October 17 2024

1. State Polling Errors Could Affect Electoral College Outcome
2. National Development in Disaster-Prone Areas Surges, Led by Florida
3. Carl Sagan’s 1995 Forecast for America
4. US Airstrikes Target Houthi Weapon Sites in Yemen, Deploying B-2 Stealth Bombers
5. Giant Pandas Return to Washington D.C. Zoo, Marking US-China Diplomatic Progress; Pandamonium Ensues
October 17 1973: OPEC enacts oil embargo

See the new Ad Astra Podcast! Released on Apple and Spotify around 10a CST.

Editors note: We’re still waiting on Israel’s retaliatory strike on Iran. It will come and when it does, we’ll cover it.

1. State Polling Errors Could Affect Electoral College Outcome

State-level polls, often less accurate than national ones, have historically underestimated key candidates in tight races. With the Electoral College in focus, even small polling misses could determine the 2024 presidential winner.  A look at polling averages over time shows that the last two cycles were not outside the scope of previous elections. But this year, amid another tight presidential race, even a small polling miss could vastly misjudge the outcome. Every cycle, the polls diverge from the election results to some extent. It’s inevitable when pollsters can only make estimates about who will show up to vote, some people only make up their minds in the voting booth, and bombshells may drop late in the race. Data from the past four decades shows that the polls do not always bias one party over the other, and that past performance can’t predict how the polls will do the next time around. The polls in the 2022 midterms, for example, were some of the most accurate in years. To judge the accuracy of presidential polls, the charts in this article show averages that combine many polls into one estimate for each election. Between 1988 and 2020, the final national polling average was off by an average of 2.3 percentage points. Some years were better than others: In 2008, the national polling average missed the final result for Barack Obama by less than one percentage point on average; in 1996, it overestimated the support for Bill Clinton by almost four points. State-level polls haven’t performed quite as well. Since 2000, polls in close states have been off by an average of 3.1 points. In 2016 and 2020, nearly all of the state-level polling averages underestimated support for Mr. Trump, sometimes by a wide margin. The state polling misses have been magnified in the last two presidential elections — two very close races that heightened the importance of the Electoral College.  

Article Source: NYT

2. National Development in Disaster-Prone Areas Surges, Led by Florida

Florida built 77,000 new properties in high-risk flood areas since 2019, the most in the nation, according to an analysis by climate-modeling firm First Street Foundation for The Wall Street Journal.  The building binge is putting the real-estate industry, and the banks that finance it, on a collision course with insurers.  The new construction is one reason insurance bills for Milton and Helene are expected to be between $40 billion and $75 billion, according to ratings firm Morningstar DBRS. Big payouts from natural disasters are driving insurers to raise rates and pull back on coverage.  Nationally, 290,000 new properties were built in high-risk flood areas from 2019 through 2023, almost one in five of the 1.6 million built in total in that period, the First Street analysis found.  Other states with heavy new construction in areas at high risk of flooding include Texas, with 63,000 properties since 2019, California with 21,000 properties, and North Carolina with 11,000, the First Street analysis found.  Americans moved to risky areas as they became more vulnerable because of climate change. In the decade through 2020, the U.S. population overall grew 7.4% but rose 10.2% in the South and 9.2% in the West, including areas vulnerable to storms and wildfires, according to ratings firm AM Best.  Home insurers racked up more than $32 billion in underwriting losses in the four years through last year, according to ratings firm S&P Global. The result is premiums “have nowhere to go but up,” Morningstar said in a research note on Monday.

Article Source: WSJ

3. Carl Sagan’s 1995 Forecast for America

Carl Sagan, writing in 1995, had a dark vision of a future that looks a little like this. “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. “The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), the lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

Article Source: WaPo

4. US Airstrikes Target Houthi Weapon Sites in Yemen, Deploying B-2 Stealth Bombers

The U.S. military conducted airstrikes in Yemen against the Iranian-backed Houthis, targeting five underground weapons storage sites, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement late Wednesday. The strikes were carried out by B-2 Spirit bombers, marking the first use of these strategic stealth bombers against the Houthis.  “This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened, or fortified,” Austin said in the statement.  He added that the deployment of B-2 long-range bombers demonstrated “U.S. global strike capabilities” to take action anytime and anywhere. The targeted facilities housed weapon components of the type used in attacks on military and civilian vessels in the region, the statement said.  

Editors note: Using high-tech stealth bombers worth billions of dollars to target ragtag militias in caves firing missiles worth thousands of dollars is a losing strategy. Meanwhile, the Red Sea remains a no-go zone for commercial shipping.

Article Source: WaPo

5. Giant Pandas Return to Washington D.C. Zoo, Marking US-China Diplomatic Progress; Pandamonium Ensues

After an 8,000-mile journey from China, Washington’s two new giant pandas arrived at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo on Tuesday, delighting panda fans and continuing a conservation program that goes back more than half a century.  Almost a year after D.C.’s last giant pandas left for China, Qing Bao, a 3-year-old female, and Bao Li, a 3-year-old male, arrived at the zoo on Connecticut Avenue with a police escort around 11:30 a.m.  After traveling 19 hours on a trip from Chengdu, China, with a stop in Anchorage, they had landed at Washington Dulles International Airport about 90 minutes earlier. Although the zoo said the pandas won’t make their public debut until Jan. 24, pandamania was already underway. The animals arrived on a white-and-blue FedEx Boeing 777 “Panda Express” cargo jet adorned with an image of a giant panda on its nose. The new arrivals signal a renewal of the National Zoo’s 50-year-long project to conserve, study and exhibit giant pandas. They come after concern in the past few years that the program might be in jeopardy, in part because of poor relations between the United States and China. The zoo’s giant panda program began in 1972 with a dramatic Cold War meeting between President Richard M. Nixon and Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong.

Article Source: WaPo

October 17 1973: OPEC enacts oil embargo

The Arab-dominated Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announces a decision to cut oil exports to the United States and other nations that provided military aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. According to OPEC, exports were to be reduced by 5 percent every month until Israel evacuated the territories occupied in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. In December, a full oil embargo was imposed against the United States and several other countries, prompting a serious energy crisis in the United States and other nations dependent on foreign oil.  the price of oil increased by 70 percent. At OPEC’s Tehran conference in December, oil prices were raised another 130 percent, and a total oil embargo was imposed on the United States, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Eventually, the price of oil quadrupled, causing a major energy crisis in the United States and Europe that included price gouging, gas shortages, and rationing. In March 1974, the embargo against the United States was lifted after U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger succeeded in negotiating a military disengagement agreement between Syria and Israel. Oil prices, however, remained considerably higher than their mid-1973 level. OPEC cut production several more times in the 1970s, and by 1980 the price of crude oil was 10 times what it had been in 1973. By the early 1980s, however, the influence of OPEC on world oil prices began to decline; Western nations were successfully exploiting alternate sources of energy such as coal and nuclear power, and large, new oil fields had been tapped in the United States and other non-OPEC oil-producing nations.

Sources

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/17/us/politics/national-polls-election-results.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

2. https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/florida-flood-zones-development-0593cdb9?st=wfWPph&reflink=article_copyURL_share

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/john-lanchester-consumer-price-index-who-is-government/

4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/17/us-strike-houthi-yemen-b2-bombers/

5. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/10/15/dc-new-giant-pandas-national-zoo/