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Month: December 2018

The inevitability of impeachment

The inevitability of impeachment

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Elizabeth Drew writes: An impeachment process against President Trump now seems inescapable. Unless the president resigns, the pressure by the public on the Democratic leaders to begin an impeachment process next year will only increase. Too many people think in terms of stasis: How things are is how they will remain. They don’t take into account that opinion moves with events. Whether or not there’s already enough evidence to impeach Mr. Trump — I think there is — we will…

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The fallacy of obviousness

The fallacy of obviousness

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Teppo Felin writes: Scientific experiments don’t generally attract widespread attention. But the ‘Gorillas in Our Midst’ (1999) experiment of visual attention by the American psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris has become a classic. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman highlights this experiment and argues that it reveals something fundamental about the human mind, namely, that humans are ‘blind to the obvious, and that we also are blind to our blindness’. Kahneman’s claim…

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Trump imperils our planet

Trump imperils our planet

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In an editorial, the New York Times says: It’s hard to believe but it was only three years ago this month — just after 7 p.m., Paris time, Dec. 12, to be precise — that delegates from more than 190 nations, clapping and cheering, whooping and weeping, rose to celebrate the Paris Agreement — the first genuinely collective response to the mounting threat of global warming. It was a largely aspirational document, without strong legal teeth and achieved only after…

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Middle East’s murderous autocrats prepare to celebrate the death of the Arab Spring

Middle East’s murderous autocrats prepare to celebrate the death of the Arab Spring

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The Guardian reports: Gulf nations are moving to readmit Syria into the Arab League, eight years after Damascus was expelled from the regional bloc over its brutal repression of peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad. At some point in the next year it is likely Assad will be welcomed on to a stage to once again take his place among the Arab world’s leaders, sources say. Shoulder to shoulder with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and Egypt’s latest…

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Saudi king shakes up cabinet, keeping power in son’s hands

Saudi king shakes up cabinet, keeping power in son’s hands

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The New York Times reports: King Salman of Saudi Arabia shook up the kingdom’s cabinet on Thursday, naming new ministers and security chiefs but keeping the levers of power firmly in the hands of his son and designated heir, Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Saudi Arabia and its 33-year-old crown prince have been under heavy international scrutiny since a team of Saudi agents killed and dismembered the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October. Western intelligence…

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How a floundering D-lister was groomed for the presidency on reality TV

How a floundering D-lister was groomed for the presidency on reality TV

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Patrick Radden Keefe writes: After starring in fourteen seasons of “The Apprentice,” all executive-produced by [Mark] Burnett, Trump appeared in the gilded atrium of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, to announce that he was running for President. Only someone “really rich,” Trump declared, could “take the brand of the United States and make it great again.” He also made racist remarks about Mexicans, prompting NBC, which had broadcast “The Apprentice,” to fire him. Burnett, however, did not sever his relationship…

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$800 million in taxpayer money went to private prisons where migrants work for pennies

$800 million in taxpayer money went to private prisons where migrants work for pennies

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The Daily Beast reports: For $3 a day, Yesica works the graveyard shift in the kitchens of the for-profit immigration prison where she is locked up. Each morning, at 1 a.m., the guards of the Joe Corley Detention Facility in southeast Texas rouse Yesica and the 35 other women who share a dormitory-style room. Work begins an hour later and lasts through sunrise, ending at 8 a.m. Yesica does everything from cooking breakfast, to serving her fellow detainees, to cleaning…

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California: The state of resistance

California: The state of resistance

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Michael Greenberg writes: A kindling sense of apocalypse is business as usual for Californians, who live almost nonchalantly with impending doom. Wildfires eat up the landscape, roar into the cities, drop tons of choking ash in the mountain-locked valleys. Mudslides come in winter and spring. Underfoot is the constant threat of “the big one,” the earthquake that will end everything in a few minutes. Dwindling rivers, drained lakes, and recurring droughts keep the southern and most populous part of California…

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Hume believed we were nothing more or less than human

Hume believed we were nothing more or less than human

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Julian Baggini writes: Socrates died by drinking hemlock, condemned to death by the people of Athens. Albert Camus met his end in a car that wrapped itself around a tree at high speed. Nietzsche collapsed into insanity after weeping over a beaten horse. Posterity loves a tragic end, which is one reason why the cult of David Hume, arguably the greatest philosopher the West has ever produced, never took off. While Hume was lying aged 65 on his deathbed at…

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Millions of America’s school children are being terrorized by gun violence

Millions of America’s school children are being terrorized by gun violence

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The Washington Post reports: Locked behind their green classroom door, MaKenzie Woody and 25 other first-graders huddled in the darkness. She sat on the vinyl tile floor against a far wall, beneath a taped-up list of phrases the kids were encouraged to say to each other: “I like you,” “You’re a rainbow,” “Are you ok?” In that moment, though, the 6-year-old didn’t say anything at all, because she believed that a man with a gun was stalking the hallways of…

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How Trump is poisoning America

How Trump is poisoning America

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The New York Times reports: Had Donald J. Trump not won the presidency in 2016, millions of pounds of chlorpyrifos most likely would not have been applied to American crops over the past 21 months. It would not have sickened substantial numbers of farm workers, or risked what the Environmental Protection Agency’s own studies suggest could be continued long-term health problems for others exposed to the chemical at low levels. Widespread concerns about chlorpyrifos led to its removal for nearly…

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How did Trump find the ‘heel spurs’ that helped him dodge the draft during the Vietnam War?

How did Trump find the ‘heel spurs’ that helped him dodge the draft during the Vietnam War?

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The New York Times reports: In the fall of 1968, Donald J. Trump received a timely diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that led to his medical exemption from the military during Vietnam. For 50 years, the details of how the exemption came about, and who made the diagnosis, have remained a mystery, with Mr. Trump himself saying during the presidential campaign that he could not recall who had signed off on the medical documentation. Now a possible explanation…

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Trump’s Syria withdrawal has handed a huge gift to ISIS

Trump’s Syria withdrawal has handed a huge gift to ISIS

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Janine di Giovanni writes: Christmas came early in Syria. Donald Trump’s surprise tweet heralding the withdrawal of US troops neatly indicated the winners and losers in the murderous eight-year Syrian war. While the US never had much leverage in Syria – thanks to Barack Obama’s disastrous 2013 decision not to act following the Ghouta chemical attacks – Trump has managed, in a 16-word message, to embolden Islamic State, Moscow, Damascus, Hezbollah and Iran. In a sense, he has abandoned any…

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Japan to resume commercial whaling, defying international ban

Japan to resume commercial whaling, defying international ban

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The New York Times reports: Japan said on Wednesday that it would withdraw from an international agreement and resume commercial whaling, a defiant move to prop up an industry that still has cultural significance there, despite plummeting demand for whale meat. Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, said the country would leave the International Whaling Commission, which established a moratorium on hunting whales that took effect in 1986. The international agreement never stopped Japanese whaling, because it allowed the country…

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