Music: Bill Laurance — ‘Denmark Hill’
The imminent end of Britain’s social democracy
Matt Seaton writes: The immediate, clear consequence of the UK election of December 12, 2019, is that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has succeeded where Theresa May’s failed in the last general election, in 2017—by winning an emphatic parliamentary majority that can pass the legislation necessary to facilitate Britain’s departure from the European Union. The faint irony of that two-year hiatus and the handover of party leadership from May to Johnson is that the latter’s deal is rather worse—from the Brexiteers’…
A Labour revival must tap into the energy for change on the ground
John Harris writes: Ten days before the election, I was in the Dumbiedykes estate in Edinburgh, a high-rise scheme a few minutes’ walk from the Scottish parliament, where a shrinking working-class community is hanging on in the face of gentrification. The neighbourhood, which had a Labour MP until 2010, is the headquarters of an organisation called Edinburgh Helping Hands, whose motto is “Solidarity not charity”: its work runs from giving children in the city free bikes, through football and boxing…
Donald Trump fears only one Democrat: Warren Sanders
Robert Reich writes: There aren’t 20 Senate Republicans with enough integrity to remove the most corrupt president in American history, so we’re going to have to get rid of Trump the old-fashioned way – by electing a Democrat next 3 November. That Democrat will be Warren Sanders. Although there are differences between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, I’m putting them together for the purpose of making a simple point. These two have most of the grassroots energy in the 2020…
The knowledge of trees
Sue Burke writes: The U.N. Climate Change Conference in Madrid opened on Dec. 2 by calling the climate crisis a “war against nature.” But trees have always been at war, fighting for their survival. While plants may seem passive in the environment, they can sense their environments, make decisions, and respond to threats—up to a point. Every autumn holds terrible perils for plants. While many trees drop their leaves every year, the decision of precisely when to do so is…
A new study shows an animal’s lifespan is written in the DNA. For humans, it’s 38 years
A genetic “clock” lets scientists estimate how long extinct creatures lived. Wooly mammoths could expect around 60 years. Australian Museum By Benjamin Mayne, CSIRO Humans have a “natural” lifespan of around 38 years, according to a new method we have developed for estimating the lifespans of different species by analysing their DNA. Extrapolating from genetic studies of species with known lifespans, we found that the extinct woolly mammoth probably lived around 60 years and bowhead whales can expect to enjoy…
The accidental book review that made Jack Kerouac famous
Ronald K.L. Collins writes: In early September 1957, Jack Kerouac achieved the dream of every writer. Around midnight he and his girlfriend, Joyce Glassman, left her brownstone apartment in New York City for a nearby newsstand at Broadway and 66th Street. They waited while the nightman cut the twine around the morning edition of the New York Times. Rifling through the paper, they found on Page 27 an expected review of Kerouac’s new book, “On the Road.” Glassman recalled that…
Music: Bill Laurance — ‘Ready Wednesday’
Centrists say Johnson’s victory is proof Sanders or Warren can’t win. They’re wrong
Cas Mudde writes: The exit polls for the UK general election had barely been published and US pundits were already tweeting out the lessons for next year’s US presidential election. It’s almost as if their conclusions had been reached before the results were known. “Right populism will always beat left populism,” tweeted Yascha Mounk. Perhaps that’s the case, but I don’t know of many elections in which right and left populism were up against each other. And that’s leaving aside…
Devoid of agility, charisma and credibility, Corbyn has led Labour into the abyss
Polly Toynbee writes: Given the worst choice in history, the public preferred [Boris Johnson] to his opponent. How bad did Labour have to be to let this sociopathic, narcissistic, glutton for power beat them? That’s the soul-searching question every Labour member, office-holder and MP has to ask. Labour was disastrously, catastrophically bad, an agony to behold. A coterie of Corbynites cared more about gripping power within the party than saving the country by winning the election. The national executive committee,…
A 1970s hard-left clique led the Labour Party into a dead end
Jonathan Freedland writes: Like anyone who travelled the country and listened to voters, candidates and canvassers, I heard with my own ears the Labour voters who said they couldn’t back the party this time, not because of Brexit but because of Corbyn. Indeed, Brexit was often cited not for its own sake – little of this campaign was spent debating customs zones and trade agreements – but rather for its confirmation of their view that Corbyn was irredeemably “weak”. This…
Richer nations accused of stalling progress on climate crisis
The Guardian reports: Poor countries have accused a handful of richer nations of holding up progress on tackling the climate crisis at UN talks in Madrid, as demonstrators and activists vented their frustration in the final hours of two weeks of negotiations. The talks dragged on to what looked set to be a late final night with no guarantee of an agreed outcome, as governments wrangled over the details of a seemingly arcane issue: carbon markets, governed by a provision…
A great big gift not on Trump’s disclosure form: Giuliani’s legal advice
The New York Times reports: For the past 20 months, President Trump has received free personal legal services from one of America’s highest-paid lawyers, who has traveled around the country and across the ocean to defend him in the special counsel’s inquiry and press Ukraine to investigate a political rival and unfounded conspiracy theories. The lawyer, of course, is Rudolph W. Giuliani, but Mr. Trump did not mention Mr. Giuliani or his unpaid labor on the annual financial disclosure he…
Supreme Court to rule on release of Trump’s financial records
The New York Times reports: The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether President Trump can block the release of his financial records, setting the stage for a blockbuster ruling on the power of presidents to resist demands for information from prosecutors and Congress. The court’s ruling, expected by June, could require disclosure of information the president has gone to extraordinary lengths to protect. Or the justices could rule that Mr. Trump’s financial affairs are not legitimate subjects of…
Judge’s decision may shine light on secret Trump-Putin meeting notes
Yahoo News reports: A district court judge in Washington, D.C., has ordered administration lawyers to explain why, for more than two years, the White House has refused to turn over to the State Department an interpreter’s notes from a meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. That meeting took place in the summer of 2017, during a summit of the G-20 nations in Hamburg, Germany. The two men got along so well that the meeting, which was supposed…
Music: Yussef Dayes — ‘For My Ladies’