Vox: 9 questions about China you were too embarrassed to ask

The last major area where Washington and Beijing generally see eye to eye is on climate policy. In 2014, after years of stalemate and more than nine months of negotiations, China and the US agreed to work together to tackle climate change. As the two largest carbon emitters in the world — responsible collectively for about 40 percent of emissions — their breakthrough helped set the framework for the landmark 2015 Paris agreement and helped convince other countries to join the global treaty to lower carbon emissions. (Trump has insisted that he will pull the US out of the Paris accord, but it’s unclear if he really will.)

In some spheres, differences between the US and China are a source of discomfort and criticism, but they aren’t grounds for considering each other enemies. The most obvious example of that is their sharply contrasting notions of political liberty; the US is a liberal democracy, while China has a one-party authoritarian state. “Our fundamental political values don’t align, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily a foe of ours. It means there may be limitations on our ability to trust each other,” says Julian Gewirtz, a Rhodes scholar studying Chinese history at Oxford University and the author of a new book on the history of China’s economy. Beijing does not take kindly to the way Washington criticizes it for its approach to human rights. [...]

China seems to have dialed back its cyberattacks recently. After the Justice Department’s indictment of five Chinese military hackers for stealing trade secrets in 2014 and a 2015 agreement between the US and China to refrain from hacking each other’s private sectors, the government and experts have said that China’s hacking operations appear to have declined. But analysts say they could pick up again at any point — something that seems entirely plausible if Trump keeps up his hawkish rhetoric on China. [...]

But China isn’t remotely close to achieving America’s standard of living. In 2014, GDP per capita in the US was around $55,000; in China, it was around $8,000. The US’s GDP per capita is seven times that in China, and that gap isn’t going to close any time soon.

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FiveThirtyEight: Barack Obama Won The White House, But Democrats Lost The Country

All this had been accomplished in a country that seemed increasingly open to the Democratic Party’s ideas: At the beginning of Obama’s term, 44 percent of Americans thought marijuana should be legal; by the end of his time in office, 60 percent thought so. Support for same-sex marriage skyrocketed. In 2015, 45 percent of Americans said they leaned Democrat, compared to 42 percent who leaned Republican, and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million.

So why did the Democrats lose the 2016 presidential election? Why, even as Obama spoke, was there a newly expanded Republican majority in Washington working overtime to gut his hallmark healthcare law? In his eight years in office, Obama oversaw the rapid erosion of the Democratic Party’s political power in state legislatures, congressional districts and governor’s mansions. At the beginning of Obama’s term, Democrats controlled 59 percent of state legislatures, while now they control only 31 percent, the lowest percentage for the party since the turn of the 20th century. They held 29 governor’s offices and now have only 16, the party’s lowest number since 1920. [...]

While the party was getting younger, it was also growing more diverse. The share of self-identified Democrats who were nonwhite remained on track with the broader demographic shift the country has been undergoing — a trend that started well before Obama took office. Both parties recognized that the Democrats were winning a long-term political battle in a country where a majority of the population will be nonwhite by 2044. Sixty-four percent of Democrats were white in 2000; that number dropped to 57 percent in 2008 and 53 percent in 2014. (Seventy-four percent of American adults overall were white in 2000, dropping to 64 percent in 2014.) [...]

But the big-tent philosophy brought challenges for Democrats ideologically and electorally. “We have to unite the undocumented abuela with the treehugger from Oregon with the criminal-justice advocate from Detroit with the anti-Wall Street small farmer from Iowa with the trans woman from Florida,” said Heather McGhee, president of the progressive think tank Demos. “Creating a forceful, coherent progressive vision in an age of racial, economic and political inequality is more challenging than the conservative project of small government and lower taxes.” [...]

Democrats’ most complex problem is with race. Inextricably intertwined in the party’s loss of political power — even as it made demographic strides — are uncomfortable questions about the deep racial divide that lingers in its broader traditional coalition. Many Democrats blame the party’s state-level approach and fundraising challenges for their losses, but what’s trickier and more fundamental is that the business of appealing to the abuelas or trans women might make some of the white, anti-Wall Street small farmers uncomfortable or downright angry.

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Gravitahn: The Truth Cannot be Sexist - Steven Pinker on the biology of sex differences

The Conversation: Syria, Russia and Turkey – the uneasy alliance reshaping world politics

It seems that the fall of Aleppo and the ceasefire is a victory for Putin, Erdogan and Assad, at least in the short term. For Assad, simply being at the international negotiating table is a win. But even if he regains control of Syria, he will have to fight a long battle with Islamic State, similar to the ongoing battles with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Putin will use his expanding influence in the Middle East to weaken Western political and economic influence globally. He will use his relationship with Erdogan’s Turkey to weaken NATO and make it irrelevant in a new world order, or disorder, of populist leaders.

Most interestingly, Erdogan will claim to have brought peace to Syria as the Sunni representative of the trio. His bold efforts to change Turkey’s constitution to bring in an executive presidential system during a state of emergency could only be understood in terms of his strong desire to lead the Muslim world. He wants an uninterrupted rule with no critical dissidence or political challenge so that he can channel all his energy into the greater Middle East.

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Vox: Congressional Republicans can challenge Trump without fear — if they want to

For Trump, and for his core adherents, the more isolated he is from what they call political correctness, from the mass of elite as well as broad public opinion, and from the broader cultural trend toward inclusion, the better he’s doing. This is the view expressed by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway when she complains that “everyone is gunning for us.” [...]

The specific argument, though, is that Trump’s unpopularity won’t really matter until it matters to a large number of elected Republicans in the House and Senate, and until it matters enough for them to consider impeaching Trump or defying him on key proposals and nominations. Even a deeply unpopular Trump will still be popular with Republican voters; the CBS poll that found Trump’s approval at 32 percent on Wednesday also found that Republicans gave him a 68 percent approval rating — very low by historic standards but enough to keep most Republican senators and members of Congress in line. [...]

Another problem for would-be Trumpian primary challengers: It may be difficult to define what the challenge would be about, in any coherent way, other than personal loyalty to Trump. Especially in the Republican primaries, but again in his inaugural speech, Trump presented himself not as a right-wing ideologue but as a sort of super-competent technocrat, defining a few big problems (“We’re always losing”) and pledging to fix them (“I alone…”).

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The Conversation: Are third-party candidates spoilers? What voting data reveal

We looked at how voter turnout interacted with the voting performance of third-party candidacies. We took into consideration the expansion of the voting franchise through the 15th Amendment, which granted universal male suffrage; the 19th Amendment, which extended the vote to women; the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18; and the Voting Rights Act. We also compensated for historical and demographic trends.

We found that not only do third-party candidacies fail to increase turnout, they are actually associated with a statistically significant reduction in turnout. Put simply, fewer people vote in elections in which third-party candidates receive a substantial portion of the vote. [...]

But the overriding fact is that when controlling for the expansion of the voting pool, turnout does not vary widely from one election to the next. That suggests that most voters go to the polls because they want to vote, not because they are motivated by any particular candidate. The one exception to this rule appears to be Ross Perot’s candidacy in 1992. But the one thing that distinguished his candidacy was the US$100 million of his own money he had to spend. By way of contrast, Jill Stein raised and spent about $3.5 million in the latest campaign cycle.

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Wired: Slovakia’s Hyperloop Moves a Step Closer to Not Being a Joke

On Wednesday, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies signed an “exploratory agreement” with the Czech city of Brno, which wants to examine the feasibility of a hyperloop line to Bratislava, Slovakia, where HTT also is working with the government. Being fired through a tube will cut the 80-mile trip, which takes 90 minutes by rail, to 10 minutes. [...]

It has just over 30 full-time employees, and most of the development work is done by more than 800 engineers with day jobs at places like SpaceX, NASA, and Boeing. They trade their time for stock options, and the challenge of making this crazy idea work. [...]

Of course, the technology is but one hurdle. In fact, the engineering, though tricky, is totally doable. It relies on a clever remix of technology already at work in things like maglev trains and the oil industry. “It’s not a technology challenge,” Ahlborn says. Making hyperloop work is easy compared to making hyperloop feasible. If this thing is to have any chance at success, it must offer reliable, useful, cost-effective service against things like railroads and airlines. And then there’s the regulatory challenges.

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Boing Boing: Map shows Middle East based on who actually holds territory

From Geopolitical Futures via Joshua Landis. Seems rough on details. If Islamic State gets wee satellites down in Yemen, you'd think the Sinai Insurgents would at least get some diagonal shading!

see the map