Politico: What Trump Is Missing About American History

 The 1619 Project’s focus on slavery and racism, including its assertion and then revision about slavery and the Revolution, highlights how history is always in the process of revision through new information and new perspectives. But that process flies in the face of common ideas about history, that it is static and certain. Criticisms of the project and misunderstanding about revision come from this basic misapprehension about how we know what we know about the past.

Journalists and politicians are examples of two groups that are differently but equally susceptible to a desire for clarity and simplicity about the historical past. But the past is rarely clear and was never simple. We understand the motivation—in both cases they are eager for a usable past, a way of explaining in straightforward terms the context for the present. [...]

In essence, what happened with the New York Times is an example of how anyone—including journalists and politicians—can step into the stream of historical knowledge without acknowledging that the stream is moving. American history—indeed, any history—is actively created as researchers learn new facts and gain new perspectives on the past. History is unfolding chronologically: We each experience this in our lives as time moves inexorably forward. There is a tension between experiencing history—time moving forward—and representing history—holding time still. But how we represent the past is also moving; it never stays still for long, and it never has. [...]

If our history is constantly evolving as we develop new understandings of the past, does it mean all claims about the past have equal integrity—or validity? No. Understanding the past requires evidence marshaled to a narrative (or argument, or interpretation). Not all evidence is equally germane, not all arguments about the past are equally persuasive. Understanding the process by which historians make them better equips us to assess them.

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Nautilus Magazine: Your Brain Makes You a Different Person Every Day

 Every moment of your life, your brain is rewiring. You’ve got 86 billion neurons and a fraction of a quadrillion connections between them. These vast seas of connections are constantly changing their strength, and they’re unconnecting and reconnecting elsewhere. It’s why you are a slightly different person than you were a week ago or a year ago. When you learned that my name is David, there’s a physical change in the structure of your brain. That’s what it means to remember something. [...]

There’s a study that’s been running for a few decades with nuns who’ve lived in a convent their whole lives and agreed to donate their brains upon their death. At autopsy, researchers discovered that some fraction of these nuns had Alzheimer’s disease, but nobody knew it when they were alive. The reason is because they were constantly challenging themselves. They had responsibilities and chores. They dealt with each other all the time, and one of the most challenging things for the brain is other people, in a good way. So till the day they died, they were cognitively active. Even though their brains were physically getting chewed up by the disease, they were constantly building new roadways in the brain. [...]

This question got me really interested in whether we could create new senses for humans. Could you feed in some kind of data stream where the brain is getting new data about something in the world that’s useful? This is called sensory substitution. In my lab, we started doing this with individuals who are deaf. We built a vest that’s covered in vibratory motors, kind of like the buzzer on your cell phone. The vest captures sound and turns the sound into patterns of vibration. The motors are ranged from low to high frequency, which is how your inner ear is also arranged, so we’re taking the inner ear and transferring it to the skin of the torso. It turns out that people who are deaf can understand what is happening in the auditory world by getting the information just through the patterns of vibration on their skin. You’re not using your skin for much of anything, but it’s this incredible computational material that you can pass a lot of data through.

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Politico: ‘It’s a big, big swing’: Trump loses ground with white voters

 But the president is tilting at the margins with those groups. His bigger problem is the demographic that sent him to the White House — white voters, whose embrace of Trump appears to be slipping in critical, predominantly white swing states. [...]

But Trump is working from a disadvantage this year. There are relatively few undecided voters left to persuade. Democrats are also highly energized about the Supreme Court. And Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the court one month before the midterm elections two year ago did nothing to stop Democrats from steamrolling Trump and the GOP.

The erosion of Trump’s white support — and its significance to the November outcome — was never more obvious than in Trump’s messaging in recent days. Last week, he called for the creation of a commission to promote “patriotic education,” while dismissing “critical race theory” and the 1619 project of The New York Times Magazine. At a rally in Mosinee, Wis., he lit into Kamala Harris — the first major party woman of color vice presidential nominee — lamenting the possibility of her becoming president “through the back door.”[...]

Trump is doing better with whites in some states than others. In North Carolina, he is drawing noncollege-educated white voters at about the same levels he was in 2016. But in other states, including some with sizable populations of people of color, he is underperforming with whites. In Florida, Trump is running ahead of Biden with white voters 56 percent to 39 percent, according to a Monmouth University poll. But that is far short of the 32 percentage-point margin he posted in 2016. In Arizona, he has seen his 14-point edge with white voters in 2016 cut as well. [...]

Even if the result is a margin of victory with noncollege-educated white voters that is smaller than it was four years ago, Trump will almost certainly carry that group. And if he can turn them out in greater numbers, he could shift the electorate toward him in several predominantly white states. Republicans and Democrats alike estimate there are hundreds of thousands of unregistered, noncollege-educated whites in key swing states that Trump could still pick up.

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Social Europe: Covid-19 and a new social Europe

 Initially, there was a prudent consent towards stronger government involvement in policy responses to the rapid spread of the virus, albeit with reticence from the social partners, whose participation depends on the different traditions of social dialogue across Europe. But lockdown exit strategies have been marked by the absence of involvement by social partners and the wider civil society. [...]

The European Commission led by Jean-Claude Juncker attempted to rekindle Social Europe with the European Pillar of Social Rights agreed in 2017. These latter included, for example, fair working conditions and prevention of atypical and non-permanent work relationships. [...]

In the current ‘rebuilding’ dash, however, the commission has taken on a role of ‘funding entrepreneur’, implementing instruments such as Next Generation EU rather than acting as the guardian of common social and employment standards. This shift risks relegating the promising pillar of rights to a non-vital, dependent component of a larger economic-recovery project, led by market forces.

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UnHerd: The failure of France’s Greens

Meanwhile several of the Green mayors have opposed government plans for a rapid roll-out of a fifth generation, super-fast internet network in France. Eric Piolle, the second-term mayor of Grenoble — rumoured to be considering a Green run for the presidency in 2022 — described 5G in July as “useful only for watching porn movies in high definition on your mobile phone in a lift.”

The Greens’ criticism may, or may not, be justified. The Tour de France, for instance, is indeed a carbon-generating carnival of plastic largesse with a terrible doping record; it is also a much-loved symbol of French unity and variety — an international sporting event which literally comes “down your way”. Either way, these are scarcely the kind of pressing local issues which French voters expect their mayors to address. [...]

It seems that the French people agree with him. Green support in the polls has dropped rapidly, and according to an Odoxa poll, positive opinions of the EELV party have fallen by 14 points to 43%. Over 70% of French people say they disapprove of Green attacks on Christmas trees; 68% dislike Green attacks on the Tour de France. [...]

And yet it’s worth remembering that the Green Wave was only made possible by a collapse in nationwide turn-out. The surge occurred only in big and medium towns, in economically thriving places with a large population of young, professional and educated voters. They have many local problems but they have been sheltered from the difficulties facing rural and outer suburban France, which generated the Yellow Vest movement in 2018. In these struggling areas, the Greens scarcely exist as an electoral force.

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The Guardian: The wurst is over: why Germany now loves to go vegetarian

Around 42% of those questioned said they were deliberately reducing their consumption of meat in some form, by keeping to a diet that was either vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian or “flexitarian”, meaning centred around plant food with the occasional piece of meat on the side. A further 12.7% of respondents said they “don’t know” or would “prefer not to say”.

The flexitarian approach has considerable support among environmentalists: a recent report by the UK Climate Assembly advocated people changing their diet to reduce meat and dairy consumption by between 20% and 40%, rather than cutting them out altogether. [...]

France, the other great European carnivore nation surveyed in the project, trailed behind its neighbour, with 68.5% of respondents claiming to eat meat without restraint. In both countries, those who have curbed their meat eating said they had done so out of concerns for animal welfare and the environment. [...]

Overall, meat consumption in Germany and France remains higher than in the developing world, and any declining tendency is expected to be outweighed by developing countries becoming more carnivorous as their purchasing power increases: global production of meat is forecast to increase by 15% in the decade to 2027.

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Deutsche Welle: Opinion: China's ethnic socialism

 Just a few weeks ago, Beijing introduced a new language policy for schools in Inner Mongolia, whereby instruction in Mongolian will be replaced with lessons in Mandarin in a number of subjects. Many fear that this will massively impact on Mongolian culture. [...]

Most of the inhabitants of Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet are not Han Chinese, who constitute the majority in China. Until 2012, when Xi Jinping took office, all 56 recognized ethnic groups in China enjoyed equal rights. But Xi, who, if things go very wrong, will be able to let himself be chosen as president for life in 2023, put an end to that equality. [...]

The West did not understand why Beijing could not wait until 2047, when the "one country, two systems" policy would have expired anyway and China would have won. However, for China, this is not a question of rational politics but of ideology, one according to which the Han are considered superior to China's other ethnic groups. The people of Hong Kong, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang are not seen as equal partners, and this explains the Communist Party's inhumane treatment of certain groups, who are nonetheless all citizens of China.

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FiveThirtyEight: How Did Lindsey Graham End Up In Such A Close Race?

 Recent polls of the U.S. Senate race in South Carolina have found third-term Sen. Lindsey Graham effectively tied in his contest against Democrat Jaime Harrison, a former top aide to longtime South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn and a one-time South Carolina Democratic Party chair. This is pretty surprising at first glance — Graham cruised to victory in 2014, winning by 15 percentage points. And Harrison isn’t some political juggernaut; in fact, he’s never before won any elective office. [...]

The reason: The makeup of South Carolina’s electorate is relatively good for Democrats (up to a point). The electorate is about 28 percent Black — a higher percentage than every other state save Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and Mississippi. (About 28 percent of Alabama’s voters are Black too.) And South Carolina has a higher percentage of white voters with college degrees (27 percent) than all of those states but Maryland (29 percent).2 Put those two groups together and you have the conditions for a sizable Democratic vote.

Also, President Trump is slightly less popular in South Carolina than he was in 2016. His net job approval rating3 in South Carolina was +7 at the start of his term (50 percent approval, 43 disapproval) compared to +2 now (50 percent approval, 48 percent disapproval), according to Civiqs data. And that shift, and the unpopularity of the Trump-led GOP with college-educated white people in cities and surrounding suburbs, gives Democrats more of a chance. Democrat Joe Cunningham won the congressional district in the Charleston area two years ago, becoming the first Democrat to do so since 1978. [...]

We are talking about fairly small differences here, so I don’t think there is a clear and obvious explanation for why Graham is running behind Trump. But here is some semi-informed speculation about why some Republicans and conservative-leaning independents who like Trump might be wary of Graham. In the past, Graham has aligned himself with decidedly un-Trumpy causes and people, from Graham’s close relationship with the late Sen. John McCain to his pre-Trump call for the GOP to adopt more lenient policies toward undocumented immigrants. Having served in Congress since 1995, Graham at this point is the definition of a Washington insider. Also, Graham spent much of the 2016 campaign blasting Trump in very harsh terms, including calling him a “complete idiot.” (Graham ran for president himself, remember.) So Republican voters might remember those comments and not trust Graham’s post-2016 conversion to Trump diehard.

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