming for a multibillion-dollar federal grant. . . .The United States will have its first high-speed rail system just before it hosts its next Olympic Games — the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Brightline West’s target date coincides with start of the games.
Among other projects at various stages, California is building a 500-mile system to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco that has been marred by delays and cost overruns. Its price tag, at $128 billion, is nearly quadruple the $33 billion project voters approved in 2008. A 119-mile section is under construction and projections call for a 171-mile segment connecting Merced, Fresno and Bakersfield to open between 2030 and 2033.In Texas, a plan for a train connecting Dallas and Houston in less than 90 minutes has been slow to progress amid challenges in an environmental review, opposition from landowners and, more recently, a leadership exodus at the company developing the line.
In the Pacific Northwest, a project is in the early phases of planning to connect Portland, Ore., Seattle and Vancouver, Canada.While most of the $66 billion the infrastructure law allocated for rail will go toward upgrading existing track and replacing century-old tunnels and bridges along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, $12 billion is set aside for improving passenger services outside that region, including for high-speed rail.Brightline West recently received a $25 million grant from the infrastructure law, while the California high-speed project has a $20 million grant for its Fresno station as it seeks $8 billion more. Other projects have requested federal funding.
There area also a smattering of proposals to expand or improve existing Amtrak slow speed passenger rail service shown on the map above.
The 20% drop in two years. Following a 40% drop in five years. There's nothing even remotely similar in the historical record.
China's fertility rate is estimated to have dropped to a record low of 1.09 in 2022, the National Business Daily said on Tuesday, a figure likely to rattle authorities as they try to boost the country's declining number of new births.
The state-backed Daily said the figure from China's Population and Development Research Center put it as having the lowest fertility level among countries with a population of more than 100 million.
The scars left by China’s population-control policies are clear. Last year, its population started to fall for the first time since 1962; its working-age population has been declining for a decade. A shrinking workforce acts as a drag on growth, and a swelling number of elderly puts pressure on the welfare system.Family-planning regulations like the one-child policy are widely blamed for depressing birth rates. But a less explored idea is that falling birth rates can ripple through the population causing the decline to be self-reinforcing. There has been little hard evidence to back this up, but a new paper about changes in China 50 years ago appears to offer some proof. Pauline Rossi of Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and Yun Xiao of the University of Gothenburg show in the Journal of the European Economic Association that birth-control policies have “spillover effects”, meaning that if some couples reduce their number of children, it may lead others to follow suit.
China is considering a variety of policies to encourage young adults to marry and have children. The same link, a May 15, 2023 report, notes that a year ago, these were the numbers:
1.2: China’s total fertility rate, or TFR—the number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—is one of the lowest in the world. In the US and the UK, the TFR is 1.7 and 1.6 respectively. In India, whose population recently beat China’s, the TFR is 2.
Formal college degree requirements are being somewhat rolled back in government hiring and H.R. Departments, but revealed preferences in hiring, and the economic edge associated with having a degree has soared, and far more people have them than did two decades ago (48.3% of Americans age 25 years or older, with women more likely to earn degrees than men). Even the last decade has made a difference in educational attainment:
- From 2011 to 2021, the percentage of adults age 25 and older who had completed high school increased for all race and Hispanic origin groups. During this period, high school completion increased from 92.4% to 95.1% for the non-Hispanic White population; from 84.5% to 90.3% for the Black population; from 88.6% to 92.9% for the Asian population; and from 64.3% to 74.2% for the Hispanic population.
- From 2011 to 2021, the percentage of adults age 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree or higher increased from 34.0% to 41.9% for the non-Hispanic White population; from 19.9% to 28.1% for the Black population; from 50.3% to 61.0% for the Asian population; and from 14.1% to 20.6% for the Hispanic population.
In 1910, high school diplomas were more scarce than graduate degrees are today. In 1970, 55.2% of people age 25 years and older had high school diplomas, just a little more than the percentage of people that age who have college degrees today. When I graduate from high school, 76.9% of people 25 years of age or older were high school graduates.
The economic premium associated with having a college degree has increases steadily since 1972 (the chart below uses the hourly wage v. salaried and business income distinction, but the two track each other):
The economic advantage of getting a college degree remains at just about an all-time high when compared with the average earnings of Americans with only a high-school diploma. In recent years, a typical college graduate earned a median wage premium of more than $30,000, or almost 75 percent more than those who had completed just high school, a 2019 New York Fed analysis found. . . .We often hear that the strong preference for degrees isn’t fair to the majority of Americans who didn’t go to college. But that majority is falling fast, and the percentage of college-educated American adults is pushing 50 percent when associate degrees are included. And while the percentage of Black and Latino college graduates is significantly lower, it is far higher than a few decades earlier. In fact, in 1960, only 41 percent of Americans had completed high school. It might have been plausible then to argue that plenty of dropouts had great talents and were unfairly penalized by high school diploma requirements. But it would have been badly misguided to oppose efforts to vastly improve high school graduation rates, which stand at 91 percent today.
From a New York Times op-ed column.
The result is that today, a minority of the population can exercise outsize influence on policies and leadership, leading many Americans increasingly to feel that the government is a captive of minority rule.Twice in the past two decades, the president was elected while losing the popular vote — George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016. That had happened only three times in the previous 200-plus years. The dynamic extends beyond the presidency to the other two branches of government.A new Washington Post analysis found that four of the nine current justices on the Supreme Court were confirmed by senators who represent a minority of the U.S. population. Since 1998, Republicans have had a majority in the Senate a total of 12 years but did not during that time represent more than half the nation’s population, The Post’s analysis of population data and Senate composition shows.The Post also found that during Trump’s presidency, 43 percent of all judicial and governmental nominees were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population. Under President Biden, not quite 5 percent of nominees were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population.
[H]e looked at me as if I had said "What is the square root of Naugahyde?"
the most interesting visitor to Printed Page today came all the way from Peru. It was his second time in the store. We started talking about the political situation, and he told me that now matter how turbulent ours is, it's nothing compared to most of the countries in South America. Drug lords and other criminals control governments, democracy is a battered concept, and assassination is as near as last week. He said that he came to the US in the Eighties to study. He thought the nature of American politics had deteriorated, but compared to South America? Hold my beer. I didn't know whether to conclude that we're lucky in America, or that we're becoming more like South America.
There is a substack article entitled "What the heck happened in 2012?" whose premise that 2012 in particular was an important year is a bit dubious (with the 2007-2008 financial crisis being a better date in many cases), but which does have lots of neat charts on older and more recent trends.
The premise is that we're having something of a 1968 style cultural upheaval driven by economic prosperity, smart phones, and the Internet. The link between pedestrian deaths and smart phone ownership is particular viable as a causal connection.
Hello Baby is a webcomic at Webtoons by Enjelicious, a South Korean comic author, who established herself with her first "big time" debut comic, Age Matters, which was recently completed after years of serialization. Hello Baby has been running for about six months and as I write, thirty episodes are available if you are willing to pay a modest price so you don't have to wait three weeks to read episodes for free.
Age Matters, one of the hottest titles in the romance comic genre at the time, was about a young woman filling in for a friend in her friend's job a cook and maid for a young CEO of a social media tech company who falls in love with him, that also has a strong supporting cast of secondary characters, and a backstory of melodrama involving famous models, villains motivated by jealousy and money, and rich family business chiefs looking for marriage alliances. Overall, the tone is cute and funny, if somewhat cliched. The most serious issues it explores, not very seriously, are the propriety of a woman dating a younger man, and the propriety of a woman dating her boss. It has a good chance of being made into a live action K-drama if this isn't already in the works.
Hello Baby is her sophomore romance comic effort. It is more serious, more down to Earth, and explores deeper emotions and issues related to modern marriage, parenting, love, responsibility, and our social instincts that deserve thought and discussion (but can't be discussed without revealing some spoilers from the first dozen or so episodes from what will probably be more than a hundred episodes when it's done, below the fold). It is also a huge hit and also has strong K-drama potential.
I've removed a number of stale blogs and bad links from the blogroll and inserted updated links where possible, in the case of a couple of blogs that relocated to substack.
The legal system has really sprung into action to hold the January 6 rioters and related coup attempt related bad actors accountable.
Republican politicians in Congress have decried it, but the failure of Trump's coup attempt, and the prosecution of people involved in it, has involved actions from many Republican officer holders who have broken Trump's spell over them.
The Justice Department has charged more than 1,100 people in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, and about a third of that number were sentenced to prison time, the Biden administration announced over the weekend. The DOJ released its latest statistics about Jan. 6 on Sunday, exactly 31 months after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to protest former President Trump’s election loss.Of all the charges listed, the majority of defendants – 967 – were accused of trespassing on restricted federal grounds. Just over 100 of the people in that group face additional charges for illegally entering federal grounds with a weapon.The DOJ said 372 people were charged with "assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees." Roughly a third of those were accused of using a deadly weapon against an officer or "causing serious bodily injury" to an officer. It said about 64 people have been charged with destruction of government property, and 51 were charged with theft of government property.The DOJ said 632 people have pleaded guilty to various charges – mostly misdemeanors, although 198 have pleaded guilty to felonies. The department said 597 people have received sentences for their activities on Jan. 6, and 366 of those were sentenced to incarceration.
From Fox News.
The average U.S. physician earns $350,000 a year. Top doctors pull in 10 times that. . . . The figures are nigh-on unimpeachable. They come from a working paper, newly updated, that analyzes more than 10 million tax records from 965,000 physicians over 13 years. The talented economist-authors also went to extreme lengths to protect filers’ privacy, as is standard for this type of research.By accounting for all streams of income, they revealed that doctors make more than anyone thought — and more than any other occupation we’ve measured. In the prime earning years of 40 to 55, the average physician made $405,000 in 2017 — almost all of it (94 percent) from wages. Doctors in the top 10 percent averaged $1.3 million. And those in the top 1 percent averaged an astounding $4 million, though most of that (85 percent) came from business income or capital gains.
In certain specialties, doctors see substantially more in their peak earning years: Neurosurgeons (about $920,000), orthopedic surgeons ($789,000) and radiation oncologists ($709,000) all did especially well for themselves. Specialty incomes cover 2005 to 2017 and are expressed in 2017 dollars. . . . Even in these peak years, family-practice physicians made around $230,000 a year. General practice ($225,000) and preventive-medicine ($224,000) doctors earned even less — though that’s still enough to put them at the top of the heap among all U.S. earners. . . .Our analysis of Census Bureau data shows that residents are in an exclusive class with oil field roughnecks when it comes to hours worked in their late 20s and early 30s; firefighting managers such as captains and lieutenants also come close. And those blue-collar jobs pay about as well as medical residencies — often a bit better. At least until the residents become physicians and settle into working fewer hours and earning, um, more.Residency also extends your education into your late 20s and beyond, cutting into your lifetime earning potential. And, as Abaluck’s students often point out, that long medical education also leads to astonishingly high student debt — an average of $246,000 as of 2017. But that debt almost vanishes against a physician’s still more-than-robust expected $10 million in lifetime income.
In 1970, based on a slightly different measure that’s been tracked for longer, America had more licensed physicians per person than all but two of the 10 countries for which we have data. . . .
[T]he United States has far fewer residency slots than qualified med school graduates, which means thousands of qualified future physicians are annually shut out of the residency pipeline, denied their chosen career and stuck with no way to pay back those quarter-million-dollar loans.
[A] deeply influential 1980 report . . . by a federal advisory committee tasked with ensuring the nation had neither too few nor too many doctors, concluded that America was barreling toward a massive physician surplus. . . .In response to the report and the end of some federal grant programs, the mighty Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), a coalition of MD-granting medical schools and affiliated teaching hospitals, slammed the brakes on a long expansion. From 1980 to around 2004, the number of medical grads flatlined, even as the American population rose 29 percent. . . .
Federal support for residencies was also ratcheted down, making it expensive or impossible for hospitals to provide enough slots for all the medical school graduates hitting the market each year. That effort peaked with the 1997 Balanced Budget Act which, among other things, froze funding for residencies — partially under the flawed assumption that HMOs would forever reduce the need for medical care in America[.]
In 2021, a large survey found that about 1 in 5 doctors intended to leave their current practice within two years, and the share of physicians in private practice fell from 56 percent in 2016 to 47 percent in 2022, according to the American Medical Association.But for decades, many policymakers believed more doctors caused higher medical spending. Orr says that’s partly true, but “the early studies failed to differentiate between increased availability of valuable medical services and unnecessary treatment and services.”“In reality, the greater utilization in places with more doctors represented greater availability, both in terms of expanded access to primary care and an ever-growing array of new and more advanced medical services,” he writes. “The impact of physician supply on levels of excessive treatment appears to be either small or nonexistent.” . . .
Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. It grew a bit faster than inflation over the time period studied, but much slower than overall health-care costs.“People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”Regardless, the dramatic limits on medical school enrollment and residencies enjoyed strong support from the AAMC and the AMA. We were surprised to hear both organizations now sound the alarm about a doctor shortage. MD-granting medical schools started expanding again in 2005.Someone like Orr might say it’s because states have responded to the shortage by empowering nurse practitioners and physician assistants to perform tasks that once were the sole province of physicians. Over the past 20 years, the number of registered nurses grew almost twice as quickly as the number of doctors, and the number of physician assistants grew almost three times as rapidly, our analysis showed.Osteopathic schools, which grant DO degrees, were also fast to respond to the physician shortage, doubling in number since the turn of the millennium, according to the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine. DO is a legally equivalent medical degree that features additional training in hands-on, chiropractic-like treatment, and those who earn it are more likely to go into primary care.
While there still aren’t enough residency positions, we’re getting more thanks in part to recent federal spending bills that will fund 1,200 more slots over the next few years.But that’s still well short of the 4,000 per year that Grover estimates will be needed to stem the shortage.
Despite tens of billions of dollars of weapons poured into Ukraine and training of many of the country's troops by the U.S. and its allies, progress in the counteroffensive has been limited. So Kyiv is changing its tactics.The New York Times on Wednesday reported that Ukrainian military commanders are now "focusing on wearing down the Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles instead of plunging into minefields under fire." This comes as a troop surge is underway in the country’s south, "with a second wave of Western-trained forces launching mostly small-scale attacks to punch through Russian lines.”
From here.
Destroying Russian Targets From Beyond Line Of Sight
Essentially, at this point, the Ukrainian counteroffensive is trying to use non-line of sight weapons (mostly howitzers and surfaced launched guided missiles) to wipe out Russia's heavy military equipment (e.g. artillery batteries, rocket launchers, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, anti-aircraft weapons, and radar batteries) and fixed military base structures (e.g. military barracks, fuel storage tanks, and ammunition storage buildings) on Ukrainian territory.
This tactic is viable because Ukraine has been provided with Western surface launched guided missiles and intelligence from its Western allies and Western provided reconnaissance drones, regarding the location of enemy targets.
Ukraine Can Launch Its Strikes From Safe Positions
These Western supplied guided missiles directed at targets identified with Western help can be launched by Ukrainian forces from positions of relative safety. This is because the Western supplied surface launched guided missiles have superior range and accuracy to Russian canon artillery.
Russia did has a limited supply of mildly inferior surface launched guided missiles that could have threatened Ukrainian forces beyond canon artillery range. But Russia has mostly exhausted its supply of guided missiles.
Russia still has some long range unguided or minimally guided missiles. But these missiles are inaccurate and it doesn't appear that Russia has the intelligence and reconnaissance resources to precisely identify targets for them either. Russia appears to be using these inaccurate long range missiles mostly to terrorize more or less random civilian targets in the Ukrainian interior as a way of expressing dissatisfaction with Ukrainian actions it can't address militarily. Russia also has short range unguided rockets for its attack helicopters and ground batteries, which are also quite inaccurate. But Russia's remaining far less precise missiles aren't very effective against specific Ukrainian military targets, and even these inferior missiles are in short supply in the Russian arsenal.
Also, Ukraine has enough anti-aircraft capabilities, such as infantry carried anti-aircraft missiles called MANPADs (as well as more potent anti-aircraft missiles) to discourage attacks on its forces at fairly short ranges from Russian attack helicopters and ground attack aircraft. Russian attack helicopter and ground attack aircraft must operate at short ranges that make them vulnerable to Ukraine's Western supplied MANPADs because Russia has few longer range air to ground guided weapons.
Russian Can't Replace Its Equipment And Soldier Losses
The other key factor that helps Ukraine's new tactic of destroying Russian heavy military equipment and fixed military bases with non-line of sight weapons make sense is that Russia does not have military equipment stockpiles or the industrial capacity (of its own or through allies who can supply it with military equipment reliably), which are sufficient to replace its lost military equipment quickly.
While Western economic sanctions haven't crushed the Russian economy to the extent diplomats had hoped as punishment for their completely unjustified invasion of Ukraine, these economic sanctions have been sufficient to greatly constrict Russia's ability to obtain military equipment to replace its losses from foreign suppliers.
Likewise, Russia doesn't have large numbers of well trained soldiers that it can deploy to backfill the casualties its soldiers are suffering in the Ukraine War. Russia is mostly replacing its soldiers who are dead, injured, captured, or have deserted, with minimally and hastily trained, and minimally equipped, young and reluctant conscripts. Few Russians, other than prison inmates recruited by the Wagner mercenary force Russia has hired, appear to be volunteering to join its military to help make up for its losses.
Russia also appears to be incapable of activating the hundreds of thousands of reserve forces it has on paper. This could be because their readiness, even if they could be activated, is probably no better than the readiness of its fresh conscripts. This could also be because Russia doesn't want to incur the political backlash and stir the resistance to its Ukrainian military operations that a mass mobilization of these reserves might trigger.
The U.S. Military Would Have First Secured Air Superiority
In a U.S. military operation, the task of taking out the opposing force's heavy military equipment and fixed military base structures would have done with a sustained period of fixed wing aircraft sorties. The U.S. would have started with strikes from stealth aircraft to take out anti-aircraft defenses and destroy enemy air-to-air fighter aircraft. Once anti-aircraft defenses were neutralized and air superiority was secured, the U.S. would have taken out the remaining targets from fighter aircraft carrying guided bombs and non-stealth bombers carrying guided bombs. U.S. spy planes and drones, and U.S. spy satellites would have identified targets.
But, of course, U.S. military doctrine has at its foundation the fact that the U.S. has the largest and most advanced air force in the world (secured with a military budget vastly larger than that of any other country in the world), and the U.S. has effectively unlimited supplies to state of the art ultra-precise guided missiles and bombs that achieve something very close to a one-shot, one-kill ratio in practice.
The Military Consequences Of A Lack Of Air Superiority
Ukraine can't use the standard U.S. military tactics described above because it has a small and not state of the art (e.g. non-stealth) air force.
Russia can prevent Ukrainian fighter aircraft from securing air superiority with its larger although also not state of the art air force, and with Russia's fairly effective anti-aircraft weapons. Indeed, anti-aircraft capabilities appear to be one of the few areas where the strength of the Russian military that was widely assumed prior to the Ukraine war actually proved to be true.
Ukraine's inability to secure air superiority has also prevented it from using military transport planes and helicopters to cross over Russian mine fields and defensive lines to put their ground forces in a position to strike from behind Russian defensive lines with more than small, special operations type units.
Russian mine fields and defensive lines aren't impenetrable, but they are sufficient to keep its mix of Soviet designed tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and armored personnel carriers, and modestly superior Western supplied version of these heavy military ground vehicles at bay.
On the other hand, Ukraine's also surprisingly effective air defenses and its small remaining air force are still sufficient so far to prevent Russian from gaining air superiority either. Ukraine's ability to prevent Russia from securing air superiority is one of the main reasons that Ukraine hasn't suffered a rout at the hands of Russian forces.
The Impact Of Russia's Nuclear Arsenal
If Russia had not had nuclear weapons, there is little doubt that the United States and its allies would have used their potent and advanced air forces to secure air superiority for Ukrainian forces, which would have led to Russia's swift and total defeat, and which would also have led to many lost Russian military aircraft.
Russia's air force is large and reasonably modern, but it aircraft aren't as advanced as state of the art Western military aircraft, its precision air to ground weapons are scarce and not as good, and its pilots are less well trained. In a battle for air superiority with Western air forces over Ukraine, the Western forces would almost certainly prevail (despite modern Russian air defenses at the margins of Russian and Belorussian controlled territory which are still not very effective against stealth aircraft). Russian military aircraft would suffer disproportionate losses, although the Western air forces would not escape the conflict unbloodied and would lose some planes as well.
But, because the United States and Ukraine's other Western-aligned allies have feared that direct participation in the war between Russia and Ukraine could trigger a Russian nuclear strike on the U.S. or one of its allies, the West has refrained from decisively intervening in the conflict in this way.
Piracy is pretty rare, with the map above providing, while not a complete list of incidents, a very large share of them, worldwide - many of which aren't that serious.
Many of the familiar piracy hotspots remain. The waters off the coast of West Africa are the worst. Southeast Asia is next.
But piracy has pretty much ended in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the adjacent parts of the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, all of which have been places where there has been piracy in modern times. Also, the incidents in India, Mozambique and Brazil on the map involved ships docketed in port, not at sea.
UPDATE August 4, 2023: The tranquility of the Persian Gulf with respect to piracy needs to come with a caveat, however. The Iranian military is a genuine threat to civilian shipping in the Persian Gulf and its immediate vicinity, and has been involved in numerous incidents of illegitimate hostile acts towards both military and civilian ships there, but this doesn't count as piracy because piracy, by definition, involves non-state actors.
The average quality of bridges in the U.S. is falling slightly, but only about a third as many bridges in very bad condition as in 1990 (interestingly coinciding with falling crime rates as well).
On the other hand, the fact that even 1% of bridges in the U.S. are in critical condition or worse, even if this is only a third of the number of bridges that were in this state in 1990, is still very concerning. At the current rate of improvement, it will take the U.S. until about the year 2050 or so to get all of its bridges out of a critical condition state.
Yes, transportation infrastructure officials have had their priorities straight, but there is still an underinvestment in infrastructure in the U.S.
Since bridges are both getting older and handling more traffic, we might expect their condition to get worse as they accumulate more wear and tear. We do see a very slight decline in the average rating of deck, substructure, and superstructure since the mid-aughts (prior to that, average rating was increasing over time). Note the vertical axis here: this decline is VERY slight.A rating of between 6 and 7 corresponds to the average bridge being somewhere between 'good' and 'satisfactory', more or less in-line with the ASCE's rating of "C" for our bridges in the most recent infrastructure report card.
The fact that in spite of all of this Trump is currently running away with the Republican nomination contest is, arguably, even more scary and concerning than January 6 itself. It’s one thing for Trump to do all this awful stuff. It’s another to have done it and clearly still be the choice of the Republican Party. There is literally only one pro-democracy major political party in America and that’s frightening as hell.
- Political Science Professor Steve Greene (August 2, 2023) (emphasis in the original).
Two more graphics from the New York Times that he referenced in his previous post at his blog sum up the situation within the GOP:
There are moderate Republicans out there in the GOP base, who tend to be affluent, college educated, and not self-described as "very conservative." But they make up only about 25% of the party and are out of step with the other 75% of the rank and file Republican base. The half of that 75% of Republicans who are not in the core MAGA base are much more similar to MAGA Republicans than they are to moderate Republicans.
The context for this cry of despair can be summed up with this New York Times graphic (never mind the two times Trump was impeached but not convicted, the criminal conviction of the Trump organization in New York State, the Trump University civil fraud case defeat, the large civil verdict against Trump for rape and defamation, the massive Fox News settlement of a defamation case against it for knowingly making false statements about the accuracy of the 2020 election results, the thousand plus January 6 riot convictions, the many election fraud case attorneys who were sanctioned for unprofessional conduct, fake electors charged with crimes in Michigan, and more):
