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Maybe it’s old hat to you but it’s news to me. At Atlantic there’s a report of how a kid who grew up in a trailer park in Montana overturned 150 years of established biology.

You probably learned in school (I certainly did) that lichens were a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an algal species. Toby Spribille figured out that wasn’t true. They were actually a symbiotic relationship among two fungi and an algal species. Read the whole thing.

At Time former editor Norman Pearlstine calls for an end to the temporizing and capitulate to the North Koreans as quickly as possible:

Those arguments notwithstanding, it is hard to argue against increasing our diplomatic efforts with North Korea. While U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis may be right in saying we would win a war with North Korea, he is also right in saying that any war would be “catastrophic” — to our allies and most probably to ourselves.

President Trump has made contradictory statements about North Korea. Along with his increasingly belligerent threats, Trump, while campaigning for the Presidency and in an interview with Bloomberg News in May, said that he would be willing to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, “under the right circumstances.” Those circumstances weren’t defined.

Don Gregg is right in thinking talks should begin without preconditions. Now is the time to do so.

We have nothing to negotiate with the North Koreans. They won’t relinquish their nuclear weapons and missiles. We would be insane to insist on anything less. Should the North Koreans agree to what we want, they would be lying. Under the circumstances any negotiation with the North Koreans would be a capitulation.

There is an alternative other than war or negotiations and it’s the one I’ve advised in the past: do nothing. Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry.

At The Week Damon Linker endorses Bernie Sanders for president in 2016:

Has any Democrat with national ambitions run for office over the past 30 years without promising a “strong, bold economic program for the middle class and those working hard to get there” (presumably in contrast to the lazy poor people who aren’t working hard)? Without throwing a few punches at vaguely defined “special interests”? Without assuring voters a little defensively (and unconvincingly) that the party isn’t about “expanding the government” or about moving “in one direction or another along the political spectrum”?

Well, there is one Democrat with national ambitions who ran for office without rehearsing center-left cliches. And he did astonishingly well against a candidate strongly favored by the same party establishment that’s spent the past six months drafting the ideas that made up Schumer’s op-ed.

This Democrat, of course, was Bernie Sanders.

Better late than never, I guess. More support this ardent in March 2016 might have been helpful.

As it is if Bernie Sanders is the new face of the Democratic Party, the party is in for a world of hurt. He’s 75 and in 2020 will be 79. It is 20 years past time for the Democratic Party to hand the Silent Generation the gold watch.

USNews editor Peter Roff has a harsher reaction to the Democrats’ rebranding strategy:

The Democrats are a party adrift. They’ve been able to slow the progress of the new administration to a considerable degree using parliamentary tricks and legislative maneuvers but no one, including some of their most senior political leaders, really has a clue how to get out of the hole they dug for themselves while Barack Obama was president.

His shift to the left – he ran as a centrist but governed as a progressive – showed a whole new generation of young, middle and working-class voters that the Democrats can be trusted to tax you, spend your money on someone else, and impose regulations on the economy that make it tough for you to find a job.

Sooner or later, they always revert to form no matter how hard they try to hide it. Walter Mondale didn’t hide it – and in 1984 he lost 49 states and the presidency to Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton did hide it and won twice, albeit with less than 50 percent of the popular vote each time, but he was smart enough to work with the first Republican Congress in 40 years to produce a series of balanced budgets and to sign, after first vetoing it twice, tough welfare reform legislation that worked.

The Democrats latest try at assembling an agenda for the future was released to little enthusiasm Monday in ex-urban Virginia. Bearing a slogan that sounds like it was stolen from a pizza chain (whose founder and spokesman happens to be a Republican), party luminaries including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – both of whom hail from major American cities – tried to persuade voters in the suburban, ex-urban and rural areas that Democrats are in sync with their interests.

In fairness to President Obama he also demonstrated that sudden epiphanies on the politics of sexual orientation aren’t toxic and that Americans really do want a president who unites them.

The Democrats continue to blame everyone but themselves for their failures, not just in last November’s election but over the last eight years. They blame gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is a tool used by majorities to concentrate minorities to weaken their influence (as in the Illinois 4th District) or to dilute minorities to the same end. It is used by both political parties, as any one observant enough to really care knows.

They blame money despite the mounting evidence that campaign spending is only a minor success factor. We have seen so many examples of that it’s hard to deny the conclusion now. The Georgia 6th District is only the most recent; Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by many multiples.

I continue to believe and hope against all odds that in the final analysis good governance is the key to lasting electoral success. Watch which way the canoes are paddling. In terms of domestic outmigration the cities, states, and regions most solidly controlled by Democrats are experiencing a stunning flight by citizens. The largest and most Democratic states, i.e. California, Illinois, and New York are all losing citizens in the hundreds of thousands. You can’t compensate for that by pursuing the illegal immigrant vote.

That last remark is intended to be hortatory. Democrats shouldn’t cease being Democrats. They need to change their approaches to governing to strategies that actually work rather than pursuing the strategies that they wish would work.

I was surprised to see the claim that Sen. Schumer’s announced agenda, dubbed a “Better Deal”, was intended to remind us of Donald Trump’s book The Art of of the Deal. From a marketing standpoint it would seem to me that would be the last thing you’d want to do. I also found the idea that it was a reference to Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” agenda.

I thought it was an evocation of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. Maybe it’s all three.

Or a floor wax and a dessert topping.

The reactions are in and the response is “meh”. The editors of the New York Times in a piece that is more anti-Republican than it is pro-Democratic take the opportunity to implicitly make a call for bipartisanship while slamming the Republicans they’d need to seal the deal:

The Democratic agenda’s political purpose is clear enough. Party leaders realize, as Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, wrote on Monday, that they’ve lost the last two elections in part because they “failed to articulate a strong, bold economic program for the middle class and those working hard to get there.”

But articulating a program is one thing; persuading the party in power to work with them is quite another.

It cannot be stated often enough that Republicans have spent over eight years doing little more than obstructing Democratic initiatives. That tactic seemed to work for them politically. But elected representatives are ultimately judged on what they deliver.

I actually agree with that last sentence. The problem that Democrats face is that in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, Connecticut, Detroit, and many other state and local governments where they’ve held sway for decades what they’re delivering are debt and decline. Even with an acquiescent press you can’t expect to be judged solely on your victories, especially when your failures are more dramatic. They’ve got to learn that there’s more to good governance than higher taxes and more debt.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson found the Democrats’ “Better Deal” altogether too tepid:

I’m still waiting to hear the “bold solutions” that Democrats promise. I can think of one possibility: Why not propose some version of truly universal single-payer health care?

Yes, that would be risky. But it might generate real excitement among the Democratic base — and also grab the attention of some of the GOP’s working-class supporters. Incrementalism is not the answer. Democrats need to go big or go home.

echoed by the Washington Post‘s editors:

Even allowing for the degree of difficulty, however, the Democratic response, as sketched so far, is less than compelling: Its declared premise, that the economy is “rigged” against middle-class people, has a basis in the reality of Washington special-interest politics but seems better calculated to placate the party’s ascendant left wing than to start a serious policy conversation. American capitalism needs reform, not delegitimization. The Democrats offer one interesting idea in this respect — beefed up antitrust efforts to help bring down prices of airline tickets and the like. Otherwise, they rehash ideas that Mr. Trump himself has embraced at least rhetorically (massive new infrastructure spending; tougher negotiations between Medicare and the pharmaceutical companies) or play small ball (a tax credit for business to do job training).

The Democratic message includes nothing, yet, on trade, a major omission, given Mr. Trump’s effective exploitation of the issue. Yet perhaps it was better to remain silent than to admit the contradiction between House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (Calif.) promise that Democrats would confront “rising everyday costs” and the higher consumer prices that would result from the protectionism favored by both Mr. Trump and the Democratic left. Democrats also had nothing to say about tax reform, possibly because the clearest need is for a more internationally competitive (i.e., lower) corporate rate, which is what President Barack Obama correctly concluded, but populists abhor. Democrats are right that the United States hungers for a more equitable and effective alternative to GOP economics; obviously, though, they’re still working on it.

However, the reaction of the day goes to the Wall Street Journal‘s James Freeman:

It seems that the new rebranding campaign may be useful, except in many of the places where Democrats need to win.

will circling the wagons, conjoined with Republicans falling on their faces, be enough to recover the literally thousands of offices in legislatures the Democrats have lost over the last eight years? That seems to be what Sen. Schumer is banking on.

You really owe it to yourself to read Mikhail Iossel’s essay in Foreign Policy on the role of the American soap opera Santa Barbara in the Russian popular imagination. Here’s a snippet:

Santa Barbara was the first American soap opera to be broadcast on Russian television. It started airing on Jan. 2, 1992, with episode 217, and came to a close on April 17, 2002, with episode 2,040. For the first several years, the new episodes ran three evenings per week. Later on, the show’s broadcasts became fewer and further between.

For 10 long years — all through the crime-ridden, chaotic 1990s, the early post-Soviet years of timelessness and hardship — life in large cities, small towns, industrial settlements, and snowbound villages across Russia’s 11 time zones would come to a standstill as the remarkably cheery sounds of Santa Barbara’s intro issued from millions of TV sets. “Run on home — you don’t want to miss Santa Barbara,” the kindly pharmacist from a TV commercial would say to the old woman at the counter. It was that big a deal. Missing an episode was considered to be a personal mini-tragedy.

Santa Barbara’s imprint was everywhere. It entered the Russian vernacular, as a denotation for any hopelessly tortuous, excessively dramatic kind of relationship. (“Oh, I can’t stand those two, with their endless Santa Barbara!”) A well-known pop band, Mona Lisa, released a super-hit, “Santa Barbara,” in which young women proclaim their undying love for the character Mason Capwell (played by Lane Davies). Countless Russian dogs and cats bore the exotic names Mason, Eden, Cruz, and C.C. Capwell. A trickle of former Santa Barbara stars — Jed Allan, Lane Davies, Nicolas Coster, and others — visited Russia at different times in the 1990s and 2000s, appearing on numerous TV channels, giving a plethora of print interviews, gushing about the beauty of Russia and its men and women — and generally, one would imagine, feeling like the Beatles during their first tour of the United States.

It was a national obsession of borderline-insane magnitude.

The contrast between the fictitious Santa Barbara and the realities of life in late 20th century post-Soviet Russia could hardly have been starker. When the last episode of the soap was aired in Russia a decade later (and a decade later than here), it left behind a country studded with homes and neighborhoods influenced by it along with a lingering nostalgia.

I want to recommend an excellent essay by Alan Jay Levinovitz at Aeon on the decline of modern economics into mathematics:

The failure of the field to predict the 2008 crisis has also been well-documented. In 2003, for example, only five years before the Great Recession, the Nobel Laureate Robert E Lucas Jr told the American Economic Association that ‘macroeconomics […] has succeeded: its central problem of depression prevention has been solved’. Short-term predictions fair little better – in April 2014, for instance, a survey of 67 economists yielded 100 per cent consensus: interest rates would rise over the next six months. Instead, they fell. A lot.

Nonetheless, surveys indicate that economists see their discipline as ‘the most scientific of the social sciences’. What is the basis of this collective faith, shared by universities, presidents and billionaires? Shouldn’t successful and powerful people be the first to spot the exaggerated worth of a discipline, and the least likely to pay for it?

In the hypothetical worlds of rational markets, where much of economic theory is set, perhaps. But real-world history tells a different story, of mathematical models masquerading as science and a public eager to buy them, mistaking elegant equations for empirical accuracy.

Extra points for the uncited reference to John Maynard Keynes in the title of the essay: “The new astrology”.

Economics is a science of human behavior or it is nothing. Mathematical models should reflect a keen understanding of the underlying workings of whatever you’re trying to model. They aren’t a substitute for understanding. Mathematical notation does not produce rigor; it arises from rigor. Adam Smith and David Ricardo were great economists because they understood the human behaviors about which they wrote. Mathematical notation would not have made them better.

If you cannot explain your understanding in clear language, you do not have a clear understanding.