(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Data-nerding [1] ['Chitown Kev', 'Belinda Ridgewood', 'Bill In Portland Maine'] Date: 2026-08-13 We begin today with the original reporting from Alison Bath of Stars and Stripes about the mental health crises on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. “Interviews with active-duty sailors and family members, along with dozens of public social media comments and posts by crew members, describe sailors struggling with exhaustion and declining morale, including reports of suicidal thoughts and at least one instance where a crew member was prevented from jumping overboard. The concerns come during an unusually demanding deployment — Lincoln sailors have supported 40 days of continuous combat operations in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations and logged 250 consecutive days at sea, according to Navy officials. […] Family members and sailors say the roughly 5,000 service members aboard Lincoln have endured food and water shortages, disrupted mail service and long workdays with little time off. Lincoln has gone much of the deployment without the regular port calls that typically give carrier crews a break from life at sea. Carriers generally pull into a port every 30 to 45 days to allow for replenishment, maintenance and crew rest.” Greg Sargent of The New Republic points out that the ramifications of David Crowley’s upset win over Francesca Hong in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor could go beyond the race for governor. “Let’s connect the dots. Most obviously, a Crowley win in the primary probably makes it more likely that a Democrat will take over the Wisconsin governorship next year from incumbent Democrat Tony Evers. Republicans spent millions to boost Hong for exactly that reason. But that’s not all: With Crowley at the top of the ticket, Democratic strategists believe, wins in many down-ballot state legislative races in Wisconsin are now more likely. On that front, the stakes are very high. Another top Democratic goal this year is flipping control of the Wisconsin state legislature, which is notoriously far more right wing than the state itself. To do so, they’re targeting 14 GOP-controlled legislative seats—10 in the State Assembly and four in the State Senate. Winning those seats would have been harder with Hong as the gubernatorial candidate, Democratic strategists say. “Crowley’s path to victory runs through suburban Wisconsin and through holding down Republican margins in rural communities,” Joe Zepecki, a veteran Democratic strategist in the state, told me. “That overlaps with exactly where Democrats need to win state legislative seats to get the trifecta next year.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo says that for all of the hoopla regarding the role of prediction markets in elections, those prediction markets are still a strong derivative of actual election polls. “…there was a different casualty from the night’s results that I personally enjoyed witnessing because it’s a hobbyhorse or pet peeve of mine — and it seems to be as well of the numbers crunchers/data nerds whose Twitter feeds I watch on elections night. I’m talking here about the “prediction markets.” An earlier iteration of political prediction markets were a thing back in the aughts. But as they’ve returned in a slicker, more highly capitalized form in the last few years, there’s been a growing argument that they’re not only predictive about political races and possibly as good as polls but actually better than polls. This has always struck me as not only wrong but a category logical error. Needless to say, after these two races where polls were consistently wrong by double digits, it might seem hard to make an argument that they’re better. But that’s not the argument. The issue is that these supposed wisdom of crowds (or perhaps inside information) data markets are really just emanations of the polls. So what me and my data pals were watching last night was that Kalshi and Polymarket were close to certain that Hong was the winner last night until the first results started coming in, at which point the Hong contract collapsed. But the real reveal was that Hong and Crowley wildly oscillated back and forth over the course of the night. And that only really made sense if you were moving your money on the latest headlines or the topline number on the results sights. In other words, it all pretty clearly showed that the betters (sorry, investors … lol) were buying on the basis of the polls. Once it was clear that the polls were wildly off, they were completely adrift. The markets “knew” they were very wrong and were starved of data for how to get right.” Tony Farah of Salon says that the U.S. economy is incentivizing the boom in prediction markets and amoral betting behavior. “On Aug. 3, Democratic senators from six states sent a letter to the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the independent government arm that regulates Polymarket and Kalshi, warning that the apps are allowing bets to be placed on wildfires, which could incentivize arson. They highlight previous examples of bets placed on the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, which razed large areas of Los Angeles County, killing 31 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures. […] After giving over way too much private data to Kalshi, I was able to browse entire categories dedicated to natural disasters and climate change, such as if 2026 will be the hottest year ever or if the U.S. will ever meet its climate goals. I also found weird things like how many Atlantic hurricanes this year or if California will be hit by a magnitude 8 earthquake, which goes without saying but would be extremely bad. For context, the recent Colombia and Venezuela earthquakes were both magnitude 7.4 and 7.5 respectively. All of these things are likely to kill countless people if they happen, but climate change is already widely treated like an abstract future problem, rather than our disastrous present, so maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. […] What these apps do best is lay bare the ways in which our entire economy is structured like a betting app strung together by incentive perverts. It’s why the market rewards the most amoral and destructive behavior, from hedge funds that short the market and destroy company value to vulture capitalists who gut businesses like Toys “R” Us or Radio Shack, and then escape on their golden corporate parachutes. Even when such behavior results in a recession, the government is likely to bail big corporations out, while any form of assistance for the working class is branded as “socialism.” In fact, the entire stock market could be best described as a casino that incentivizes absurd growth like the historic tech bubble provoked by the spread of artificial intelligence.” I found it extremely difficult to excerpt G. Elliott Morris “Strength by Numbers” on the correlation between anti-Trump sentiment and anti-system sentiment in American politics but I will include a link. I will say that Morris’s post is a data point in favor of a dilemma that I have long noted: If you campaign on an anti-establishment/anti-system platform (as Trump did) and win, you become the “establishment” and will be judged accordingly. Paul Krugman wonders why oil prices are not even higher than they already are. “…Why aren’t oil prices even higher? They were over $100 a barrel before markets began betting on an end to the war, so why aren’t they back above $100 again? Also, why are they “only” about $25 a barrel above prewar levels, when many analysts — myself included — suggested that they might go much higher? A large part of the answer is that oil prices actually are higher — if you look at the right numbers. […] …while the price of a barrel of crude is up around $25, the price of the products refined from that barrel is up about 25+35=60 dollars per barrel, putting it in the range of middle of the road predictions of what would happen as a result of a long-term Hormuz closure. Why has the crack spread widened so much? The main answer is that a lot of the world’s refining capacity is either trapped inside the Strait or offline as a result of Ukraine’s drone campaign against Vladimir Putin. So it’s not all about Iran. Indeed, one indicator of how much the other war matters is that JD Vance reportedly had to plead with Volodymyr Zelenskyy to halt attacks on oil tankers using the Russian port of Novorossiysk.” Amir Soltenadeh of Deutsche Welle looks at some of the alternate routes that Gulf countries are attemting to utilize as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. “Saudi Arabia is sending its crude through the East-West Pipeline from the kingdom’s eastern oil fields to the Saudi Red Sea port of Yanbu, enabling it to keep up shipments to global markets by circumventing Hormuz entirely. During April and May, Saudi cargo shipments from its Gulf coast fell from 47.5 million tons a year earlier to just 6.3 million tons, according to data from the International Monetary Fund’s Portwatch platform. Over the same period, exports through the Red Sea rose from 29.6 million to 54.8 million tons. That additional 25.2 million tons replaced roughly 61% of the volume lost on the Persian Gulf side. The shift shows that the East-West Pipeline is not merely an emergency backup, but also an important tool to keep Saudi oil flowing during a Hormuz closure.” Finally today, Raphael Tsavkko Garcia of Al Jazeera sees the official U.S. designation of two of Brazil’s criminal organizations as “terrorist groups” as election interference. “In designating Brazil’s two largest criminal organisations, Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV), as “terrorist” groups, the United States has asserted its own definition of Brazil’s security threats, with consequences that reach far beyond law enforcement. The move is being presented by both the US and the Brazilian far right as a “necessary response” to the “growing transnational reach of organised crime”, but, in reality, it says far more about politics than security. […] PCC and CV may corrupt institutions, influence politicians, control territory or confront the state when it serves their interests, but their primary purpose is criminal power and profit, not political transformation. Politics is a means of protecting and expanding their operations, not the reason those organisations exist. The more broadly governments apply the terrorism label, the more it risks obscuring the nature of the security threat itself, while giving states greater scope to use such designations for political ends. That makes the question of why Washington chose to act now particularly important.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/8/13/800083647/community/abbreviated-pundit-roundup/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/