When someone tells you who they are, over and over, in words and actions, BELIEVE THEM! DJT is an abomination who openly talks about how he will dismantle our democracy, violate the Constitution, and take vengeance on his perceived enemies using the apparatus of a government filled with cronies he installs.  See:

Jamelle Bouie in the NYT : “And Donald Trump is telling us, loud and clear, that he wants to end American democracy as we know it.”

Eric Foner in the NYT: “President Trump announced that he plans to issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship, the principle that everyone born in the United States, with a handful of exceptions, is automatically a citizen of the United States.“It was always told to me,” the president declared, “that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t.””

Catherine Rampell, WashPo, quoting DJT: “If I happen to be president, and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them,’” he said. “They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.”

Heather Cox Richardson in her Letters From an American, also quoting the weirdly bronzed one: “In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day [sic] we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Racists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream”

David Graham, writing in the Atlantic: “In fact, much of what Trump is discussing is un-American, not merely in the sense of being antithetical to some imagined national set of mores, but in that his ideas contravene basic principles of the Constitution or other bedrock bases of American government. They are the sorts of ideas that would have been shocking to hear from any mainstream politician just a decade ago.”

A reasonable summary of the state of the small nuclear reactor industry by Brad Plumer and Ivan Penn appears here in the NYT .  I support development of this industry as an adjunct to other carbon neutral sources, since wind and solar’s intermittent availability, combined with the inevitably increasing demands of electrification (as well as the inefficiencies and inadequacy of out transmission grid), make achieving net zero otherwise nearly impossible.

Ezra Klein interviews Zack Beauchamp and they discuss Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 in this excellent podcast.

Katelyn Jetelina talks about the evidence showing that masks do work – especially for individuals who wear a high quality mask (N95 or KN95) correctly.  She summarizes the pros and cons well in her Substack post.

Odds Ratios and 95% confidence intervals of a subset of eligible included studies comparing masked versus unmasked.
Source

The Republican party is no longer composed of individuals who respect the rule of law.  Apparently even when completely documented violations occur, the lure of power and control will overcome any pretense of respect for legal norms.  See: Paxton, Ken

It seems there is no end to the idiocy displayed by some members of the US House of Representative’s Republican caucus, who are opposing renewing the funding for PEPFAR.  This was undoubtedly encouraged by the even greater demonstration of irrational thinking displayed in this Heritage Foundation report. Richard W. Bauer, a Roman Catholic priest who spent 25 years working on the ground in clinics for people with H.I.V. in Kenya, Tanzania and Namibia describes the issue in his NYT opinion piece, It’s Not Pro-Life to Oppose a Program That Has Saved 25 Million Lives. An excerpt:

The Royal Society in the UK looked at multiple studies of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) against COVID-19 and issued a report (and summarized here in the BMJ):

Writing in the NY Times, David Wallace-Wells compares mortality rates in the U.S. to that in our peer nations, and (no surprise) we don’t  match up well. Most of the data comes from a paper entitled Missing Americans: Early death in the United States—1933–2021 by Bor, Stokes, Raifman et al.

I particularly liked the concluding paragraph from Matt Yglesias’ Slow Boring substack post re. the new Ivy+ Admissions Paper:

“Fundamentally, though, you come back to the themes of my Strange Death ofEducation Reform series about improving public education. This proved to be a substantively difficult and politically unrewarding task. But it’s actually very important! The victims of the inequities identified in this paper — kids with good grades, 1500+ SAT scores, generally from families in the 70th-80th percentile of the income distribution — do perfectly well in the United States of America. The much larger problem is poor kids for whom K-12 school quality makes a huge difference but who often don’t have access to the best teachers or the best curriculum. This doesn’t key into the personal identity issues of New York Times subscribers in the same way that arguing about Ivy League admissions does, but it’s much more important.”

Randall Monroe and XKCD serendipitously meet up with JAMA…

Wallace J, Goldsmith-Pinkham P, Schwartz JL. Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic. JAMA Intern Med. Published online July 24, 2023. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.1154

“Findings  In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.”