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Get rules in place to hold data centres to account, experts tell Tasmania, ahead of AI entrenching itself
An artificial intelligence institute has warned there may not be much economic benefit from data centre developments if…
#NewsBeep #News #Artificialintelligence #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AU #Australia #datacentre #firmus #Technology
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/907880/ -
Get rules in place to hold data centres to account, experts tell Tasmania, ahead of AI entrenching itself
An artificial intelligence institute has warned there may not be much economic benefit from data centre developments if…
#NewsBeep #News #Artificialintelligence #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AU #Australia #datacentre #firmus #Technology
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/907880/ -
Get rules in place to hold data centres to account, experts tell Tasmania, ahead of AI entrenching itself
An artificial intelligence institute has warned there may not be much economic benefit from data centre developments if…
#Australia #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AU #Austrlia #datacentre #Firmus
https://www.europesays.com/australia/107450/ -
Get rules in place to hold data centres to account, experts tell Tasmania
By Ashleigh BarracloughAn artificial intelligence institute warns there may not be much economic benefit from data centre developments if public authorities don't put binding conditions on proponents.
#AI #EnergyPolicy #WaterResources #UrbanDevelopmentandPlanning #StateandTerritoryGovernment #AshleighBarraclough
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Get rules in place to hold data centres to account, experts tell Tasmania
By Ashleigh BarracloughAn artificial intelligence institute warns there may not be much economic benefit from data centre developments if public authorities don't put binding conditions on proponents.
#AI #EnergyPolicy #WaterResources #UrbanDevelopmentandPlanning #StateandTerritoryGovernment #AshleighBarraclough
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Get rules in place to hold data centres to account, experts tell Tasmania
By Ashleigh BarracloughAn artificial intelligence institute warns there may not be much economic benefit from data centre developments if public authorities don't put binding conditions on proponents.
#AI #EnergyPolicy #WaterResources #UrbanDevelopmentandPlanning #StateandTerritoryGovernment #AshleighBarraclough
-
Get rules in place to hold data centres to account, experts tell Tasmania
By Ashleigh BarracloughAn artificial intelligence institute warns there may not be much economic benefit from data centre developments if public authorities don't put binding conditions on proponents.
#AI #EnergyPolicy #WaterResources #UrbanDevelopmentandPlanning #StateandTerritoryGovernment #AshleighBarraclough
-
Get rules in place to hold data centres to account, experts tell Tasmania
By Ashleigh BarracloughAn artificial intelligence institute warns there may not be much economic benefit from data centre developments if public authorities don't put binding conditions on proponents.
#AI #EnergyPolicy #WaterResources #UrbanDevelopmentandPlanning #StateandTerritoryGovernment #AshleighBarraclough
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UK-based Basecamp Research raised $140M to map global biodiversity for drug discovery.
By training AI on genetic data from unexplored organisms, they aim to design new therapies.
While this scales their work, proving safety in humans and ensuring fair benefit-sharing remain key challenges.
#AI #technology #biotech #lifesciences #DNA #drugdiscovery #biodiversity #innovation #engineering #startups #business #investment #UK
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UK-based Basecamp Research raised $140M to map global biodiversity for drug discovery.
By training AI on genetic data from unexplored organisms, they aim to design new therapies.
While this scales their work, proving safety in humans and ensuring fair benefit-sharing remain key challenges.
#AI #technology #biotech #lifesciences #DNA #drugdiscovery #biodiversity #innovation #engineering #startups #business #investment #UK
-
UK-based Basecamp Research raised $140M to map global biodiversity for drug discovery.
By training AI on genetic data from unexplored organisms, they aim to design new therapies.
While this scales their work, proving safety in humans and ensuring fair benefit-sharing remain key challenges.
#AI #technology #biotech #lifesciences #DNA #drugdiscovery #biodiversity #innovation #engineering #startups #business #investment #UK
-
UK-based Basecamp Research raised $140M to map global biodiversity for drug discovery.
By training AI on genetic data from unexplored organisms, they aim to design new therapies.
While this scales their work, proving safety in humans and ensuring fair benefit-sharing remain key challenges.
#AI #technology #biotech #lifesciences #DNA #drugdiscovery #biodiversity #innovation #engineering #startups #business #investment #UK
-
UK-based Basecamp Research raised $140M to map global biodiversity for drug discovery.
By training AI on genetic data from unexplored organisms, they aim to design new therapies.
While this scales their work, proving safety in humans and ensuring fair benefit-sharing remain key challenges.
#AI #technology #biotech #lifesciences #DNA #drugdiscovery #biodiversity #innovation #engineering #startups #business #investment #UK
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Finally Friday Reads: Moving Right Along
“Why Natalie gets paid the big bucks.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day. Sky Dancers!
It seems we have more of the same this week, and that’s a damn shame! Voting Rights, Press Access, Trump’s Fanboi treatment of a dictator, and the deconstruction of anything representing fairness and opportunity sally forth. Let’s take a look at the headlines as we get closer to the midterm elections!
Let’s start with a Supreme Court Decision that’s definitely in the damn shame category. This is from Jacob Knutson writing for Democracy Docket. “Supreme Court revives DHS use of flawed immigration database for voter purges.” Ideology once again trumps law and data.
In a dangerous decision for voters, the Supreme Court authorized the Trump administration to overhaul a federal immigration database into a vast, centralized and deeply flawed database of Americans’ personal information to initiate registration purges.
The decision lets the administration move forward with a key provision of President Donald Trump’s 2025 anti-voting executive order, much of which courts have permanently blocked.
At least five of the Court’s Republican-appointed justices lifted a lower-court order that found the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) modification and use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement (SAVE) system “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The majority’s opinion gave short shrift to the danger of eligible voters, especially naturalized citizens, being wrongly removed from the rolls — a concern highlighted by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent.
“[T]he harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The decision Friday marks a significant loss to voters — particularly naturalized citizens, who have been disproportionately falsely flagged as ineligible voters when states have fed their registration lists into SAVE.
It also deals a blow to voting and privacy groups challenging DHS’s overhaul of SAVE as a violation of federal privacy laws and an unconstitutional attempt to usurp states’ authority over elections.
SAVE has existed for decades as a tool that lets states check the immigration status of people applying for government benefits.
However, in the 2025 executive order, Trump directed DHS to transform the database into a sweeping tool to vet state voter rolls.
The Supreme Court granted the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) request to stay the lower-court ruling even though a coalition of voting and privacy advocates led by the League of Women Voters warned that SAVE was never designed to check voter eligibility and, when used this way, will erroneously flag eligible voters as noncitizens.
“Today’s decision is profoundly disappointing, as it puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections,” the coalition said in a statement. “However, this case is not over. The D.C. district court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated multiple laws.”
“We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands,” it added.
The White House is certainly afraid of the results of the upcoming election. So are members of Congress. This is from Susan B. Glasser writing for The New Yorker. “The Week Republicans Finally Panicked About Trump. The President’s party, facing a midterm reckoning, is begging for a way out of his Iran-war doom loop.”
Trump’s ability to change the subject has long been one of his political superpowers. This was widely understood to be one of the reasons—beyond his apparently genuine loathing of the news organizations in question—for his “FAKE NEWS” press ban. I’m sure that he thought the spectacle of his dictator pas de deux with Xi would provide days’ worth of obsessive chatter. It may be, however, that the only person in politics that the President has succeeded in distracting this time is himself.
Forty days before the midterm elections, Washington is increasingly consumed not by Trump’s endless antics so much as by the rapidly clarifying political reality of the predicament in which the President, deeply unpopular and trapped in an unwon war of his own choosing in the Middle East, has got himself and his party. A reckoning—one far harsher than was expected, even a few months ago—now seems imminent.
Few are flatly predicting yet that Democrats will seize control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives—in the Senate, they would need to flip a net of four seats to win the chamber—but, by just about every metric except the vast sums of campaign cash that Trump has drummed up, this election looks increasingly likely to produce an outright repudiation of the President’s party, after a campaign season in which Trump’s own reckless politics and persona have defined the political landscape. No modern President, in fact, has ever gone into a midterm election this unpopular. Trump’s standing with the American public is currently twice as low as it was at this point in 2018, when Republicans lost forty-one seats in the House.
“Since early September, there has been a noticeable shift toward Democrats,” Doug Sosnik, who served as the political director of the Clinton White House, wrote on Thursday, in one of his closely followed election analyses. The movement of voters away from Republicans “hit a tipping point in recent weeks,” Sosnik concluded, with “Democrats now positioned for gains that looked unimaginable at the beginning of the year,” an outcome largely attributable to voters’ rejection of “the increasingly erratic behavior of an out of touch Commander in Chief.” This assessment is not all that different from what Republicans—both privately and, in some cases, publicly—are saying. “Republicans are running out of runway,” Dave Winston, a longtime G.O.P. pollster, warned this week in an op-ed in Roll Call, blaming this development on the fact that Trump’s economic message has been “falling on deaf ears.” The phrase “ringing alarm bells” was used.
The political class has responded accordingly. “The Republican abandonment of Donald Trump begins,” the conservative National Review wrote on Wednesday. That same day, Punchbowl News said this was the week that Republicans were hitting the “panic button.” That afternoon, the right-wing Christian radio host Steve Deace posted a screed on X complaining that Trump’s failed war with Iran risks becoming a “2020 Covid lockdown level of political albatross” that could cost the G.O.P., even in Trump bulwarks such as Deace’s home state of Iowa, where Democrats now look like they could take both the governorship and an open U.S. Senate seat. Just two years ago, Trump won the state by thirteen points.
So many Republican candidates in recent days have broken with Trump that it’s as if a secret memo went out announcing that the floodgates were officially open. (Newsweek even started a tracker of “Republicans breaking with Trump ahead of midterms.”) Among the more notable defections were Republican Senate nominees in Iowa and Michigan, both of whom pleaded with Trump to end the war with Iran, now. “Michigan families are struggling with the price of everyday life,” Mike Rogers, a former congressman who is the G.O.P. nominee in Michigan, says in a new ad, itself a rebuke to Trump’s line that the affordability crisis is just another Democratic hoax. “Groceries cost too much. We have to bring prices down. The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly. When it does, energy costs will plummet.” Representative Ashley Hinson, the nominee in Iowa, echoed that language. “The war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end,” she said. Democrats quickly pointed out that, so far, Hinson had voted multiple times against resolutions in Congress to stop the conflict.
Well, that’s refreshing! This take is from Bill Scher writing for the Washington Monthly. ‘This Is the Biggest Reason Why a Blue Wave Is Probably Coming. Nothing makes voters angrier at the party in power than having less money in their pockets, and real disposable income is down.” I just hope all these prognosticators are right.
There are lots of reasons to believe Democrats are about to crush the midterm elections. Donald Trump’s average job approval is below 40 percent, about 5 points lower than it was in the 2018 midterms, which were deemed a “Blue Wave.” His authoritarian antics continue to dominate media coverage, as does seemingly corrupt behavior from him and his family. Democrats are ahead in the generic congressional ballot poll average by nearly 9 points, matching the national popular vote margin for the 2018 House elections. In September polling of Senate races, Democrats lead in six states with Republican-held seats, more than the four needed to take control. Gas and food prices remain high, which the public broadly blames on Trump’s ham-fisted tariffs and blunderbuss war with Iran.
There are millions of reasons to believe Republicans are going to hold off a Blue Wave: specifically, the hundreds of millions of dollars they are flooding into political advertising to paint Democratic candidates as radical socialists. As Democrats need wins in states and districts where Trump won comfortably in 2024, the right-leaning voters who will determine the outcomes may well be swayed by the negative advertising avalanche. Furthermore, the Democratic margins in most Senate polling are usually within the margin of error, and there is plenty of precedent for Republicans to outperform polls on Election Day.
But one factor may outweigh the rest: the decline in real disposable income.
Real disposable income measures how much money people have after taxes, adjusted for inflation. Seth Masket, the political scientist who now publishes a Substack newsletter has long tracked the correlation between real disposable income and midterm election outcomes. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson observed about Masket’s research back in 2010, “It’s not perfect correlation, but the trend is clear. When folks feel richer, they reward the party in power.” This May, Masket offered a midterm forecast largely based on the specific metric he uses, “growth in per capita real disposable income between the second quarter of the year before the election and the first quarter of the election year,” which came in at a limp 0.4 percent. The model projected a 46-seat net gain for House Democrats, though even Masket said he would consider it surprising if that exact number came to pass.
Allow me to add a data point: the second quarter of the election year.
Per capita real disposable income took a big hit in the second quarter of 2026, with growth coming in at negative 0.4 percent compared to the prior quarter.
And what happened just before the second quarter began? Donald Trump attacked Iran, and oil prices skyrocketed.
If we look at growth in per capita real disposable income from the 3rd quarter in the year before a midterm to the 2nd quarter in the year of the midterm, the 2025-2026 number is also negative: -0.5 percent.
Any such decline is unusual. We’re about to hold the 20th midterm election since 1950. In only four of these, from the period of third quarter to the second quarter, did per-capita real disposable income shrink.
Two of those midterms, 1958 and 1974, tie for the biggest Blue Waves of the last 75 years, each netting Democrats 48 House seats. A third was in 2022 during the Joe Biden presidency, when red-hot inflation chewed up paychecks, but Masket notes it as a massive outlier, with the president’s party coughing up only nine House seats. He attributes the limited losses to a slew of Trump-backed extremist candidates baselessly flogging election fraud and backlash over the right-wing Supreme Court ending Roe v. Wade. I would add that the worst of the inflation spike had ended; 2022’s second quarter decline was not as bad as the preceding four, and the following quarter was positive. In other words, the trajectory was moving in the right direction.
Economics matters. I can speak from recent experience in this second Trump term about what his tariffs and other bad policy are doing to me and I can see by checking the data that I’m not the only one. You can hear in conversations between people and from your friends. The money runs out before the car can be gassed and the grocery shopping is adequate. This is why I laughed at that article about sending women back to being housewives with a few tax cut dribbles. That would mean homeless and starvation for most of America’s families. Also, this is a very bad time of year to cut out programs that feed school children and the elderly. Those headlines do not help the situation at all.
Trump is feeding his fires with government funds. His audacity with this move did not surprise me. Nothing does anymore. Will this be another illegal move left to back pages so know when can really find it? Isaac Arnsdorf has the story for the Washington Post. “Trump ad airing with government funding despite law against ‘propaganda’. The agency responsible for the commercial was not immediately clear.” He clearly has no interest of knowledge of our laws.
A television ad promoting President Donald Trump began airing on cable Wednesday saying it was paid for by the U.S. government, despite a federal prohibition on using taxpayer dollars for “publicity or propaganda.”
The ad is similar to spots released earlier by the nonprofit arm of Trump’s political operation to promote his record in the midterms campaign. But this one includes a tag reading, “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
Since the 1950s, annual appropriations legislation — including the funding bill Trump signed in February — has routinely included a ban on using federal funds for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” The Government Accountability Office has said the prohibition applies to communications that are “purely partisan” and “designed to aid a political party or candidates.”
The ad consists of a supercut of Trump photos and videos interspersed with text of campaign slogans. The soundtrack features snippets of Trump speeches and a chorus of women singing, “I’ll make them love me.” It ends with Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White praising Trump over footage of the June match on the White House lawn and military flyovers.
It has aired so far on Newsmax in Chicago and Fox News in Los Angeles, according to ad-tracking firm AdImpact. The firm noted, however, that it could not verify spending data for the ad because the networks airing it were not classifying it as political.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, argued that the ads are not political and that Trump is not on the ballot.
The president has repeatedly told his supporters to vote as if he were.
This AP article as provided by the Washington Sun has news that the Press Pool is back in place at the White House. “White House TV Pool Is Operating Again After Days of Outlets Being Banned When the White House booted CNN and two other outlets from the grounds, the other four networks in the pool declined to participate in a show of solidarity.” Jocelyn Noveck has the lede.
The U.S. network video pool for the White House was back in operation Friday, for the first time since President Donald Trump banned three news outlets in a high-profile showdown over media access.
“As of now, all systems are go,” said a person familiar with the pool, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the fluidity of the situation.
The pool consists of five major U.S. broadcast outlets that take turns shooting and sharing video. When the White House banned CNN — which belongs to the pool — and two other outlets from White House grounds, the other four declined to participate in a show of solidarity.
A judge temporarily struck down the ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico on Thursday, but his ruling didn’t directly address the pool. The networks continued to refrain from covering Trump as part of the pool even as reporters from all three outlets were allowed back in the White House.
As President Donald Trump prepared to take Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit the National Archives on Friday, the pool’s live feed was being shared again.
This last bit of news has me very angry having lived through the period when segregation in schools was either the rule or the geographic fact up in to the period where desegregation became the rule. This is also from the AP. “Trump administration moves to limit fixes for systemic racism in schools.” Annie Ma has the story.
For decades, a key principle underpinned civil rights enforcement in American schools: Not all discrimination was intentional.
Even if a school policy was written without overt racial bias, it might unfairly hurt one group of students over another, the understanding went. The concept is known as systemic racism, and Republican and Democratic administrations agreed: Schools and universities that received federal funding had an obligation to address it.
Under President Donald Trump’s administration, that’s no longer the case. One by one, the administration has limited the remedies schools can use to address systemic racial injustice.
This summer, the Education Department rescinded a regulation that allowed schools to gauge potential discrimination by comparing outcomes across races, such as the racial breakdown of students in advanced classes. Then, it issued a letter to American schools, emphasizing it’s illegal to consider race when crafting discipline policies — even if one particular racial group ends up suspended or expelled more often.
At the same time, Trump’s Justice Department has stepped away from many school desegregation cases. In a news release Thursday, the department boasted of successfully working through the courts to close more than 50 desegregation cases since Trump took office, with motions to dismiss in the works in many other cases. Previous administrations had used these federal court cases to hold schools accountable when students of color had worse outcomes than white students — high rates of discipline, worse school facilities or reduced access to extracurriculars and advanced coursework.
While Trump’s first administration deprioritized enforcing racial justice, his current administration has gone further — threatening to punish schools for any consideration of race in their policies and practices.
To the administration, the practice of examining different outcomes for particular groups of students, sometimes known as “disparate impact,” was itself a form of racial discrimination.
“The Obama and Biden Administrations weaponized disparate impact by effectively coercing schools to discipline students differently based on race in order to engineer equitable disciplinary outcomes across racial groups,” Education Department spokesperson Sabin Sidney said. “These practices unfortunately led to unsafe classrooms and undermined student learning.”
It’s very difficult for me to see us return to this situation especially given my children and grandchildren are multiracial.
So, that’s pretty much enough to stew on for the moment.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#2026Midterms #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #Affordability #BlueWaveMidterm2026 #Freedom #SocialJustice #TaxPayerFundedPropaganda #voterSuppression #WhiteHousePressPool -
Finally Friday Reads: Moving Right Along
“Why Natalie gets paid the big bucks.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day. Sky Dancers!
It seems we have more of the same this week, and that’s a damn shame! Voting Rights, Press Access, Trump’s Fanboi treatment of a dictator, and the deconstruction of anything represent fairness and opportunity sally forth. Let’s take a look at the headlines as we get closer to the midterm elections!
Let’s start with a Supreme Court Decision that’s definitely in the damn shame category. This is from Jacob Knutson writing for Democracy Docket. “Supreme Court revives DHS use of flawed immigration database for voter purges.” Ideology once again trumps law and data.
In a dangerous decision for voters, the Supreme Court authorized the Trump administration to overhaul a federal immigration database into a vast, centralized and deeply flawed database of Americans’ personal information to initiate registration purges.
The decision lets the administration move forward with a key provision of President Donald Trump’s 2025 anti-voting executive order, much of which courts have permanently blocked.
At least five of the Court’s Republican-appointed justices lifted a lower-court order that found the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) modification and use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement (SAVE) system “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The majority’s opinion gave short shrift to the danger of eligible voters, especially naturalized citizens, being wrongly removed from the rolls — a concern highlighted by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent.
“[T]he harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The decision Friday marks a significant loss to voters — particularly naturalized citizens, who have been disproportionately falsely flagged as ineligible voters when states have fed their registration lists into SAVE.
It also deals a blow to voting and privacy groups challenging DHS’s overhaul of SAVE as a violation of federal privacy laws and an unconstitutional attempt to usurp states’ authority over elections.
SAVE has existed for decades as a tool that lets states check the immigration status of people applying for government benefits.
However, in the 2025 executive order, Trump directed DHS to transform the database into a sweeping tool to vet state voter rolls.
The Supreme Court granted the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) request to stay the lower-court ruling even though a coalition of voting and privacy advocates led by the League of Women Voters warned that SAVE was never designed to check voter eligibility and, when used this way, will erroneously flag eligible voters as noncitizens.
“Today’s decision is profoundly disappointing, as it puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections,” the coalition said in a statement. “However, this case is not over. The D.C. district court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated multiple laws.”
“We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands,” it added.
The White House is certainly afraid of the results of the upcoming election. So are members of Congress. This is from Susan B. Glasser writing for The New Yorker. “The Week Republicans Finally Panicked About Trump. The President’s party, facing a midterm reckoning, is begging for a way out of his Iran-war doom loop.”
Trump’s ability to change the subject has long been one of his political superpowers. This was widely understood to be one of the reasons—beyond his apparently genuine loathing of the news organizations in question—for his “FAKE NEWS” press ban. I’m sure that he thought the spectacle of his dictator pas de deux with Xi would provide days’ worth of obsessive chatter. It may be, however, that the only person in politics that the President has succeeded in distracting this time is himself.
Forty days before the midterm elections, Washington is increasingly consumed not by Trump’s endless antics so much as by the rapidly clarifying political reality of the predicament in which the President, deeply unpopular and trapped in an unwon war of his own choosing in the Middle East, has got himself and his party. A reckoning—one far harsher than was expected, even a few months ago—now seems imminent.
Few are flatly predicting yet that Democrats will seize control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives—in the Senate, they would need to flip a net of four seats to win the chamber—but, by just about every metric except the vast sums of campaign cash that Trump has drummed up, this election looks increasingly likely to produce an outright repudiation of the President’s party, after a campaign season in which Trump’s own reckless politics and persona have defined the political landscape. No modern President, in fact, has ever gone into a midterm election this unpopular. Trump’s standing with the American public is currently twice as low as it was at this point in 2018, when Republicans lost forty-one seats in the House.
“Since early September, there has been a noticeable shift toward Democrats,” Doug Sosnik, who served as the political director of the Clinton White House, wrote on Thursday, in one of his closely followed election analyses. The movement of voters away from Republicans “hit a tipping point in recent weeks,” Sosnik concluded, with “Democrats now positioned for gains that looked unimaginable at the beginning of the year,” an outcome largely attributable to voters’ rejection of “the increasingly erratic behavior of an out of touch Commander in Chief.” This assessment is not all that different from what Republicans—both privately and, in some cases, publicly—are saying. “Republicans are running out of runway,” Dave Winston, a longtime G.O.P. pollster, warned this week in an op-ed in Roll Call, blaming this development on the fact that Trump’s economic message has been “falling on deaf ears.” The phrase “ringing alarm bells” was used.
The political class has responded accordingly. “The Republican abandonment of Donald Trump begins,” the conservative National Review wrote on Wednesday. That same day, Punchbowl News said this was the week that Republicans were hitting the “panic button.” That afternoon, the right-wing Christian radio host Steve Deace posted a screed on X complaining that Trump’s failed war with Iran risks becoming a “2020 Covid lockdown level of political albatross” that could cost the G.O.P., even in Trump bulwarks such as Deace’s home state of Iowa, where Democrats now look like they could take both the governorship and an open U.S. Senate seat. Just two years ago, Trump won the state by thirteen points.
So many Republican candidates in recent days have broken with Trump that it’s as if a secret memo went out announcing that the floodgates were officially open. (Newsweek even started a tracker of “Republicans breaking with Trump ahead of midterms.”) Among the more notable defections were Republican Senate nominees in Iowa and Michigan, both of whom pleaded with Trump to end the war with Iran, now. “Michigan families are struggling with the price of everyday life,” Mike Rogers, a former congressman who is the G.O.P. nominee in Michigan, says in a new ad, itself a rebuke to Trump’s line that the affordability crisis is just another Democratic hoax. “Groceries cost too much. We have to bring prices down. The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly. When it does, energy costs will plummet.” Representative Ashley Hinson, the nominee in Iowa, echoed that language. “The war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end,” she said. Democrats quickly pointed out that, so far, Hinson had voted multiple times against resolutions in Congress to stop the conflict.
Well, that’s refreshing! This take is from Bill Scher writing for the Washington Monthly. ‘This Is the Biggest Reason Why a Blue Wave Is Probably Coming. Nothing makes voters angrier at the party in power than having less money in their pockets, and real disposable income is down.” I just hope all these prognosticators are right.
There are lots of reasons to believe Democrats are about to crush the midterm elections. Donald Trump’s average job approval is below 40 percent, about 5 points lower than it was in the 2018 midterms, which were deemed a “Blue Wave.” His authoritarian antics continue to dominate media coverage, as does seemingly corrupt behavior from him and his family. Democrats are ahead in the generic congressional ballot poll average by nearly 9 points, matching the national popular vote margin for the 2018 House elections. In September polling of Senate races, Democrats lead in six states with Republican-held seats, more than the four needed to take control. Gas and food prices remain high, which the public broadly blames on Trump’s ham-fisted tariffs and blunderbuss war with Iran.
There are millions of reasons to believe Republicans are going to hold off a Blue Wave: specifically, the hundreds of millions of dollars they are flooding into political advertising to paint Democratic candidates as radical socialists. As Democrats need wins in states and districts where Trump won comfortably in 2024, the right-leaning voters who will determine the outcomes may well be swayed by the negative advertising avalanche. Furthermore, the Democratic margins in most Senate polling are usually within the margin of error, and there is plenty of precedent for Republicans to outperform polls on Election Day.
But one factor may outweigh the rest: the decline in real disposable income.
Real disposable income measures how much money people have after taxes, adjusted for inflation. Seth Masket, the political scientist who now publishes a Substack newsletter has long tracked the correlation between real disposable income and midterm election outcomes. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson observed about Masket’s research back in 2010, “It’s not perfect correlation, but the trend is clear. When folks feel richer, they reward the party in power.” This May, Masket offered a midterm forecast largely based on the specific metric he uses, “growth in per capita real disposable income between the second quarter of the year before the election and the first quarter of the election year,” which came in at a limp 0.4 percent. The model projected a 46-seat net gain for House Democrats, though even Masket said he would consider it surprising if that exact number came to pass.
Allow me to add a data point: the second quarter of the election year.
Per capita real disposable income took a big hit in the second quarter of 2026, with growth coming in at negative 0.4 percent compared to the prior quarter.
And what happened just before the second quarter began? Donald Trump attacked Iran, and oil prices skyrocketed.
If we look at growth in per capita real disposable income from the 3rd quarter in the year before a midterm to the 2nd quarter in the year of the midterm, the 2025-2026 number is also negative: -0.5 percent.
Any such decline is unusual. We’re about to hold the 20th midterm election since 1950. In only four of these, from the period of third quarter to the second quarter, did per-capita real disposable income shrink.
Two of those midterms, 1958 and 1974, tie for the biggest Blue Waves of the last 75 years, each netting Democrats 48 House seats. A third was in 2022 during the Joe Biden presidency, when red-hot inflation chewed up paychecks, but Masket notes it as a massive outlier, with the president’s party coughing up only nine House seats. He attributes the limited losses to a slew of Trump-backed extremist candidates baselessly flogging election fraud and backlash over the right-wing Supreme Court ending Roe v. Wade. I would add that the worst of the inflation spike had ended; 2022’s second quarter decline was not as bad as the preceding four, and the following quarter was positive. In other words, the trajectory was moving in the right direction.
Economics matters. I can speak from recent experience in this second Trump term about what his tariffs and other bad policy are doing to me and I can see by checking the data that I’m not the only one. You can hear in conversations between people and from your friends. The money runs out before the car can be gassed and the grocery shopping is adequate. This is why I laughed at that article about sending women back to being housewives with a few tax cut dribbles. That would mean homeless and starvation for most of America’s families. Also, this is a very bad time of year to cut out programs that feed school children and the elderly. Those headlines do not help the situation at all.
Trump is feeding his fires with government funds. His audacity with this move did not surprise me. Nothing does anymore. Will this be another illegal move left to back pages so know when can really find it? Isaac Arnsdorf has the story for the Washington Post. “Trump ad airing with government funding despite law against ‘propaganda’. The agency responsible for the commercial was not immediately clear.” He clearly has no interest of knowledge of our laws.
A television ad promoting President Donald Trump began airing on cable Wednesday saying it was paid for by the U.S. government, despite a federal prohibition on using taxpayer dollars for “publicity or propaganda.”
The ad is similar to spots released earlier by the nonprofit arm of Trump’s political operation to promote his record in the midterms campaign. But this one includes a tag reading, “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
Since the 1950s, annual appropriations legislation — including the funding bill Trump signed in February — has routinely included a ban on using federal funds for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” The Government Accountability Office has said the prohibition applies to communications that are “purely partisan” and “designed to aid a political party or candidates.”
The ad consists of a supercut of Trump photos and videos interspersed with text of campaign slogans. The soundtrack features snippets of Trump speeches and a chorus of women singing, “I’ll make them love me.” It ends with Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White praising Trump over footage of the June match on the White House lawn and military flyovers.
It has aired so far on Newsmax in Chicago and Fox News in Los Angeles, according to ad-tracking firm AdImpact. The firm noted, however, that it could not verify spending data for the ad because the networks airing it were not classifying it as political.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, argued that the ads are not political and that Trump is not on the ballot.
The president has repeatedly told his supporters to vote as if he were.
This AP article as provided by the Washington Sun has news that the Press Pool is back in place at the White House. “White House TV Pool Is Operating Again After Days of Outlets Being Banned When the White House booted CNN and two other outlets from the grounds, the other four networks in the pool declined to participate in a show of solidarity.” Jocelyn Noveck has the lede.
The U.S. network video pool for the White House was back in operation Friday, for the first time since President Donald Trump banned three news outlets in a high-profile showdown over media access.
“As of now, all systems are go,” said a person familiar with the pool, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the fluidity of the situation.
The pool consists of five major U.S. broadcast outlets that take turns shooting and sharing video. When the White House banned CNN — which belongs to the pool — and two other outlets from White House grounds, the other four declined to participate in a show of solidarity.
A judge temporarily struck down the ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico on Thursday, but his ruling didn’t directly address the pool. The networks continued to refrain from covering Trump as part of the pool even as reporters from all three outlets were allowed back in the White House.
As President Donald Trump prepared to take Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit the National Archives on Friday, the pool’s live feed was being shared again.
This last bit of news has me very angry having lived through the period when segregation in schools was either the rule or the geographic fact up in to the period where desegregation became the rule. This is also from the AP. “Trump administration moves to limit fixes for systemic racism in schools.” Annie Ma has the story.
For decades, a key principle underpinned civil rights enforcement in American schools: Not all discrimination was intentional.
Even if a school policy was written without overt racial bias, it might unfairly hurt one group of students over another, the understanding went. The concept is known as systemic racism, and Republican and Democratic administrations agreed: Schools and universities that received federal funding had an obligation to address it.
Under President Donald Trump’s administration, that’s no longer the case. One by one, the administration has limited the remedies schools can use to address systemic racial injustice.
This summer, the Education Department rescinded a regulation that allowed schools to gauge potential discrimination by comparing outcomes across races, such as the racial breakdown of students in advanced classes. Then, it issued a letter to American schools, emphasizing it’s illegal to consider race when crafting discipline policies — even if one particular racial group ends up suspended or expelled more often.
At the same time, Trump’s Justice Department has stepped away from many school desegregation cases. In a news release Thursday, the department boasted of successfully working through the courts to close more than 50 desegregation cases since Trump took office, with motions to dismiss in the works in many other cases. Previous administrations had used these federal court cases to hold schools accountable when students of color had worse outcomes than white students — high rates of discipline, worse school facilities or reduced access to extracurriculars and advanced coursework.
While Trump’s first administration deprioritized enforcing racial justice, his current administration has gone further — threatening to punish schools for any consideration of race in their policies and practices.
To the administration, the practice of examining different outcomes for particular groups of students, sometimes known as “disparate impact,” was itself a form of racial discrimination.
“The Obama and Biden Administrations weaponized disparate impact by effectively coercing schools to discipline students differently based on race in order to engineer equitable disciplinary outcomes across racial groups,” Education Department spokesperson Sabin Sidney said. “These practices unfortunately led to unsafe classrooms and undermined student learning.”
It’s very difficult for me to see us return to this situation especially given my children and grandchildren are multiracial.
So, that’s pretty much enough to stew on for the moment.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#2026Midterms #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #Affordability #BlueWaveMidterm2026 #Freedom #SocialJustice #TaxPayerFundedPropaganda #voterSuppression #WhiteHousePressPool
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Finally Friday Reads: Moving Right Along
“Why Natalie gets paid the big bucks.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day. Sky Dancers!
It seems we have more of the same this week, and that’s a damn shame! Voting Rights, Press Access, Trump’s Fanboi treatment of a dictator, and the deconstruction of anything represent fairness and opportunity sally forth. Let’s take a look at the headlines as we get closer to the midterm elections!
Let’s start with a Supreme Court Decision that’s definitely in the damn shame category. This is from Jacob Knutson writing for Democracy Docket. “Supreme Court revives DHS use of flawed immigration database for voter purges.” Ideology once again trumps law and data.
In a dangerous decision for voters, the Supreme Court authorized the Trump administration to overhaul a federal immigration database into a vast, centralized and deeply flawed database of Americans’ personal information to initiate registration purges.
The decision lets the administration move forward with a key provision of President Donald Trump’s 2025 anti-voting executive order, much of which courts have permanently blocked.
At least five of the Court’s Republican-appointed justices lifted a lower-court order that found the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) modification and use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement (SAVE) system “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The majority’s opinion gave short shrift to the danger of eligible voters, especially naturalized citizens, being wrongly removed from the rolls — a concern highlighted by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent.
“[T]he harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The decision Friday marks a significant loss to voters — particularly naturalized citizens, who have been disproportionately falsely flagged as ineligible voters when states have fed their registration lists into SAVE.
It also deals a blow to voting and privacy groups challenging DHS’s overhaul of SAVE as a violation of federal privacy laws and an unconstitutional attempt to usurp states’ authority over elections.
SAVE has existed for decades as a tool that lets states check the immigration status of people applying for government benefits.
However, in the 2025 executive order, Trump directed DHS to transform the database into a sweeping tool to vet state voter rolls.
The Supreme Court granted the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) request to stay the lower-court ruling even though a coalition of voting and privacy advocates led by the League of Women Voters warned that SAVE was never designed to check voter eligibility and, when used this way, will erroneously flag eligible voters as noncitizens.
“Today’s decision is profoundly disappointing, as it puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections,” the coalition said in a statement. “However, this case is not over. The D.C. district court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated multiple laws.”
“We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands,” it added.
The White House is certainly afraid of the results of the upcoming election. So are members of Congress. This is from Susan B. Glasser writing for The New Yorker. “The Week Republicans Finally Panicked About Trump. The President’s party, facing a midterm reckoning, is begging for a way out of his Iran-war doom loop.”
Trump’s ability to change the subject has long been one of his political superpowers. This was widely understood to be one of the reasons—beyond his apparently genuine loathing of the news organizations in question—for his “FAKE NEWS” press ban. I’m sure that he thought the spectacle of his dictator pas de deux with Xi would provide days’ worth of obsessive chatter. It may be, however, that the only person in politics that the President has succeeded in distracting this time is himself.
Forty days before the midterm elections, Washington is increasingly consumed not by Trump’s endless antics so much as by the rapidly clarifying political reality of the predicament in which the President, deeply unpopular and trapped in an unwon war of his own choosing in the Middle East, has got himself and his party. A reckoning—one far harsher than was expected, even a few months ago—now seems imminent.
Few are flatly predicting yet that Democrats will seize control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives—in the Senate, they would need to flip a net of four seats to win the chamber—but, by just about every metric except the vast sums of campaign cash that Trump has drummed up, this election looks increasingly likely to produce an outright repudiation of the President’s party, after a campaign season in which Trump’s own reckless politics and persona have defined the political landscape. No modern President, in fact, has ever gone into a midterm election this unpopular. Trump’s standing with the American public is currently twice as low as it was at this point in 2018, when Republicans lost forty-one seats in the House.
“Since early September, there has been a noticeable shift toward Democrats,” Doug Sosnik, who served as the political director of the Clinton White House, wrote on Thursday, in one of his closely followed election analyses. The movement of voters away from Republicans “hit a tipping point in recent weeks,” Sosnik concluded, with “Democrats now positioned for gains that looked unimaginable at the beginning of the year,” an outcome largely attributable to voters’ rejection of “the increasingly erratic behavior of an out of touch Commander in Chief.” This assessment is not all that different from what Republicans—both privately and, in some cases, publicly—are saying. “Republicans are running out of runway,” Dave Winston, a longtime G.O.P. pollster, warned this week in an op-ed in Roll Call, blaming this development on the fact that Trump’s economic message has been “falling on deaf ears.” The phrase “ringing alarm bells” was used.
The political class has responded accordingly. “The Republican abandonment of Donald Trump begins,” the conservative National Review wrote on Wednesday. That same day, Punchbowl News said this was the week that Republicans were hitting the “panic button.” That afternoon, the right-wing Christian radio host Steve Deace posted a screed on X complaining that Trump’s failed war with Iran risks becoming a “2020 Covid lockdown level of political albatross” that could cost the G.O.P., even in Trump bulwarks such as Deace’s home state of Iowa, where Democrats now look like they could take both the governorship and an open U.S. Senate seat. Just two years ago, Trump won the state by thirteen points.
So many Republican candidates in recent days have broken with Trump that it’s as if a secret memo went out announcing that the floodgates were officially open. (Newsweek even started a tracker of “Republicans breaking with Trump ahead of midterms.”) Among the more notable defections were Republican Senate nominees in Iowa and Michigan, both of whom pleaded with Trump to end the war with Iran, now. “Michigan families are struggling with the price of everyday life,” Mike Rogers, a former congressman who is the G.O.P. nominee in Michigan, says in a new ad, itself a rebuke to Trump’s line that the affordability crisis is just another Democratic hoax. “Groceries cost too much. We have to bring prices down. The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly. When it does, energy costs will plummet.” Representative Ashley Hinson, the nominee in Iowa, echoed that language. “The war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end,” she said. Democrats quickly pointed out that, so far, Hinson had voted multiple times against resolutions in Congress to stop the conflict.
Well, that’s refreshing! This take is from Bill Scher writing for the Washington Monthly. ‘This Is the Biggest Reason Why a Blue Wave Is Probably Coming. Nothing makes voters angrier at the party in power than having less money in their pockets, and real disposable income is down.” I just hope all these prognosticators are right.
There are lots of reasons to believe Democrats are about to crush the midterm elections. Donald Trump’s average job approval is below 40 percent, about 5 points lower than it was in the 2018 midterms, which were deemed a “Blue Wave.” His authoritarian antics continue to dominate media coverage, as does seemingly corrupt behavior from him and his family. Democrats are ahead in the generic congressional ballot poll average by nearly 9 points, matching the national popular vote margin for the 2018 House elections. In September polling of Senate races, Democrats lead in six states with Republican-held seats, more than the four needed to take control. Gas and food prices remain high, which the public broadly blames on Trump’s ham-fisted tariffs and blunderbuss war with Iran.
There are millions of reasons to believe Republicans are going to hold off a Blue Wave: specifically, the hundreds of millions of dollars they are flooding into political advertising to paint Democratic candidates as radical socialists. As Democrats need wins in states and districts where Trump won comfortably in 2024, the right-leaning voters who will determine the outcomes may well be swayed by the negative advertising avalanche. Furthermore, the Democratic margins in most Senate polling are usually within the margin of error, and there is plenty of precedent for Republicans to outperform polls on Election Day.
But one factor may outweigh the rest: the decline in real disposable income.
Real disposable income measures how much money people have after taxes, adjusted for inflation. Seth Masket, the political scientist who now publishes a Substack newsletter has long tracked the correlation between real disposable income and midterm election outcomes. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson observed about Masket’s research back in 2010, “It’s not perfect correlation, but the trend is clear. When folks feel richer, they reward the party in power.” This May, Masket offered a midterm forecast largely based on the specific metric he uses, “growth in per capita real disposable income between the second quarter of the year before the election and the first quarter of the election year,” which came in at a limp 0.4 percent. The model projected a 46-seat net gain for House Democrats, though even Masket said he would consider it surprising if that exact number came to pass.
Allow me to add a data point: the second quarter of the election year.
Per capita real disposable income took a big hit in the second quarter of 2026, with growth coming in at negative 0.4 percent compared to the prior quarter.
And what happened just before the second quarter began? Donald Trump attacked Iran, and oil prices skyrocketed.
If we look at growth in per capita real disposable income from the 3rd quarter in the year before a midterm to the 2nd quarter in the year of the midterm, the 2025-2026 number is also negative: -0.5 percent.
Any such decline is unusual. We’re about to hold the 20th midterm election since 1950. In only four of these, from the period of third quarter to the second quarter, did per-capita real disposable income shrink.
Two of those midterms, 1958 and 1974, tie for the biggest Blue Waves of the last 75 years, each netting Democrats 48 House seats. A third was in 2022 during the Joe Biden presidency, when red-hot inflation chewed up paychecks, but Masket notes it as a massive outlier, with the president’s party coughing up only nine House seats. He attributes the limited losses to a slew of Trump-backed extremist candidates baselessly flogging election fraud and backlash over the right-wing Supreme Court ending Roe v. Wade. I would add that the worst of the inflation spike had ended; 2022’s second quarter decline was not as bad as the preceding four, and the following quarter was positive. In other words, the trajectory was moving in the right direction.
Economics matters. I can speak from recent experience in this second Trump term about what his tariffs and other bad policy are doing to me and I can see by checking the data that I’m not the only one. You can hear in conversations between people and from your friends. The money runs out before the car can be gassed and the grocery shopping is adequate. This is why I laughed at that article about sending women back to being housewives with a few tax cut dribbles. That would mean homeless and starvation for most of America’s families. Also, this is a very bad time of year to cut out programs that feed school children and the elderly. Those headlines do not help the situation at all.
Trump is feeding his fires with government funds. His audacity with this move did not surprise me. Nothing does anymore. Will this be another illegal move left to back pages so know when can really find it? Isaac Arnsdorf has the story for the Washington Post. “Trump ad airing with government funding despite law against ‘propaganda’. The agency responsible for the commercial was not immediately clear.” He clearly has no interest of knowledge of our laws.
A television ad promoting President Donald Trump began airing on cable Wednesday saying it was paid for by the U.S. government, despite a federal prohibition on using taxpayer dollars for “publicity or propaganda.”
The ad is similar to spots released earlier by the nonprofit arm of Trump’s political operation to promote his record in the midterms campaign. But this one includes a tag reading, “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
Since the 1950s, annual appropriations legislation — including the funding bill Trump signed in February — has routinely included a ban on using federal funds for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” The Government Accountability Office has said the prohibition applies to communications that are “purely partisan” and “designed to aid a political party or candidates.”
The ad consists of a supercut of Trump photos and videos interspersed with text of campaign slogans. The soundtrack features snippets of Trump speeches and a chorus of women singing, “I’ll make them love me.” It ends with Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White praising Trump over footage of the June match on the White House lawn and military flyovers.
It has aired so far on Newsmax in Chicago and Fox News in Los Angeles, according to ad-tracking firm AdImpact. The firm noted, however, that it could not verify spending data for the ad because the networks airing it were not classifying it as political.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, argued that the ads are not political and that Trump is not on the ballot.
The president has repeatedly told his supporters to vote as if he were.
This AP article as provided by the Washington Sun has news that the Press Pool is back in place at the White House. “White House TV Pool Is Operating Again After Days of Outlets Being Banned When the White House booted CNN and two other outlets from the grounds, the other four networks in the pool declined to participate in a show of solidarity.” Jocelyn Noveck has the lede.
The U.S. network video pool for the White House was back in operation Friday, for the first time since President Donald Trump banned three news outlets in a high-profile showdown over media access.
“As of now, all systems are go,” said a person familiar with the pool, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the fluidity of the situation.
The pool consists of five major U.S. broadcast outlets that take turns shooting and sharing video. When the White House banned CNN — which belongs to the pool — and two other outlets from White House grounds, the other four declined to participate in a show of solidarity.
A judge temporarily struck down the ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico on Thursday, but his ruling didn’t directly address the pool. The networks continued to refrain from covering Trump as part of the pool even as reporters from all three outlets were allowed back in the White House.
As President Donald Trump prepared to take Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit the National Archives on Friday, the pool’s live feed was being shared again.
This last bit of news has me very angry having lived through the period when segregation in schools was either the rule or the geographic fact up in to the period where desegregation became the rule. This is also from the AP. “Trump administration moves to limit fixes for systemic racism in schools.” Annie Ma has the story.
For decades, a key principle underpinned civil rights enforcement in American schools: Not all discrimination was intentional.
Even if a school policy was written without overt racial bias, it might unfairly hurt one group of students over another, the understanding went. The concept is known as systemic racism, and Republican and Democratic administrations agreed: Schools and universities that received federal funding had an obligation to address it.
Under President Donald Trump’s administration, that’s no longer the case. One by one, the administration has limited the remedies schools can use to address systemic racial injustice.
This summer, the Education Department rescinded a regulation that allowed schools to gauge potential discrimination by comparing outcomes across races, such as the racial breakdown of students in advanced classes. Then, it issued a letter to American schools, emphasizing it’s illegal to consider race when crafting discipline policies — even if one particular racial group ends up suspended or expelled more often.
At the same time, Trump’s Justice Department has stepped away from many school desegregation cases. In a news release Thursday, the department boasted of successfully working through the courts to close more than 50 desegregation cases since Trump took office, with motions to dismiss in the works in many other cases. Previous administrations had used these federal court cases to hold schools accountable when students of color had worse outcomes than white students — high rates of discipline, worse school facilities or reduced access to extracurriculars and advanced coursework.
While Trump’s first administration deprioritized enforcing racial justice, his current administration has gone further — threatening to punish schools for any consideration of race in their policies and practices.
To the administration, the practice of examining different outcomes for particular groups of students, sometimes known as “disparate impact,” was itself a form of racial discrimination.
“The Obama and Biden Administrations weaponized disparate impact by effectively coercing schools to discipline students differently based on race in order to engineer equitable disciplinary outcomes across racial groups,” Education Department spokesperson Sabin Sidney said. “These practices unfortunately led to unsafe classrooms and undermined student learning.”
It’s very difficult for me to see us return to this situation especially given my children and grandchildren are multiracial.
So, that’s pretty much enough to stew on for the moment.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#2026Midterms #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #Affordability #BlueWaveMidterm2026 #Freedom #SocialJustice #TaxPayerFundedPropaganda #voterSuppression #WhiteHousePressPool
-
Finally Friday Reads: Moving Right Along
“Why Natalie gets paid the big bucks.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day. Sky Dancers!
It seems we have more of the same this week, and that’s a damn shame! Voting Rights, Press Access, Trump’s Fanboi treatment of a dictator, and the deconstruction of anything representing fairness and opportunity sally forth. Let’s take a look at the headlines as we get closer to the midterm elections!
Let’s start with a Supreme Court Decision that’s definitely in the damn shame category. This is from Jacob Knutson writing for Democracy Docket. “Supreme Court revives DHS use of flawed immigration database for voter purges.” Ideology once again trumps law and data.
In a dangerous decision for voters, the Supreme Court authorized the Trump administration to overhaul a federal immigration database into a vast, centralized and deeply flawed database of Americans’ personal information to initiate registration purges.
The decision lets the administration move forward with a key provision of President Donald Trump’s 2025 anti-voting executive order, much of which courts have permanently blocked.
At least five of the Court’s Republican-appointed justices lifted a lower-court order that found the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) modification and use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement (SAVE) system “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The majority’s opinion gave short shrift to the danger of eligible voters, especially naturalized citizens, being wrongly removed from the rolls — a concern highlighted by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent.
“[T]he harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The decision Friday marks a significant loss to voters — particularly naturalized citizens, who have been disproportionately falsely flagged as ineligible voters when states have fed their registration lists into SAVE.
It also deals a blow to voting and privacy groups challenging DHS’s overhaul of SAVE as a violation of federal privacy laws and an unconstitutional attempt to usurp states’ authority over elections.
SAVE has existed for decades as a tool that lets states check the immigration status of people applying for government benefits.
However, in the 2025 executive order, Trump directed DHS to transform the database into a sweeping tool to vet state voter rolls.
The Supreme Court granted the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) request to stay the lower-court ruling even though a coalition of voting and privacy advocates led by the League of Women Voters warned that SAVE was never designed to check voter eligibility and, when used this way, will erroneously flag eligible voters as noncitizens.
“Today’s decision is profoundly disappointing, as it puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections,” the coalition said in a statement. “However, this case is not over. The D.C. district court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated multiple laws.”
“We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands,” it added.
The White House is certainly afraid of the results of the upcoming election. So are members of Congress. This is from Susan B. Glasser writing for The New Yorker. “The Week Republicans Finally Panicked About Trump. The President’s party, facing a midterm reckoning, is begging for a way out of his Iran-war doom loop.”
Trump’s ability to change the subject has long been one of his political superpowers. This was widely understood to be one of the reasons—beyond his apparently genuine loathing of the news organizations in question—for his “FAKE NEWS” press ban. I’m sure that he thought the spectacle of his dictator pas de deux with Xi would provide days’ worth of obsessive chatter. It may be, however, that the only person in politics that the President has succeeded in distracting this time is himself.
Forty days before the midterm elections, Washington is increasingly consumed not by Trump’s endless antics so much as by the rapidly clarifying political reality of the predicament in which the President, deeply unpopular and trapped in an unwon war of his own choosing in the Middle East, has got himself and his party. A reckoning—one far harsher than was expected, even a few months ago—now seems imminent.
Few are flatly predicting yet that Democrats will seize control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives—in the Senate, they would need to flip a net of four seats to win the chamber—but, by just about every metric except the vast sums of campaign cash that Trump has drummed up, this election looks increasingly likely to produce an outright repudiation of the President’s party, after a campaign season in which Trump’s own reckless politics and persona have defined the political landscape. No modern President, in fact, has ever gone into a midterm election this unpopular. Trump’s standing with the American public is currently twice as low as it was at this point in 2018, when Republicans lost forty-one seats in the House.
“Since early September, there has been a noticeable shift toward Democrats,” Doug Sosnik, who served as the political director of the Clinton White House, wrote on Thursday, in one of his closely followed election analyses. The movement of voters away from Republicans “hit a tipping point in recent weeks,” Sosnik concluded, with “Democrats now positioned for gains that looked unimaginable at the beginning of the year,” an outcome largely attributable to voters’ rejection of “the increasingly erratic behavior of an out of touch Commander in Chief.” This assessment is not all that different from what Republicans—both privately and, in some cases, publicly—are saying. “Republicans are running out of runway,” Dave Winston, a longtime G.O.P. pollster, warned this week in an op-ed in Roll Call, blaming this development on the fact that Trump’s economic message has been “falling on deaf ears.” The phrase “ringing alarm bells” was used.
The political class has responded accordingly. “The Republican abandonment of Donald Trump begins,” the conservative National Review wrote on Wednesday. That same day, Punchbowl News said this was the week that Republicans were hitting the “panic button.” That afternoon, the right-wing Christian radio host Steve Deace posted a screed on X complaining that Trump’s failed war with Iran risks becoming a “2020 Covid lockdown level of political albatross” that could cost the G.O.P., even in Trump bulwarks such as Deace’s home state of Iowa, where Democrats now look like they could take both the governorship and an open U.S. Senate seat. Just two years ago, Trump won the state by thirteen points.
So many Republican candidates in recent days have broken with Trump that it’s as if a secret memo went out announcing that the floodgates were officially open. (Newsweek even started a tracker of “Republicans breaking with Trump ahead of midterms.”) Among the more notable defections were Republican Senate nominees in Iowa and Michigan, both of whom pleaded with Trump to end the war with Iran, now. “Michigan families are struggling with the price of everyday life,” Mike Rogers, a former congressman who is the G.O.P. nominee in Michigan, says in a new ad, itself a rebuke to Trump’s line that the affordability crisis is just another Democratic hoax. “Groceries cost too much. We have to bring prices down. The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly. When it does, energy costs will plummet.” Representative Ashley Hinson, the nominee in Iowa, echoed that language. “The war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end,” she said. Democrats quickly pointed out that, so far, Hinson had voted multiple times against resolutions in Congress to stop the conflict.
Well, that’s refreshing! This take is from Bill Scher writing for the Washington Monthly. ‘This Is the Biggest Reason Why a Blue Wave Is Probably Coming. Nothing makes voters angrier at the party in power than having less money in their pockets, and real disposable income is down.” I just hope all these prognosticators are right.
There are lots of reasons to believe Democrats are about to crush the midterm elections. Donald Trump’s average job approval is below 40 percent, about 5 points lower than it was in the 2018 midterms, which were deemed a “Blue Wave.” His authoritarian antics continue to dominate media coverage, as does seemingly corrupt behavior from him and his family. Democrats are ahead in the generic congressional ballot poll average by nearly 9 points, matching the national popular vote margin for the 2018 House elections. In September polling of Senate races, Democrats lead in six states with Republican-held seats, more than the four needed to take control. Gas and food prices remain high, which the public broadly blames on Trump’s ham-fisted tariffs and blunderbuss war with Iran.
There are millions of reasons to believe Republicans are going to hold off a Blue Wave: specifically, the hundreds of millions of dollars they are flooding into political advertising to paint Democratic candidates as radical socialists. As Democrats need wins in states and districts where Trump won comfortably in 2024, the right-leaning voters who will determine the outcomes may well be swayed by the negative advertising avalanche. Furthermore, the Democratic margins in most Senate polling are usually within the margin of error, and there is plenty of precedent for Republicans to outperform polls on Election Day.
But one factor may outweigh the rest: the decline in real disposable income.
Real disposable income measures how much money people have after taxes, adjusted for inflation. Seth Masket, the political scientist who now publishes a Substack newsletter has long tracked the correlation between real disposable income and midterm election outcomes. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson observed about Masket’s research back in 2010, “It’s not perfect correlation, but the trend is clear. When folks feel richer, they reward the party in power.” This May, Masket offered a midterm forecast largely based on the specific metric he uses, “growth in per capita real disposable income between the second quarter of the year before the election and the first quarter of the election year,” which came in at a limp 0.4 percent. The model projected a 46-seat net gain for House Democrats, though even Masket said he would consider it surprising if that exact number came to pass.
Allow me to add a data point: the second quarter of the election year.
Per capita real disposable income took a big hit in the second quarter of 2026, with growth coming in at negative 0.4 percent compared to the prior quarter.
And what happened just before the second quarter began? Donald Trump attacked Iran, and oil prices skyrocketed.
If we look at growth in per capita real disposable income from the 3rd quarter in the year before a midterm to the 2nd quarter in the year of the midterm, the 2025-2026 number is also negative: -0.5 percent.
Any such decline is unusual. We’re about to hold the 20th midterm election since 1950. In only four of these, from the period of third quarter to the second quarter, did per-capita real disposable income shrink.
Two of those midterms, 1958 and 1974, tie for the biggest Blue Waves of the last 75 years, each netting Democrats 48 House seats. A third was in 2022 during the Joe Biden presidency, when red-hot inflation chewed up paychecks, but Masket notes it as a massive outlier, with the president’s party coughing up only nine House seats. He attributes the limited losses to a slew of Trump-backed extremist candidates baselessly flogging election fraud and backlash over the right-wing Supreme Court ending Roe v. Wade. I would add that the worst of the inflation spike had ended; 2022’s second quarter decline was not as bad as the preceding four, and the following quarter was positive. In other words, the trajectory was moving in the right direction.
Economics matters. I can speak from recent experience in this second Trump term about what his tariffs and other bad policy are doing to me and I can see by checking the data that I’m not the only one. You can hear in conversations between people and from your friends. The money runs out before the car can be gassed and the grocery shopping is adequate. This is why I laughed at that article about sending women back to being housewives with a few tax cut dribbles. That would mean homeless and starvation for most of America’s families. Also, this is a very bad time of year to cut out programs that feed school children and the elderly. Those headlines do not help the situation at all.
Trump is feeding his fires with government funds. His audacity with this move did not surprise me. Nothing does anymore. Will this be another illegal move left to back pages so know when can really find it? Isaac Arnsdorf has the story for the Washington Post. “Trump ad airing with government funding despite law against ‘propaganda’. The agency responsible for the commercial was not immediately clear.” He clearly has no interest of knowledge of our laws.
A television ad promoting President Donald Trump began airing on cable Wednesday saying it was paid for by the U.S. government, despite a federal prohibition on using taxpayer dollars for “publicity or propaganda.”
The ad is similar to spots released earlier by the nonprofit arm of Trump’s political operation to promote his record in the midterms campaign. But this one includes a tag reading, “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
Since the 1950s, annual appropriations legislation — including the funding bill Trump signed in February — has routinely included a ban on using federal funds for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” The Government Accountability Office has said the prohibition applies to communications that are “purely partisan” and “designed to aid a political party or candidates.”
The ad consists of a supercut of Trump photos and videos interspersed with text of campaign slogans. The soundtrack features snippets of Trump speeches and a chorus of women singing, “I’ll make them love me.” It ends with Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White praising Trump over footage of the June match on the White House lawn and military flyovers.
It has aired so far on Newsmax in Chicago and Fox News in Los Angeles, according to ad-tracking firm AdImpact. The firm noted, however, that it could not verify spending data for the ad because the networks airing it were not classifying it as political.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, argued that the ads are not political and that Trump is not on the ballot.
The president has repeatedly told his supporters to vote as if he were.
This AP article as provided by the Washington Sun has news that the Press Pool is back in place at the White House. “White House TV Pool Is Operating Again After Days of Outlets Being Banned When the White House booted CNN and two other outlets from the grounds, the other four networks in the pool declined to participate in a show of solidarity.” Jocelyn Noveck has the lede.
The U.S. network video pool for the White House was back in operation Friday, for the first time since President Donald Trump banned three news outlets in a high-profile showdown over media access.
“As of now, all systems are go,” said a person familiar with the pool, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the fluidity of the situation.
The pool consists of five major U.S. broadcast outlets that take turns shooting and sharing video. When the White House banned CNN — which belongs to the pool — and two other outlets from White House grounds, the other four declined to participate in a show of solidarity.
A judge temporarily struck down the ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico on Thursday, but his ruling didn’t directly address the pool. The networks continued to refrain from covering Trump as part of the pool even as reporters from all three outlets were allowed back in the White House.
As President Donald Trump prepared to take Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit the National Archives on Friday, the pool’s live feed was being shared again.
This last bit of news has me very angry having lived through the period when segregation in schools was either the rule or the geographic fact up in to the period where desegregation became the rule. This is also from the AP. “Trump administration moves to limit fixes for systemic racism in schools.” Annie Ma has the story.
For decades, a key principle underpinned civil rights enforcement in American schools: Not all discrimination was intentional.
Even if a school policy was written without overt racial bias, it might unfairly hurt one group of students over another, the understanding went. The concept is known as systemic racism, and Republican and Democratic administrations agreed: Schools and universities that received federal funding had an obligation to address it.
Under President Donald Trump’s administration, that’s no longer the case. One by one, the administration has limited the remedies schools can use to address systemic racial injustice.
This summer, the Education Department rescinded a regulation that allowed schools to gauge potential discrimination by comparing outcomes across races, such as the racial breakdown of students in advanced classes. Then, it issued a letter to American schools, emphasizing it’s illegal to consider race when crafting discipline policies — even if one particular racial group ends up suspended or expelled more often.
At the same time, Trump’s Justice Department has stepped away from many school desegregation cases. In a news release Thursday, the department boasted of successfully working through the courts to close more than 50 desegregation cases since Trump took office, with motions to dismiss in the works in many other cases. Previous administrations had used these federal court cases to hold schools accountable when students of color had worse outcomes than white students — high rates of discipline, worse school facilities or reduced access to extracurriculars and advanced coursework.
While Trump’s first administration deprioritized enforcing racial justice, his current administration has gone further — threatening to punish schools for any consideration of race in their policies and practices.
To the administration, the practice of examining different outcomes for particular groups of students, sometimes known as “disparate impact,” was itself a form of racial discrimination.
“The Obama and Biden Administrations weaponized disparate impact by effectively coercing schools to discipline students differently based on race in order to engineer equitable disciplinary outcomes across racial groups,” Education Department spokesperson Sabin Sidney said. “These practices unfortunately led to unsafe classrooms and undermined student learning.”
It’s very difficult for me to see us return to this situation especially given my children and grandchildren are multiracial.
So, that’s pretty much enough to stew on for the moment.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#2026Midterms #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #Affordability #BlueWaveMidterm2026 #Freedom #SocialJustice #TaxPayerFundedPropaganda #voterSuppression #WhiteHousePressPool -
Finally Friday Reads: Moving Right Along
“Why Natalie gets paid the big bucks.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day. Sky Dancers!
It seems we have more of the same this week, and that’s a damn shame! Voting Rights, Press Access, Trump’s Fanboi treatment of a dictator, and the deconstruction of anything represent fairness and opportunity sally forth. Let’s take a look at the headlines as we get closer to the midterm elections!
Let’s start with a Supreme Court Decision that’s definitely in the damn shame category. This is from Jacob Knutson writing for Democracy Docket. “Supreme Court revives DHS use of flawed immigration database for voter purges.” Ideology once again trumps law and data.
In a dangerous decision for voters, the Supreme Court authorized the Trump administration to overhaul a federal immigration database into a vast, centralized and deeply flawed database of Americans’ personal information to initiate registration purges.
The decision lets the administration move forward with a key provision of President Donald Trump’s 2025 anti-voting executive order, much of which courts have permanently blocked.
At least five of the Court’s Republican-appointed justices lifted a lower-court order that found the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) modification and use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement (SAVE) system “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The majority’s opinion gave short shrift to the danger of eligible voters, especially naturalized citizens, being wrongly removed from the rolls — a concern highlighted by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent.
“[T]he harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
The decision Friday marks a significant loss to voters — particularly naturalized citizens, who have been disproportionately falsely flagged as ineligible voters when states have fed their registration lists into SAVE.
It also deals a blow to voting and privacy groups challenging DHS’s overhaul of SAVE as a violation of federal privacy laws and an unconstitutional attempt to usurp states’ authority over elections.
SAVE has existed for decades as a tool that lets states check the immigration status of people applying for government benefits.
However, in the 2025 executive order, Trump directed DHS to transform the database into a sweeping tool to vet state voter rolls.
The Supreme Court granted the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) request to stay the lower-court ruling even though a coalition of voting and privacy advocates led by the League of Women Voters warned that SAVE was never designed to check voter eligibility and, when used this way, will erroneously flag eligible voters as noncitizens.
“Today’s decision is profoundly disappointing, as it puts millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database weeks before the midterm elections,” the coalition said in a statement. “However, this case is not over. The D.C. district court ruled that the expanded SAVE program violated multiple laws.”
“We will be doing everything in our power to protect Americans’ voting and privacy rights by ensuring that the district court decision stands,” it added.
The White House is certainly afraid of the results of the upcoming election. So are members of Congress. This is from Susan B. Glasser writing for The New Yorker. “The Week Republicans Finally Panicked About Trump. The President’s party, facing a midterm reckoning, is begging for a way out of his Iran-war doom loop.”
Trump’s ability to change the subject has long been one of his political superpowers. This was widely understood to be one of the reasons—beyond his apparently genuine loathing of the news organizations in question—for his “FAKE NEWS” press ban. I’m sure that he thought the spectacle of his dictator pas de deux with Xi would provide days’ worth of obsessive chatter. It may be, however, that the only person in politics that the President has succeeded in distracting this time is himself.
Forty days before the midterm elections, Washington is increasingly consumed not by Trump’s endless antics so much as by the rapidly clarifying political reality of the predicament in which the President, deeply unpopular and trapped in an unwon war of his own choosing in the Middle East, has got himself and his party. A reckoning—one far harsher than was expected, even a few months ago—now seems imminent.
Few are flatly predicting yet that Democrats will seize control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives—in the Senate, they would need to flip a net of four seats to win the chamber—but, by just about every metric except the vast sums of campaign cash that Trump has drummed up, this election looks increasingly likely to produce an outright repudiation of the President’s party, after a campaign season in which Trump’s own reckless politics and persona have defined the political landscape. No modern President, in fact, has ever gone into a midterm election this unpopular. Trump’s standing with the American public is currently twice as low as it was at this point in 2018, when Republicans lost forty-one seats in the House.
“Since early September, there has been a noticeable shift toward Democrats,” Doug Sosnik, who served as the political director of the Clinton White House, wrote on Thursday, in one of his closely followed election analyses. The movement of voters away from Republicans “hit a tipping point in recent weeks,” Sosnik concluded, with “Democrats now positioned for gains that looked unimaginable at the beginning of the year,” an outcome largely attributable to voters’ rejection of “the increasingly erratic behavior of an out of touch Commander in Chief.” This assessment is not all that different from what Republicans—both privately and, in some cases, publicly—are saying. “Republicans are running out of runway,” Dave Winston, a longtime G.O.P. pollster, warned this week in an op-ed in Roll Call, blaming this development on the fact that Trump’s economic message has been “falling on deaf ears.” The phrase “ringing alarm bells” was used.
The political class has responded accordingly. “The Republican abandonment of Donald Trump begins,” the conservative National Review wrote on Wednesday. That same day, Punchbowl News said this was the week that Republicans were hitting the “panic button.” That afternoon, the right-wing Christian radio host Steve Deace posted a screed on X complaining that Trump’s failed war with Iran risks becoming a “2020 Covid lockdown level of political albatross” that could cost the G.O.P., even in Trump bulwarks such as Deace’s home state of Iowa, where Democrats now look like they could take both the governorship and an open U.S. Senate seat. Just two years ago, Trump won the state by thirteen points.
So many Republican candidates in recent days have broken with Trump that it’s as if a secret memo went out announcing that the floodgates were officially open. (Newsweek even started a tracker of “Republicans breaking with Trump ahead of midterms.”) Among the more notable defections were Republican Senate nominees in Iowa and Michigan, both of whom pleaded with Trump to end the war with Iran, now. “Michigan families are struggling with the price of everyday life,” Mike Rogers, a former congressman who is the G.O.P. nominee in Michigan, says in a new ad, itself a rebuke to Trump’s line that the affordability crisis is just another Democratic hoax. “Groceries cost too much. We have to bring prices down. The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly. When it does, energy costs will plummet.” Representative Ashley Hinson, the nominee in Iowa, echoed that language. “The war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end,” she said. Democrats quickly pointed out that, so far, Hinson had voted multiple times against resolutions in Congress to stop the conflict.
Well, that’s refreshing! This take is from Bill Scher writing for the Washington Monthly. ‘This Is the Biggest Reason Why a Blue Wave Is Probably Coming. Nothing makes voters angrier at the party in power than having less money in their pockets, and real disposable income is down.” I just hope all these prognosticators are right.
There are lots of reasons to believe Democrats are about to crush the midterm elections. Donald Trump’s average job approval is below 40 percent, about 5 points lower than it was in the 2018 midterms, which were deemed a “Blue Wave.” His authoritarian antics continue to dominate media coverage, as does seemingly corrupt behavior from him and his family. Democrats are ahead in the generic congressional ballot poll average by nearly 9 points, matching the national popular vote margin for the 2018 House elections. In September polling of Senate races, Democrats lead in six states with Republican-held seats, more than the four needed to take control. Gas and food prices remain high, which the public broadly blames on Trump’s ham-fisted tariffs and blunderbuss war with Iran.
There are millions of reasons to believe Republicans are going to hold off a Blue Wave: specifically, the hundreds of millions of dollars they are flooding into political advertising to paint Democratic candidates as radical socialists. As Democrats need wins in states and districts where Trump won comfortably in 2024, the right-leaning voters who will determine the outcomes may well be swayed by the negative advertising avalanche. Furthermore, the Democratic margins in most Senate polling are usually within the margin of error, and there is plenty of precedent for Republicans to outperform polls on Election Day.
But one factor may outweigh the rest: the decline in real disposable income.
Real disposable income measures how much money people have after taxes, adjusted for inflation. Seth Masket, the political scientist who now publishes a Substack newsletter has long tracked the correlation between real disposable income and midterm election outcomes. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson observed about Masket’s research back in 2010, “It’s not perfect correlation, but the trend is clear. When folks feel richer, they reward the party in power.” This May, Masket offered a midterm forecast largely based on the specific metric he uses, “growth in per capita real disposable income between the second quarter of the year before the election and the first quarter of the election year,” which came in at a limp 0.4 percent. The model projected a 46-seat net gain for House Democrats, though even Masket said he would consider it surprising if that exact number came to pass.
Allow me to add a data point: the second quarter of the election year.
Per capita real disposable income took a big hit in the second quarter of 2026, with growth coming in at negative 0.4 percent compared to the prior quarter.
And what happened just before the second quarter began? Donald Trump attacked Iran, and oil prices skyrocketed.
If we look at growth in per capita real disposable income from the 3rd quarter in the year before a midterm to the 2nd quarter in the year of the midterm, the 2025-2026 number is also negative: -0.5 percent.
Any such decline is unusual. We’re about to hold the 20th midterm election since 1950. In only four of these, from the period of third quarter to the second quarter, did per-capita real disposable income shrink.
Two of those midterms, 1958 and 1974, tie for the biggest Blue Waves of the last 75 years, each netting Democrats 48 House seats. A third was in 2022 during the Joe Biden presidency, when red-hot inflation chewed up paychecks, but Masket notes it as a massive outlier, with the president’s party coughing up only nine House seats. He attributes the limited losses to a slew of Trump-backed extremist candidates baselessly flogging election fraud and backlash over the right-wing Supreme Court ending Roe v. Wade. I would add that the worst of the inflation spike had ended; 2022’s second quarter decline was not as bad as the preceding four, and the following quarter was positive. In other words, the trajectory was moving in the right direction.
Economics matters. I can speak from recent experience in this second Trump term about what his tariffs and other bad policy are doing to me and I can see by checking the data that I’m not the only one. You can hear in conversations between people and from your friends. The money runs out before the car can be gassed and the grocery shopping is adequate. This is why I laughed at that article about sending women back to being housewives with a few tax cut dribbles. That would mean homeless and starvation for most of America’s families. Also, this is a very bad time of year to cut out programs that feed school children and the elderly. Those headlines do not help the situation at all.
Trump is feeding his fires with government funds. His audacity with this move did not surprise me. Nothing does anymore. Will this be another illegal move left to back pages so know when can really find it? Isaac Arnsdorf has the story for the Washington Post. “Trump ad airing with government funding despite law against ‘propaganda’. The agency responsible for the commercial was not immediately clear.” He clearly has no interest of knowledge of our laws.
A television ad promoting President Donald Trump began airing on cable Wednesday saying it was paid for by the U.S. government, despite a federal prohibition on using taxpayer dollars for “publicity or propaganda.”
The ad is similar to spots released earlier by the nonprofit arm of Trump’s political operation to promote his record in the midterms campaign. But this one includes a tag reading, “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
Since the 1950s, annual appropriations legislation — including the funding bill Trump signed in February — has routinely included a ban on using federal funds for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” The Government Accountability Office has said the prohibition applies to communications that are “purely partisan” and “designed to aid a political party or candidates.”
The ad consists of a supercut of Trump photos and videos interspersed with text of campaign slogans. The soundtrack features snippets of Trump speeches and a chorus of women singing, “I’ll make them love me.” It ends with Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White praising Trump over footage of the June match on the White House lawn and military flyovers.
It has aired so far on Newsmax in Chicago and Fox News in Los Angeles, according to ad-tracking firm AdImpact. The firm noted, however, that it could not verify spending data for the ad because the networks airing it were not classifying it as political.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, argued that the ads are not political and that Trump is not on the ballot.
The president has repeatedly told his supporters to vote as if he were.
This AP article as provided by the Washington Sun has news that the Press Pool is back in place at the White House. “White House TV Pool Is Operating Again After Days of Outlets Being Banned When the White House booted CNN and two other outlets from the grounds, the other four networks in the pool declined to participate in a show of solidarity.” Jocelyn Noveck has the lede.
The U.S. network video pool for the White House was back in operation Friday, for the first time since President Donald Trump banned three news outlets in a high-profile showdown over media access.
“As of now, all systems are go,” said a person familiar with the pool, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the fluidity of the situation.
The pool consists of five major U.S. broadcast outlets that take turns shooting and sharing video. When the White House banned CNN — which belongs to the pool — and two other outlets from White House grounds, the other four declined to participate in a show of solidarity.
A judge temporarily struck down the ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico on Thursday, but his ruling didn’t directly address the pool. The networks continued to refrain from covering Trump as part of the pool even as reporters from all three outlets were allowed back in the White House.
As President Donald Trump prepared to take Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit the National Archives on Friday, the pool’s live feed was being shared again.
This last bit of news has me very angry having lived through the period when segregation in schools was either the rule or the geographic fact up in to the period where desegregation became the rule. This is also from the AP. “Trump administration moves to limit fixes for systemic racism in schools.” Annie Ma has the story.
For decades, a key principle underpinned civil rights enforcement in American schools: Not all discrimination was intentional.
Even if a school policy was written without overt racial bias, it might unfairly hurt one group of students over another, the understanding went. The concept is known as systemic racism, and Republican and Democratic administrations agreed: Schools and universities that received federal funding had an obligation to address it.
Under President Donald Trump’s administration, that’s no longer the case. One by one, the administration has limited the remedies schools can use to address systemic racial injustice.
This summer, the Education Department rescinded a regulation that allowed schools to gauge potential discrimination by comparing outcomes across races, such as the racial breakdown of students in advanced classes. Then, it issued a letter to American schools, emphasizing it’s illegal to consider race when crafting discipline policies — even if one particular racial group ends up suspended or expelled more often.
At the same time, Trump’s Justice Department has stepped away from many school desegregation cases. In a news release Thursday, the department boasted of successfully working through the courts to close more than 50 desegregation cases since Trump took office, with motions to dismiss in the works in many other cases. Previous administrations had used these federal court cases to hold schools accountable when students of color had worse outcomes than white students — high rates of discipline, worse school facilities or reduced access to extracurriculars and advanced coursework.
While Trump’s first administration deprioritized enforcing racial justice, his current administration has gone further — threatening to punish schools for any consideration of race in their policies and practices.
To the administration, the practice of examining different outcomes for particular groups of students, sometimes known as “disparate impact,” was itself a form of racial discrimination.
“The Obama and Biden Administrations weaponized disparate impact by effectively coercing schools to discipline students differently based on race in order to engineer equitable disciplinary outcomes across racial groups,” Education Department spokesperson Sabin Sidney said. “These practices unfortunately led to unsafe classrooms and undermined student learning.”
It’s very difficult for me to see us return to this situation especially given my children and grandchildren are multiracial.
So, that’s pretty much enough to stew on for the moment.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#2026Midterms #JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #Affordability #BlueWaveMidterm2026 #Freedom #SocialJustice #TaxPayerFundedPropaganda #voterSuppression #WhiteHousePressPool
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DATE: September 27, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: People with higher autistic traits tend to avoid positive relationship-maintenance tactics
A recent study suggests that people in the general population who possess higher levels of autistic-like traits tend to avoid positive, affectionate behaviors to maintain their romantic relationships. The research, published in Evolutionary Psychology, indicates that these traits influence relationship dynamics largely through a person’s attachment style rather than broad evolutionary reproductive strategies.
The research was led by Andrzej Łukasik, a PhD with habilitation and head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Rzeszow’s Collegium Medicum in Poland, who aimed to explore how subtle personality traits shape romantic behavior from an evolutionary perspective. The central focus of the study is autistic-like traits, which refer to patterns of social functioning, communication difficulties, and rigid thinking. “Autistic-like traits (ALTs) are personality, social, and cognitive characteristics associated with autism that can also occur, to varying degrees, in the general population,” Łukasik told PsyPost. “They are not considered a disorder.”
To understand how these traits impact relationships, the scientists looked at mate retention tactics. These are behaviors people use to keep a partner and prevent them from leaving. Mate retention is generally divided into what Łukasik described as “benefit-provisioning tactics, such as showing affection, giving compliments or gifts, and offering support, and cost-inflicting tactics, such as inducing jealousy, engaging in controlling behavior, or making threats.” The authors suspected that the way a person tries to keep a partner depends heavily on their attachment style.
Attachment styles describe how people form emotional bonds, generally falling into secure, anxious, or avoidant categories. “People with anxious attachment usually have a strong need for closeness and may react strongly to distance or uncertainty,” Łukasik explained. “In contrast, people with avoidant attachment may feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness and place greater value on independence.” In fact, a 2016 study found that insecure attachment predicts how frequently people use various mate retention behaviors, and a study covered by PsyPost in 2021 indicated that anxious attachment is linked to both positive and negative mate retention strategies.
The researchers also framed their study around life history theory, an evolutionary concept describing how individuals allocate their limited time and energy. In this framework, people adopt varying reproductive strategies. A fast strategy involves high mating effort, characterized by seeking multiple partners and short-term relationships. A slow strategy involves high parental effort, prioritizing stable, long-term investments in a single partner and offspring.
Previous evolutionary theories proposed that autistic-like traits might be an adaptation linked to a slow reproductive strategy. However, because these traits are also associated with insecure attachment, which typically aligns with a fast strategy, the authors designed this study to test how all these factors connect. “Research by Marco Del Giudice and colleagues (2010) has suggested that ALTs may be associated with a slow reproductive strategy,” Łukasik noted. “However, higher levels of ALTs are also linked to insecure attachment styles (avoidant and anxious), which have more often been associated with characteristics of a fast strategy.”
Therefore, the researchers examined whether ALTs might actually predict a fast strategy and whether attachment style moderates that relationship. To map out these connections, the scientists recruited 796 Polish adults. The participants were 52 percent female and had an average age of 36.4 years. Every participant had been in a romantic relationship for at least three months.
The researchers administered a series of established questionnaires. They used the Autism-Spectrum Quotient to measure the degree of autistic-like traits, the Experiences in Close Relationships scale to assess anxious and avoidant attachment, and the Mate Retention Inventory to evaluate the frequency of benefit-provisioning and cost-inflicting behaviors. They also used brief scales to measure mating effort and parental effort. The team then used a statistical technique called structural equation modeling to analyze the complex web of relationships between all these variables at once.
The results suggest that autistic-like traits are notable predictors of insecure attachment. Participants who scored higher on autistic-like traits reported higher levels of both anxious and avoidant attachment styles. This indicates that people with more of these traits often worry about their partners leaving while simultaneously struggling with emotional closeness.
When looking at mate retention, the researchers found that individuals with higher autistic-like traits were less likely to engage in benefit-provisioning tactics. They tended to avoid showering their partners with affection or gifts as a way to maintain the relationship. The initial statistical models suggested that these individuals were also less likely to use cost-inflicting tactics. However, when the scientists controlled for the participants’ ages, they found a positive link between autistic-like traits and cost-inflicting tactics.
Age acted as a masking variable because older individuals naturally tend to use fewer negative tactics. Once age was factored out, the data suggested that people with higher autistic-like traits might actually use cost-inflicting tactics slightly more often.
In terms of evolutionary strategies, autistic-like traits proved to be weak predictors of life history outcomes. “The results did not support the hypothesis that ALTs predict a fast rather than a slow reproductive strategy,” Łukasik said. “ALTs were only weakly related to reproductive strategies.” Instead, attachment styles acted as a bridge between the variables.
Anxious attachment was linked to higher mating effort and lower parental effort, and it predicted the use of both positive and negative mate retention tactics. Avoidant attachment was similarly linked to higher mating effort and lower parental effort, but it predicted a lower use of benefit-provisioning tactics. “Individuals with an anxious attachment style tend to use a mixed partner-retention strategy involving both attraction and distancing, probably due to an overperception of the risk of infidelity,” Łukasik pointed out. “In contrast, individuals with an avoidant attachment style tend to use benefit-provisioning tactics less often, possibly because such tactics allow them to avoid closeness with their partner and maintain distance from their partner.”
Age played a broad role across the entire study. The scientists found that as participants got older, their levels of attachment anxiety decreased. Older participants also reported lower mating effort, higher parental effort, and a decreased use of both types of mate retention tactics. This aligns with the idea that as people age and relationships stabilize, they shift their energy away from securing a mate and toward investing in their existing family.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on cross-sectional data, meaning the researchers measured all variables at a single point in time. This design makes it impossible to determine the true direction of the effects, and one cannot assume that autistic-like traits cause specific attachment styles or relationship behaviors. In addition, the participants self-reported their behaviors, which can introduce bias if people alter their answers to appear more socially acceptable.
The researchers also note that the Autism-Spectrum Quotient might measure elements of social anxiety or general interpersonal difficulty rather than pure autistic traits. This overlap could skew the interpretation of the results. The weak link between autistic-like traits and reproductive strategies also suggests that broad evolutionary models like life history theory might not fully capture the nuances of modern human relationships, pointing to a need for different measurement approaches in future studies.
Ultimately, the findings offer insight into the practical challenges some people face in romance. “These findings may help explain relationship difficulties experienced by individuals with higher levels of autistic-like traits,” Łukasik concluded. “Benefit-provisioning tactics are generally associated with greater relationship satisfaction, whereas cost-inflicting tactics are linked to lower satisfaction and may contribute to difficulties in developing and maintaining stable close relationships.”
The study, “Autistic-Like Traits in Members of the General Population and Mate Retention Tactics: The Mediation of Attachment Styles and Reproductive Strategies,” was authored by Andrzej Łukasik and Agnieszka Łaba-Hornecka.
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DATE: September 27, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: People with higher autistic traits tend to avoid positive relationship-maintenance tactics
A recent study suggests that people in the general population who possess higher levels of autistic-like traits tend to avoid positive, affectionate behaviors to maintain their romantic relationships. The research, published in Evolutionary Psychology, indicates that these traits influence relationship dynamics largely through a person’s attachment style rather than broad evolutionary reproductive strategies.
The research was led by Andrzej Łukasik, a PhD with habilitation and head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Rzeszow’s Collegium Medicum in Poland, who aimed to explore how subtle personality traits shape romantic behavior from an evolutionary perspective. The central focus of the study is autistic-like traits, which refer to patterns of social functioning, communication difficulties, and rigid thinking. “Autistic-like traits (ALTs) are personality, social, and cognitive characteristics associated with autism that can also occur, to varying degrees, in the general population,” Łukasik told PsyPost. “They are not considered a disorder.”
To understand how these traits impact relationships, the scientists looked at mate retention tactics. These are behaviors people use to keep a partner and prevent them from leaving. Mate retention is generally divided into what Łukasik described as “benefit-provisioning tactics, such as showing affection, giving compliments or gifts, and offering support, and cost-inflicting tactics, such as inducing jealousy, engaging in controlling behavior, or making threats.” The authors suspected that the way a person tries to keep a partner depends heavily on their attachment style.
Attachment styles describe how people form emotional bonds, generally falling into secure, anxious, or avoidant categories. “People with anxious attachment usually have a strong need for closeness and may react strongly to distance or uncertainty,” Łukasik explained. “In contrast, people with avoidant attachment may feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness and place greater value on independence.” In fact, a 2016 study found that insecure attachment predicts how frequently people use various mate retention behaviors, and a study covered by PsyPost in 2021 indicated that anxious attachment is linked to both positive and negative mate retention strategies.
The researchers also framed their study around life history theory, an evolutionary concept describing how individuals allocate their limited time and energy. In this framework, people adopt varying reproductive strategies. A fast strategy involves high mating effort, characterized by seeking multiple partners and short-term relationships. A slow strategy involves high parental effort, prioritizing stable, long-term investments in a single partner and offspring.
Previous evolutionary theories proposed that autistic-like traits might be an adaptation linked to a slow reproductive strategy. However, because these traits are also associated with insecure attachment, which typically aligns with a fast strategy, the authors designed this study to test how all these factors connect. “Research by Marco Del Giudice and colleagues (2010) has suggested that ALTs may be associated with a slow reproductive strategy,” Łukasik noted. “However, higher levels of ALTs are also linked to insecure attachment styles (avoidant and anxious), which have more often been associated with characteristics of a fast strategy.”
Therefore, the researchers examined whether ALTs might actually predict a fast strategy and whether attachment style moderates that relationship. To map out these connections, the scientists recruited 796 Polish adults. The participants were 52 percent female and had an average age of 36.4 years. Every participant had been in a romantic relationship for at least three months.
The researchers administered a series of established questionnaires. They used the Autism-Spectrum Quotient to measure the degree of autistic-like traits, the Experiences in Close Relationships scale to assess anxious and avoidant attachment, and the Mate Retention Inventory to evaluate the frequency of benefit-provisioning and cost-inflicting behaviors. They also used brief scales to measure mating effort and parental effort. The team then used a statistical technique called structural equation modeling to analyze the complex web of relationships between all these variables at once.
The results suggest that autistic-like traits are notable predictors of insecure attachment. Participants who scored higher on autistic-like traits reported higher levels of both anxious and avoidant attachment styles. This indicates that people with more of these traits often worry about their partners leaving while simultaneously struggling with emotional closeness.
When looking at mate retention, the researchers found that individuals with higher autistic-like traits were less likely to engage in benefit-provisioning tactics. They tended to avoid showering their partners with affection or gifts as a way to maintain the relationship. The initial statistical models suggested that these individuals were also less likely to use cost-inflicting tactics. However, when the scientists controlled for the participants’ ages, they found a positive link between autistic-like traits and cost-inflicting tactics.
Age acted as a masking variable because older individuals naturally tend to use fewer negative tactics. Once age was factored out, the data suggested that people with higher autistic-like traits might actually use cost-inflicting tactics slightly more often.
In terms of evolutionary strategies, autistic-like traits proved to be weak predictors of life history outcomes. “The results did not support the hypothesis that ALTs predict a fast rather than a slow reproductive strategy,” Łukasik said. “ALTs were only weakly related to reproductive strategies.” Instead, attachment styles acted as a bridge between the variables.
Anxious attachment was linked to higher mating effort and lower parental effort, and it predicted the use of both positive and negative mate retention tactics. Avoidant attachment was similarly linked to higher mating effort and lower parental effort, but it predicted a lower use of benefit-provisioning tactics. “Individuals with an anxious attachment style tend to use a mixed partner-retention strategy involving both attraction and distancing, probably due to an overperception of the risk of infidelity,” Łukasik pointed out. “In contrast, individuals with an avoidant attachment style tend to use benefit-provisioning tactics less often, possibly because such tactics allow them to avoid closeness with their partner and maintain distance from their partner.”
Age played a broad role across the entire study. The scientists found that as participants got older, their levels of attachment anxiety decreased. Older participants also reported lower mating effort, higher parental effort, and a decreased use of both types of mate retention tactics. This aligns with the idea that as people age and relationships stabilize, they shift their energy away from securing a mate and toward investing in their existing family.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on cross-sectional data, meaning the researchers measured all variables at a single point in time. This design makes it impossible to determine the true direction of the effects, and one cannot assume that autistic-like traits cause specific attachment styles or relationship behaviors. In addition, the participants self-reported their behaviors, which can introduce bias if people alter their answers to appear more socially acceptable.
The researchers also note that the Autism-Spectrum Quotient might measure elements of social anxiety or general interpersonal difficulty rather than pure autistic traits. This overlap could skew the interpretation of the results. The weak link between autistic-like traits and reproductive strategies also suggests that broad evolutionary models like life history theory might not fully capture the nuances of modern human relationships, pointing to a need for different measurement approaches in future studies.
Ultimately, the findings offer insight into the practical challenges some people face in romance. “These findings may help explain relationship difficulties experienced by individuals with higher levels of autistic-like traits,” Łukasik concluded. “Benefit-provisioning tactics are generally associated with greater relationship satisfaction, whereas cost-inflicting tactics are linked to lower satisfaction and may contribute to difficulties in developing and maintaining stable close relationships.”
The study, “Autistic-Like Traits in Members of the General Population and Mate Retention Tactics: The Mediation of Attachment Styles and Reproductive Strategies,” was authored by Andrzej Łukasik and Agnieszka Łaba-Hornecka.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AutisticTraits #AttachmentStyles #MateRetention #RomanticRelationships #EvolutionaryPsychology #ALTs #AnxiousAttachment #AvoidantAttachment #PositiveTactics #CostInflictingTactics
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DATE: September 27, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: People with higher autistic traits tend to avoid positive relationship-maintenance tactics
A recent study suggests that people in the general population who possess higher levels of autistic-like traits tend to avoid positive, affectionate behaviors to maintain their romantic relationships. The research, published in Evolutionary Psychology, indicates that these traits influence relationship dynamics largely through a person’s attachment style rather than broad evolutionary reproductive strategies.
The research was led by Andrzej Łukasik, a PhD with habilitation and head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Rzeszow’s Collegium Medicum in Poland, who aimed to explore how subtle personality traits shape romantic behavior from an evolutionary perspective. The central focus of the study is autistic-like traits, which refer to patterns of social functioning, communication difficulties, and rigid thinking. “Autistic-like traits (ALTs) are personality, social, and cognitive characteristics associated with autism that can also occur, to varying degrees, in the general population,” Łukasik told PsyPost. “They are not considered a disorder.”
To understand how these traits impact relationships, the scientists looked at mate retention tactics. These are behaviors people use to keep a partner and prevent them from leaving. Mate retention is generally divided into what Łukasik described as “benefit-provisioning tactics, such as showing affection, giving compliments or gifts, and offering support, and cost-inflicting tactics, such as inducing jealousy, engaging in controlling behavior, or making threats.” The authors suspected that the way a person tries to keep a partner depends heavily on their attachment style.
Attachment styles describe how people form emotional bonds, generally falling into secure, anxious, or avoidant categories. “People with anxious attachment usually have a strong need for closeness and may react strongly to distance or uncertainty,” Łukasik explained. “In contrast, people with avoidant attachment may feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness and place greater value on independence.” In fact, a 2016 study found that insecure attachment predicts how frequently people use various mate retention behaviors, and a study covered by PsyPost in 2021 indicated that anxious attachment is linked to both positive and negative mate retention strategies.
The researchers also framed their study around life history theory, an evolutionary concept describing how individuals allocate their limited time and energy. In this framework, people adopt varying reproductive strategies. A fast strategy involves high mating effort, characterized by seeking multiple partners and short-term relationships. A slow strategy involves high parental effort, prioritizing stable, long-term investments in a single partner and offspring.
Previous evolutionary theories proposed that autistic-like traits might be an adaptation linked to a slow reproductive strategy. However, because these traits are also associated with insecure attachment, which typically aligns with a fast strategy, the authors designed this study to test how all these factors connect. “Research by Marco Del Giudice and colleagues (2010) has suggested that ALTs may be associated with a slow reproductive strategy,” Łukasik noted. “However, higher levels of ALTs are also linked to insecure attachment styles (avoidant and anxious), which have more often been associated with characteristics of a fast strategy.”
Therefore, the researchers examined whether ALTs might actually predict a fast strategy and whether attachment style moderates that relationship. To map out these connections, the scientists recruited 796 Polish adults. The participants were 52 percent female and had an average age of 36.4 years. Every participant had been in a romantic relationship for at least three months.
The researchers administered a series of established questionnaires. They used the Autism-Spectrum Quotient to measure the degree of autistic-like traits, the Experiences in Close Relationships scale to assess anxious and avoidant attachment, and the Mate Retention Inventory to evaluate the frequency of benefit-provisioning and cost-inflicting behaviors. They also used brief scales to measure mating effort and parental effort. The team then used a statistical technique called structural equation modeling to analyze the complex web of relationships between all these variables at once.
The results suggest that autistic-like traits are notable predictors of insecure attachment. Participants who scored higher on autistic-like traits reported higher levels of both anxious and avoidant attachment styles. This indicates that people with more of these traits often worry about their partners leaving while simultaneously struggling with emotional closeness.
When looking at mate retention, the researchers found that individuals with higher autistic-like traits were less likely to engage in benefit-provisioning tactics. They tended to avoid showering their partners with affection or gifts as a way to maintain the relationship. The initial statistical models suggested that these individuals were also less likely to use cost-inflicting tactics. However, when the scientists controlled for the participants’ ages, they found a positive link between autistic-like traits and cost-inflicting tactics.
Age acted as a masking variable because older individuals naturally tend to use fewer negative tactics. Once age was factored out, the data suggested that people with higher autistic-like traits might actually use cost-inflicting tactics slightly more often.
In terms of evolutionary strategies, autistic-like traits proved to be weak predictors of life history outcomes. “The results did not support the hypothesis that ALTs predict a fast rather than a slow reproductive strategy,” Łukasik said. “ALTs were only weakly related to reproductive strategies.” Instead, attachment styles acted as a bridge between the variables.
Anxious attachment was linked to higher mating effort and lower parental effort, and it predicted the use of both positive and negative mate retention tactics. Avoidant attachment was similarly linked to higher mating effort and lower parental effort, but it predicted a lower use of benefit-provisioning tactics. “Individuals with an anxious attachment style tend to use a mixed partner-retention strategy involving both attraction and distancing, probably due to an overperception of the risk of infidelity,” Łukasik pointed out. “In contrast, individuals with an avoidant attachment style tend to use benefit-provisioning tactics less often, possibly because such tactics allow them to avoid closeness with their partner and maintain distance from their partner.”
Age played a broad role across the entire study. The scientists found that as participants got older, their levels of attachment anxiety decreased. Older participants also reported lower mating effort, higher parental effort, and a decreased use of both types of mate retention tactics. This aligns with the idea that as people age and relationships stabilize, they shift their energy away from securing a mate and toward investing in their existing family.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. The study relied on cross-sectional data, meaning the researchers measured all variables at a single point in time. This design makes it impossible to determine the true direction of the effects, and one cannot assume that autistic-like traits cause specific attachment styles or relationship behaviors. In addition, the participants self-reported their behaviors, which can introduce bias if people alter their answers to appear more socially acceptable.
The researchers also note that the Autism-Spectrum Quotient might measure elements of social anxiety or general interpersonal difficulty rather than pure autistic traits. This overlap could skew the interpretation of the results. The weak link between autistic-like traits and reproductive strategies also suggests that broad evolutionary models like life history theory might not fully capture the nuances of modern human relationships, pointing to a need for different measurement approaches in future studies.
Ultimately, the findings offer insight into the practical challenges some people face in romance. “These findings may help explain relationship difficulties experienced by individuals with higher levels of autistic-like traits,” Łukasik concluded. “Benefit-provisioning tactics are generally associated with greater relationship satisfaction, whereas cost-inflicting tactics are linked to lower satisfaction and may contribute to difficulties in developing and maintaining stable close relationships.”
The study, “Autistic-Like Traits in Members of the General Population and Mate Retention Tactics: The Mediation of Attachment Styles and Reproductive Strategies,” was authored by Andrzej Łukasik and Agnieszka Łaba-Hornecka.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AutisticTraits #AttachmentStyles #MateRetention #RomanticRelationships #EvolutionaryPsychology #ALTs #AnxiousAttachment #AvoidantAttachment #PositiveTactics #CostInflictingTactics
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“Something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?”*…
Further to the post of Septmeber 15: on trying to understand what might lie on the other side of a transformation driven by AI (and related technologies). Microsoft’s Deputy CTO, Sam Schillace, suggests that organizations are about to change completely…
… Here’s a nerdy TL;DR if you want it: I think AI will enable a switch from what is essentially circuit switching today, in all kinds of organizations, to something that will look and feel a lot more like packet switching. This will happen partially because it can now (AI is to this problem what fast processors were to distributed networking protocols), and because networks are almost always more powerful, flexible, and scalable. This idea is going to feel super uncomfortable and be rejected by business leaders, employers and academics in much the same way that network engineers rejected the idea of packet-switched networks…
… In 1965, making a long-distance phone call in America was a feat of engineering coordination. A call from New York to Los Angeles required a dedicated copper path, physically reserved, for the duration of the conversation, and AT&T had to employ armies of switching engineers to manage this. The Bell System was one of the great technical achievements of the twentieth century, and the people who built it were not fools. They worked ferociously for what they were optimizing for: guaranteed, high-quality, reliable connections between two points.
It seemed fine – expensive, but that’s what everyone was used to. If you are my age, you remember when long-distance was even a thing, and those calls cost more and were precious. I still get a tiny bit nervous talking to my parents 3000 miles away in Michigan, that was so deeply ingrained. Part of me still can’t believe that phone calls all cost the same.
Then a small group of researchers, largely funded by ARPA, mostly working in universities, proposed something that sounded to the Bell engineers like a joke. Instead of reserving a dedicated path, you would break messages into small pieces, label each piece with a destination, and release them into the network to find their own way. Different pieces of the same message might travel completely different routes. They might arrive out of order. There was no guarantee that any particular piece would arrive at all. A phone call, under this scheme, would be like mailing a letter by tearing it into a hundred pieces and dropping each one in a different mailbox, hoping they’d all show up. (Kind of like training a giant AI model on lots of small fragments of language (tokens) and hoping that somehow intelligence would emerge from putting them back together randomly – which largely worked).
The Bell engineers had a name for this general idea: chaos. They had a specific critique too, which was that you couldn’t make any guarantees about quality of service. Voice needs low, consistent latency: you can’t have some syllables arriving seconds after others. And of course, data needs reliability: a corrupted file is useless. The engineers were right about all of this. Packet switching, in its early forms, was genuinely worse at the things circuit switching was designed to do.
It also, within a few decades, made the Bell System irrelevant. The internet didn’t improve on the telephone network; it made the telephone network a minor application running on top of something much larger. Today your phone calls travel as packets (which is why they all cost the same – there’s no such thing as a “long circuit” now), just like everything else. The Bell engineers optimized for the wrong thing. I love that this also has a flavor of “worse is better”. The Bell engineers were optimizing for “correct, complete, but complex and rigid” and the internet is more “simple and recoverable beats correct and complex”.
What actually happened was a philosophical shift about where intelligence should live. Circuit switching is a centralized control philosophy. Someone, somewhere, reserves the path before any message travels it. The network takes responsibility for delivery. The endpoints are dumb; they just send and receive. All the complexity, all the guarantee-making, lives in the infrastructure itself. This works, and it scales up to a point, and then it hits a wall, because the central system has to know everything about every connection, and that knowledge becomes impossible to manage as the network grows. (Sound familiar? This is how we build companies these days. We’ll come back to that idea)
Packet switching inverts this entirely. The network is dumb and the endpoints are smart. A router doesn’t understand the content of the packets it handles – it reads a destination address and forwards the packet one hop closer. The intelligence about what the message means, whether it arrived correctly, what to do if it didn’t – all of that lives at the edges, in the devices doing the communicating. The protocol defines what the endpoints must do. The network just moves bits.
You have seen this argument before, in a different domain. Central planning versus markets is the same disagreement. The Soviet planning apparatus tried to do for an economy what circuit switching does for a telephone network: reserve resources, guarantee outcomes, manage the whole system from the center. It failed not because the planners were stupid but because the information required to run a complex system centrally exceeds what any center can hold (it also failed because many of them were corrupt, and centralized systems are vulnerable to this, since there’s no way to build in mechanisms to correct, outcompete or otherwise reverse that corruption).
Prices, in a market, are packets. They carry information about supply and demand from the edges without anyone at the center having to understand or coordinate it. Markets are chaotic, wasteful, frequently unfair, and they consistently outperform central planning at scale for the same reason the internet outperformed the Bell System. The network always wins, eventually, because the network is where the information actually lives.
Let’s think about companies now. Companies love to do re-orgs. Or at least, they have to do them. They’re a lot of work, just like it was a lot of work to organize and change the old Bell network, and for the same reasons. Companies have to deal with the pain of organizational overhead, because to a large extent, they try to do central planning – circuit switching.
A manager, in an org chart, is a leased line. From an organizational perspective, they’re like a circuit between strategy and execution, reserved whether or not signal is flowing. The org chart is the circuit map. It tells you the paths that exist, which means it also tells you the paths that don’t. If you need to get information or work from point A to point B and there’s no line between them on the chart, you have a problem – you need to go up to a common node and back down, or you need to get someone to lay a new line. When a company needs to change how it behaves, it rewires the circuit map, which we call a reorg.
Why do we do this? This is not because companies are stupid or because the people running them lack imagination (hopefully). It’s because circuit-switched organizations are the only kind that could be managed without the infrastructure that packet-switched organizations require (which isn’t unlike what happened with the internet – we needed cheap processors to be able to build routers that could handle packets fast enough. Before we had that, we had no choice but to set up dedicated circuits).
If you can’t do the things an organization needs – observing and judging work, finding capabilities, holding people accountable – without the overhead of a fixed org chart, well, you just have to have it.
The cost of this solution is enormous and mostly invisible because it’s so normalized…
[Schillace expands on this idea…]
… When packet switching was proposed, the experts who objected most loudly were the most qualified people in the room. They were “right” in an engineering sense, but wrong in the systems sense. And they did what most people do, asking a “why not” question (against the old design and constraints) instead of a “what if” one: what if the new processors could enable a new network design?
Most people looking at AI are making the same mistake, and I predict we will see a lot of this from the orthodox “business advisor” community. I hear this from engineers and leaders already, and it sounds just like the Bell folks: You can’t guarantee accountability in a decentralized system. You can’t audit a network that routes around hierarchy. Regulators will never accept this. Sophisticated investors will raise concerns about governance.
All of these objections will be correct in the short term and beside the point in the long term. They are right from some kind of local engineering perspective but wrong from an emergent systems perspective. The question is not whether packet-switched organizations perform better on the metrics that circuit-switched organizations were built for. They won’t, at least at first, just like packet-switched networks didn’t at first. The question is whether the new architecture unlocks things the old one couldn’t do at all. And I think it will – I think we will get levels of scale, creativity and responsiveness by using these new tools to push intelligence to the edge of all kinds of organizations – not just businesses but political, social, educational and creative ones…
…There is a useful heuristic here, which is that disruptive ideas tend to produce a room that’s roughly split in half. Usually something like half the people think the idea is obviously correct (the folks asking “what if”), and half think it’s obviously wrong (the “why not” crowd). I’ve written about this kind of bifurcation before – this is the sign of something that is genuinely disruptive, and the split is between people who are rejecting it because it feels threatening, and people who have internalized the new world view and are beginning to extrapolate it…
[Schillace considers earlier, unsuccessful attempts at “packet-switched organizations,” concluding that “AI is [the] missing piece – cheap enough intelligence to put “everywhere” and enable a bunch of these ideas for real. It’s the equivalent of those cheap processors [that enabled packet switching] finally showing up, except it’s a much more complete stack arriving all at once” and that the next few years will consist in discovering the new protocols that will allow “packet-switched organizations” to succeed…]
… The Bell engineers who resisted packet switching were not, in the end, wrong about what they said. Voice quality did suffer in early VoIP, packets did get dropped a lot, and for a while, quality was worse. But they were wrong about what would matter in ten years, and catastrophically wrong about what would be possible in thirty.
Email was not a better telegram, the web was not a better encyclopedia, and streaming was not a better cable network. Each of these looks, in retrospect, like an obvious evolution, but none of them were conceivable from inside the circuit-switched world (I remember the freak out about how video was going to break even the highly scalable new internet. It wasn’t even thinkable in the circuit switched world). They required the new infrastructure before anyone could imagine what to build on it.
The organizational equivalent is similarly hard to see in advance. It is likely that packet-switched, AI-native organizations will not just do existing organizational things more efficiently, but that they will do things that are not currently possible. There might be organizations that form around specific problems and dissolve when the problem is solved, rather than persisting as structures in search of purpose, or expertise that routes to where it is needed rather than being allocated by headcount. We might have large groups with a degree of strategic flexibility and sophistication that have never existed together – we might get political or creative movements in radically different shapes because of that. We are definitely going to see an evolution in the creation, management and use of institutional memory. Training will probably look very different, as will job descriptions.
And almost certainly: we will get things we cannot name yet. Nobody in 1975 could have described Google, or Facebook, or VOIP, or even Google Docs.
The phone company’s engineers built something extraordinary. The Bell System was a genuine engineering achievement, and the people who designed it were some of the best technical minds of their era. They lost anyway. Networks are more robust, once the infrastructure to support them exists, and the right protocols to create and maintain them are adopted.
My bet is that the organizations of the future, the ones that compete and thrive, will make use of AI to build networks the same way the internet made use of those cheap processors and new protocols to build huge scale and new capabilities.
This will feel controversial, and might even be worse at first, but networks always win. The age of centrally planned organizations is coming to an end…
Eminently worth reading in full. Chaos that scales: “The Network Always Beats the Castle,” via @timoreilly.bsky.social.
See also: Benedict Evans‘ “AI, tools and transformation“:
… With every new technology, we start by using it for the work we already have, and we just do that more and faster. But then, over time, you make entirely new things. We will use AI to automate broad classes of stuff inside existing workflows and existing companies (although, as I’ve outlined above, that will be enormously more trouble and work than just giving everybody a model). But with every previous platform shift, the stuff that actually mattered was the stuff that wasn’t even possible before and that no-one even imagined…
And by way of keeping all of this in perspective, see Henry Farrell‘s “Machine god metaphors eat your brain” and Max Read‘s “Between 5 and 14 thoughts about AI and the discourse cycle.”
(Image above: source)
* Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man” (from Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)
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As we try to peer over the horizon, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to a man whose work has helped propel the advances we’re pondering: James Hardy Wilkinson; he was born on this date in 1919. A mathematician, he is best known for his pioneering work in numerical analysis and numerical linear algebra, especially in the context of high-speed digital computing. In 1970 he won the ACM Turing Award.
Wilkinson with his Turing Award (source) #AI #artificialIntelligence #circuitSwitching #corporations #culture #HenryFarrell #history #JamesHWilkinson #JamesWilkinson #Mathematics #organizations #packetSwitching #SamSchillace #Technology #TimOReilly -
Lakekeeper и Apache Polaris: сравниваем REST-каталоги для Iceberg
Спор о формате таблиц для lakehouse , похоже, закончился, Iceberg сегодня поддерживают Trino, Spark, ClickHouse, Snowflake и дальше по списку, так что следующим приходится выбирать каталог. Каталог хранит указатель на актуальную версию таблицы, проводит commit и решает, кому эту таблицу читать, поэтому по весу я бы поставил этот выбор рядом с выбором СУБД. В статье разбираю Lakekeeper , это один бинарник на Rust и обычный Postgres для метаданных, права на OpenFGA до отдельной таблицы и механизм ContractVerification, который может отклонить commit, если тот ломает контракт данных. Для сравнения рядом Apache Polaris , проект фонда Apache на Java с RBAC в два уровня и федерацией внешних каталогов. В конце описан стек из банковского проекта (RustFS, Lakekeeper с Postgres, SeaTunnel, NiFi, Trino и ClickHouse), который развернули на своём железе за три дня и через три недели вывели в тестовую эксплуатацию.
https://habr.com/ru/articles/1087262/
#lakekeeper #apache_polaris #apache_iceberg #iceberg_rest_catalog #dwh #контракты_данных #хранилище_данных #datalakehouse #data_mesh #data_governance
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Lakekeeper и Apache Polaris: сравниваем REST-каталоги для Iceberg
Спор о формате таблиц для lakehouse , похоже, закончился, Iceberg сегодня поддерживают Trino, Spark, ClickHouse, Snowflake и дальше по списку, так что следующим приходится выбирать каталог. Каталог хранит указатель на актуальную версию таблицы, проводит commit и решает, кому эту таблицу читать, поэтому по весу я бы поставил этот выбор рядом с выбором СУБД. В статье разбираю Lakekeeper , это один бинарник на Rust и обычный Postgres для метаданных, права на OpenFGA до отдельной таблицы и механизм ContractVerification, который может отклонить commit, если тот ломает контракт данных. Для сравнения рядом Apache Polaris , проект фонда Apache на Java с RBAC в два уровня и федерацией внешних каталогов. В конце описан стек из банковского проекта (RustFS, Lakekeeper с Postgres, SeaTunnel, NiFi, Trino и ClickHouse), который развернули на своём железе за три дня и через три недели вывели в тестовую эксплуатацию.
https://habr.com/ru/articles/1087262/
#lakekeeper #apache_polaris #apache_iceberg #iceberg_rest_catalog #dwh #контракты_данных #хранилище_данных #datalakehouse #data_mesh #data_governance
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Data shows England made inroads against Spain but they must be more clinical | Andrew Beasley
By Andrew BeasleyThomas Tuchel’s side had 36 touches in the Spain penalty area at Wembley but were given a lesson in taking chances
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/sep/28/england-spain-penalty-box-touches-nations-league
#NationsLeague #England #Spain #Football #Sport #TheGuardian #AndrewBeasley
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Data shows England made inroads against Spain but they must be more clinical | Andrew Beasley
By Andrew BeasleyThomas Tuchel’s side had 36 touches in the Spain penalty area at Wembley but were given a lesson in taking chances
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/sep/28/england-spain-penalty-box-touches-nations-league
#NationsLeague #England #Spain #Football #Sport #TheGuardian #AndrewBeasley
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Data shows England made inroads against Spain but they must be more clinical | Andrew Beasley
By Andrew BeasleyThomas Tuchel’s side had 36 touches in the Spain penalty area at Wembley but were given a lesson in taking chances
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/sep/28/england-spain-penalty-box-touches-nations-league
#NationsLeague #England #Spain #Football #Sport #TheGuardian #AndrewBeasley
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Data Shows That Flu Is Off To An Early Start This Year!
#COVID19 #SARSCoV2 #Pandemic #CovidIsNotOver #CovidIsAirborne #H5N1 #Measles #WhoopingCough #RSV #Norovirus #Tuberculosis #Polio #Mpox #MaskUp #N95 #KeepMasksInHealthcare
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Data Shows That Flu Is Off To An Early Start This Year!
#COVID19 #SARSCoV2 #Pandemic #CovidIsNotOver #CovidIsAirborne #H5N1 #Measles #WhoopingCough #RSV #Norovirus #Tuberculosis #Polio #Mpox #MaskUp #N95 #KeepMasksInHealthcare
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Random Old Comic: Waste Reclamation https://www.toyboxcomix.com/2022/02/11/waste-reclamation/ Waste Reclamation #Data #GeordiLaForge #StarTrek