States people are migrating to...

And of course, those they are leaving...


The states people really want to move to — and those they don’t

When the U.S. economy slowed during the recession, so did one of the major demographic shifts of the last several decades. For a brief respite, the Northeast and Midwest stopped shedding quite so many residents to the burgeoning Sun Belt. That trend, though — which has big consequences for politics, among other things — has been picking back up.

New census data shows the trend accelerating back to its pre-recession pace. Florida, which actually lost more domestic movers than it gained right after the housing bubble burst, picked up about 200,000 net new movers between 2014 and 2015 (this number includes people who move between states, not immigration into the United States from abroad). Illinois, meanwhile, had a net loss of about 105,000 residents, its largest one-year population leak in the 21st century.

The District of Columbia, perched between the North and South, has been a winner, too.

The other big gains over the past year were Texas (170,000 new migrants), Colorado (54,00o), and Arizona and South Carolina (both with more than 45,000 each). Not a single state in the Northeast or Midwest gained domestic movers over the last year. [...]

I think much of it can be explained as people retiring and looking for a comfortable, affordable place to retire to. Younger people are likely going where the jobs are, and where there is affordable housing. Read the whole thing for more details, lots of embedded links, and more graphs showing stats for the regions of the US, and more.

   

Talk is cheap...

...and therefore probably worth doing. And with Russia involving itself so directly in the Syrian conflict, it would be difficult to try to achieve anything there without talking to them.

Obama officials are talking to Putin more than ever
But do they have anything to show from their stepped-up dialogue?

An Obama administration debate about whether to engage Vladimir Putin or treat him like a pariah has tilted in the engagement camp’s favor—even as critics and some officials worry that it’s become too easy for the Russian president to get a stature-enhancing meeting with U.S. leaders.

When Secretary of State John Kerry heads to Moscow on Tuesday for a planned sit-down with Putin, it will be his second visit to see the Russian leader since May. It also follows three face-to-face encounters between Putin and President Barack Obama since late September. Some critics of engagement fear that Putin has, in effect, used his military intervention in Syria to win a seat at the diplomatic table, while others doubt that the increased dialogue is achieving anything.

“The skeptics are still skeptical,” said Evelyn Farkas, who departed as the Pentagon’s top official for Russia and Ukraine this fall and pushed for a generally harder line on Moscow than the White House has adopted. “You don't have any results yet for the engagement people.”

For now, sources say, Obama and Kerry in particular believe the costs of interacting with Putin are relatively low and that discussion—whose tone a senior administration official described as “not warm but not hostile,” and “businesslike”—is more likely than a freeze-out to yield progress on disputes over a peace deal for Syria and Russian aggression in Ukraine. [...]

Will anything good come of it? Who knows. Something may come of it, or it may all come to nothing. Time will tell.
     

How did the US help create IS/ISIS/Daesh?

Russia Says U.S. Policies Helped Islamic State, Interfax Reports

U.S. actions in the Middle East helped Islamic State to gain influence, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said, according to Interfax.

The strengthening of Islamic State “became possible partly due to irresponsible U.S. politics” that focused on fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad instead of joining efforts to root out terrorism, Medvedev was cited as saying in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday. President Barack Obama earlier on Sunday said that Russia is facing a strategic choice as Assad can’t stay. The Obama administration declined to comment Sunday on Medvedev’s statement. [...]

Another article I read earlier in the week, would seem to support the idea of bad US policy being partly responsible for helping create IS (Daesh). This is from an interview with Robert Ford, former US ambassador to Syria:

Why we’re not doing a better job destroying ISIS, according to the former U.S. ambassador to Syria

[...] Looking back on our policy toward Iraq and Syria, did the Obama administration do enough?

Well, the administration I think made one major mistake in both countries. Which is that it didn’t seek to implement policies that would help address underlying Sunni-Arab grievances. For example, Assad's unbelievable brutality in Syria. Removing sarin gas was a small step, but the regime still uses chemical weapons. On the Iraq side, there was a similar problem. There the administration in 2010 strongly backed Nouri al-Maliki returning as prime minster. There were some in the administration who thought that was not a good idea because he was very sectarian, but the administration went ahead anyway.

The problems that Maliki caused among Iraqis combined with Bashar al-Assad's actions in Syria created this devil’s brew that is the Islamic State. The administration is trying to address it now. They finally dropped their support of Maliki, and they’re trying to address it in a very narrow way in Syria, but it got very bad before the administration started to make changes. [...]

Sunni Muslims in both Syria and Iraq were not being represented, so they joined forces and became IS/ISIS/Daesh.

The Russians have an interest in solving this, because it's unfolding on their doorstep, and they don't want it spreading to the large Muslim population in their own country. And while Assad has been brutal, he was also fighting Sunni Muslims, many of them brutal, who became IS/ISIS/Daesh fighters.

Assad and his followers are of the Alawite Muslim sect, which are more westernized than the Sunnis. The Alawites are only around 10% of the Syrian population, whereas the Sunnis are about 74%. Historically,Sunnis have persecuted Alawites. The Sunnis outnumbered them and tried to take over, and Alawites defended themselves.

The Alawites have Iran and Russia as allies, who support keeping Assad in power.

The US got rid of Saddam in Iraq, and destabilized it. The US got rid of Qaudaffi in Libya, and destabilized it. Now the US is demanding the removal of Assad. Is it any wonder the Russians support him? Perhaps they have had enough of the US destabilizing the Middle East. One only has to look at a map to see why it matters more to Russia; it affects them more directly by proximity.

If the US wants to try to negotiate the eventual removal of Assad, they can try. But to insist on it as they are doing may be a mistake, because Russia and it's allies don't want it, and it looks as if they are going to try to use the UN to support that position as well. If they succeed at the UN, and can't be persuaded to change their minds, then continuing to insist on Assad's removal just becomes a block to further progress. Maybe the US needs to be more flexible and bend a little?

Russia may try to go it alone, but they may ultimately find they need more allies. Ideally, we should have a coalition to fight IS/ISIS/Daesh. Russia it seems, does not want to join a US led coalition. Fine, even understandable. But Russia may well find that few want to join a coalition lead by Russia.

The US and Russia would be stronger working together. But it won't happen unless both sides can learn to bend, to compromise on particular areas of concern they each have, that they currently can't agree on. That must be overcome before they can work together. Can they do it? Will they?

     

"Demographics tend to be political destiny"

Republicans’ 2016 math problem, explained in two charts

It's easy to overthink elections. I do it all the time. But at its most basic level, demographics tend to be political destiny. And that's why Dan Balz's column over the weekend, which details the difficult demographic realities facing the Republican Party in 2016 (and beyond), is so important. [...]

Read the whole thing for the two charts, embedded links and more. I think it explains a lot.

     

Who's got the better plan for Syria?

One could argue, Russia has the more realistic one:

Who Is a Better Strategist: Obama or Putin?

[...] And yet, it is hard to escape the impression that Putin has been playing his weak hand better than Obama has played his strong one. These perceptions arise in part because Obama inherited several foreign-policy debacles, and it’s hard to abandon a bunch of failed projects without being accused of retreating. Obama’s main mistake was not going far enough to liquidate the unsound positions bequeathed by his predecessor: He should have gotten out of Afghanistan faster and never done regime change in Libya at all. By contrast, Putin looks successful at first glance because Russia is playing a more active role than it did back when it was largely prostrate. Given where Russia was in 1995 or even 2000, there was nowhere to go but up.

But Putin has also done one thing right: He has pursued simple objectives that were fairly easy to achieve and that played to Russia’s modest strengths. In Ukraine, he had one overriding goal: to prevent that country from moving closer to the EU, eventually becoming a full member, and then joining NATO. He wasn’t interested in trying to reincorporate all of Ukraine or turn it into a clone of Russia, and the “frozen conflict” that now exists there is sufficient to achieve his core goal. This essentially negative objective was not that hard to accomplish because Ukraine was corrupt, internally divided, and right next door to Russia. These features made it easy for Putin to use a modest degree of force and hard for anyone else to respond without starting a cycle of escalation they could not win.

Putin’s goals in Syria are equally simple, realistic, and aligned with Russia’s limited means. He wants to preserve the Assad regime as a meaningful political entity so that it remains an avenue of Russian influence and a part of any future political settlement. He’s not trying to conquer Syria, restore the Alawites to full control over the entire country, defeat the Islamic State, or eliminate all Iranian influence. And he’s certainly not pursuing some sort of quixotic dream of building democracy there. A limited deployment of Russian airpower and a handful of “volunteers” may suffice to keep Assad from being defeated, especially if the United States and others eventually adopt a more realistic approach to the conflict as well.

By contrast, U.S. goals toward both of these conflicts have been a combination of wishful thinking and strategic contradictions. In Ukraine, a familiar alliance of neocon fantasists (e.g., Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland) and liberal internationalists convinced themselves that the EU Accession Agreement was a purely benign act whose virtues and alleged neutrality no one could possibly misconstrue. As a result, they were completely blindsided when Moscow kept using the realpolitik playbook and saw the whole matter very differently. (There was an element of hypocrisy and blindness here, too; Russia was simply acting the same way the United States has long acted when dealing with the Western Hemisphere, but somehow U.S. officials managed to ignore the clear warnings that Moscow had given.) Moreover, the core Western objective — creating a well-functioning democratic Ukrainian state — was a laudable but hugely demanding task from the very beginning, whereas Putin’s far more limited goal — keeping Ukraine out of NATO — was comparatively easy.

Needless to say, U.S. policy in Syria has been even more muddled. Since the uprising first began, Washington has been vainly trying to achieve a series of difficult and incompatible goals. It says, “Assad must go,” but it doesn’t want any jihadi groups (i.e., the only people who are really fighting Assad) to replace him. It wants to “degrade and destroy ISIS,” but it also wants to make sure anti-Islamic State groups like al-Nusra Front don’t succeed. It is relying on Kurdish fighters to help deal with the Islamic State, but it wants Turkey to help, too, and Turkey opposes any steps that might stoke the fires of Kurdish nationalism. So the United States has been searching in vain for “politically correct” Syrian rebels — those ever-elusive “moderates” — and it has yet to find more than a handful. And apart from wanting Assad gone, the long-term U.S. vision for Syria’s future was never clear. Given all this muddled direction, is it any wonder Putin’s actions look bold and decisive while Obama’s seem confused?

This difference is partly structural: Because Russia is much weaker than the United States (and destined to grow even weaker over time), it has to play its remaining cards carefully and pursue only vital objectives that are achievable at modest cost. The United States has vastly more resources to throw at global problems, and its favorable geopolitical position allows it to avoid most of the repercussions of its mistakes. Add to that the tendency of both neoconservatives and liberal internationalists to believe that spreading the gospel of “freedom” around the world is necessary, easy to do, and won’t generate unintended consequences or serious resistance, and you have a recipe for an overly ambitious yet under-resourced set of policy initiatives. Needless to say, this is the perfect recipe for recurring failure. [...]

Having a strong hand is not perhaps as important as playing well the hand you have.
*

     

Nations within Nations. Is it true?

Which of the 11 American nations do you live in?

Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government.

“The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps — including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history,” Woodard writes in the Fall 2013 issue of Tufts University’s alumni magazine. “Our continent’s famed mobility has been reinforcing, not dissolving, regional differences, as people increasingly sort themselves into like-minded communities.” [...]

See the whole article for a larger map, embedded links, and descriptions of each of the individual "nations" on the map.

This reminds me a lot of a similar map I blogged about in 2007. The older map broke up areas into even smaller areas. So which is better? Have things changed much? Or is it just a matter of perspective?
     

The State of Religion In America Today

It ain't what it used to be:

Religion in America’s states and counties, in 6 maps

[...] With what is arguably the most widely observed holiday of the nation’s most popular religion right around the corner, now seems as good a time as any to look at the state of religion in America’s states and counties. All six of the maps and data below—which depict religious popularity, diversity and adherents—come from the “2010 U.S. Religion Census: Religious Congregations & Membership Study,” an every-decade research effort sponsored by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, which gathers statistics for religious groups or scholars interested in such. [...]

Fascinating maps, of interesting categories.

The Telegraph newspaper examines some of the data in detail:

Lots of atheists, more Muslims, fewer Christians and Jews: this is the new America

[...] Did you know there are – possibly – now more religious Muslims than religious Jews in Florida? I know, it seems incredible. Miami Beach has had 15 Jewish mayors, there are getting on for 200 synagogues in South Florida – and, of course, it was the hunting ground of the despicable Bernie Madoff.

[...]

There are still more Jews than Muslims in Florida, loosely defined; these figures measure Judaism as a religion. That said, even to compare the two 20 years ago would have seemed ridiculous. Florida has a small but vibrant, growing Muslim community, half of it from India, followed by Pakistanis – only 150,000 registered voters to date. As you'd expect, 80 per cent voted for Obama in the last two elections; but in other elections they're swing voters, and in Florida you ignore those at your peril. As for the Jewish community, the retirement communities are reflecting the national picture. [...]

Read the whole thing for more interesting facts, figures and maps. And guess what is the most popular non-Christian religion in the American West? No wonder I love living out here. I can feel it.
     

USA, the world's largest oil producer?

Yep. That's where we are heading:

U.S. to become world's largest oil producer before 2020, IEA says

The U.S. will become the world’s top producer of oil within five years, a net exporter of the fuel around 2030 and nearly self-sufficient in energy by 2035, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.

It’s a bold set of predictions for a nation that currently imports some 20% of its energy needs.

Recently, however, an “energy renaissance” in the U.S. has caused a boost in oil, shale gas and bio-energy production due to new technologies such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Fuel efficiency has improved in the transportation sector. The clean energy industry has seen an influx of solar and wind efforts.

By 2015, U.S. oil production is expected to rise to 10 million barrels per day before increasing to 11.1 million bpd by 2020, overtaking second-place Russia and front-runner Saudi Arabia. The U.S. will export more oil than it brings into the country in 2030.

Around the same time, however, Saudi Arabia will be producing some 11.4 million bpd of oil, outpacing the 10.2 million from the U.S. In 2035, U.S. production will slip to 9.2 million bpd, far behind the Middle Eastern nation’s 12.3 million bpd. Iraq will exceed Russia to become the world’s second largest oil exporter.

At that point, real oil prices will reach $125 a barrel. By then, however, the U.S. won’t be relying much on foreign energy, according to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook.

Globally, the energy economy will undergo a “sea change,” according to the report, with nearly 90% of Middle Eastern oil exports redirecting toward Asia. [...]

This report also confirms the claims made by Porter Stansberry, that I referred to in an earlier post about President Obama capitalizing on an oil boom, like Teddy Roosevelt and FDR did. And with the same corrupting influences.

   

Greece has an 81 percent chance of defaulting?

Those don't sound like good odds:

Euro zone warns Greeks on sovereignty and privatization

BRUSSELS/BERLIN (Reuters) - Euro zone finance ministers have approved a 12 billion euro ($17.4 billion) installment of Greece's bailout, but signaled that the nation must expect significant losses of sovereignty and jobs.

Ministers in the Eurogroup gave the go-ahead for the fifth tranche of Greece's 110-billion-euro financial rescue agreed last year, and said details of a second aid package for Athens would be finalized by mid-September.

But within hours of Saturday's decision, Eurogroup chairman Jean-Claude Juncker warned Greeks that help from the EU and International Monetary Fund would have unpleasant consequences.

"The sovereignty of Greece will be massively limited," he told Germany's Focus magazine in the interview released on Sunday, adding that teams of experts from around the euro zone would be heading to Athens.

"One cannot be allowed to insult the Greeks. But one has to help them. They have said they are ready to accept expertise from the euro zone," Juncker said.

Greeks are acutely sensitive to any infringement of their sovereignty and any suggestion that foreign "commissars" might become involved in running the country is an incendiary political issue and could trigger more street protests.

[...]

Juncker also said Greece must privatize on a scale similar to the sell off of East German firms in the 1990s.

"For the forthcoming wave of privatizations they will need, for example, a solution based on a model of Germany's 'Treuhand agency'," Juncker said, referring to the privatization agency that sold off 14,000 East German firms between 1990 and 1994.

[...]

Financial markets still see an 81 percent chance that Greece will eventually default, and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told Der Spiegel in an interview that Berlin was making preparations for such an event -- even though it does not expect it to happen.

Private financial institutions have held talks with finance ministry and central bank officials in euro zone countries to discuss under what conditions the private sector would be willing to help finance Greece and by how much.

Those discussions continue, with the involvement of the private sector in the next package a must for several euro zone countries as voters grow increasingly opposed to shouldering the burden of bailing out Greece on their own.

But private sector involvement must be voluntary to avoid triggering another downgrade of Greek debt to default status by ratings agencies, a development which could put the whole Greek banking sector at risk. [...]

It sounds like they (the EU) knows that what they are doing is going to fail, and they are hoping that the private sector will somehow bail them out of the mess government has made? How much sense does that make? And as for their comparison to East Germany's Treuhand selloff... well. Read the whole thing. It doesn't sound promising at all.

Meanwhile, back home:

Debt ceiling: Why Sunday could be make-or-break day for 'grand bargain'

I hope they do reach a grand bargin. I have no doubt that it won't be perfect, and that it will be criticized from both sides (as compromises usually are). But compromise IS the nature of politics in a democratic republic. An even though the "bargain" will be imperfect, I think it will be better than the continuing doubt and uncertainty being created by the ongoing lack of a budget, and lack of a plan to deal with the deficit. It's dangerous; we are teetering on the edge of an abyss. And the fact that it has been allowed to go on this long, is shocking. Tragic and shocking.

     

The "Radiation Network" Radiation Map of USA

I found this interesting. A non-government source of radiation monitoring, with real-time updates:


RadiationNetwork.com

[...] Welcome to RadiationNetwork.com, home of the National Radiation Map, depicting environmental radiation levels across the USA, updated in real time every minute. This is the first web site where the average citizen (or anyone in the world) can see what radiation levels are anywhere in the USA at any time (see Disclaimer below). [...]

The map here is just a screenshot. Follow the link to see the real-time map, and the legend that explains what the numbers mean.
     

Does your state have a personality?

The United States of Mind

Researchers Identify Regional Personality Traits Across America

Certain regional stereotypes have long since become cliches: The stressed-out New Yorker. The laid-back Californian.

But the conscientious Floridian? The neurotic Kentuckian?

You bet -- at least, according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations.

Even after controlling for variables such as race, income and education levels, a state's dominant personality turns out to be strongly linked to certain outcomes. Amiable states, like Minnesota, tend to be lower in crime. Dutiful states -- an eclectic bunch that includes New Mexico, North Carolina and Utah -- produce a disproportionate share of mathematicians. States that rank high in openness to new ideas are quite creative, as measured by per-capita patent production. But they're also high-crime and a bit aloof. Apparently, Californians don't much like socializing, the research suggests. [...]

Read the rest for more details. The article also has an interactive map of the USA, where you can click on five categories in the left sidebar, which will pull up a map showing how each of the 50 states rates in that category. Placing your mouse cursor on each state will give you a list of all the scores for that state.