“Armenia and Azerbaijan announced an agreement early Tuesday to halt fighting over the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan under a pact signed with Russia that calls for deployment of nearly 2,000 Russian peacekeepers and territorial concessions.
Nagorno-Karabakh has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a 1994 truce ended a separatist war in which an estimated 30,000 people died. Sporadic clashes occurred since then, and full-scale fighting began on Sept. 27.”
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“The agreement calls for Armenian forces to turn over control of some areas it held outside the borders of Nagorno-Karabakh, including the eastern district of Agdam.”
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“Armenians will also turn over the Lachin region, which holds the main road leading from Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. The agreement calls for the road, the so-called Lachin Corridor, to remain open and be protected by Russian peacekeepers.
In all, 1,960 Russian peacekeepers are to be deployed in the region under a five-year mandate.
The agreement also calls for transport links to be established through Armenia linking Azerbaijan and its western exclave of Nakhcivan, which is surrounded by Armenia, Iran and Turkey.”
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“The seizure of Shushi, which Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev claimed Sunday and was confirmed by Nagorno-Karabakh’s presidential spokesman Monday, gave Azerbaijan a significant strategic advantage. The city is positioned on heights overlooking the regional capital of Stepanakert, 10 kilometers (six miles) to the north.”
“in 2016: Trump beat his polls by just a few points in just a few states. The presidential polls were, simply, not that off. State-level polling was less accurate, although as editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote after the election, it was “still within the ‘normal’ range of accuracy.”
That doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of polling lessons to be gleaned from 2016, though. The importance of education in predicting a person’s political preferences was a big one.”
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“Nearly every pollster we talked to has made some kind of modification since the last general election. Some changes were precipitated by what happened in 2016, while others were driven by the challenges facing the polling industry, such as low response rates to phone calls and the greater cost of high-quality polling.
But one thing came up again and again in our interviews: Pollsters told us they were now weighting their samples by education, because one key takeaway from 2016 was just how important someone’s level of educational attainment was in predicting their vote.”
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“NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls are even weighted by the share of respondents from urban, suburban and rural areas. “This helps to make sure we are fully representing rural Americans,” said Horwitt, adding that it also “removes another factor which can contribute to poll-to-poll variation.”
A number of pollsters have also changed the way they recruit respondents to make sure they are reaching every pocket of the population. Courtney Kennedy, Pew Research Center’s director of survey research, explained that Pew has moved away from conducting polls by live phone calls that use random-digit dialing to reach respondents to an address-based approach in which Pew first gets in touch with respondents by snail mail to recruit them. Horwitt also told us that NBC News/Wall Street Journal no longer uses random-digit dialing; instead, they draw their samples from lists of registered voters, which allows them to “calibrate the mix of respondents between Republicans, independents and Democrats on each survey.”
Pollsters that reach respondents by phone are also relying more on cellphones.”
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“many pollsters are using a combination of approaches to reach the widest slice of voters.”
“Their strategy is to make allegations first and hopefully find evidence for them later. This state of affairs was thrown into stark relief late Friday morning during a Fox News interview with RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel. During it, Fox News hosts appeared to be out of patience with her evidence-free insinuations that the election was somehow stolen from Trump.
“We just haven’t seen it. It hasn’t been presented. There’s all kinds of stuff flying on the internet, but when we look into it, it doesn’t pan out,” anchor Bret Baier told McDaniel, as she failed to explain how her technical gripes about election observers in Michigan could possibly affect the result in a state Biden appears poised to win by well over 100,000 votes.”
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“While the courts and even Fox News don’t really seem to be buying what Trump is selling, the president does retain loyalty from key elected Republicans. In the hours following a Thursday press event in which the president undermined US elections by making baseless allegations of fraud, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz went on Fox News and indicated they’ll stand by Trump as he fights it out to the bitter end.”
““Things could be different with more data, of course,” said Clark. But overall, he thought her ideological profile was remarkably clear. “She’s voting very consistently in these cases so far. Even with this small number of cases, she’s showing up on the far right edge of the court.”
It’s hard, of course, to directly extrapolate from Barrett’s record as an appellate judge to how she might rule as a Supreme Court justice, but it’s reasonable to expect she will be reliably conservative. That said, Barrett has not always ruled in line with fellow conservatives on the 7th Circuit, and even the conservative justices on the Supreme Court disagree with each other on some topics or differ on which issues are more important. It remains to be seen just how persuadable Barrett might be if she’s confirmed, or how her perspective might change after a few years on the bench.”
“Wisconsin is proof that politicos have short memories. In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry carried Wisconsin by just 0.4 percentage points — making it the closest state in the country. Four years earlier, it had been even closer — Democrat Al Gore won the Badger State by just 5,708 votes, or 0.2 points.
But Democrat Barack Obama really connected with Wisconsin voters, winning the state by 14 points in 2008 and 7 points in 2012. Going into 2016, that contributed to a sense that Wisconsin was a safe bet for Hillary Clinton — part of the mythical “blue wall.” It had, after all, voted Democratic in seven consecutive presidential elections by that point.”
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“Conventional wisdom says that Clinton lost Wisconsin because she infamously did not visit the state at all during the final seven months of the 2016 campaign. But that’s probably not true; Clinton devoted a lot of effort to winning Pennsylvania and still lost there, for instance. Instead, Wisconsin probably got redder in 2016 for the same reason that Pennsylvania and other Midwestern states did: demographics. The one-time home of progressive stalwarts like Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette and Victor Berger could not escape the modern reality that white people without a bachelor’s degree — who make up 59 percent of Wisconsin’s population age 25 and older — have become more and more Republican, especially in the Trump era.”
Nuclear Powerin Competitive Electricity Markets Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2000. https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2000/nea2569-dereg-2.pdf Economics of Nuclear Power World Nuclear Association. 3 2020. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx Economics of Nuclear Power Plant InvestmentMonte Carlo Simulations of Generation III/III+ Investment Projects Ben Wealer, Simon Bauer, Leonard Goke,
“If Taiwan is to fend off a Chinese invasion, it will need reluctant recruits like Roger Lin to summon the patriotism that inspired older generations but these days doesn’t burn as passionately in the young.
The 21-year-old French-language major regards his upcoming mandatory four-month military service as an unnecessary burden, even as complaints persist that such stints are too short to protect the nation compared with the two to three years that previous generations served.
Weeks of flaring tensions between China and Taiwan, which has been buzzed by dozens of Chinese warplanes in a disquieting show of force, have not emboldened Lin or changed his mind. If China and its much larger military decides to invade, the island’s devastation would be a fait accompli, he said, even with the outside chance the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense.”
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“Lin’s fatalism and indifference are somewhat expected among the young. But they come at a perilous moment. Fraught relations between Washington and Beijing are, more so than in any other flashpoint, raising the possibility of war in Taiwan, a self-governed democratic island of 24 million — roughly the size of Maryland — that China has regarded as a breakaway province since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.
The stakes for Washington are high. Losing a democratic Taiwan to China would probably signal the end of American power in the Pacific, freeing China’s military to project its strength in the region and beyond to the detriment of U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea.
Led by an increasingly nationalistic Xi Jinping, China has in recent weeks flown military sorties deeper into Taiwanese airspace and beefed-up military exercises aimed at invading the disputed territory. The best hope for preventing a conflict that would probably draw in the U.S. is Taiwan’s willingness and ability to deter China’s aggression, experts said.
But the Taiwan government has struggled to instill the same sense of urgency found in other countries with national service requirements such as South Korea, Israel and even Singapore, which faces no immediate threats.”
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“Taiwan’s active duty military has shrunk to 165,000 from 275,000 three years ago. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army numbers 2 million.
Under public pressure to move to an all-volunteer army, Taiwan began phasing-out conscription in 2013.”
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“a debate within U.S. foreign policy circles over whether to revise its stance toward defending Taiwan. The current policy, known as strategic ambiguity, leaves China and Taiwan guessing if the American military will respond to an attack on the island. The approach is credited with maintaining the peaceful status quo since 1979, when Washington cut official ties with Taipei to launch diplomatic relations with Communist China.
Now, leading voices — including the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard N. Haass — are arguing that a more powerful and hawkish China must be countered with an explicit warning of U.S. force if it were to move against Taiwan.
“Such a policy would lower the chances of Chinese miscalculation, which is the likeliest catalyst for war in the Taiwan Strait,” Haass co-wrote”
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“Some experts fear that could undermine Taiwan efforts to rebuild its military: “I worry [it] would potentially confuse this work that Tsai is trying to do and allow people in Taiwan to say: ‘We don’t need to do this military spending. We don’t need to beef-up our military because the U.S. is coming to our aid,’” said Shelley Rigger, a Taiwan expert and political scientist at Davidson College in North Carolina.”
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“It’s also unclear whether the U.S. could successfully defend Taiwan given deficiencies in American forces in the region and Chinese weapons designed to thwart the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers.”
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““Soldiers get more respect in places such as America, but we still don’t have that climate in Taiwan,” said Lai, who has yet to complete his four-month required service. “Military camp culture isn’t that strong, and our sense of patriotism isn’t as keen.”
His reluctance is partly due to the fact he and many other young Taiwanese don’t believe China would ever strike; they’ve spent their entire lives in peace. Only if the island were actually invaded would Lai volunteer to fight — with our without the U.S.”
“The Navy wants to double its number of submarines as part of a modernization plan to build more than 500 ships by 2045 to maintain a competitive edge against other naval powers such as China and Russia, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said”
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“Esper said the need to modernize the Navy is in part due to China’s own naval modernization and shipbuilding efforts. The Pentagon’s China report released Sept. 1 determined the country aims to have a “world-class” military on par with the United States by 2049. It already has the largest navy in the world at 350 ships. The United States now has 296 deployable battle force ships, according to the Navy.”
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“The first priority of that plan is to have a large number of attack submarines, with a target of 70 to 80 submarines overall. This will require the Navy to build at least three next generation Virginia-class submarines every year “as soon as possible,” Esper said. The Navy now has more than 40 operational attack submarines, according to Pentagon documents.”
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“Large nuclear-powered aircraft carriers also will be part of the future Navy, still considered the force’s “most visible deterrent,” he said. The Navy is also looking at “light carriers,” such as the USS America amphibious assault ship that can go to sea with vertical takeoff and landing aircraft including the F-35B fighters and the MV-22 Osprey. These light carriers would free up the bigger carriers for more of the “critical high-end fight,” Esper said.”
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“Unmanned naval vessels have been discussed in a number of congressional hearings about the future of the Navy and they are included in the Battle Force 2045 plan. Esper said the future force will have between 140 to 240 unmanned and “optionally manned” surface and subsurface vessels that can perform a variety of missions including surveillance, mine-laying and missile strikes.”
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“Congressional help will also be necessary to make the plan work. Esper said he wants lawmakers to stop using continuing resolutions to fund the defense budget and allow the military to divest from legacy systems so that the funds can be put towards “higher priorities.” He also said he will request that the Navy have the authority to put any end-of-year budget savings towards shipbuilding instead of the losing money when it is not spent.”