This picture was taken in the early morning, just as the sky was barely starting to brighten. That’s why the left side of the photo is slightly lighter than the right side: I took the left part of the picture a few minutes later than the right side. In any case, this picture is mostly notable because it’s a nice shot of Orion, the only constellation that many of us city dwellers ever see.

The US embassy in Havana, which was mostly evacuated in 2017.Emily Michot/Miami Herald/TNS via ZUMA

This is the damnedest story. You remember that business with the American diplomats in Havana all developing headaches and other cognitive difficulties? Nobody ever figured out what was really going on, but it was widely believed to be the result of some kind of attack using microwaves or some such. Apparently, the same thing has now happened in both China and Russia:

What began as strange sounds and symptoms among more than a dozen American officials and their family members in China in 2018 has turned into a diplomatic mystery spanning multiple countries and involving speculation about secret high-tech weapons and foreign attacks.

One of the biggest questions centers on whether Trump administration officials believe that Mr. Lenzi and other diplomats in China experienced the same mysterious affliction as dozens of diplomats and spies at the American Embassy in Cuba in 2016 and 2017, which came to be known as Havana Syndrome. American employees in the two countries reported hearing strange sounds, followed by headaches, dizziness, blurred vision and memory loss.

….Similar episodes have been reported by senior C.I.A. officers who visited the agency’s stations overseas, according to three current and former officials and others familiar with the events. That includes Moscow, where Marc Polymeropoulos, a C.I.A. officer who helped run clandestine operations in Russia and Europe, experienced what he believes was an attack in December 2017….Some senior Russia analysts in the C.I.A., officials at the State Department and outside scientists, as well as several of the victims, see Russia as the most likely culprit given its history with weapons that cause brain injuries and its interest in fracturing Washington’s relations with Beijing and Havana.

Obviously I have nothing special to say about this. Opinion seems to be split between it being (a) some kind of genuine attack from the Russians or (b) sort of like chronic Lyme disease, which sufferers say is real but doctors say is just a bundle of symptoms with no connection to real Lyme disease. It’s just weird as hell.

The Scream, Edvard Munch

I’ve seen and heard from a surprising number of liberals who feel like they need to be talked off the ledge over the upcoming election. In one sense, this is hardly surprising after 2016. If Donald Trump could pull an election victory out of thin air four years ago, what’s to say he can’t do it again? I am here to talk you down from this particular ledge. Consider:

• First off, it turns out that the 2016 polls weren’t actually off by more than one or two points at most. There’s really no reason to worry that this year’s polls are likely to be wildly off.
• What’s more, in this year’s polls Joe Biden is much farther ahead than Hillary Clinton was in 2016. The Economist has him 8.4 points ahead. 538 has him 10.2 points ahead. Real Clear Politics has him 8.6 points ahead. Even an error of two or three points wouldn’t change things much, and there’s a limit to how much the national polls and the Electoral College can diverge. If Biden ends up five or six points ahead nationally on Election Day, it’s all but impossible for him to lose the Electoral College.
• That said, pollsters are being much more careful this year and they’re paying a lot more attention to important state polls. Both the Economist and 538 have Biden ahead of Trump in the Electoral College by more than 50 votes.
  

  

• The COVID-19 pandemic is a huge headwind for Trump. He’s doing his best to insist that he’s handled it better than any leader in the world, but nobody outside his base believes him. The evidence of the real world is just too strong.
• Trump’s biggest weakness is among women, especially suburban women, and he is literally doing nothing to address that. Instead he’s dismissing concerns about the coronavirus and then heading off to his rallies to yell and scream about locking everyone up. This is losing him support among women.
  

  

• In 2016, Trump benefited from the last-minute effect of the Comey letter. Fair or not, it played into the public perception of Hillary as a little shady and hurt her badly. This year’s last-minute surprise, the Hunter Biden laptop, is a joke. Not only is it getting very little play outside the fever swamps, but it’s an effort to portray Biden as corrupt. This is a sure loser since there simply isn’t any public perception that Biden, who served in public office for nearly half a century, is corrupt.
• I hate to bring this up, and it is a lamentable retrograde truth in politics, but Biden is a standard-issue white guy. There won’t be any last-minute defections from voters who decide they just can’t support a woman.

Both the Economist and 538 give Biden about a 90 percent chance of winning, but I suspect they’re hedging their bets a little and Biden’s odds are actually a bit better than that. In any case, if you’re on the ledge because Trump still has a 5-10 percent chance of being reelected, I can’t help you much. That’s just the reality. But I do have this advice: you should probably pay a lot less attention to anecdotal reports from a few of your friends. Likewise, with the periodic news stories about towns that still love Trump. I mean, even if he loses he’s probably still going to rack up 60 million votes or so (experts project a total turnout of around 150 million.) Of course you have friends who are either still dithering or else are committed to voting for the guy. What do you expect?

Finally, since everyone agrees that Trump could win, get out there and do some door knocking or phone banking if you’re truly on the ledge right now. It will take your mind off things and help reduce Trump’s chances at the same time.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 19. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

A girl in the town of Tecate peeks over a sign to see what’s on the other side.

Hey, did you know that if you’re on the American side of the border near Tecate, T-Mobile switches your cell phone to a Mexican carrier? And did you know that if, say, you blow out a tire and call AAA when you’re connected to a Mexican carrier, AAA won’t answer the phone? I didn’t know that either! But now I do.

It all turned out OK in the end, but this incident has gotten me wondering if I should buy one of those temporary tire repair kits just in case. Anybody have any advice about those things?

Here’s a chart showing COVID-19 case growth since June 1 along with COVID-19 mortality growth lagged by three weeks:

As you can see, there is still a correlation: when cases rise, deaths rise three weeks later, although by a smaller amount. There was a brief dip in case growth in mid-September that didn’t show up in a reduced death rate three weeks later, but perhaps it was too small and short-lived to be meaningful.

The bad news here is that if you ignore the blips, cases started a steady rise on September 29. Today is three weeks later. Are we about to see a steady rise in the death rate too?

It’s two weeks until Election Day, so let’s take a look at the presidential polls in order to set a baseline of sorts:

Donald Trump dipped a bit after the first debate, but then made up some of his loss. On net, he lost perhaps a point in the national polling and half a dozen seats in the Electoral College polling. Overall, though, the message of the polls is remarkable steadiness. It seems that everyone has already made up their minds and nothing much is likely to change it.

Today is my birthday. I am now old enough to collect Social Security. Hooray.

This is surely one of the most discouraging birthdays in a long time. In my head I remain optimistic about America waking up from its four-year nightmare and finally flushing Donald Trump and his entire hateful movement down one of those toilets he’s always complaining about. But in my heart—

Well, that’s a different matter. Ratfucking operations are hardly new to American politics, but the Trump/Giuliani campaign against Hunter Biden is truly without precedent in the annals of repellent personal attacks. Partly this is because it’s so obviously a ratfuck, and yet Republicans are mostly just whistling into the wind and letting it play out. But mostly it’s because of what Trump is doing. He’s a man with a chilling instinct for what will hurt someone the most and a conscience that never gets in the way of carrying it out. In the case of Joe Biden, he knows that what will hurt him the most is an attack on his family, so that’s what he directed Giuliani to come up with. He doesn’t care if there’s any truth to it. He doesn’t care who’s behind it. He doesn’t care what damage it does. Win or lose, he wants revenge on Joe Biden, and this is his way of getting it. This is what it’s like having a sociopath for president, and the fact that he has even a chance of being reelected is profoundly depressing.

But on the bright side, I’ll get a cake today. I’m not sure that will make up for things, but it’s a start.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 18. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 17. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.