The reality of demagoguery is you cannot control the hate & division you unleash.

You seeing America? Pls notice the distinct absence of the National Guard though the president set the agenda for this rally.

This is his legacy. This is #MAGA. This is America

There AREN'T "good people on both sides", Trump.

He told them to stand back & stand by. Here they are.

Guilliani said at today's rally "trial by combat"

The ugly truth is they've weaponised fear & hate BUT they didn't create it. They weaponised what was already there.
A collosal failure of so many institutions. His entire presidency was leading to this moment and law enforcement weren't ready?
That's the reality that a lot of people are unwilling to confront. It's not just Trump. He is a distilled manifestation of what has never been exorcised. All of it was just waiting there for decency to be replaced with blind ambition & greed.
The levers of white supremacy & racism are as present as they ever were. All it took was for someone to say fuck being decent, tap into the primal. It happened in the UK first and then, having resorted to the same playbook, lightning struck again Nov. 16
Another revelation is the weakness of "law & order". It requires the societal contract to abide by them. America & the UK had no vocabulary to respond to incivility. He tested the robustness of the laws by saying fuck it and nothing happened. Impeached but nothing happened
Subpoenas were casually declined. In the UK, Boris Johnson was found to have illegally prorogued parliament, nothing happened. Several violations of the Hatch Act. He literally made a mockery of the constitution as the law and order president.
A huge part of this is decency politics. One of the most irksome legacies from the Obama administration, for me, was "when they go low, we go high"... Nah! When they're low, they're at kicking height. Kick the twats.
It rendered entire systems stagnant and unable to respond & adapt.

So now, on the day of certifying the election he lost, domestic white terrorists descended on the capital in an act of civil war and they didn't even have metal detectors.
On a day that a Black, whose mother picked cotton, became the first Black Democrat elected as a senator from Georgia.

A tale of two Americas. One that is trying to fulfil her promise by righting past evils & one that can't let go of said evils, clinging to power violently

More from Government

Typically excellent piece from @dsquareddigest The exponential insight is especially neat. Think of it a little like fishing...today you can’t export oysters to the EU (because you simply aren’t allowed to), tomorrow you don’t have a fish exporting business (to the EU).


The extremely small minority of people who known anything about this who think that Brexit will be good for the City make a number of arguments which I shall address in turn...

1. They need us more than we need them. This is a variant of the German carmakers argument. And we know how that went...Business will follow the profit opportunity and if that has moved then so will the business...

And what do we mean by us / we. We’re not talking about massed ranks of Euro investing / trading etc blue blooded British institutions.

Au contraire. We’re talking about the London based subs of US, Asian and indeed European capital markets players...As soon as they think the profit opportunity has moved then so will they...it’s a market innit...
Which metric is a better predictor of the severity of the fall surge in US states?

1) Margin of Democrat victory in Nov 2020 election
or
2) % infected through Sep 1, 2020

Can you guess which plot is which?


The left plot is based on the % infected through Sep 1, 2020. You can see that there is very little correlation with the % infected since Sep 1.

However, there is a *strong* correlation when using the margin of Biden's victory (right).

Infections % from
https://t.co/WcXlfxv3Ah.


This is the strongest single variable I've seen in being able to explain the severity of this most recent wave in each state.

Not past infections / existing immunity, population density, racial makeup, latitude / weather / humidity, etc.

But political lean.

One can argue that states that lean Democrat are more likely to implement restrictions/mandates.

This is valid, so we test this by using the Government Stringency Index made by @UniofOxford.

We also see a correlation, but it's weaker (R^2=0.36 vs 0.50).

https://t.co/BxBBKwW6ta


To avoid look-ahead bias/confounding variables, here is the same analysis but using 2016 margin of victory as the predictor. Similar results.

This basically says that 2016 election results is a better predictor of the severity of the fall wave than intervention levels in 2020!

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