Sunday Readings: November 20, 2016

Happy Sunday all.

The New Yorker has a deep dive into the past few weeks in the Obama White House. The president is quoted extensively in the essay, which is meant as a palate cleanser after the last two weeks.

“This is not the apocalypse,” Obama said. History does not move in straight lines; sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it goes backward. A couple of days later, when I asked the President about that consolation, he offered this: “I don’t believe in apocalyptic — until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.”

However, as with all things Obama it’s better to look at his actions rather than his words. The Guardian has a good piece on how the president is ensuring that the extrajudicial assassination machine Obama expanded will go to Trump virtually unchanged:

“Maybe on the left no one would believe that Trump has a steady hand, but Obama has normalized the idea that presidents get to have secret large-scale killing programs at their disposal,” said Naureen Shah of Amnesty International USA.

And of course Obama has said that if Trump “succeeds” the whole country succeeds too — a rather revolting thing to say given the president-elect’s stated policy goals. The Trump movement’s “success” was on display this weekend after vandals desecrated a park in the memory of Jewish Beastie Boys rapper Adam Yauch.

On May 3, 2013, the Palmetto Playground in Brooklyn, New York was renamed to Adam Yauch Park in memory of the Beastie Boy, who died in 2012. Today, the park was defaced with swastikas and graffiti that read “Go Trump,” Billboard reports.

Anyway.

Jeffrey St. Clair of CounterPunch has a good post-mortem on how badly the Democrats screwed up the election.

The Clinton campaign, like Luca Brasi, now sleeps with the fishes, but that virus persists, gnawing away at the brainstem of the vanquished Clinton team and the leaders of the Democratic Party. The same self-righteous surrogates who assured nervous liberals of the mathematical inevitability of Hillary’s election have now been deployed to rationalize her inexplicable defeat.

Each day a new scapegoat emerges: James Comey, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, Anthony Weiner, rigged voting machines, Fox News, fake stories on Facebook, Bernie Bros, even Bernie Sanders himself, the man who debased himself by campaigning his ass off for a candidate who ridiculed him behind his back and then blamed him for her own predictable demise. Oh, and if it’s Friday, it must be Susan Sarandon’s fault for being one of the few “celebrities” with a conscience and the courage to articulate it.

The Economist looked at data in Trump leaning counties and found low health standards correlated with Trump support — could the failure of Obamacare have been a greater factor in the election than we thought?

Counties with a large proportion of whites without a degree also tend to fare poorly when it comes to public health. However, even after controlling for race, education, age, sex, income, marital status, immigration and employment, these figures remain highly statistically significant. Holding all other factors constant — including the share of non-college whites — the better physical shape a county’s residents are in, the worse Mr Trump did relative to Mr Romney.

And a trillion dollars in undiscovered oil reserves was found in Texas, Gizmodo reports.

The estimate consists of “undiscovered and technically recoverable” resources of “continuous” oil and gas. Understanding all of this jargon is key. Undiscovered resources are estimated based on existing geologic knowledge and theory, meaning the exact amount of oil and gas in the Wolfcamp shale could be larger or smaller. Technically recoverable resources are those that can in theory be produced using current technology and industry standard practices. Finally, continuous resources are dispersed in small amounts throughout a basin rather than large, discrete deposits. “Because of that, continuous resources commonly require special technical drilling and recovery methods, such as hydraulic fracturing,” the USGS writes. (According to The Guardian, fracking is already common practice at the more than 3,000 horizontal oil wells located in the Wolfcamp region.)

That’s good news considering the Arctic is currently 36 degrees above normal, per The Washington Post.

The temperature averaged over the Arctic near the Pole (north of 80 degrees latitude) was an “insane” 36 degrees (20 Celsius) above normal. In reviewing historical records back to 1958, we could not find a more intense anomaly.

See you Monday.