Events

Yet another reporter stumbles upon the Dunning-Krueger effect (though without naming it) to explain Trump's stumbles upon the body politic. Meanwhile, some Republicans are finally distancing themselves from him, but in a way that makes them look even more craven than they already looked. It's even looking like they know they've made a huge mistake. Maybe. And even though his balloon is on fire, he's already starting to blame "them" for "fixing" the general election. Via Schneier, the NIST no longer...

I thought earlier today that this was unique. James Fallows, who knows more about the presidency than most living journalists, agrees: To the best of my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened before. Presidents of one party call nominees from the other party “bad choices” or “wrong for America” or “risky bets” or in some other way second-best options to their own preferred candidate. As far as I am aware, none of them has previously declared a major-party nominee categorically unfit. Again we...

President Obama yesterday called Donald Trump "woefully unprepared" and "unfit" to be president: During a press conference at the White House with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Obama posed the question to the Republican Party: "If you are repeatedly having to say what Trump says is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?" "The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that had made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn't appear to have...

Attention flat-earthers: you can't simultaneously believe in GPS and that the earth is a disk covered by the dome of Heaven. Maps of Australia are the latest casualty in the war between evidence and...well, flat-earthers: The Australian Plate is moving about 7 centimeters (2.8 inches) northwards every single year. This motion has accumulated over the decades to produce a significant discrepancy between local coordinates on maps and global coordinates in digital navigation systems used by satellites. At...

This evening's Times: Back in 1968, at the age of 22, Donald J. Trump seemed the picture of health. He stood 188 cm with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished, aside from a routine appendectomy when he was 10. But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels. The diagnosis resulted in...

This year's Republican National Convention is the first one in modern times after which the nominee polled lower than before it: Gallup has surveyed on this question since 1984, and the 2016 GOP convention was the first time where a candidate ended up in negative territory. The voters who felt less likely to vote Trump after the convention outnumbered those who felt even more motivated for the GOP nominee, 51-36, according to a Gallup poll. The closest a convention came to such unfavorable closing...

With a new job, summer weather, and lots of things going on, July 2016 turned out to be the worst month for the Daily Parker since November 2010. Back then I was finishing my MBA and traveling for work four days a week. This past month I only had 37 entries (the all-time mean is 40), averaging 1.19 per day (cf. mean 1.33). Ah, well. I'll try to be more conscientious this month.

Michael Moore, no friend of Donald Trump, thinks we're just stupid enough to elect him: Here are the 5 reasons Trump is going to win: 1. Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit.  I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states – but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a...

Via Bruce Schneier, the Universities of Bath, Manchester, and Princeton have developed a simple model to explain how altruism may have evolved in humans: The key insight is that the total size of population that can be supported depends on the proportion of cooperators: more cooperation means more food for all and a larger population. If, due to chance, there is a random increase in the number of cheats then there is not enough food to go around and total population size will decrease. Conversely, a...

Items of note: We're not imagining the humidity; so far, this month has been the 3rd wettest July in Chicago history. (It's not likely to break into 2nd place, though.) Bruce Schneier has a long post about the security of elections. Josh Marshall thought Hillary Clinton did a great job last night; Andrew Sullivan, never a Clinton supporter, was more critical but nonetheless will "happily use [his] first vote as an American for her." Off to the meeting. More later.