Month: October 2022

Over at Slate, Molly Olmsted writes about the apocalypse. That is, the real apocalypse:

If you peruse the list of recent releases in Christian publishing, you’ll get the sense that “the end times” are upon us. This summer saw the release of survival guides, books about current events, and prayer manuals all oriented around a rapture, a second coming of Christ, or an otherwise cataclysmic event at the hands of God.

According to Publishers Weekly, this spate of end-times books is being printed to meet demand. It’s what the readers want....There’s no denying that the apocalypse is currently having a moment, culturally and politically. It could be driven partly by the pandemic and fears of climate change. Those are actual, frightening apocalyptic scourges. Russia’s war has also set off alarm bells for certain evangelicals, as there was a Cold War tradition of identifying the country, variably, with Gog or Magog.

Back in the mid-80s I had a friend at work who was really into this stuff. When I first met him he was convinced that the Ayatollah Khomeini was the Antichrist. He could reel off all of Khomeini's similarities to the biblical description and he could equally easily reel off all the reasons that the current era (i.e., 1985) matched the biblical prophecies of the apocalypse.

That never really worked out, and by the time of the Gulf War he had changed his mind and decided that Saddam Hussein was the Antichrist. He even wrote a whole book about it that he made me read.

I got a new job shortly after that and mostly lost touch with him. But we still ran into each other occasionally, and the last time I saw him he had switched horses again to Osama bin Laden. There was no book this time, but he had no trouble describing in detail how Osama fit descriptions of the Antichrist and how the events of 2001 fit descriptions of the end times.

Because of this I'm not so convinced that interest in the end times is especially new. As Olmstead acknowledges, The Late Great Planet Earth was published in 1970 and sold 28 million copies, while the Left Behind series was published starting in 1995 and sold 65 million copies. Evangelicals have long loved Israel not because they love Jews, but because they believe its existence is necessary in order for it to be destroyed to fulfill biblical prophecies. Beyond that, millenarianist cults have been common in American history for the past couple of centuries. The fact that their predictions never turn out to be true never stops them. New cults just spring up with different dates for the end of days.¹

Apocalyptic thinking seems to come in waves, but the current wave does seem a little different. In the Left Behind series, for example, the Antichrist turns out to be the Secretary General of the UN. But there's no Antichrist this time around. Apocalyptic thinking instead focuses on the man who's going to fight the Antichrist, our good friend Donald Trump.

Trump might seem an odd candidate for this role, but there you have it. During the first 15 years of the 21st century evangelical Christians became increasingly despondent about their fate. Membership was down; secularism was growing; the old guard evangelical leaders were dead or retired; and liberals seemed to be winning cultural battles all over the place. By the time the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, they were close to despair.

And then Trump showed up. And he fought. And he told them not to despair, because we could fight the liberals and their wokeism and libertine values. Evangelicals rejoiced at having a new champion, and that's why they love him even though he's hardly a poster boy for family values. Sinners can be forgiven, after all.

It's also why they don't care when liberals point out every new episode of non-Christian behavior on Trump's part. It's small potatoes. When you're fighting the coming of the Antichrist, you need someone tough, not someone perfect. Trump may be a bastard, but he's their bastard.

Unfortunately, this resurgence of end times-ism among conservative Christians has recently been matched by a secular version among many liberals. For them, Donald Trump is the Antichrist and the end times are marked by the overturn of democracy; the horror of climate change; and a string of conservative cultural victories (of which Dobbs is just the beginning). This is one of the things that has made American politics so polarized: to a large extent, both sides are no longer just fighting over politics, but over literal apocalypses that have them scared shitless. It's a big problem.

¹This should come as no surprise. Human history is full of evil and tragedy, and practically any decade you pick has people who are pretty good candidates for Antichrist-hood, along with plenty of terrible events that seem apocalyptic indeed (wars, famine, disease, earthquakes, etc.).

This cracks me up:

Anti-trans activist Caroline Farrow portrayed her arrest as an aggressive response to "some insulting messages on the internet”

She failed to mention she was arrested for doxing trans woman @flyinglawyer73 who this week received an arson threat...https://t.co/ilHYx9Bbls

— David Gilbert (@daithaigilbert) October 6, 2022

Based on the gigantic picture, you'd think that J.K. Rowling—who lives in Scotland—had been arrested recently by the Surrey police for her anti-trans activism. But no: It was Caroline Farrow who was arrested, and she is nothing more than an "ally" of Rowling, whatever that means.

Clickbait, clickbait, clickbait.

This is a Cistus ladanifer in Monet's garden in Giverny. At least, that's what I think it is based on an extensive one-minute use of Google's image search engine. Good enough for blogging!

As I mentioned yesterday, the WTO forecasts a sharp slowdown in international trade next year. What does that look like in the US right now?

There's no obvious interpretation to this. Trade has been increasing steadily since 2021, and then took a sharp upward turn in March. Since then it's been declining. Is that because the economy is slowing or because it's just reverting to the mean after the March spike?

Maybe a bit of both, but it's not really possible to say yet. However, the Wall Street Journal passes this along:

New orders of overseas products are declining all over the place. The US is the strongest of the lot, but even at that it's been in negative territory since June (anything below 50 indicates a slowdown in activity).

Best guess: international trade is declining after a hot 2021. This is just another addition to dozens of pieces of evidence that all point in the same direction: Economies ran hot in 2021, producing the underlying circumstances that caused core inflation to rise. But nearly every one of these underlying factors peaked and started to decline in early 2022.

NOTE: The chart shows only trade in goods because trade in services is pretty much the same every month. Focusing on goods does a better job of illustrating the change in trade.

This is another picture from my astronomy session on Sunday night—but it's not a photo of the sky. Since everything was going well, I let the telescope camera run for as long as I could and ended up staying until about 6 am. That made it a very long night, but it also meant that it was sunrise by the time I finished packing up and got started down the mountain. At about 3,000 feet I took this picture of the infamous Southern California marine layer, still about a thousand feet below me. The rosy fingers of dawn add a hint of color to the scene.

Here is a routine cri de coeur about the national debt over at National Review:

We are doomed:

Bottom-line: the party’s over. Current levels of federal borrowing are completely untenable. America’s flirtation with Modern Monetary Theory must come to an end. And we better course correct quickly. Otherwise, we might soon be staring down the barrel of a debt crisis.

How long have conservatives been screaming about this? Since the '80s? The '50s? The Great Depression? And nothing has ever happened. But they keep screaming and screaming anyway without even a shred of evidence that the national debt is actually a problem.

Here is US national debt compared to Japan:

Japan has been at allegedly catastrophic levels for decades, but it seems to keep serenely swimming along anyway. Conservatives have invented plenty of answers for this—aging population, higher savings rates, cultural differences, etc. etc.—but none of that withstands scrutiny. They simply can't deal with the fact that a big industrial economy with its own currency has been able to survive and even prosper with a national debt more than twice as big as our own.

As for us, our national debt goes up during recessions (1991, 2008, 2020) when we run deficits—as we should—and is otherwise pretty flat. There's really nothing dangerous going on.

On a related topic, here is how much we pay in interest charges on the national debt:

Ronald Reagan blew up interest payments back when tax cuts for the rich were going to supercharge the economy, but Bill Clinton put things right and interest payments have been steady ever since the end of his term. The only time they've risen significantly in the post-Reagan era is when Republicans cut taxes (2003, 2017). As a result, interest payments on the debt were lower in 2021 than they were in 1950.

And yet conservatives and Republicans keep up the same old schtick forever and ever, even though nothing ever happens. The national debt is unsustainable! We must change course immediately! Cutting taxes on the rich and cutting welfare payments to the poor is the only answer!

Come on. Don't just keep yelling "unsustainable!" and pretending it's an actual argument. Show us the receipts or stfu. It's probably not correct to literally say that the national debt doesn't matter, but a hundred years of experience shows that it doesn't matter very much.

Three researchers recently decided to take a look at how different kinds of students do in STEM courses at the university level. So they gathered up more than 100,000 records and then controlled for high school prep and desire to attain a STEM degree. Given that, how did different students respond to modest setbacks? Here's the answer:

A DFW is a low grade (D or F) or a withdrawal from an introductory STEM class. The highlighted column, for example, shows students who are similar in preparation, similar in desire for a STEM degree, and who had one bad result in an introductory STEM course. With all those things the same, how many of them stuck with STEM and eventually graduated?

• White male: 33%
• Black male: 16%
• White female: 28%
• Black female: 15%

Here's another way of looking at the data. The first column shows graduation rates for students who never had any bad results:

• Black men graduated at 64% of the rate of white men.
• Black women graduated at 68% of the rate of white women.

The third column shows graduation rates for students who had several bad results:

• Black men graduated at 37% of the rate of white men.
• Black women graduated at 42% of the rate of white women.

Even among equally prepared students, setbacks in intro courses had a far bigger negative effect on Black STEM students than white STEM students. Conversely, setbacks had very little differential effect on male and female students.

Needless to say, this research hangs entirely on whether all these students really had similar high school prep. I can't judge that, so others will have to. But assuming the researchers did at least a creditable job of controlling for preparedness, their results show that Black STEM students are far more likely than white students to abandon STEM in the face of moderate difficulties.

Why is this? Was preparedness not as equal as the researchers thought? Are Black students more likely than white students to believe themselves unqualified in the face of a few early setbacks? Are struggling Black students less likely than white students to seek out help? Or to get it? Are STEM programs full of racists who will use any excuse to boot out Black students who show even the slightest vulnerability? We don't know. But the authors think we ought to look beyond solutions that focus on things like bridge programs, undergraduate research experiences, and remedial courses, since their research suggests that better preparedness doesn't do much good. Instead we should look more deeply at "institutional transformation."

I don't have the chops to comment on this. But this research is only a start, and the first step, obviously, is to confirm or refute it with further studies.

Golly:

World trade in goods is set to slow sharply next year, possibly easing high inflation but raising the risk of a global recession, a new forecast shows. Surging energy costs and rising interest rates are weakening household demand across the globe, a dynamic that could cause exports and imports to increase by just 1% in 2023, the World Trade Organization said Wednesday. That is down from a previous forecast of 3.4%.

Jerome Powell is going to go down in history as the second worst Fed chair ever.

Earlier today I ran across a headline in the Wall Street Journal informing us that job openings were down in August. That sounded interesting, so I pulled up the data to take a look.

Down? I should say so:

Yikes! In the space of a single month we lost more than a million job openings. With the exception of the first month of the pandemic (not shown in the chart) this is more than double the next biggest loss over the entire past decade.

One way or another, employers decided in the blink of an eye to withdraw 1.1 million job openings. Is this the start of the jobs recession the Fed is so desperate to inflict on us?

This is phase 3 of my Andromeda Galaxy imaging. I took this near the top of Palomar Mountain, which isn't as dark as the desert but makes up for it with 5,000 feet of elevation.

Although my imaging session started out poorly, it ended up going very well. The sky was dark and clear; focus was good; the meridian flip executed without a hitch; I finally got a really good calibration on my guide camera; polar alignment was perfect; and autoguiding worked about as well as it can. The final image uses 47 stacked five-minute exposures

The main difference between this one and the phase two image is that the longer exposure time does a better job of showing the cloudy periphery around the core of the galaxy. It's a matter of opinion which one is the prettier photograph—I'd pick the phase two image—but the phase three picture is unquestionably sharper and shows much more detail.

This is my final image of Andromeda. Given my current level of skill, it's about as good as I can do, and I never planned to spend a lot of time on it in the first place. But with my basic skills now fairly complete, it's time to move on to other targets. The moon will keep me indoors for the next couple of weeks, but I should have something nice to show you three or four weeks from now.

UPDATE: In order to match the orientation of the other two photos, I initially flipped the phase 3 photo. That was a mistake, so I re-edited the image later and rotated it instead of flipping it. I also did the sharpening and de-noising more carefully, and toned down the color a bit. The star fields at top left and bottom right were artificially added after the rotation, which does no harm.