How did Trump win? Or more to the point, how did Trump win given that he only had a 38 percent favorability rating among people who voted on Election Day? The answer is partly the Electoral College, of course. But it’s also that Clinton was really, really unpopular herself — almost as unpopular as Trump — with a favorability rating of just 43 percent among Election Day voters. Also, the substantial number of voters who disliked both Clinton and Trump went to Trump by a 17-point margin. Voters really weren’t willing to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt. That’s largely because Clinton was viewed as dishonest and untrustworthy, exactly the sort of message that the Russian campaign (which used hashtags such as #Hillary4Prison) was trying to cultivate. Trump, of course, was trying to cultivate this message too. Media coverage often struck the same themes. And voters sometimes heard variations on this theme from Sanders and his supporters in the more contentious moments of the Democratic primaries. Was some of this Clinton’s fault? Yep, of course. Would Clinton still have been “Crooked Hillary” even without the Russians? Almost certainly. But the Russians were at least adding fuel to the right fire — the one that wound up consuming Clinton’s campaign. The indictment also alleges that the Russian conspirators sought to suppress African-American turnout. A decline in black turnout was an important — perhaps even decisive — factor in Clinton’s defeat, although it may have been inevitable given that Barack Obama, the first African-American president, had been on the ballot in 2012.

How Much Did Russian Interference Affect The 2016 Election? | FiveThirtyEight

With regard to the last point, the various voter suppression tactics enacted by Republican legislatures need to be taken into consideration as well.

(via dendroica)

coffees-and-cats:

delcat:

unexplained-events:

Mine Kafon by Massoud Hassani

Hassani, a product designer from Afganistan, build (by hand) a wind-powered device that trips land mines as it rolls across the ground. It is made using bamboo and biodegradable products.

Many of these mines are active and near populated areas in countries like Afganistan and are hard to remove. The UN says that one mine clearance specialist is killed, and two injured, for every 5,000 mines cleared.

Hassani’s cheap and easy to make method has been achieving great results.

SOURCE

In a world of overcomplicated solutions, we need more people who think “Wait, why don’t we just roll a giant freaking ball over it?”

this guy made a katamari for landmines

prokopetz:

Just saying “I don’t watch TV” sounds pretentious, but there’s a big difference between “I don’t watch TV because I feel that the entertainment of the common masses is beneath me”, and “I don’t watch TV because I’m too busy marathoning YouTube videos of a guy 100% clearing Super Mario 64 without pressing the A button”.

We had vegan friends who handled the cat food tin in the same way that people at Sellafield handle something that’s started to tick. In the end, they worked out a vegetarian diet with the occasional treat of fish. Their cat was a young Siamese. It thrived on the stuff. Of course it did. It used to go out and hang around the organic goat shed, and ate more rats and mice than its owners had hot dinners, which wasn’t hard. But it was very understanding about it, and never let them know. We occasionally saw it trotting over the garden with something fluffy in its mouth, and it used to give us looks of conspiratorial embarrassment, like a Methodist minister caught enjoying a pint.

Terry Pratchett, “The Unadulterated Cat” (via noirandchocolate)