Los Angeles Times: If you think mass shootings are becoming more frequent, and worse — you're right

Gardner is an epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa who blogs frequently at the Incidental Economist, an indispensable health policy website. He based his most recent post there on a roster of mass shootings produced by my colleagues here at The Times on Oct. 2, the day after the Las Vegas massacre, which took the lives of 58 spectators at a country music festival and injured more than 500 others. [...]

Gardner’s analysis of episodes since 1984 underscores that most mass shootings (which experts generally define as incidents with four or more casualties) involve five to 19 deaths. But there is also “a series of ultra casualty events,” he wrote in October, shortly after Las Vegas. “The death rate in these massacres has almost tripled since 2000.” [...]

“Either we’re going to have to start doing something to prevent this,” he told me, “or we’re going to have to turn our public spaces into high-defense camps. Are all public spaces going to have to be under surveillance? Are we going to do facial recognition of everyone going down every street? That seems like a real dystopian future.” [...]

Gardner’s data graphs suggest that at least one more mass killing by gunfire is due in the U.S. before the end of the year. The chances are low it will lead to more firearms regulation, when the previous wave has not.

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Foreign Policy: Rex Tillerson Is Underrated

The reasons for these lamentations aren’t hard to discern. Top positions around the department remain unfilled, morale is at rock bottom, and experienced senior diplomats are resigning in droves. Tillerson has yet to offer a clear vision of what U.S. foreign policy ought to be, has made little or no progress on the major diplomatic challenges the United States currently faces, and is sometimes at odds with President Donald Trump himself. He openly supports cutting his own department’s budget and has brought in an outside consulting firm to propose major reforms that have veteran officials up in arms. Given all that, no wonder so many observers find little to praise and much to condemn. [...]

Second, Tillerson is serving a president who is genuinely clueless about foreign policy yet seems to think he’s some sort of a strategic genius. Trump is good at selling himself and positively world-class at conning gullible people, but there’s a great deal he simply doesn’t know about foreign affairs, and some of the things he thinks he knows are wrong. He won’t stop tweeting twaddle, and smarter leaders than he is have taken his measure and figured out that flattering his ego and pandering to his business interests will get him to do what they want. Given the president he serves, how effective could Tillerson possibly be? [...]

Finally, let’s not forget that the State Department’s role was declining long before Tillerson showed up. The last secretary of state who had a lot of genuine foreign-policy clout was James Baker, who was both an extremely talented negotiator and also enjoyed an unusually close working relationship with President George H.W. Bush and national security advisor Brent Scowcroft. But that was more than a quarter-century ago. Since then, successive presidents have increasingly marginalized the department and concentrated more and more power in the White House itself, where the National Security Council staff has ballooned. The power of the Pentagon has been growing too, with regional combatant commanders controlling vastly greater resources and wielding a lot more influence than local ambassadors or even the secretary of state. This was true under Bill Clinton, true under George W. Bush (where Vice President Dick Cheney’s office also had considerable power), and true under Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton was a loyal team player and energetic salesperson during Obama’s first term, but she was given little independent authority and had little impact on policy. John Kerry was more influential — especially on the Iran nuclear deal — but that was mostly because Obama was happy to let him handle impossible tasks like Israeli-Palestinian peace and willing to let him take the fall if these initiatives failed.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Values That ‘Values Voters’ Care About Most Are Policies, Not Character Traits

“Values voters” — a label that emerged to describe conservative Christians during the 2004 election — are sometimes held up as prioritizing candidate character, meaning whether a candidate personally embodies Christian values such as kindness, honesty and forgiveness. But although personal character is important, evangelicals’ first priority is to elect politicians who will fight for them and advance their agenda on the issues they care about. [...]

According to a 2015 survey conducted by the Barna Group, a research organization that focuses on Christian trends, 58 percent of evangelicals said that candidates’ stances on the issues were a key factor for their presidential vote, while less than half said the same of a candidate’s character (46 percent) or religious faith (45 percent). Robert Jeffress, a prominent Christian conservative supporter of Donald Trump, told The Washington Post that for evangelicals, character matters, but “leadership, experience, morality and faith are all important, and the rank of those changes according to circumstances.” [...]

The policy goals that fall under the umbrella of “family values” or “moral values” are largely social and cultural, and they remain high political priorities for evangelicals. When asked in the same Barna survey which issues will have “a lot” of impact on candidate selection, evangelicals were about as likely to cite abortion (64 percent) and religious liberty (67 percent) as the economy (69 percent). [...]

On the campaign trail, Moore has denied the existence of evolution (57 percent of evangelicals do as well). He has said that Ronald Reagan’s famous statement about the Soviet Union being “the focus of evil in the modern world” could apply to the U.S. — when asked for an example, he pointed to the legalization of same-sex marriage. Moore has suggested that the 9/11 attacks may have been a punishment from God because abortion and sodomy are legal. He called the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage “even worse” than the 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case, which found that African-Americans were property and not citizens. The idea of electing a senator who does not oppose abortion appears to be particularly troubling for some Alabama evangelicals. “I don’t want to vote for a creep, but I also don’t vote for Democrats,” Charlene Buttram, who is married to a pastor in a town southeast of Birmingham, told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t believe in abortion.”

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The Calvert Journal: Holidays in Soviet Sanatoriums

Soviet-era sanatoriums are among the most innovative, and sometimes most ornamental, buildings of their time – from Kyrgyzstan’s Aurora, designed in the shape of a ship, to Druzhba, a Constructivist masterpiece on the Crimean shore that sparked rumours that a flying saucer had landed. Such buildings challenge the standard notion that architecture under communism was unsightly and drab. Sprinkled across the post-Soviet landscape, they survive in varying states of decay, with relatively few still in operation. But at their peak, these sanatoriums were visited by millions of citizens across the USSR each year, courtesy of the state.

The issue of free time greatly engaged Soviet leaders as they set out to define and shape the New Soviet Man. Unlike western vacations, which Soviets perceived as vulgar pursuits characterised by conspicuous consumption and idleness, holidays in the USSR were decidedly purposeful. Their function was to provide rest and recuperation, so citizens could return to work with renewed diligence and productivity. The 1922 Labour Code prescribed two weeks’ holiday a year for many workers and under Joseph Stalin the “right to rest” was enshrined in the 1936 constitution for all citizens of the USSR. In line with Stalin’s First and Second Five-Year Plans, writes Johanna Geisler in The Soviet Sanatorium: Medicine, Nature and Mass Culture in Sochi, 1917–1991, rapid development of the industry meant that by 1939, 1,828 new sanatoriums with 239,000 beds had been built. [...]

Alongside the rise of sanatoriums, “kurortology” – a medical science studying the effects of nature and the elements on humans – was born. Like the Romantic poets before them, Soviet kurortologists viewed reconnection with the natural environment, previously seen as hostile and inhospitable, as having the potential both to heal illness and to end social alienation. Institutes devoted entirely to the study of kurortology were established. Investigating the efficacy of natural cures, they explored the success of treatments ranging from mud baths to light therapy. Not only did kurortology underpin medical culture in sanatoriums, but it also influenced their architecture.

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Vox: How job surveillance is transforming trucking in America

The promise of self-driving trucks will radically reshape one of America's most common jobs. There are 3.5 million professional drivers in the US, all of whom may face job displacement in the autonomous future being developed by companies like Otto, Daimler, and Tesla. But before robots take the wheel entirely, there will be a long period where truckers and artificial technology split the responsibilities of the work. The first big step toward that future comes in the form of the electronic logging device, a dashboard monitor that tracks speed, location, and a driver's schedule, and reports it to an employer or a third-party monitoring service. It has a lot of truckers worried.