IT’S NOT MAGIC, IT’S PALMYRA:

What makes baseball’s “magic mud” so special?: It has just the right mix of spreadability, stickiness, and friction to give pitchers a better grip on the ball. (Jennifer Ouellette, Nov 7, 2024, Ars Technica)

In the first experiment, the authors smeared the mud between two plates and then rotated them, measuring the changes in viscosity with a rheometer. In the second, they used an atomic force microscope to peer at the atomic structure of the material to learn more about what makes it sticky. The third experiment required a bit of ingenuity in terms of building the apparatus. They mounted pieces of mudded baseball leather on acrylic base plates and then lowered a ball to contact the surface. At first, they used a steel ball, but it didn’t have the same elastic properties as human skin. So they made their own ball out of PDMS, carefully tuned to the same elasticity, and coated it with synthetic squalene to mimic the secretion of sebum on the fingers by human oil glands.

Pradeep et al. found that magic mud’s particles are primarily silt and clay, with a bit of sand and organic material. The stickiness comes from the clay, silt, and organic matter, while the sand makes it gritty. So the mud “has the properties of skin cream,” they wrote. “This allows it to be held in the hand like a solid but also spread easily to penetrate pores and make a very thin coating on the baseball.”

When the mud dries on the baseball, however, the residue left behind is not like skin cream. That’s due to the angular sand particles bonded to the baseball by the clay, which can increase surface friction by as much as a factor of two. Meanwhile, the finer particles double the adhesion. “The relative proportions of cohesive particulates, frictional sand, and water conspire to make a material that flows like skin cream but grips like sandpaper,” they wrote.

WHEN JOE STEPPED ASIDE THEY NEEDED TO NOMINATE A GOVERNOR:

It’s the economy, stupid: The US election was another reminder of people’s biggest political priority (Elliot Keck, 8 November, 2024, The Critic)

.The Trump campaign placed the Biden-Harris administration’s failed economic record at the centre of its messaging, but looking around the world and indeed looking at home, this approach was far from unique.

This is something that Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and effectively Starmer’s number two, picked up on in his broadcast round on Thursday morning. When asked for his analysis about the US election, McFadden drew on his own experience as part of the project to “change” the Labour party post-2019 and ultimately win power. As he put it “we had a real focus on living standards and how people felt, and the question ‘are you better off than you were four years ago’… was actually one that we posed during the election.”

That relentless focus on what Labour dubbed a “Tory cost of living crisis” and “Tory tax rises” certainly delivered a decisive victory. And while Conservatives may not want to hear this, the Labour opposition arguably had a more sophisticated and holistic understanding of what a cost of living crisis feels like than the Sunak government.

Whereas Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt twice pulled the lever of tax cuts on pay slips through the two 2p cuts on national insurance and waited for gratitude that never arrived, Labour recognised that actually it wasn’t just in payslips where people felt the impact. It was mortgage costs driven by higher interest rates, rental costs due to the failure to build, inflation driven by the covid spending binge and more, all compounded by the perception of significant government waste and failing public services. Most barely noticed the national insurance cuts.

THERE’S A REASON WE ARE THE ELITE:

What if the liberal elites are right? (Matthew Parris, November 8, 2024, The Spectator)

It’s time we stopped patronizing populists by cooing that we’re sorry we didn’t listen and will henceforward do our best to “address their concerns.” We should treat them as the adults they are, and tell them, man to man, that their concerns cannot be met. In countries like America, where money, talent and ambition gravitate towards clusters where success breeds success, we cannot realistically level-up with scarce public funds when the Treasury’s cupboard is bare.

In a national workforce where whole sectors of the economy are critically short of workers to fill jobs we must either import labor (immigration), hoist wages to a level that attracts native workers (inflation and higher taxation) or starve the health, social care, farming and service sectors of workers (ruination). We can keep out imports at a stroke, but prices will rise and our own exporters will face reprisals.

Actually, we do know better.

THE UNWASHED ELITES:

Never Reelect a Revolutionary: Post-populism in messianic time (Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, 11/08/24, The Point)

[B]eing entrenched is a problem for populism. Populism declares that there is a totalizing antagonism between the people and the establishment. Its raison d’être stems from the claim that elites leading the media, the government and educational and scientific institutions operate in opposition to the interests of the populations they are meant to serve. Some populists cast the difference between the two camps in terms of identity, claiming that “elites” and the “people” are fundamentally different human types. Racism can grow in this environment, but even it can be a secondary tool, a means of stylizing a deeper drive in the populist imaginary: namely, the claim that the oppositions between elites and the people are irreconcilable. For that reason, gradual reform, compromise and moderation will not do. Populism lurches toward revolution and the complete explosion of the establishment.

That’s why political success menaces the populist. How can populists justify managing the very elite institutions they were meant to destroy?

Populists may respond to this riddle by painting their enemies in the establishment as residing outside of their reach, such as when Hungarian president Viktor Orbán claims to be fighting against the European Union and Western liberalism. Some, like the Sweden Democrats, may be lucky enough to be kingmakers for a governing administration without being formally a part of it, allowing them to shape policy while posing as outsiders. Enfranchised populists may claim that the forces they fight against are so embedded in institutions that elected politicians can’t (yet) reach them, and thus that the cause of rebellion must continue even after an electoral victory. Narratives about a deep state running the U.S. government during the first presidency of Donald Trump are an example of the latter.

These are attempts at mitigation rather than cures, however. If, for example, a deep state allegedly remains in control even after a revolutionary takeover, populism’s supporters may deem political action futile and disengage. Elected populists are thus forced into a world of gamesmanship, negotiation, compromise and management. They often become conservers, conservative even—not in the palingenetic sense of resurrecting a lost golden age but merely, and more boringly, through their incentive to maintain the world in which they flourish. Max Weber famously argued that bureaucrats will seldom cross the institutions they run, because with time their personal power and prestige depend on those very institutions.

Such is the condition for many populists throughout the world today, in what we might call an era of post-populism—an era during which yesterday’s revolutionaries now cling to the status quo, where radical “Make America Great Again” gives way to paranoid “Keep America Great.” Elected populists (and particularly reelected populists) now find themselves tasked with instilling a durable mythology that will allow supporters to maintain their commitment to the cause even as it changes.