Kevin Drum

Here is part of the New York Times write-up of the PRRI poll that I posted about this morning:

The Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core found a strong correlation between where people get their news and how much they believe in QAnon’s ideas. Among those who said they most trusted far-right news outlets, such as One America News Network and Newsmax, two in five qualified as full-on QAnon believers. Fully 48 percent of these news consumers said they expected a storm to wipe away the elites soon.

That puts these news consumers far out of alignment with the rest of the country — even fans of the conservative-leaning Fox News. Among respondents who preferred Fox News above other sources, 18 percent were QAnon believers.

There you have it. Now that the world contains Newsmax, Fox News is merely "conservative leaning." The working of the refs is officially complete.

This started out as a Black-eyed Susan vine and ended up as an abstract design after I got done playing with it. Why did I do this? I just felt like it. The original picture was nothing special, so why not futz around and have some fun?

PRRI released a survey today about QAnon believers that mostly contains no surprises. Believers tend to be Republican, white, low-income, evangelical, etc. Here's a chart showing that if you believe in one conspiracy theory, you believe in all of them:

If this polling is correct, it shows the danger of our newfound belief that the coronavirus might have been released from the Wuhan lab. It's one thing to believe in an accidental release, but this poll suggests that 39 percent of Americans believe the virus was intentionally developed by Chinese scientists. This is a very different thing, and there's convincing genomic evidence that it's not true.

So let's be careful with the lab leak theory, OK? Reporters need to take extra care when they write about it to distinguish between an accidental release (possible) and some kind of engineered virus (very unlikely).

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 26. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I have the peculiar ability to wake up anytime I want without an alarm clock, and apparently my unconscious mind can do this too. I had already decided not to bother with the lunar eclipse this morning, but at about 3:30 I woke up, allegedly to "go to the bathroom." But as my unconscious mind knew, once I was up I'd be sure to look out the window to check out the moon, and that was that. It took only a few seconds to decide that as long as I was up I might as well shoot a few pictures.

The sky here in Irvine was mostly clear near the horizon, with only wisps of clouds here and there. Here's a closeup of the moon a few minutes after the end of totality. As you can see, with the moon in eclipse stars are clearly visible—though I don't know what they are:

And here's a wider angle view right at the start of totality:

On Sunday 14 people died when a cable car in Italy crashed to the ground just a few feet from its destination. But why? One of the primary cables snapped, but the emergency brake should have held the car in place. Why didn't it?

Service had resumed on 25 April as Italy eased coronavirus lockdown restrictions. Technical checks were done, including a check on 3 May to “remedy inefficiencies”, but they had not been “decisive” in resolving issues, investigators said.

In order to avoid delays to the service, a device that deactivates the emergency brakes was kept in place. Had the emergency brakes activated, they would have held the cabin steady after the cable snapped. The move was made “in the belief that a cable breakage could never have happened”.

Unbelievable.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through May 25. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Well, this is embarrassing. Not only is this not Mount Whitney, it's not within a hundred miles of Mount Whitney. A look through the original series of photos tells me that this picture was taken while heading south on US 395 just before the Mammoth Lakes exit. That makes it Laurel Mountain . . . I think? Which clocks in at a puny 11,818 feet.

The original post, in all its mistaken glory, is below.

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This is Mount Whitney, highest mountain in the contiguous US at 14,505 feet. It beats Mount Elbert in Colorado by 65 feet, which just goes to show the misfortune of being #2 by even a tiny amount (less than half a percent in this case). After all, who's ever heard of Mount Elbert?

I chose to render this in shades of gray instead of the high contrast that's more typical of black-and-white alpine photos. Not only was this more faithful to my recollection, but it just seemed right.

QUIZ: Everyone knows that Denali is the highest peak in the US. Without looking it up, what's the second highest?

It's pet peeve time! Perhaps you've seen this image:

The one on the left is the original. The bowdlerized one on the right is the image that went into the Bartram Trail High School yearbook after the faculty advisor decided to hide the cleavage from 80 different pictures of senior girls. We have been assured that many of the alterations are clumsier than this one, to the point where they almost look like parodies.

Make no mistake: this was a dumb thing to do. So what's my peeve?

Here it is. This dumb little local squabble has been on the main page of the Washington Post for three days. It was on the main page of the New York Times. It was on the main page of the Guardian. Also the BBC, USA Today, CNBC, HuffPost, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, NPR, CBS News, NBC News, and probably others. I'm not counting any of the dozens of mentions it got in local media.

In the dim past—20 years ago?—this would have remained a dumb little local controversy in St. Johns, Florida, which is exactly what it deserves. Today it gets national attention. Why do we keep doing this? In a country the size of the United States, there are dozens of these neighborhood kerfuffles every day. They mean nothing. And yet, because they're clickbait, national news organizations blare them as if they're real news. As a result, everyone ends up believing they are real news and a thousand Twitter ships are launched in outrage.

Stop it.

Is it better to ignore assholes who live for publicity, or do their lies need to be highlighted and fought to prevent them from settling in by default?

This is an eternal question, but I would like to suggest that in the case of Marjorie Taylor Greene the answer has become obvious: ignore her.

Please.