Midterm Elections | Homo Occidendum | America’s Water & Infrastructure Crisis

Following last night’s midterm elections, Democrats have the majority in the House while Republicans retain their reign over the Senate. 

– Republicans won the gubernatorial and senate race in Florida. (NPR)

– It looks very likely that Republicans will have won the governorship in Georgia.

– Texas Senator Ted Cruz won over Beto O’Rourke.

– At age 29, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. (CNN)

– Democrats gained a governor seat in Kansas. (Vox)

– Florida passed Amendment 4, granting voting rights to 1.5 million ex-felons. (Vox)

– Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar became the first Muslim woman elected to congress. (CNN)

– Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland became the first Native American women elected to congress. (CNN)

– Colorado elected the first openly gay governor, Jared Polis. (CNN)

– North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp lost her Senate seat to Republican Kevin Cramer. (CNN)

– Arkansas voted to increase minimum wage to $11 by 2021 and Missouri voted to increase their minimum wage to $12 by 2023. (Vox)

– Massachusetts voted to uphold Transgender rights. (Boston)

– A West Point classmate, John James (Republican), who reported to Pnut’s publisher as a senior in their last semester at school lost in his Senate campaign in Michigan. Another classmate who worked in the same section as the two of us was Michael Cerrone. He was 24 years old when he was killed in combat 12 years ago in a car bomb in Iraq. America is special because of men like Michael.

Potential Attack On Macron Foiled: Six individuals, five men and a woman, were arrested by French security services in Brittany, northeast and southeast France. On Tuesday a judicial source said an investigation was taking place into a “criminal terrorist association” suspected of plotting a violent attack against President Emmanuel Macron. The arrests occurred as Macron was touring the battlefields of northern France to mark the 100th anniversary of the World War One Armistice. Last year police arrested a 23-year-old man for plotting to kill Macron at the Bastille Day parade on July 14. (BBC)

Do Not Raise Them Up Down Under: A government-backed policy announced over the weekend, to give priority boarding to veterans on some commercial airlines in Australia, has back-fired. The plan, part of a broader push to recognize veterans, included having airlines make in-flight announcements acknowledging a veteran’s service. Critics, among them many veterans, said the idea of singling out servicemen and women for special treatment was at odds with the country’s egalitarian national ethos. In fact, not only was the policy distinctly un-Australian, it was something even worse: an Americanism. (NYT)

A Tilted Legacy: Something besides freedom and democracy happened to East Germans when the Berlin Wall came down 29 years ago November 9th. Some men lost wives who went west to look for work and never came back. Today, no one embodies the frustrations of those eastern men, or has been more the object of their ire, than Angela Merkel, an eastern woman who rose to the pinnacle of power and provides a daily reminder of their own failure. Living standards in the East still lag behind those in the West, and it only got worse after the influx of immigrants in 2015. Last year a third of the men in Saxony cast ballots for the far-right AdF party. Said the minister for integration in Saxony: “We had a crisis of masculinity in the East and it is feeding the far right.” (NYT)

AI: African Intelligence: Samasource is a San Francisco-based company that counts Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and Yahoo among its clients. It employs more than 1,000 poor Kenyans, who live and come to work in one of Africa’s worst slums, to create training data — information, images– that computers will understand. It’s a side of artificial intelligence most people hear little about. Yet the information prepared in the building housing this “slum school” forms a crucial part of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest and most famous efforts in AI. (BBC)

– “China greenlights large batch of Ivanka Trump trademark applications:Ivanka Trump-branded semiconductors and voting machines? In China?” (WaPo)

– “The Arab Winter Is Coming: Gulf states are asserting themselves more than ever, and that’s a problem for the U.S.” (Atlantic)

– “The Rhine, a Lifeline of Germany, Is Crippled by Drought: One of the longest dry spells on record has left part of the Rhine in Germany at record-low levels for months, forcing freighters to reduce their cargo or stop plying the river altogether.” (NYT)

– “Britain’s populist party has an Infowars editor for a spokesman. Jewish leaders are worried.” (WaPo)

Everything Is Bigger (And More Complicated) In Texas: Texas has one of the strictest voter-ID laws in the country; the Republican-controlled state legislature has made it as hard as possible. And Texas has all but banned voter-registration drives, which is how many low-income and minority voters are registered, through laws that bar anyone but a deputy voter registrar in a particular county from registering voters in that county. If they tried to register a voter in another county, even they would be breaking the law. From trying to register to casting a ballot, it is hard to vote in Texas, maybe harder than in any other state. It’s part of a national GOP effort to maintain political control through scorched-earth culture-war campaigns that target historically disfavored minorities and the disenfranchisement of the populations whose growth and influence could challenge that control. (Atlantic)

A Town Grieves Their Fallen Hero: The 39-year-old mayor of North Ogden, Utah, a popular family man, was also an officer in the Utah National Guard. Saturday in Kabul, Afghanistan, Major Brent Taylor was killed in what authorities are calling an insider attack. (NPR)

– “‘I’m Very Worried About Don Jr.”: Forget the Midterms—West Wing Insiders Brace for the Mueller Storm” (Vanity Fair)

– “Rural America’s Own Private Flint: Polluted Water Too Dangerous to Drink: Nitrates, a common farming byproduct from manure spreading, have been linked to an array of serious health risks.” (NYT)

– “Right-Wing Hate Groups Are Recruiting Video Gamers” (NPR)

– “Why Don’t Young People Vote? This System Doesn’t Want Them To.:Don’t lament young people’s apathy, consider what’s making them apathetic.” (Slate)

– “A Slow-Motion Coup in Tennessee: For years, Republicans in this state have attempted to undermine the foundation of democratic government: the vote.” (NYT)

– “Why So Many Kentuckians Are Barred From Voting on Tuesday, and for Life” (NYT)

– “Why has Nike’s founder given a record amount to a Republican candidate?: Phil Knight’s unprecedented donation in the Oregon governor’s race has raised questions ahead of the US midterms” (Guardian)

– “Interstellar object may have been alien probe, Harvard paper argues, but experts are skeptical: The object, nicknamed ‘Oumuamua, meaning “a messenger that reaches out from the distant past” in Hawaiian, was discovered in October 2017.” (CNN)

– “Spanking Is Ineffective and Harmful to Children, Pediatricians’ Group Says” (NYT)

– “Learning to Read in Your 30s Profoundly Transforms the Brain: The learning process leads to a reorganization that extends to deep brain structures.” (Nautilus)

– “The Problem With Being Perfect: A trait that’s often seen as good can actually be destructive. Here’s how to combat it.” (Atlantic)

– “Here’s Why [Insert Thing Here] Is Not a Password Killer” (Troy Hunt)

– “5 Simple Windows Security Tips You’ve Got No Excuse to Ignore” (Gizmodo)

– “Fox News Is Poisoning America. Rupert Murdoch and His Heirs Should Be Shunned.” (The Intercept)

– “Can the Republic Strike Back?” (Intelligencer)

– “Blasphemy, Pakistan’s New Religion” (NYT)

– “Ballot Initiatives Are Powerful. The Powerful Have Noticed.: In California, wealth and stealth have often subverted the goals of measures that have impacted nearly every facet of life in the state.” (NYT)

– “The American civil war didn’t end. And Trump is a Confederate president: His supporters hark back to an 1860s fantasy of white male dominance. But the Confederacy won’t win in the long run” (Guardian)

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