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Special prosecutor investigations always take a long time. Out of 9 previous prosecutors, only two wound up in less than 2 years, and Mueller has already produced more charges than both of them put together. The only other investigations of comparable public profile to this, Iran-Contra and Whitewater, both lasted around 7 years.

A handy comparison chart here

National polling is meaningless for Congressional races.

True, given gerrymandering which has distorted the picture bigly..

Most Democrats live in concentrated areas geographically, generally known as the 80/20 Rule; i.e. 80% of registered Democrats live in 20% of the country.

Nope. The 80-20 rule is something different. Of course, the fact is, 80% of Republicans also live in 20% of the country. Just check it out. Thanks to burgeoning urbanization, 80% of the country lives in mega-clusters of population.

So basically, you're confusing statistics with reality. A common problem among Trump supporters. Remember, they couldn't even figure out they didn't win a landslide.

If a national poll is split 50-50 on a generic candidate that means Republicans have a sizeable lead in total congressional races.

Nope. A national poll with that kind of spread means that Republicans are desperately lying when they claim to have widespread support and praying that Anthony Kennedy's inevitable ruling on their gerrymandering doesn't hurt them too much.

Really, instead of utterly devastating, they praying for only hugely discomforting.

But many of them are already getting out now.

Depends on the poll you look at. He's definitely within the margin of error for *maybe* being slightly ahead in approval percentage. But the point still stands. Why is being almost as popular as the president he despised respectable? If he's so much better, shouldn't it be obvious to more people?

Let's be fully realistic here, if Trump was doing such a 'crappy job' of running the country, his popularity wouldn't be over 50%.

Let's pause for a moment on the assertion that Trump has an approval rating above 50% and start our fake news discussion there. Can you source that popularity poll? Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com has the results of a pretty wide collection of popularity polls and my cursory glance shows only 1-2 this calendar year which have him at or above 50%, with the vast majority of the poll population showing significantly lower. Before that you have to go back almost a full year to the second half of May 2017 to find a poll that delivered a result greater than 50%. https://projects.fivethirtyeig...

You're not really disputing the parent. The parent claimed that Republican primary voters went for Trump because he was the outsider candidate, you are saying that people voted for Trump because they felt that they were being ignored by the insider candidates. Those viewpoints are not in opposition.

As for splitting the vote, you linked to a really long wikipedia page without any explanation about what we should be looking for. Nate Silver's guess about why Trump won the primary is mostly in agreement with what the parent said. Trump did poorly up to a point during the primaries, failing to win any state until New York, and then he won every state thereafter. That implies a split vote between the other candidates until something changed and Republican voters rallied behind him.

Why The Oldest Person In The World Keeps Dying

How did you determine that the Mueller investigation is a farce? What evidence do you have that the rest of us don't have?

From my point of view, I see a couple of convictions and some guilty pleas, and a bunch of people freaking out that their crimes might be uncovered next. That's rather the opposite of a farce. If anything, it looks like a reasonable and fairly well-run investigation. Given how long they usually take, this one seems to be especially fruitful very quickly.

Again, that seems to be the opposite of a farce. More like shooting fish in a barrel.

Their Mueller investigation must truly be going poorly. It's been over a year and they haven't found anything that says Trump colluded. They've found wrong doing by various underlings but, considering the average person commits three felonies a day.... Now the Democrats want their own investigation where they themselves can run it and leak with impunity.

On the contrary Mueller's investigation seems to be moving fairly quickly.

And he's gotten a bunch of guilty pleas, including from Flynn, Papadopoulos, Gates who were some fairly important campaign members. Not to mention having Manafort absolutely dead-to-rights on really serious money laundering. Cohen, Trump's lawyer/fixer, being under direct investigation and having his documents seized. Not to mention Kushner, Trump's son in law, is now being investigated for both his company's long history of fishy dealings (submitting fraudulent docs for renovation permits), not to mention the question of who gave Kushner 1.2 billion to bail out the family business and why?

You are correct that we don't have any public indictments connecting the Trump campaign with Russian intelligence, but the investigation is far from over, and Mueller isn't likely to show his hand until he's ready to charge someone.

For instance, there's already rumours that Mueller has evidence that Cohen made a secret trip to Prague, an major allegation from the Steele Dossier that Cohen has denied. But Mueller may not want to make that evidence public at this point in the investigation, nor may he want to do it in October when he might be accused of inappropriate interference like Comey did. But if that evidence doesn't come out till after the election it doesn't help Democrats till 2020, and if they don't win a house they won't be able to launch congressional investigations.

More likely the suit has 3 objectives.
1) See if they can use subpoenas to get their hands on any proof of collusion before the midterms.
2) Open a line of legal inquiry going that Trump can't pardon/fire his was out of.
3) Keep generating Trump-Russia news. As they learned from the Clinton emails once the narrative is established all you need to do it trigger the keywords to be effective.

You can't really say this.

I believe I just did.

Until there is another secret vote, which won't happen because SCOTUS ruled the way they did, it is impossible to know if the majority is in favor or not.

You're mistaken. It's impossible to know the amount of public support for gay marriage with absolute certainty, but we can state with a very high degree of certainty that it's above 50%.

The last set of national polls were useless in determining the thinking of the electorate.

No, they weren't. Nate Silver:

Another myth is that Trump’s victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state. Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968.

While most 2016 polls were off, they were within the margin of error. They were off by less than 4 points.

Current polling consistently shows support of gay marriage above 60%. Now, statistics is not an exact science -- the actual number could be a few points below that. 59%, 58%, 57%...sure. But under 50%? No. These are multiple reliable polling agencies. It's entirely possible that they're all off by 2-3 points, as the 2016 election showed us. But the odds that they're all off by more than ten points (and, in some cases, as many as 15) are so low as to be effectively impossible.

Further, current polls on public opinion of gay marriage are consistent with two things: increasing acceptance of gay marriage over time, and historical instances where public opinion on civil rights issues changed following court decisions.

While the polls turned out to be less accurate than usual

Actually, the 2016 polls were more accurate than usual (more details). The mis-prediction of the election was not due to poor polling data but poor analysis combined with a very close election.

It was also gerrymandered up the wazoo when Democrats were in power.

Yes. Reynolds v. Sims and Baker v. Carr. Of course, those Democrats were often entirely different in politics. Such is history.

Gerrymandering simply strengthens whoever is currently more popular.

Wrong. In some cases, actually weakens those who are more popular, as shown in Wisconsin and North Carolina.

If congressional districts were assigned rationally, Democrats wouldn't do very well anyway

Yes, but that's because your definition of rational which is 100% Republican Agenda. You do realize your biases, however, are not supported in actual math that is independent of your partisan bias.

The only way Democrats could do well if the US went to strict national popular majorities, but that is utterly unacceptable and incompatible with federalism.

Or you know, actually voting. Of course, that is utterly unacceptable to the Republican agenda which relies on voter suppression.

In actual fact [people-press.org], liberals only make up about 17% of the US political spectrum and California is thoroughly unrepresentative of the country.

Actually, California is highly representative of the country, and it's only because of zealots like you that it gets demonized as some outside nemesis.

The reason Republicans are so strong is because Democrats have fallen out of favor with the political center: moderates and independents.

Also untrue, the truth is quite contrary.

It is actually the Republicans who have become more extremist, but they rely on moving the perceptual concept to turn the tables instead of embrace reality.

I'm a good example of that: I used to be a registered Democrat but loathe what the Democratic party has become over the last decade. I won't vote for Democrats again until they clearly disavow people like Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Corey Booker, and Elizabeth Warren.

You're actually a good example of the lying fraud of the GOP, as you vacuously and repetitively pretend to claim to be a Democrat and a moderate, yet entirely espouse the hard-core right-wing agenda, and blame Obama for creating conflict.

Tell you what, maybe people will believe you when you disavow individuals like Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thoma

All kinds of odd things happened...

but for most companies 29 hours was too disruptive.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

We don't have to guess.
https://projects.fivethirtyeig...

It’s called P-hacking.

Yes, Hillary won the popular vote, but from just two districts in LA and one in NYC. Had polls weighted a person's per-capita electoral value, Trump was obviously winning in a landslide.

What does that mean "but from just two districts in LA and one in NYC"? Clinton won the popular vote by about 2.9 million votes, sure. I am willing to entertain that there are two districts in LA and one in NYC that had an imbalance of 2.9 million votes in Clinton's favor - but so what? To deny that Clinton won the popular vote nation-wide because one or a few regions had particular voting patterns is similar to questioning the validity of Trump's electoral college win by saying something like "Yes, Donald won the electoral college, but from just one state (Texas)."

Nobody who has any knowledge of the electoral voting system thought that the popular vote total has any direct bearing on the winner of the election. However, national popular vote polls do give useful input to models of how individual states' electoral college seats are likely to be assigned. As fivethirtyeight.com pointed out - there was a lot of spotty journalism out there in regards to recognizing the complexity of the electoral college and how to interpret polls.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

That's some interesting revisionist history you have there. I remember the polls putting Clinton as winning by a wide margin. Could you remind me who won?

A fun little article if you think I'm wrong, feel free to post your evidence to counter mine if you'd like.

The link you posted ( https://www.npr.org/2016/11/14... ) does not seem to match your statement. In fact point #1 is basically what I was saying. It states as point #1 that the polls (at least the Real Clear Politics' final polling average) in 2016 were closer to the vote results than they were in 2012, when they were off by about 3.2%, well within the stated uncertainty ranges. The polls were indicating nothing like a "landslide", and just like "Brexit", a single "polling error" away from deciding between choice "A" or choice "B".

Then, after basically saying, "the polls were within their measurement capabilities", the author of the article goes on to look at reasons why the polls might have been wrong. But they were not "wrong"! They were correct within the published accuracy of their measurement! Might there be ways to increase their accuracy? Sure, but it is impossible to eliminate all uncertainties, even if you somehow were able to actually poll every voter in the country and get their true feelings about how they would vote - some of them will change their minds, and some of them will die before the polls even open. The polls were "better" in 2016 than 2012. Hopefully they will be better still in 2018.

In any case, maybe I just wasn't reading widely enough before the elections and maybe there was a widespread narrative that Clinton was winning by a wide margin - I was mostly looking at poll aggregators. So maybe I had less of a feeling that the last few months before the election had Clinton with an insurmountable lead. I went into election night thinking that Trump had about a 20% chance of winning, as reflected by the polling and various models derived from that. It made the morning news that he had won a surprise, but not something amazingly unexpected. I think the betting markets had similar odds.

Here is a postmortem from late January, with slightly better data than the mid-November NPR article linked above:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

"Another myth is that Trump’s victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state.3 Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968."

that poll is a significant outlier compared to pretty well every other published poll on the same topic. did you even watch the msnbc video that you linked to that described the fact that it was done with a different methodology than the others?

Russia used misinformation to install Trump and look what we have: mass shooting after mass shooting. At this rate all humanity will be gone in years. It is too bad Hillary has not yet gotten into power, she would be our savior from this kind of misinformation Russian tyranny.

Ironically what you said is the definition of fake news.

"Russia used misinformation to install Trump"

There's no evidence this is true

In fact Rosenstein said it wasn't true

https://www.realclearpolitics....

Now, there is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.

"and look what we have: mass shooting after mass shooting. "

Mass shootings account for less than 1% of homicides in the US. They are a bad way to understand gun violence.

A more typical example of gun violence is deaths from gun violence. And most of those happen in places that already have gun control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Gun violence is most common in poor urban areas and frequently associated with gang violence, often involving male juveniles or young adult males. Although mass shootings have been covered extensively in the media, mass shootings in the US account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths and the frequency of these events steadily declined between 1994 and 2007, rising between 2007 and 2013.

"At this rate all humanity will be gone in years"

There'll still be loads of humans left at the end of Trump's second term.

"It is too bad Hillary has not yet gotten into power, she would be our savior from this kind of misinformation Russian tyranny."

You know she's conceded the election, right? The idea that if people keep whinging online enough the election result will somehow change and she'll replace Trump in the White House is delusional.

Even 538, which is hilarious biased in favor of Clinton (they're one of the many sites that predicted her victory as a sure thing) says that there's no evidence Russian meddling had any effect on the election. At most they say Russia may have amplified flaws Clinton already had, but like I said, 538 is hilarious biased in her favor.

So, ~300,000,000 million people need to give up their right to defend themselves because ~.0001% of them are fuck ups, instead of dealing with those individuals. While those mass shootings are tragic, Also, 317 is a lie...

"Between 1966 and 2012, there were 90 such incidents in the U.S."
https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

my views as a finnish person

You're drunk right now, aren't you? I love Finland and Finnish people, but they are drunk almost all the time.

in my experience trump does authentically have higher popularity until you get up to category of +60 year old women who overwhelmingly would've preferred clinton

In your experience, do you realize that there are actually data that shows you have it completely wrong? Among women, Trump is most popular with women over 65.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

http://college.usatoday.com/20...

This is wrong by any measure. Trump's approval ratings are competitive with Ford's, but (since we're talking about hate here) Trump's disapproval ratings are the highest ever measured at this point in his presidency. Though Bush 2 peaked quite a bit higher. Here.

That's only since we've been measuring approval/disapproval ratings though. Speculation is that Lincoln was really the most hated president, which makes sense if you think about it.

The hatred directed at Trump should surprise no one, he's basically a political shock jock. He got all of that publicity during the election by saying one outrageous thing after another - hate is what he runs on.

Firing Mueller is a gross abuse and violation of the separation of powers. Even sensible republicans think interfering in the DoJ is crossing the line.

Firing Mueller would be a severe political mistake, but it would not be a violation of the separation of powers. The DoJ is within the executive branch, not the judicial branch, so Trump has the authority to fire Mueller. If Mueller were under the judicial branch, Trump wouldn't be able to touch him (e.g. Trump cannot fire judges). So, that said, I believe that the one thing Trump could do to end his presidency would be to fire Mueller. If he rides it out, he'll probably make it through letting his lackeys take the fall.

538 has given some good history and analysis of special counsels: https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

For a comprehensive and well presented comparision of these figures, see Nate Silver's site trump-approval-ratings

Am I the only one seeing the steam coming off this post? Evidently it was delieverd hot and fresh, directly from the posterior of a bull. I'm curious if you could put numbers to "Most" jobs, and the salaries of "primary" earners in a 2 or 3 earner household? I would like to know what you assume a "very small percentage" is.

FiveThirtyEight has some numbers. First of all, on behalf of the ~20% of minimum wage workers living on a single minimum wage income of 15,000 bucks or less (468,000 souls) allow me to say fuck you for trying to muddy their plight with your fever dream politics.

And secondly, since the median income is in the mid 50s these days, the first two lines (adding to 51%) blow your "on average, above median income" out of the water right there.

Try looking at more numbers and less opinion pieces. People's wellbeing are decided by debates like this, stop spreading fud.

Current favorability polls have him at the lowest of any tracked modern president.
https://projects.fivethirtyeig...

This is from a right leaning website
https://www.realclearpolitics....

His behaviour is a clear aberration compared to any other president. Certainly the chaotic, unprepared, unprofessional behaviour should not belong in the White House.

Anonymous sources aren't always a reason to distrust a story. The Watergate story was broken using anonymous sources and that's just one example of a high-profile story that was anonymously sourced. It is good to treat anonymously-sourced stories with some skepticism, though. FiveThirtyEight had a great article over the summer that gave some tips on when to trust an anonymously-sourced article and when to be more skeptical.

Go to fivethirtyeight click on the approval ratings then net approval then compare to all presidents.

The only one that was even close by this time, and that was briefly, was President Clinton.

If you extend the trend forward, Reagan. Carter, Truman, and W Bush touched that level of disapproval eventually. Of those four, the last three stayed down in those ranges once they got there. (Reagan's blip was fairly brief from what I saw, presumably tied to Iran Contra, but I didn't double check.) Bush had the economy fall a part on his watch. Truman's presidency had war, nuclear weapons, mcarthyism, scandal, and strikes. Carter's had inflation and recession, as well as an energy crisis.

What is Trump's excuse?

I actually half expect the economy to go back into recession eventually, possibly in Trump's reign. They threw gasoline on the tire fire with the tax cuts. It may burn brighter for awhile because of it, but sooner or later the bill is going to become due.

The study is absurd at the outset because they have a ridiculous definition of wisdom.

The methodology is silly as well. Rather than doing "surveys", they should have looked at hard data: Less educated and less affluent people have much higher rates of divorce and domestic violence. So it is unlikely that they are "better at compromising".

People with college degrees are half as likely to divorce as those without.

She also colluded with the majority of the democratic primary voters.

Cheating doesn't become "OK" just because in the end it turned out she would have won anyway.

Do you know who else would have won anyway? Richard Nixon. So should we have given him a pass on Watergate?

She also colluded with the majority of the democratic primary voters.

That's not exactly running away with it.

It is when we're talking about Alabama. Nate Silver explains why in great detail.

I will point out that you ignored Virginia. When you cherry pick evidence, you can support any bullshit story you want.

I asked for evidence, not assertions being pulled from your ass without a shred of evidence to back them up.

Speaking of evidence, unlike you, I have evidence that the 2017 elections results bode poorly for Republicans in 2018.

No, it's some experience and wisdom [that turns people conservative as they age]

Considering research shows even our supreme justices become more liberal as they age, I would say spending a lot of time having your believes continuously tested in a way that really gives you more experience and wisdom on these topics probably makes you more liberal over time.

Perhaps most people don't actually obtain usable and unbiased experience and wisdom over their lifetime, but instead let fear drive themselves towards conservatism, but it is a big stretch to think thoughtfulness is the cause of that.

As a general rule (an unresearched, unscientific gut-feeling kind of rule!), people do seem to get more conservative as they age. I think it's fear - fear of losing what they have accrued, fear of a lifetime of experience becoming less relevant as they age, and an unwillingness to re-examine things they think they got figured out decades prior.

I don't think becoming more conservative as you age has much to do with changing political views. In fact the only research I have seen who track actual individuals' views over time has shown that supreme court justices become more liberal as they age. (although that may be because they are already older when they become justices) From what I can tell it has more to do with the difference between social and fiscal liberalism and how societies become more socially liberal over time.

I for instance am a social liberal and fiscal moderate. This means in 2017 I clearly lean Democrat. But in 2047 all of today's socially liberal battles will probably have been won. Or at least not nearly as big of issues as they are today. So I will likely be a social and fiscal moderate in my 60's. My views of women's reproductive rights, LGBT issues, and safety net programs will not have changed, it will be society's views on them which have changed.

While I am a proponent of a basic income today, perhaps in 30 years I will be against it going up from $30k/year to $40k. Then I might consider myself a fiscal conservative.

If you are really that concerned about it. You can try getting into the mathematics of sports.

Charities are often scams on both sides. e.g. The Clinton Global Fund.

Sorry, but the Clinton Global Fund has been assessed as not a scam, nor has its parent entity.

Why did it's funding go dry the day the bitch lost?

Why did the GOP tell so many lies about it?

Sorry HornWumpus, but you've discredited yourself.

You're just too much of a partisan ideologue.

PS:

Increasing the average farm plot size should be a goal.

It is. Of the Corporate Farming Oligarchy.

Stop being an ignorant mouthpiece, at least insist on being an informed one.

Then again, you're obsessed with the losing candidate, while the winning one just might be incapable of feeding himself in a few weeks.

Wildfires happen regularly in nature. The article is nonsense about their rarity. Wildfires of this size occur only if there is an abundance of fuel. Naturally, that requires a drought after a couple decades of being too wet to burn. Thanks to California fire departments, all the small wildfires that would've cleaned out the accumulating fuel were extinguished before they could consume much dead wood.

"We knew that for at least 30 years, and California is so environmentally conscious, they MUST have stopped that policy years ago right?" NO THEY'RE STILL DOING THAT. I guess I shouldn't wonder if the Bay area is prepared for the inevitable "Big One"...

Earthquakes of significance are unchanged. Despite panic that small rock-settling after fracking would result in new faultlines exploding (or whatever nonsense those stories got to).

The jury is still out on that one. In places with no fault lines, sure, it seems unlikely fracking will cause earthquakes, but in Oklahoma, it's possible.

The people who elected them are the real problem. As of today, 37.3% of adult Americans still approve of Trump, and the trend line is going up.

https://projects.fivethirtyeig...

The panopticon wasn't really the main problem in 1984 though. It was that the vast majority of that society unquestioningly accepted the government made truth over reality. Only 38% of our society does.

What time warp are you posting from? The DNC's shenanigans to fix in favor of Clinton were a topic of (very) public discussion over a year ago. And Trump's "true nature" was also evident way before the election. And 60-something million people voted for him anyway.

But yeah, I think this is the most insightful alt-history take of what the alternative might have looked like.

The factor most likely to draw a thoughtful look to dyed-in-the-wool Clinton supporters is: Trump would still be tweeting.

I'm steering well clear of partisan bias here (I voted 3rd-party if that tells you anything.)

Insisting both sides are equal, when that is clearly not the case, serves a partisan agenda.

Trump was given $2 billion plus in free media coverage.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...
https://secure.marketwatch.com...
http://www.weeklystandard.com/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

Duckduckgo returns lots more with my query, "worth of free media coverage 2016 election Trump"
If the media had ignored him or only ran paid advertisements, Trump would have been a lot less likely to have won

That's true to a point as long as you do a few things:

Like bury reports on right-wing violence?

No wait, that's the opposite, isn't it?

1) Group all anti-government, non-Muslim religious based attacks as well as white supremacist attacks into the far-right category while at the same time often miscategorizing other attacks such as classifying Fort Hood as 'workplace violence' even with Hasan's confession about his motivations. That actually required an act of Congress to have to the dead and wounded be recognized as victims of a terrorist attack and awarded Purple Hearts.

I remember another act to get other people Purple Hearts.

What was even worse was the Congressional call, where so many people thought they were getting Medals of Honor. That dismayed me. even more than trying to make a drug-addled depressed person into some sort of concerted act of terrorism.

2) Assign political motivations to non-political attacks. Not all attacks by right wingers are motivated by their ideology in the same way not all attacks by left wingers or Jihadists are motivated by theirs; sometimes an attack in a parking lot is just road rage with no deeper meaning.

Deny actual motivation and declare he's just crazy.

Seriously, any right-wing violence is immediately dismissed as mental illness by their pundits, or worse yet, blamed on the left.

3) Start tracking after 2001 and stop tracking after 2015.

Like this?

4) Change the definition of threat as it suits your needs. In some reports "threat" is based off of actual deaths and in others it's by incident. So when you need a bigger number you count the 5 times someone was harassed on the street (with no injury) and say that is a bigger threat than a single shooting that killed multiple people.

Could have told you that ten years ago.

There is also the fact that many Jihadist plots are stopped before the threat ever materializes due to the massive manpower dedicated to just that while far right attacks are not due to their limited nature and next to no dedicated special policing (they seem to be mostly of the "lone gunman", small or single target variety which are very difficult to prevent) . i.e. it's hard to stop a crazy person with a knife until the attack starts vs someone trying to buy large quantities of explosives.

Oh really?

It's just another case of statistics telling you whatever you want them to and not necessarily the truth.

Is that why you oppose the phony statistics often cited by the right?

You do, don't you? Even Jon Kyl's?

I can explain that in one word: bots.

For an enlightening case study, see here.

Even if Houston had sane zoning laws, there literally is no precedent for 53 inches of rain in 2 days, which is the average amount of rain that Houston gets in 365 days.

Except you know, actual literal precedents.

And Flooding in general is not unprecedented, so...maybe you should think about what you claim is unprecedented.

The local and extended area response was still a hell of a lot better than what happened in New Orleans after Katrina (where there were mass rapes, lots of people firing on rescue boats and helicopters, and it took a large military presence to get things back under control).

You should also be more careful about examining the stories you've heard, the mass rapes was a myth(driven by the idea that is the sort of thing would happen in New Orleans), the firing reports also happened in Harvey(and are as likely exaggerated as the first), and that military presence was needed to bring in supplies, which took somebody with the guts to think about the people to do(mostly because FEMA under Brown was dithering).

While I'm all for shitting on Houston's lack of zoning for many different reasons, this did not contribute anything to the problem with Harvey. Harvey killed 70 people (so far), while Katrina killed closed to 2,000.

I'd be careful about that too, the deaths attributed to Katrina include people who had heart attacks due to the stress, suicides and quite a few drug overdoses.

Probably not got complete results for the Harvey deaths either, at that.

It could have been so much worse.

It could have been less worse. They got lucky. In another year, Trump probably would have ruined FEMA. Even a few weeks later, if it had hit, when Trump was planning his shutdown, would have increased the disaster.

A few notes to keep in mind with the interpretation of the results:

1. The macronutrient consumption data are based on food frequency questionaires, a somewhat unreliable means to measuring food consumption. How accurate do you think you'd be if asked about how much of each type of food you ate over the past few months? For more disucssion of problems with food frequency questionaires and other general issues with studies on nutrition see: http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

2. The study is an observational study that can only assess correlation, not causation. People who reported eating more carbohydrates had higher mortality. Was eating more carbohydrates the cause of the higher mortality, or were there other differences between people who ate more carbohydrates and those who ate less? A common problem with these studies is that people who follow dietary guidelines are more likely to follow other guidelines for healthy living, so one could just be picking up a signal from decreased mortality of those who pay attention to their health in general. Socioeconomic factors are another potential confounding factor in the results. In many of the third world countries studied, a diet higher in animal protein would likely be more expensive than a diet higher in carbohydrates. These confounding variables make inferring causation difficult. Randomized controlled trials would provide a gold standard for assessing whether there is a causal relationship between carbohydrate intake and mortality, though these are notoriously difficult to perform (how do you get a large cohort of people to change their diets for long periods of time?).

3. Even if the differences in diet are causally related to the changes in mortality and CV events, the exact mechanism is unclear. For example, in a commentary published in the Lancet along side the research paper (I would recommend reading the commentary if you are interested in the subject), the authors note:

Micronutrient malnutrition is an important problem in many of the countries included in PURE. Animal products are rich sources of zinc, bioavailable iron, vitamin K2, and vitamin B12, which might be suboptimal in populations consuming high carbohydrate diets. Therefore, one potential explanation for the PURE results is that nutrient-dense meats corrected one or more nutrient deficiencies

http://www.thelancet.com/journ...

If the results are partly due to consumption of animal products alleviating micronutrient malnutrition, it is unclear whether the results would be as applicable in populations where micronutrient malnutrition is not an issue.

Overall, the study is a very important piece of evidence in determining the best amount of carbohydrates, proteins and fats to include in one's diet. However, it is not a definitive study, so one needs to consider the entire body of evidence including observational studies (such as this one) done in a number of different populations, randomized clinical trials, and laboratory experiments that get at the mechanisms involved.

Why would you like about something so trivial to disprove?

https://projects.fivethirtyeig...

He gave Trump a 28.6% chance of winning.

Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight polling organization definitely didn't say trump had ZERO chance of winning . Looks like the lowest forecast point they had for Trump was around 10% at Aug 14, 2016. If memory serves, that was right after the Access Hollywood recording of Trump talking in misogynistic terms was published. That was the point when the leaders of the Republican party were distancing themselves from the candidate and Reince Preibus reportedly asked Trump to drop out of the race.

Trump-hating liberals oppose something that Trump supports.

Sixty percent of Americans are "Trump-hating liberals", I guess.

https://projects.fivethirtyeig...